$Unique_ID{COW03284}
$Pretitle{286}
$Title{Somalia
Chapter 1A.   Historical Setting}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Robert Rinehart}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{somalis
century
somali
trade
arab
southern
towns
area
coast
early}
$Date{1981}
$Log{Mosque*0328401.scf
}
Country:     Somalia
Book:        Somalia, A Country Study
Author:      Robert Rinehart
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1981

Chapter 1A.   Historical Setting

[See Mosque: Sheikh Abdulaziz Mosque, one of Mogadishu's oldest historical
structures]

     The Somali people have inhabited portions of present-day Somalia for
1,000 years. The emergence of a sense of nationhood among them, however,
awaited the imposition of colonial rule by three European powers (Britain,
Italy, and France) on Somali-occupied territory and the extension of Ethiopian
claims there in the late nineteenth century. Between the eleventh and
fifteenth centuries, sections of the Somalis settled in the relatively fertile
river valleys of southern Somalia, where they made cultivation the basis of
their economy. Most Somalis living in the surrounding drier regions continued
to engage in nomadic pastoralism, allowing differences in social structure,
culture, and language to develop between them and their settled brethren.
Despite these differences the agricultural Somalis and the more numerous
pastoral groups have come to consider themselves one people. At an early date
in their migrations, the Somalis came into contact with the Arab world and in
time formed a strong attachment to Islam, which has further served to unite
them as a people.

     During the colonial era the Somalis were grouped into two major
divisions-Italian Somaliland and British Somaliland-and three lesser ones-the
Northern Frontier District of Kenya and those areas of Ethiopia and French
Somaliland populated predominantly by Somalis. Although the Italian and
British territories followed different patterns of development and education,
they were successfully amalgamated on July 1, 1960, into the independent
Somali Republic.

     Somalia's transition to independence differed radically from that of most
African states. In 1950 the former Italian colony was placed under a United
Nations trusteeship administered by Italy. Although British Somaliland
retained its colonial status until independence, changes instituted by the
United Nations in the trusteeship territory influenced political developments
there as well. As a result Somalia's independence as a unified, multiparty
parliamentary democracy was attained relatively painlessly.

     The early postindependence period was dominated by two difficult
problems: the political and administrative integration of the former colonial
territories and the conflict with Ethiopia and Kenya arising from Somalia's
irredentist demands. Internal political conflicts revolved around methods of
handling these difficulties. Competition for electoral support both exploited
and widened cleavages within the nation as politicians sought the backing of
rival regional and clan groups, often obscuring the country's pressing need
for development by overemphasizing party politics.

     Party composition and leadership fluctuated as new parties were formed
and others declined. A great many parties, some with only a single candidate,
participated in each national election, but one party-the Somali Youth
League-was clearly dominant and had been even before independence. The
important political parties were not divided by significant ideological
differences, and all their leaders had at one time or another served together
in the Somali Youth League. The most significant tendency was for parties to
be organized on the basis of clan-families or their constituent descent
groups, but political alliances existed across clan-family boundaries.

     The conflicts generated by competing interest groups within the parties,
the time and energy given over to aggrandizing each of them as opposed to
dealing with the country's more general problems, and the extent to which
corruption had come to pervade the operation of government and the parliament
led to disillusionment with the democratic process. On October 21, 1969,
senior officers of the Somali National Army deposed the government in a
bloodless coup and established the Supreme Revolutionary Council, headed by
Major General Mohamed Siad Barre.

     The Supreme Revolutionary Council made clear that it intended to
establish a new economic, social, and political order based on an ideology it
called scientific socialism. Somalia's long tradition of democracy was
extinguished as all important decisions were made by the military-dominated
leadership in Mogadishu and conveyed to the largely military structure in
control at the regional and local levels. Opposition to the new government's
policies was not tolerated. The Supreme Revolutionary Council initiated a
number of development projects aimed at exploiting resources to best
advantage. Priority was also given to the settlement of the nomadic and
seminomadic peoples who constituted about 60 percent of the country's
population.

     In 1976 the Supreme Revolutionary Council was abolished and its authority
transferred to the executive organs of the newly formed Somali Revolutionary
Socialist Party. Executive positions in the party were taken over by members
of the former Supreme Revolutionary Council who also retained the key posts in
the government. Therefore the changes appeared only to broaden, not replace,
the existing hierarchy.

