People of Song and Spear
A Brief Ethnographic Update
A nomad girl on pilgrimage to a shrine venerating the Sufi saint Abadir Umar Ar-Rida in Harar, Ethiopia
The Somali Peace Caravan performing in the wordless devotional music style called "grassland playing"
"God did not make Somalia for the Somalis, God made the Somalis for Somalia"
-- Sheikh Maxamad Caabdille Xasan
From the book "A Tree to Rest Under - Somalia's Culture and History" by Bianca Sorrenti, Chair of the XCKS (Revolutionary Communist Party of Somalia) International Solidarity Department, Deputy Head of the International Meeting of Communist and Worker's Parties
"Ethnically and culturally the Somali belong to the Cushitic ethnic group. Their closest kinsmen are the surrounding Cushitic (or as they are often called ‘Hamitic’) peoples of the Ethiopian lowlands who the Somalis know as the 'sisterfolk' – ‘Afar (or Danakil), the Oromo (Galla), Saho, and Beja. Their immediate neighbours to the north are the pastoral ‘Afar with whom they share Djibouti and who extend into the Somali province of the Ogaden. To the west, in Ethiopia, the Somali are bounded by the cultivating and pastoral Oromo; and in the south by the Boran Galla of Kenya. Although there is much variation amongst them, the physical features which immediately strike the eye and seem most generally characteristic of the Somali people as a whole, are their tall stature, thin bone structure and decidedly long and narrow heads. In their features particularly, the Somali also exhibit evidence of their long-standing relations with Arabia; and, in the south, amongst the Digil and Rahanweyn tribes, physical traces of their past contact with Oromo and Bantu peoples in this region. Traditionally, however, Somali set most store by their Arabian connexions and delight in vaunting those traditions which proclaim their descent from noble Arabian lineages and from the family of the Prophet. They commemorate the many centuries of contacts between the Somali and Arabian coasts which have brought Islam and many other elements of Muslim Arab culture. Thus, the Somali language contains a considerable number of Arabic loan-words, and Arabic itself is sufficiently widely known to be regarded almost as a second language. Nevertheless, although unwritten in any standard form until 1972, Somali retained its distinctiveness as a separate and extremely vigorous tongue possessing an unusually rich oral literature.
Within Somali, the widest dialect difference is between the speech of those decended from the northern pastoralists and that of the Digil and Rahanweyn decendants. These differ to much the same extent as Portuguese and Spanish. Yet, since many of its speakers are also familiar with standard Somali, the existence of this distinctive southern dialect does not alter the fact that from Djibouti to Garissa on the Tana River, standard Somali provides a single channel of communication and a common medium in which poems and songs compete for popularity. Poetry, it should be added, today as much as in the past, plays a vital part in Somali culture, and the extensive use of radio broadcasting and television in the modern-day Democratic Republic has enhanced rather than diminished its significance. Often a poem is not merely the private voice of the author, but frequently the collective tongue of a pressure group, and propaganda either for peace or for war is more effectively spread through poetry than by any other means.
The distinction between the speech of the Digil and Rahanweyn and their previously nomadic countrymen to their north and south is one feature of the wider cultural, geographic, and historical primary division in the Somali nation between the ‘Samale’ or Somali proper and the Sab. The former make up the bulk of the nation, and their name ("Somali" is a derivation from "Samale") has come to include the Sab, perhaps in the same fashion as the word ‘English’ is applied by foreigners to all the inhabitants of the British Isles. This larger fraction of the Somali nation consists of four principal groups of clans or ‘clan-families’. Descent in Somaliland is traced in the male line, and each of these units has a separate founding ancestor from whom, traditionally, its members trace their descent and take their collective name. The Samale clan-families comprise the Dir, Isaq, Hawiye, and Darod, all of whom are primarily pastoral nomads and variously distributed throughout the land. The Dir clans (‘Ise and Gadabursi) are mainly concentrated in the western part of the northern regions of the Somali Democratic Republic (the former British Somaliland), in the Jibuti Republic, and the east of the Somali Harar Province: a smaller nucleus also occurs in the south in Merca District, and between Brava and the Juba River. The Isaaq (who in conjunction with the Dir probably number almost three quarters of a million) live mainly in the centre of the northern regions of the Democratic Republic, but in their grazing movements extend also into the Haud.
