Somalia And Survival In The Shadow Of The Global Economy (Part 4)

Prof. William Reno

[Continued from the previous issue]

Northern Variation in Marginality

While Italian Somalia depended heavily upon subsidies to underwrite exports and maintain state agencies, officials in British Somaliland insisted that the colony remain economically ‘undisturbed’ and get by with a smaller state apparatus compared to its southern neighbour. British administrative responses to the anti-colonial resistance of Sayyid Mohamed Abdille Hussan, the ‘Mad Mullah of Somaliland’, whose fighters held off British expeditionary forces for twenty years from 1900 to 1920, explains some of this caution. ‘The expatriate administration’, wrote Lewis, ‘consequently received stern admonitions from London that nothing was ever to be done again that could possibly provoke the Somalis’. Thus it appears that Somali regions experienced very different legacies of colonial rule, depending whether they were included in Italian or British realms.

Differences in style, however, did not translate into dramatic variation in levels of colonial intrusion in local societies. Albeit, British officers no doubt thought that direct rule and economic intervention of the Italian sort would lead to too much resistance, would be too costly, and would weaken the willingness of local leaders to collaborate with, or at least tolerate colonial rule. These concerns informed the British doctrine of Indirect Rule elsewhere on the continent, which mandated appointment of customary authorities as agents of the colonial state wherever possible. The legal and administrative goal in Somaliland was to concretize social organization, as understood by British officials. This meant that while Italian officials were trying to destroy linage control over potential workers, British authorities recognized diya-paying groups as basic political institutions. These were groups pledged to pay blood money to the families of victims of violence to resolve feuds. Diya is an element of customary law in that it regulates social interactions. But it does not concern the standing of in individual before the law so much as the relations between groups. Lewis takes these groups as integral to local society and stresses the minimal impact of colonial rule on local society, and even asserts ‘during the colonial period, hardly any attempt was made to artificially erect a system of Indirect Rule’. This interpretation conflicts with British colonial budgets that list stipends paid to individual headmen and observers who complained that appointees had an entrepreneurial tendency to make British colonial authority a tool for fighting their internal rivals or engaging in self-enrichment.

Colonial rule actually did considerably change Northern Somalia. The concretization of diya paying groups gave local headmen a stake in enforcing colonial ordinances, since transgressions netted them a portion of fines. It was in British colonial administrative interests to reinforce the position of headmen, since diya gave justification to British ordinances prescribing collective punishment for infractions in lieu of a large and expensive bureaucracy. The practice of collective punishment, in which any member of the diya paying group could be fined or dispossessed even if another individual was suspected of an infraction, gave headmen an interest in ensuring that diya boundaries remained static. Headmen wanted to rigidify social boundaries to make sure that individuals and families did not try to reinterpret their lineage to escape obligations incurred by people unknown or distant from them. This artificial rigidity reinforced the colonial legal notion of blood group solidarity and recruited blood groups to control ‘members’ to avoid liability for their actions. Thus British, like Italian administration, laid foundations for less flexible definitions of clanship. This legacy also should aggravate group security dilemmas and provide opportunities for political entrepreneurs amidst conflict in the 1980s and 1990s, just as Italian and nationalist economic policies did in the south.

The British north, however, lacked the Italian south’s history of state appropriation of economic assets on behalf of outsiders, at least during the colonial era. This condition continued into Barre’s regime and became a major factor in shaping the local development of social regulation of violence in the 1990s and 2000s examined in detail below. Unlike every other British colony in Africa, except the Gold Coast (where resistance to colonial rule also resulted in armed struggle), colonial authorities levied no head taxes, subsisting instead on taxes on trade to pay for administration. From 1951 to 1957, average annual British Somaliland internal revenues amounted to only £860,000. The colony was distinguished as one of the few that required regular subventions from the Exchequer. London’s subsidy, along with postwar Colonial Development Corporation grants, added an average of £1.2 million to the colonial budget during the 1950s. As in the Italian colony, administration required subsidies for about two-thirds of its expenditures, though British officials rejected statist pretensions of their Italian colleagues. Regardless, colonial authorities in both places saw little prospect for viability without outside financial support, and London shed its burden upon Somali Independence in 1960.

Meanwhile, British officials pursued their goals by simply foregoing economic development. Lewis, then a member of the British Somaliland civil service, reported that when he arrived in Hargeisa in 1955 about 200 senior officers ran the entire colony. An official from London charged with charting a development plan for the colony in the 1950s complained that the local administration actually resisted the whole notion of economic development. He was astounded that, taking prewar London’s fears of disorder to heart, they feared social disruption and ‘modern’ social pressures, and to avoid these evils, they actively defied postwar economic policy directives from London that local officials considered imprudent. ‘As a result’, reports Lewis, ‘the traditional attitudes of pastoral Somali society were even more strongly entrenched in the north, while the south, by contrast, appeared in many respects more modernist in outlook’. Local society may have seemed ‘traditional’ and ‘in comparison with other segmentary lineage societies fictional kinship seems strikingly rare’, although administrative intervention in local social categories suggests otherwise.

Given these similarities, it is even more baffling that armed entrepreneurs in the south failed to build a stable political order after 1991 while armed northern leaders found ways to manage conflict, build cross cutting alliances and rein in violence without the aid of outside force or subsidies. As evidence below shows, colonial experiences were not decisive in shaping contemporary identity and political organization, though they are important for their significant influence on shaping social categories and the social distribution of resources. The key variable shaping these outcomes lies in the nature of rule in post-colonial Somalia, specifically the extent to which local elites either joined with or were excluded from political networks that dominated commerce, as the fate of commercial farms and state economic development policies in southern Somalia showed.

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