Unraveling Somalia: Race, Violence, and the Legacy of Slavery

Besteman, Catherine. Unraveling Somalia: Race, Violence, and the Legacy of Slavery. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. 284 pp.

In 1991, the Somali state collapsed. Once heralded as the only true nation - state in Africa, Somalia of the 1990s suffered brutal internecine warfare. Simultaneously, a politically orchestrated famine caused the deaths of half a million people and the flight of a million refugees.

During the civil war, scholarly and popular analyses explained Somalia's disintegration as the result of ancestral hatreds played out in warfare among various clans and subclans. The book, Unraveling Somalia, contributes to the debate by challenging this view and argues that the actual pattern of violence contradicts the prevailing model of ethnic homogeneity and clan opposition.

The author, Catherine Besteman, is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Colby College. She contends that the dissolution of the Somali nation - state can be understood only by recognizing that over the past century and a half, there emerged in Somalia a social order based on principles other than simple clan organization - a social order deeply stratified on the basis of race, status, class, region and language.

The author makes this argument by focusing on those particularly targeted in the recent violence, namely the people of the Jubba valley Gosha area. The people of the Gosha, whose ancestors were brought to Somalia as slaves, have always confronted discrimination in Somalia on the basis of their 'Bantu'heritage and their history of enslavement. In tracing their struggles to legitimize their Somali identity, the book reveals the critical significance of racial and class divisions in contemporary Somalia.

The book comprises four parts. Part 1 which consists of chapters one and two constitute the introduction.

Part Il also consists of two chapters. It deals with the historical creation of the Gosha. These two chapters introduce several primary themes that are revisited and developed from different angles throughout the book. The first theme is the transformation of space caused by the entry of ex-slaves into the Jubba valley. In claiming the Jubba valley as their refuge and establishing the valley as a place of agricultural activity, ex-slaves initiated a significant historical transformation in which the valley became, in turn, a target of colonial empire-building of capitalist foreign development interest, and of nation - state consolidation.

The second theme introduced here is the historically contingent and dynamic nature of social identity in Somalia. It is demonstrated how most exslaves and their descendants utilized flexibility in the Somali kinship system to claim membership in Somali clans. In so doing, they tried to bend and shape established Somali practices of adoption, affiliation and clientship to their benefit, while simultaneously continuing to recognize and utilize nonSomali aspects of personal identity in face-to-face encounters within and between Gosha villages.

The third theme is recognizing the historical agency of Jubba valley dwellers. The issue here is whether ex-slaves assimilated to the host society or transformed it following abolition.

Part III tackles this issue further. It is established that although most ex-slaves in the Gosha became 'Somalized' they were not simply assimilating; rather they were pursuing a subtle transformative agenda of the structural constraints that defined Somali society and their place in it. Their presence in Somalia, far from representing simply an insignificant minority population on fringes, indirectly and directly affected the dreams of empire held by colonial Italy, the technologies of state developed by the post colonial government, the conceit of 'development' peddled by Western powers, and the patterning of violence by the post state militias.

Part IV, on violence and the state, emphasizes the confluence of class stratification and racialized identities in structuring the violence of fragmentation. The two chapters detail the political economy of stratification in the Jubba valley, describing the vital struggles over land that have punctuated its history throughout the twentieth century and have material reality to the symbolic forms of denigration described in Part III. The chapters deconstruct the dialectic of internal stratification and external interventions (Cold War geopolitics, donor funding, military technology) to demonstrate the late twentieth - century transformations in the nature of state power, Somali identities, and the definitions of space that were pivotal in the Jubba valley's destruction in the midst of state collapse.

The major weakness of the book is that it is focused on urban-based clan politics. This calls for indepth research into the rural areas of Somalia whose resources and inhabitants bore the brunt of the violence of disintegration. Similarly, the question as to why so much of the destruction, the militia wars, the looting, and the killings have occurred in the farming regions of the south, is not adequately tackled by the author.