To their east, the Isaaq mingle with the Dulbahante and Warsangeli divisions of the Darod who, with a strength of perhaps one and a half million, are the largest and most widely distributed of all the Somali clan-families. As well as the eastern part of the former British Somaliland Protectorate, the Darod occupy the Eastern, Nugal and Mudug Regions, most of the Haud and Ogaden; and finally, although interrupted by a large wedge of Hawiye in the centre of the Republic and the Digil and Rahanweyn between the rivers, extend eventually into the NFD-province which once belonged to Kenya. The Hawiye, who boast probably more than half a million persons, live to the south of the Majerteyn Darod in Mudug, Hiran, and round Mogadishu. They extend some way across the Shebelle basin where they mingle with the Sab tribes, and also, like the Darod, are found again in strength in Democratic Republic's NFD. With a total population of little more than half a million, the Sab tribes are less numerous, less widely distributed, and contain only the two major divisions already mentioned. As they had the a stronger cultivating bias than any other Somali group in the past, their living space is primarily restricted to the fertile region between the two rivers where their pastoral and cultivating sections mingle not only with each other but also with pastoral nomads of the other Samale clans (although in today's industrial Somalia, all of these distinctions are being worn away in favor of new social groupings as discussed below.)
In addition to these divisions of the Somali nation whose distribution and relative strengths are vital to an understanding of both past and present events, there are a number of smaller ethnic communities which require to be mentioned. The most numerous (some 80,000 strong) are Somalized Bantu scattered in cultivating villages along the Shebelle and Juba Rivers and in pockets between them. These derive in part from earlier Bantu and Swahili-speaking groups, as well as from former slave populations freed by the suppression of slavery at the end of the nineteenth century. Somalis acted as a link in the Arab Slave Trade, but saw the personal keeping of slaves as distasteful and a stain on their honor since Somalia was "a free sky land, where every man should have a camel and a path to travel" in the words of Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah Hassan. Although they still retain today much of their physical distinctiveness, socially these communities are becoming increasingly absorbed in the wider Somali society. The best-known groups are the Shidle, and Shabelle on the Shebelle River, and the Wa-Gosha (or Gosha) and Gobaweyn on the Juba. Less numerous but economically and politically more important is the immigrant Asian community (some 40,000 in the Democratic Republic) which consists chiefly of Arabs (many of families domiciled on the coast for centuries) and a smaller number of Indians, Pakistanis, and Persians. Similarly largely occupied in trade and commerce and also in development and technical aid is the small European community, numbering about 42,000 in Somalia. The permanent European settlers live mainly as city dwelling workers, buisinesspeople, and farmers in the south of Somalia. Although the proportion of people who practise some form of cultivation is higher, probably not much more than an eigth of the total Somali population are sedentary cultivators, and these mainly the southern Digil and Rahanweyn tribes. Thus for the majority, in the arid conditions of the north, centre, and extreme south (Northern Kenya) of their country, nomadism is the prevailing economic response, and mode of livelihood and social institutions in general are tightly adjusted to the scant resources of an unenviably harsh environment. Although true nomadism has all but gone extinct in favor of mixed cultivation and large ranch-style semi-pastoralism, which has unified the once disparate Sab and Samale branches of the Somali family, understanding the past helps understand the makeup of the current SDR.
In these regions, with their home-wells as a focus of distribution, the pastoralists move over many miles in the year, driving from pasturage to pasturage and water-point to water-point their flocks of sheep and goats and herds of camels, and, in some southern areas particularly, of cattle also. Of this mixed patrimony, although the hardy Somali pony remains the prestige beast par excellence, it is their camels which Somali most esteem. These are carefully bred for milk and for carriage. Milch camels provide milk for the pastoralist on which they previously depended on for diet; burden camels, which are not normally ridden except by the sick, transported their collapsible hut or tent and all their worldly possessions from place to place. Camel-hide was used to make sandals to protect their feet on the long treks across the country. But these uses do not in themselves account for the way in which the pastoralists value their camels (to this day) or, despite the longstanding and wide use of money as a currency, explain why it is primarily in the size and quality of his camels that a man’s substance was most tellingly measured. This striking bias in Somali culture is best expressed briefly by saying that in their social as well as economic transactions the pastoralists operate on a camel standard. Thus the exchange of substantial gifts of livestock and other wealth which cements a marriage between a man and a woman and their respective kin was once conducted in camels. This difference in attitudes is consistent with the fact that the milch camels and sheep and goats usually form two separate herding units. A man’s wife and children move with the flocks which provide them with milk and the few burden camels necessary for the transport of their tents and effects. With their much greater powers of endurance and resistance to drought, a man’s milch camels are herded by his unmarried brothers, sons and nephews, moving widely and rapidly about the country far from the sheep and goats which, in the dry seasons especially, have to cling closely to sources of water. Particularly in the dry seasons, when long and frequent treks back and forth between the pastures and wells are required, camel-herding is an arduous and exacting occupation and one well calculated to foster in the young camel boys all those traits of independence and resourcefulness which are so strongly beloved by the Somali culture.
