The Gaboye of Somaliland: Legacies of Marginality, Trajectories of Emancipation
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University of Milan-Bicocca “Riccardo Massa” Department of Human Sciences for Education Doctoral Programme in Cultural and Social Anthropology Cycle XXIX THE GABOYE OF SOMALILAND: LEGACIES OF MARGINALITY, TRAJECTORIES OF EMANCIPATION Elia Vitturini Registration number 734232 Tutor: Prof. Alice Bellagamba Coordinator: Prof. Ugo E.M. Fabietti ACADEMIC YEAR 2017 A Mascia e Olga. CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 1 INTRODUCTION 3 PART I 18 WHO ARE THE GABOYE? STUDYING WRITTEN SOURCES AND THE SEARCH FOR CONCEPTUAL TOOLS 18 CHAPTER 1 18 DOCUMENTING THE SUBORDINATION OF THE GABOYE 18 1.1 WRITTEN SOURCES ON THE SUBORDINATION OF THE GABOYE 18 1.2 THE REVIEW OF THE WRITTEN SOURCES OF COLONIAL TIMES 20 1.3 THE DEBATE ABOUT ORIGINS 35 1.4 DOCUMENTING THE SUBORDINATED GROUPS’ SOCIAL POSITION BETWEEN PAST AND PRESENT 41 CHAPTER 2 64 THE ACADEMIC DEBATE AROUND ‘CASTES’ IN AFRICA 64 2.1 THE PEREGRINATIONS OF THE CONCEPT OF ‘CASTE’ ACROSS TIME AND SPACE 64 2.2 PAST AND FUTURE TRAJECTORIES OF THE CONCEPT OF ‘CASTE’ WITHIN AFRICAN STUDIES 68 2.3 RENEWING COMPARATIVE DIALOGUE 73 PART II 78 THE ROUTE OF EMANCIPATION IN THE TOWN OF HARGEYSA 78 EMANCIPATION IN THE SOMALI TERRITORIES 78 CHAPTER 3 82 THE TOWN OF HARGEYSA: THE SETTING OF THE GABOYE’S EMANCIPATION 82 3.1 BRITISH WRITTEN SOURCES: 1880s-1940 82 3.2 HARGEYSA AS THE NEW CAPITAL OF THE PROTECTORATE: 1941-1960 95 3.3 URBANISATION AND SOCIAL CHANGE 119 CHAPTER 4 121 THE GABOYE’S ORAL HISTORY 121 4.1 REPRESENTING THE PAST 121 4.2 ORAL HISTORY ABOUT THE ORIGINS OF HARGEYSA 123 4.3 ORAL HISTORY AND HARGEYSA’S FIRST WAVE OF EXPANSION 128 4.4. THE GABOYE’S SETTLEMENT IN THE TOWN DURING COLONIAL TIMES 133 CHAPTER 5 139 THE FIRST GOBOYE ‘TRADITIONAL’ LEADER AND DIYA-PAYING GROUP IN HARGEYSA 139 5.1 THE BRITISH APPROACH TO LOCAL INSTITUTIONS 139 5.2 ‘TRADITIONAL’ FORMS OF AUTHORITY 140 5.3 THE DIYA-PAYING GROUPS 151 5.4 THE GABOYE’S MOBILISATION IN HARGEYSA 159 5.5 WAYS OF ABANDONING SUBORDINATION PRE-EMANCIPATION 170 CHAPTER 6 183 THE HISTORY OF THE TRASFORMATIONS OF THE GABOYE’S SUBORDINATION DURING THE COLONIAL PERIOD 183 6.1 THE MANAGEMENT OF FOOD SURPLUSES AND THE WAVE OF URBANISATION IN THE SOMALILAND HINTERLAND 186 PART III 193 THE LEGACIES OF THE GABOYE’S INSTITUTIONALISED MARGINALITY 193 CHAPTER 7 193 THE GABOYE IN HARGEYSA BETWEEN PAST AND PRESENT 193 7.1 CHANGING PATTERNS OF THE GABOYE’S SETTLEMENT IN HARGEYSA 193 7.2 THE STORY OF THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OF DAMI 199 7.3 THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OF DAMI: URBAN SPACES AND THE REPRESENTATION OF MARGINALITY 221 7.4 URBAN SEGREGATION AND ECONOMIC MARGINALITY 232 CHAPTER 8 237 WORKING IN THE TOWN 237 8.1 THE CONTEMPORARY OUTLINE OF THE GABOYE’S OCCUPATIONAL SECTORS 237 8.2 NEW SOURCES OF INCOME AND SOCIO-ECONOMIC STRATIFICATION IN THE GABOYE COMMUNITY OF HARGEYSA 239 8.3 SHOE-WORKING, BARBERING AND BLACKSMITHING IN HARGEYSA: PAST AND PRESENT 249 8.4 THE DYNAMIC PICTURE OF THE GABOYE WOMEN’S TRADES IN HARGEYSA 255 8.5 TRANSNATIONAL MIGRATION AND THE REPRODUCTION OF ECONOMIC VULNERABILITY 260 8.6 CONTINUITIES AND TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE GABOYE’S OCCUPATIONAL SEGREGATION 265 CONCLUDING REMARKS 273 BIBLIOGRAPHY 278 INTERVIEWS 286 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This research was made possible by a PhD scholarship of the University of Milan-Bicocca, which has been my second home for the last eight years and to which I am deeply grateful. I also acknowledge the support of the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013), ERC Grant agreement n. 313737, project acronym SWAB. I am grateful to the Academy for Peace and Development of Hargeysa and to its staff for all the help and support I have received from them since 2011. They offered to me a welcoming and stimulating environment for meetings and discussions with researchers from Somaliland and the wider world. I owe an eternal debt of gratitude to the Fondazione Specchio dei Tempi and to the staff of Mohamed Aden Sheikh Teaching Hospital of Hargeysa, in particular to Angelo Conti and Daniele Regge whose work, moreover, I admire enormously. I thank Hussein and Mohamud for giving me something more precious than their time and help, their true friendship. I simply cannot imagine how this research could have proceeded if I had not met them, but I am also in their debt for the real pleasure of spending a lot of time together. I am also grateful to all the kind people who tolerated my unrequested nuisance and gave me their time: I hope I have deserved the trust they showed in sharing their personal information, ideas and opinions. I want to pay tribute to Said Mohamed Dahir: there was so much I wanted to learn from you as a man and I will always consider myself lucky that my path crossed with yours. I am