     Somalia's relations with neighboring Ethiopia deteriorated in the early
1970s when Siad Barre's government gave support to guerrilla operations
conducted by Somali separatists in the Ogaden, an action that appealed to
strong pan-Somali sentiment in the country. By mid-1977 well-equipped elements
of the army were openly cooperating with the separatists and had engaged
Ethiopian troops in the predominantly Somali region.

     In 1974 Somalia concluded a treaty of friendship and cooperation with the
Soviet Union, which became a primary military benefactor. In exchange for
continuing assistance, Moscow obtained rights to strategically located naval
and air installations. After the Soviet Union-then in the process of
establishing close ties with Ethiopia-embargoed further supplies to Somalia
in 1977, Siad Barre abrogated the treaty and expelled Soviet personnel. A
massive infusion of Soviet military aid to Ethiopia and the introduction of
Cuban troops ensured Somalia's subsequent defeat in the Ogaden.

Early History

     Because systematically collected archaeological evidence is lacking, the
prehistory of the area encompassed by present-day Somalia is obscure by
comparison with that of neighboring countries. But bushmanoid hunters and
gatherers, who inhabited much of eastern and southern Africa, are believed to
have roamed the southern interior in search of their subsistence as early as
the eighth millennium B.C. Negroid peoples subsequently settled as cultivators
in the valleys of the Juba and Shabeelle rivers.

     The ships of enterprising Egyptian, Phoenician, Persian, Greek, and Roman
traders visited the coast of Guban (the ancient Land of Punt) for cargoes of
the aromatic and medicinal resins frankincense and myrrh, tapped from trees on
its parched hills. Descriptions of the northern region and its inhabitants
first appeared in The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, written by an anonymous
Greek mariner ca. A.D. 60, and in Ptolemy's Geography. A Chinese source dating
from the ninth century mentions the area, and a later document indicates the
continued existence of trade between its ports and China in the fourteenth
century. By the tenth century Arab and Persian merchants had established a
number of towns along the Benadir and Guban coasts that were links in an
extensive trading network connecting East Africa with Southwest Asia and the
Indies.

     The origins of the Somalis and the location of the core area from which
they embarked on their centuries-long migrations are matters of debate among
scholars as is the chronological framework of those migrations in relation to
parallel movements by the Oromo people. There is no doubt, however, that the
Somalis were established in much of the region several hundred years before
the first recorded use of their name in the early fifteenth century.

Coastal Towns

     In pre-Islamic times Arab merchants already were conducting a thriving
trade from depots along the African shore of the Gulf of Aden. The most
important of these was at the walled town of Seylac (Zeila), which developed
after the sixth century as an emporium for the coffee trade from the
Abyssinian highlands and as a market for slaves brought from the Arab outpost
at Harer in the interior. Seylac eventually became the center of Muslim
culture in the region, noted for its mosques and schools. Its ruling house was
also linked historically to the Muslim emirates that, after the eleventh
century, challenged the Christian Abyssinians for domination of the highlands.
The town never recovered after being sacked by the Portuguese in 1516 and was
succeeded by Berbera as the northern hub of Arab influence in the Horn of
Africa. After a brief Abyssinian occupation in the mid-sixteenth century, the
Arab towns on the north coast became dependencies of the sharif of Mocha in
Yemen and in the seventeenth century passed to the Ottoman Turks, who
administered through locally recruited governors.

     Arab and Persian traders began settling on the Benadir Coast in the ninth
century. The merchant colony they founded at Mogadishu was initially
responsible for handling gold shipped from the Sofala fields in south central
Africa. When the concession for this trade passed in the twelfth century to
Kilwa (an Arab colony much farther south), Mogadishu and other Arab towns on
the Benadir Coast, such as Baraawe (Brava) and Marka (Merca), redirected their
attention to the immediate hinterland, developing specialized markets for
livestock, leather, ivory, amber, and slaves. In the thirteenth century the
merchant communities organized a confederation of towns under Mogadishu's
ruling dynasty. The prosperity of the Benadir towns declined in the sixteenth
century, however, as a result of Somali interference with the trade routes and
active Portuguese intervention in the region. Mogadishu was bombarded, and
other towns were occupied periodically by the Portuguese until they were
ousted in the mid-seventeenth century by the sultan of Oman, who thereafter
maintained a loose suzerainty over the Benadir Coast.