Clans were traditionally "led" by Sultans, Kings, or Princes (in Somali: Suldan, Boqar, Garad, Ugas, etc.). These titles, which evoke something of the pomp and splendour of the grand old Islamic states, had (and still have) little with the actual position of Somali clan leaders, who are normally little more than convenient figureheads and lack any firmly institutionalized power. Indeed for the majority of northern Somali clans, the position of Sultan, though often hereditary, is hardly more than an honorific title dignifying a man whose effective power is often no greater, and sometimes less, than that of other clan elders. It is in fact the elders – and this in its broadest connotation includes all adults of a family – who control clan affairs. With a few special exceptions, a hierarchical pattern of authority is foreign to pastoral Somali society which in its customary processes of decision-making is democratic almost to the point of anarchy. It must be added, however, that this markedly unstratified traditional political system did recognize a seperate category of people known as sa'sab who fulfiled such specialized tasks as hunting, leather- and metal-working, and haircutting. The people who practise these occupations form a minute fraction of the total population and, traditionally, were separated from other Somali by restrictions on marriage and commensality. Today the enfranchisement of these Midgans, Tumals, and Yibirs, is far advanced and most of their traditional disabilities are disappearing. With the absence of institutionalized hierarchical authority, Somali pastoral groups are not held together by attachment to chiefs. Beyond the clan, the widest kinship ties are those which unite kindred clans as members of the same clan-family. In the traditional social system, however, the six clan-families into which the Somali nation is divided (the Dir, Isaq, Hawiye and Darod; and the Digil and Rahanweyn) are generally too large, too widely scattered, and too unwieldy to act as effective corporate political units. In the modern situation of Somalia, the social groupings of neighborhoods and cities acquired new vitality and significance to the point having supplanted many of the old tribal kinship relations.
Despite the prevalence of war, feud, and fighting in the epic songs and poems of Somali culture, particularly amongst the descendants of the old nomads, not all men were considered warriors. Those who devote their lives to religion and in some sense practise as men of God are known as wadads, and thus distinguished from the remainder and majority of men who, whatever secular calling they follow, fell into the category of warriors (waranleh, ‘spear-bearers’). This general division still retains validity despite the proliferation of occupations available today. Sufi holy men and scholars of religion, or sheikhs – to use the Arabic title which is usually applied to the more learned among them – fulfil such important tasks as teaching the young the Quran and the elements of the faith, solemnizing marriage and ruling according to the Sufi Islamic tradition in matrimonial disputes and inheritance, assessing damages for injury, and generally directing the religious life of the community in which they live. Essentially their role is to mediate between men; and, through the Prophet, between man and God – with the help of the many local saints to whom Somali look for support in the preferment of their pleas for divine aid and succour. Ideally, whatever their clan obligations (or neighborhood associations in the modern day), men of religion are assumed to stand outside secular rivalry and conflict, although in practice in the circumstances of Somali life this expectation is rarely if ever fully sustained. What is significant here, however, is that in contrast to the position in so many other Muslim countries, Somali sheikhs are not normally political leaders and only in exceptional circumstances assume political power. Although the more hierarchical political organization of the Arabs and the Oromos might seem to afford more purchase to the theocratic ordinances of Islam, it would be very mistaken to imagine that Islam rests lightly upon the Somalis. For if in some respects the circumstances of Hijazi or Oromo society conform more closely to the theocratic Muslim pattern elsewhere when compared to the saint-venerating freewheeling Somalis, there is no distinction between the two communities in their observance of the five ‘pillars’ of their faith – the profession of belief in God and the Prophet, the daily prayers, fasting, alms-giving, and pilgrimage. Nor, certainly, are the nomads any less pious or devout than the cultivators. The true position is rather that each community has adopted Islam in slightly different ways corresponding to differences in traditional social organization.
Thus, for example, while the adoption of Sufi saints was based on adherence to a particular order in many neighboring cultures, average Somalis venerate a wide array of saints - from "family saints" that were traditionally venerated by one's lineage, to "local saints" who were the patrons of one's city or neighborhood, to "order saints" who were the patrons or teachers of one's Sufi order. Notwithstanding these regional variations, for the Somali as a whole, it is not too much to say that in many important respects Islam has become one of the mainsprings of Somali culture; and to nomad, farmer, and worker alike the profession of the faith has the force almost of an initiation rite into their society. Thus while the Somali draw many of their distinctive characteristics, especially their strong egalitarianism, their political acumen and opportunism, and their fierce traditional pride to their own culture, they also owe much to Islam. And it is typical of their mutual dependence upon these two founts of their culture that the highly pragmatic view of life which nomadism seems to foster is tempered by a deep and, as it must seem to some, fatalistic trust in the power of God and His Prophet.
Above all, Islam adds depth and coherence to those common elements of traditional culture which, over and above their many sectional divisions, unite Somalis and provide the basis for their strong national consciousness. Although the Somali did not traditionally form a unitary state, it is this heritage of cultural nationalism which, strengthened by Islam, lies behind Somali nationalism today."