indebted to my supervisor, Prof. Alice Bellagamba, for her irreplaceable guidance and for her support in helping to give order to my confused thoughts, to Luca Ciabarri for the continuous inspiration I received from him and his works, and to Prof. Ugo Fabietti for his immortal example. My thanks also go to my colleagues and to the Scientific Board of the Doctoral Course in Cultural and Social Anthropology, Department of Educational Human Sciences “Riccardo Massa”, University of Milan-Bicocca. I thank especially the members of the research group of the “Shadows of Slavery in West Africa and Beyond” project for their invaluable contributions at each step of my research path: Alessandra Brivio, Gloria Carlini, Valerio Colosio, Antonio De Lauri, Marco Gardini, Laura Menin, Luca Nevola, Claudia Pandolfo and Marta Scaglioni. Finally, thank you to Damian Randle, who revised the English language – not my mother tongue – of this work. 1 Non c’è parola, neppure nella mia lingua, per ringraziare chi mi ha dato tutto, mia madre e mio padre. Non c’è parola, neppure nella mia lingua, per ringraziare chi in questi mesi è stato e per il resto della mia vita sarà il mio tutto, Mascia e Olga. 2 INTRODUCTION This work focuses on those of the Gaboye – a cluster of minority groups resident in several Somali territories – who live in the self-proclaimed Republic of Somaliland. Somaliland is a region of the former Somali Republic and corresponds to the boundaries of the British Protectorate of Somaliland (1880s-1960). The Gaboye are fewer in number than the major local genealogical groups and they suffer, in a range of forms, descent-based marginalisation that stems from their past subordination to Somali clans. The Gaboye, together with the Tumaal and the Yibir or Anaas, were a cluster of occupationally segregated groups. The Tumaal were associated with blacksmithing, the Anaas were described as wandering sorcerers and leather workers and the Gaboye used to perform a range of activities such as leather-working, shoe-making, pottery (if female), hunting and traditional healing (and circumcision). These three groups were excluded from marriage exchanges with the other Somali clans, who considered them inferior. They lived scattered among the majority clans, to whom they were linked by a set of affiliation relationships, and were forced to undertake those occupational activities the Somalis consider degrading. They could not take part in political arenas such as the councils of the clans’ adult male members and, most importantly, were excluded from the blood-compensation exchanges between genealogical entities. The Gaboye, the Tumaal and the Anaas were ineligible to pay or to receive diya – blood-compensation, also known as mag in Somali – either as part of the groups to which they were affiliated or as autonomous diya-paying groups. Finally they were subject to rules of avoidance linked with vaguely articulated notions about their permanent condition of impurity. Today, they are organised in autonomous genealogical groups that take part in blood-compensation exchanges but continue, for the most part, to perform occupational tasks despised by the rest of the Somalilander population: they are barbers, shoe-makers, shoe- repairers and blacksmiths. The majority of them are concentrated in certain particular neighbourhoods of Hargeysa, the capital of the Republic of Somaliland. The term Gaboye is widely used not only in Somaliland but in all Somali territories. It replaced an older one commonly employed until the early 1990s and that is used nowadays only as a term of deliberate offence. This older term was Midgaan and it is also found in written sources like British colonial documents and scholarly accounts of Somali society up to the 1990s. The other term that all these sources used is Sab: this encompassed the three main denominations of marginal groups (Gaboye, Tumaal and Yibir) but it is almost entirely absent from the lexicon of the Gaboye people met during this research. According to some of our interlocutors, the term ‘Gaboye’ – which means “quiver” in Somali – is as old as Midgaan but less denigrating. For this reason, in the mid- 1990s some prominent members of the Gaboye community decided to promote its adoption in the 3 Somali territories. Now it has entered every sphere of social life, including public communication in the local media. We also stay with this term, although we are aware of its problematic features, the first of which is that it is often used by the Somalilanders in ordinary conversation both to mean the specific group of the Gaboye and as a broader term that also covers the Tumaal and the Yibir. Although the other minorities strongly reject such an identification, this is probably due to the fact that the Gaboye are the largest among them. A second problem is that the Gaboye ‘proper’ are increasingly dissatisfied with the label and prefer to identify themselves through their genealogical identities.