A Modern History of the Somali. I. M. Lewis

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       CHAPTER II

       BEFORE PARTITION

      UNTIL THE late nineteenth century the history of the eastern Horn of Africa is dominated by the protracted Somali expansion from the north, and the rise and decline of Muslim emporia along the coast. To a certain extent each of these two themes has its own particular history, but at no time over the centuries was one entirely independent of the other. The gradual enlargement of their territory by the Somali was not achieved by movements in the hinterland only, nor were events on the coast without their effect in the interior. About the tenth century, however, when our brief account opens, the pressure of events ran from the coast towards the hinterland. But by the mid-nineteenth century, a state approaching equilibrium had been attained between the outward pressures of movements in the interior and the inward trend from the coast: if anything, indeed, the balance was tipped in favour of the hinterland which had come to exert a dominant political influence over the coastal settlements. For the history of the coast documentary evidence from various sources is available, at least in some periods; but for events in the hinterland the historian has to rely much more heavily upon the testimony of oral tradition. Fortunately, oral records are on the whole sufficiently abundant and consistent in their essentials, to enable the broad outlines of the Somali dispersal to be traced with what is probably a considerable degree of accuracy. Certainly the evidence at present available leaves no doubt that the gradual expansion over the last ten centuries of the Hamitic Somali from the shores of the Gulf of Aden to the plains of northern Kenya is one of the most sustained, and in its effects, far-reaching movements of population in the history of North-East Africa.

      This was not a migration into an entirely empty land. It involved considerable displacements of other populations, and the Somali sphere was only extended by dint of continuous war and boodshed. Those who were mainly involved, other than the Somali, were the ethnically related Oromo peoples – or some of them – and a mixed negroid or Bantu population which, prior to the incursions of the Hamitic Galla and Somali, appears to have possessed part of the south of what is today the Somali Republic.

      This people known to the early Arab geographers as the Zanj, and apparently mainly concentrated in the fertile land between the two rivers, seems to have consisted of two principal elements. The major part was made up of Bantu cultivators living as sedentaries along the banks of the Shebelle and Juba and in fertile pockets between them. They figure in Oromo and Somali tradition, particularly in the folk history of those Digil and Rahanweyn clans who entered this area from the north and settled amongst the Zanj as a kind of aristocracy. Something of their life and social organization is preserved also in a late Arabic compilation known as the ‘Book of the Zanj’.¹ These sources are supplemented by more tangible evidence. Remnants, partly Swahili-speaking, reinforced by ex-slaves from the south and from Zanzibar, survive today in five distinct communities along the Shebelle River and in two on the Juba. Others again are found near Baidoa in the hinterland between the rivers, and also in Brava district in whose ancient capital a Swahili dialect, Chimbalazi, is spoken to this day.

      The second component of this pre-Hamitic population, apparently much less numerous than the riverine cultivators, was a hunting and fishing people living a precarious nomadic existence. Their present-day descendants, much affected by Hamitic influence, survive in a few scattered groups in Jubaland and in the south of the Republic where they are generally known as Ribi (or Wa-Ribi) and as Boni (or Wa-Boni). Their mode of life and their physical appearance invite comparison with the Bushmen of other areas of Africa, but their precise ethnic affiliation is still obscure. Politically and economically they seem to have been attached in small groups to the Bantu sedentaries, and still today small hunting communities of this stock are found living under the tutelage of more powerful Bantu groups in the south.

      By about the tenth century it seems that these two peoples, who are not necessarily the autochthonous inhabitants of the area, did not extend north of the Shebelle, and were in contact with the Oromo tribes, who, in turn, were already under pressure from the expanding Somali in the north-east corner of the Horn. This distribution gleaned from oral tradition is supported by the descriptions of the early Arab geographers who refer to the Hamitic peoples (the Galla and Somali) of the north and centre by the classical name ‘Berberi’, and distinguish them in physical features and culture from the Zanj to their south.

       The coastal settlements

      Before tracing the sustained surge southwards which displaced most of this Zanj population, and led eventually to the present distribution of peoples in the Horn of Africa and indirectly in part to those in Ethiopia, it is necessary to consider first the early phases of Arab settlement along the coast. This is essential since Arab colonization introduced a more diversified technology, and a more centralized system of government, which, however restricted its influence, undoubtedly made itself felt even in nomadic areas. Finally and most important of all, the new immigration brought Islam, the unifying force which played so significant a part in the sixteenth-century conquest of Abyssinia, and which remains the living faith of the Somali and of many of the peoples of present-day Ethiopia. At the same time, indirectly if not always directly, the absorption of Arab settlers seems to have given an impetus to, or to have precipitated, the movements of expansion of the Somali and Oromo.

      There is little doubt that Arabian penetration along the northern and eastern Somali coasts is of great antiquity. It probably antedates the Islamic period; and certainly shortly after the hegira Muslim Arabs and Persians were developing a string of coastal settlements in Somaliland. From their condition today, from traditional sources, and from such documentary evidence as is available, it is clear that in these towns Arab and Persian merchants and prosyletizers settled usually as local aristocracies, bringing the faith, marrying local women, and eventually merging with the local inhabitants to form a mixed Somali-Arab culture and society. This new culture representing varying degrees of mixing and blending at different periods, and by no means uniform throughout the coastal ports, is the Somali counterpart to the more extensive Swahili society of the East African coast to the south.

      Typical of these centres of Arab influence in northern Somaliland are the ancient ports of Zeila and Berbera. Zeila first appears in the record of the Arab geographers at the end of the ninth century when it is mentioned by Al-Ya‘qubi, and later writers describe it in increasing detail. Berbera, which conserves the name given in classical times to the northern coast as a whole, is probably of similar antiquity, but its history is much more obscure: it is first mentioned by the Arab geographers in the thirteenth century. Thereafter, beyond the fact that during the period of Portuguese domination in the Red Sea the town was sacked in 1518 by Saldanha, little is known of its history until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Similar obscurity surrounds most of the history of the ancient port of Mait, on the eastern coast in Erigavo District, and one of the principal centres of early Somali expansion.

      Thus at present, of the northern ports as a whole, most is known of Zeila. This town was politically the most important of the Arab settlements in the north and owed its economic prosperity, at times considerable, to its geographical position СКАЧАТЬ