     The coastal towns-in which Arabic was the language of religion, commerce,
and government-were an integral part of the Islamic world, tied to it
culturally, economically and, in theory, politically. Arab writers, like the
famous fourteenth-century traveler, Ibn Battuta, left vivid descriptions not
only of the ports on both coasts but also of the peoples who inhabited the
hinterlands. They referred to the Somali in the north as berberi
("barbarians"; hence Berbera) and the pre-Somali cultivators of the southern
river valleys as the zengi (blacks). A thirteenth-century visitor, Ibn Saiid,
was the first to identify by name a Somali clan-family (see Glossary), the
Hawiye.

The Somalis: Origins, Migrations, and Settlement

     Somali social and political organization is based on kinship groups that
range in size from the clan-families, of which there are six, to lineage
segments, of which there are thousands (see The Segmentary Social Order, ch.
2). Their traditional genealogies trace the ancestry of clan-families to
eponymous Arab forebears who belonged to the Quraysh, the tribe of the Prophet
Muhammad, and ultimately to a common ancestor. According to these accounts and
other traditional history, these Arabs arrived in the northern part of the
Horn of Africa at various times between the tenth and fourteenth centuries and
established lineages that in the course of several hundred years moved to the
south and west, displacing the Oromos as they went.

     Although versions of the traditional genealogies varied in their telling
from group to group, it was believed that the clan-families stemmed from the
sons of Aqiil-Sab and Samaal (hence, Somali). From Sab were descended the
Digil and the Rahanweyn, while the Dir (recognized as the oldest of the
clan-families), the Hawiye, and the Isaaq were in patrilineal descent from
Samaal. (The Isaaq, however, insisted in their account on direct descent from
Aqiil.) The Darod, largest of the clan-families, claimed matrilineal descent
from Samaal through Dir's daughter, who was taken as wife by its founder,
Jabarti ibn Ismail, himself a Quraysh and a descendant of Aqiil (see fig. 2).

     Scholars (among them the noted anthropologist I.M. Lewis) who have
accepted traditional history (with important modifications) as a framework for
reconstructing the actual history of the Somalis acknowledge that many of its
references to the Somalis' Arab ancestry will not stand careful scrutiny and
are probably a result of the efforts of the deeply Islamic Somalis to attach
themselves to the people of the Prophet. Some scholars also point to
traditional history as an attempt to recount in poetic terms a real but
unverifiable historical process in which parties of Arabs came to the Horn of
Africa in search of trade, adventure, or a religious following and over a
period of several centuries established kinship ties with the Somalis and
Oromos through intermarriage.

     Even those scholars who reject the applicability of this framework-or who
are critical of much traditional history-accept that there has been
substantial Arab influence and an infusion of Arab blood among the Somalis.
They do, however, question whether the point of origin of the Somalis was in
the north, as the modified version of traditional history implies, and they
have queried the pre-Somali presence of the Oromos in much of present-day
Somalia.

     On the basis of linguistic evidence supported by critical reading of
documentary sources, anthropologist Herbert S. Lewis has argued that the core
area for speakers of Eastern Cushitic languages, of which Somali is one and
Oromo another, lay in southern Ethiopia. He has suggested further that the
Somalis began their northward and eastward expansion out of the core area
substantially before the Oromos commenced their movements in the same
directions and that Somali groups not only preceded them in the north but were
present in southern Somalia as early as the twelfth century, three to four
centuries before there is any clear record of the Oromos in that area. In
Lewis' view, sections of the Oromos began their migrations only in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and their contact with the Somalis, usually
hostile, dated from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this he is
supported by the work of historian E.R. Turton and by the history of Oromo
migrations in Ethiopia.

     Among all sources, however, there is considerable agreement that the
Somalis were in much of present-day Somalia and in parts of present-day
Ethiopia known as the Haud (see Glossary) and the Ogaden at least by the
twelfth century and probably earlier. The process of their conversion to Islam
appears to have begun at about that time in the north under Arab influence but
was not completed until several centuries later in the south. In the coastal
towns and hinterlands-to which Arabs continued to migrate for
centuries-intermarriage produced a distinct integrated Arab-Somali class of
Arabic-speaking officials, merchants, craftsmen, and landowners similar to the
Swahili-speaking Arab-Bantu class that emerged to the south along the East
African coast. In some cases Arabs moved inland and established enclaved
villages where, as the gibil'aad (pale skins), they became clients of the
Somalis.

     It was commonly held that the Shabeelle River marked the extreme limit of
northward expansion of Bantu-speaking people along the East African coast and
that it was reached by them in the tenth century. The black cultivators
encountered by the Somalis in the Juba-Shabeelle area-the zengi referred to in
Arab commentaries-were likewise assumed to have been Bantu-speakers, some of
whom may have been assimilated by Somali clans. Although the issue remains an
open one, the evidence for that hypothesis has been seriously questioned in
the light of recent research. It can be demonstrated, for instance, that the
ancestors of some of the Bantu-speaking population of the southern coastal
area and interior were brought there as slaves after the arrival of the
Somalis.

     The two branches of the Somali people-the Samaal and the Sab-were
differentiated culturally, physically, and linguistically, and they also
developed divergent patterns of social and political organization. The Samaal
nomads practiced what I. M. Lewis has described as "pastoral democracy,"
without permanent chiefs or formal courts. Whatever government that existed
was conducted in the shir, an assembly composed of all adult males in a clan
or lineage group. Although no less warlike, the Sab, by contrast,
characteristically confederated under the leadership of a dominant lineage
that held title to the land and defined themselves by the area in which they
lived as well as by ties of kinship. In the southern river valleys where they
settled, the Sab practiced a sedentary economy based on trade and herding and
on the crops raised by their non-Somali clients. Affiliation with a
landholding lineage, either by kinship or by adoption as a client, conferred
the right to use its arable resources.

     By the twelfth century the ancestors of some clan-families were
established in the territories where most of their present-day descendants
live, but movements of specific groups continued into the nineteenth century,
both over long distances and as slight shifts within a given clan-family area
or lands contiguous to it. For example the Dir clan-family, located primarily
in the extreme northwest of the Somali distribution, has one clan, the Bimal,
who lives in two segments more than 1,000 kilometers away on the southern
coast and claim to have arrived there in the sixteenth century. The Darod, the
largest of the Somali clan-families, range from the north to contiguous areas
of Ethiopia. They are also situated west of the Juba River and into Kenya, an
area from which they drove the Oromos in the mid-nineteenth century after the
Darod had been forced out of the region between the Juba and Shabeelle rivers
by the Rahanweyn, who had already settled there. It has been suggested that an
important reason for the conflict between the two groups that was the
Rahanweyn, who were cattle herders and cultivators, could not tolerate the
presence of the pastoral Darod whose camels, sheep, and goats would have
destroyed crop and pastureland.

     The continuing Somali migrations were in large part the result of
conflict between groups of a pastoral nomadic people for access to grazing and
water in a harsh environment. Such conflicts took place at least as often
between clans and lineages of the same clan-family as between segments of
different clan-families. Indeed from time to time there were temporary
alliances between clans of one family and clans of another. In some cases
confederacies were formed in which one lineage came to dominate the others,
and its head, sometimes referred to as sultan, acquired a great deal of
prestige. If successful in war a sultan might also exercise real political
power. But with few exceptions such confederacies rarely endured for very long
periods, and they did not lead to the establishment of administrative
hierarchies. More often the title of sultan, when it was retained within a
lineage, had only religious significance. In troubled times groups of Somalis
sometimes rallied to war leaders who combined demonstrated military ability
with what were seen as charismatic religious qualities. Periodically,
puritanical religious orders also launched holy war against "lax" Muslims in
the coastal towns or from the sedentary and ethnically mixed clans.

Ahmed Gran

     The Muslim emirates in the Horn of Africa carried on a centuries-long war
of attrition against Abyssinia. The oldest and most famous of them was Adal,
which had its capital at Seylac and whose line of emirs belonged to the town's
ruling house. Adal was in turn part of the large sultanate of Ifat whose
hegemony stretched at its height as far as the foothills of eastern Shewa. The
northern Somali clans fell nominally under its suzerainty and fought in the
sultan's armies. War was always waged as a religious crusade, but unity in the
Muslim forces was difficult to sustain beyond a single campaign.

     In 1415 Ifat was decisively beaten by the Abyssinians, and its sultan,
Sad ad-Din, was killed in battle, subsequently to be revered as a saint by the
Somalis. An Abyssinian victory song in celebration of the event makes the
earliest recorded reference to the Somalis (or Samaal), who were listed among
the defeated foes.

     The sultanate fell apart, and Muslim power receded for a time, but in the
second decade of the sixteenth century Adal became the base for a new assault
on Abyssinia under the leadership of Ahmed ibn Ibrahim al Ghazi, better known
as Ahmed Gran-the left-handed. A famous warrior who had assumed the religious
title of imam, Ahmed Gran overthrew the ruling dynasty on the grounds that it
was more interested in the value of Seylac's trade with Abyssinia than in holy
war against the Christians. Having moved his headquarters inland to Harer, the
imam rallied an army of Somali and Afar warriors, reinforced by Turkish
mercenaries who introduced field artillery in the Horn of Africa. In less than
ten years he had conquered most of Abyssinia and divided it among Muslim
emirs. Perhaps out of concern that the Ottoman sultan would attempt to impose
suzerainty over the region, Ahmed Gran dismissed his Turkish troops at a
crucial point in the campaign before his victory over the Abyssinians was
complete.

     In 1542 the Abyssinian emperor Galawdewos, with Portuguese aid, inflicted
a decisive defeat on the Muslims at Lake Tana, and Ahmed Gran was killed in
the fighting. The unity of purpose that the imam's personality had imposed on
his Somali fighting force disappeared with his death, and their highland
conquests were abandoned. The wars continued into the 1570s, ending only when
both Somalis and Abyssinians had to face an invasion by the Oromos who, in the
course of their northward migrations, drove a wedge between the older
antagonists.

     The Ottoman Empire cited Turkish participation in Ahmed Gran's early
campaigns to justify its territorial claims in the Horn of Africa, but
otherwise the imam, through his conquests, left no lasting political legacy.
Even at the apogee of his military success, he was unable-perhaps unwilling-to
impose a government on the land he controlled and over the people who owed him
allegiance. The nomadic pastoral Somalis were willing to fight in his cause
and for Islam, but they were not amenable to being administered. Ahmed Gran
did become a folk hero among the Somalis, who tend to regard him as one of
their own although there is no clear evidence of his origins. President Siad
Barre has referred to him as the first significant character in Somali
history.

Trade and Agriculture on the Benadir Coast

     The turmoil caused by Ahmed Gran's defeat generated the further movement
of Somali clans from the north into the Juba and Shabeelle river basins. Of
the two Sab clan-families living in that region, the Digil have apparently
been there from an early date, but traditions of the much larger Rahanweyn
speak of a continuing emigration lasting from late in the fifteenth century to
the early seventeenth. As they arrived they confronted the Ajuran
confederation, which was led by the Arab-influenced Hawiye, a Samaal
clan-family that had entered the region from the Ogaden in the fourteenth
century. The newcomers brought Ajuran rule to an end by the mid-seventeenth
century, and political arrangements in the area thereafter involved the
formation of confederations in which one or another Rahanweyn clan or lineage
was dominant.

     Non-Somali clients of the Digil and the Rahanweyn had farmed the limited
fertile land in the southern river valleys for some time. Given the reluctance
of Somalis to engage directly in farming, however, there were limits to the
quantity of land cultivated. The increased availability of slaves, usually
taken from Bantu-speaking farming peoples, permitted the extension of
agriculture in the region in the nineteenth century. Slaves in turn were also
the most important commodity in a network of trade carried on by the Somalis.
That network brought ivory, rhinoceros horn, and aromatic woods and gums to
the coastal towns for export and took up-country imported and locally made
cloth, iron, dates, sugar, and jewelry. In pursuit of this trade the Somalis
engaged in transactions with the peoples of southern Ethiopia and northern
Kenya, who included the Oromos. Some trade goods from the interior never
reached the coast, as coffee, salt, and, above all, slaves were absorbed by
the Somalis themselves. Clans bitterly contested the control of trade routes
and in some instances established monopolies over the caravan trade into
particular towns-the Bimal, for example, into Marka and their rivals, the
Rahanweyn Geledi, into Mogadishu and Baraawe.

     Originally slaves had been brought in by sea from southern East African
ports as a small part of the slave trade to the Middle East. As Britain's
Royal Navy became increasingly successful in cutting off the seaborne trade,
however, slaves were walked in from the south. When the British also reduced
the overland slave trade near the end of the century, agriculture declined,
and some southern Somalis, who had become partially reliant on farming,
reverted to nomadic pastoralism.

     It was during this period of expanding trade and agricultural development
that the Somali clans took advantage of the control they exercised over the
trade routes to displace the ruling dynasties and merchant oligarchies of Arab
origin that had dominated the towns of the Benadir Coast for centuries. These
towns, however, remained under the nominal suzerainty of the Omani sultanate,
which early in the nineteenth century had transferred its base to Zanzibar.