TRIBUTE TO THE MIGHTY GENIUS OF SOMALI CLANISM

July 18, 2013

Prof Said Sh. Samatar

SOMALI CLANISM is a force in the land to be reckoned with.  Don’t snicker!  By the end of this animated screed, you will be thoroughly persuaded.  Somali clanism is at once earth-shattering and globe-trotting, coming along as a happy camper wherever Somalis set foot, from Siberia to Senegal and from the North to the South Pole.  It traverses all three tropics—Cancer, Equator and Capricorn, spewing out its lethal cocktail of clannish feud and vendetta.  It arouses in the average Somali a primal, obsessive, compulsive onrush of ugly, blind, unthinking primordial urgings.

Moreover, it contains within it a deadly load of enslaving properties, having captured the mind of some fifteen million Somalis who cringe and cower before its paralyzing transfixing embrace.  A Somali intellectual once said to the author:  “You know, I was born into this clan thing and I can’t extricate myself from its existential clutch, try hard as I may.  Indeed I am loath to disengage from its soothing, seductive grip.”  Hearing this confession, a minor chill went through me.  If a learned man, no less a university professor, confesses to this thorough-going helplessness in the face of this potent force, what about the average Somali, doomed as he is to be devoured by the toxic fumes of this dangerous narcotic.  Wittingly or unwittingly, this sense of utter helplessness envelops all Somalis, putting them in bondage to the unbreakable grip of clannish fixations, propelling them to turn into a nation of victims and criminals.  Nowadays, the virus of Somali clanism threatens to penetrate the international community.

Having conquered and colonized Somalis, clanism is on the march to score a number of conquests on the global community.  For twenty and plus years, in the face of internecine clan killing and chaos, the world has striven mightily to “nationize” us (a neologism for “making us a nation”), funding and financing no fewer than twenty reconciliation conferences to restore the Somali Cassandra of Africa to nationhood.  All to no avail.  Instead, we have triumphantly succeeded in tribalizing the world.  Employing the needle of your compass to draw an arc over the Somali peninsula, start with Puntland where Abdirahman Faroole, or Missing Fingers, has successfully outmaneuvered all opposition by successively co-opting the leading sub-clans of every major clan family.  For example, in the upper Puntland region of Mudugh, he has neutralized the Reer Mahad by slicing off to his side the Warsame and Abdi Aadan sub-clans who really are the only ones that count, in terms, that is, of numerical strength.  Similarly with the Leelkase, he culled out the Reer Haaji, leaving the rest to their clan catcalls!  A small Somali Machiavellian Faroole is.  (Parenthetically, I praise him here in order to atone for my past savage criticism of him).

The story of Somali clanism overwhelming a foreign interloper has a long precedent.  For example, the punch line of Sayyid Mahammad’s poem (“Awal Maanso Waa Taan Balfoo, Buriyey Waayaha e”) (“Long Have I Abandoned the Art of Poetic Composition”) reads:

Engriisku waa baaha qaad, baada no wada e,
Talyaana soo baxyoo haatan waa baha Daraawiishe:

The starving English have now brought us tribute of protection

As for the Italians, they’ve now become a bonafide member of the Dervish clan 

Confederacy.     

Thus does the Sayyid brag of having clanized two major European powers!  Puntland has now successfully enmeshed the Italians in Somali clanism.  Not only has Italy offered considerable aid, including a powerful radio transmitter, a local TV station and a number of infrastructure projects, but Italy has become a virtual ally of Puntland.  For example, at a recent G-8 summit (June 17-18, 2013) in Northern Ireland, the Italians are alleged to have acted as spokesmen for Puntland.  When some in the meeting referred to Hassan Sheikh Mahammed Culusow (the overweight) as president of Somalia, the Italian delegates jumped to their feet to express their doubt about Hassan’s claim.  Having bought Faroole’s line that Turkey equals Iririism, the Italians allegedly lectured the conference that Hassan represented only a clan region, and went on to pontificate on their superior historical knowledge of the region as the former colonial owner of Somalia, in contrast to the patent regional ignorance of other attendees.  (Or could the Italians be pampering Puntland with economic and political largesse because they are keen on getting a piece of the action in the current scramble for oil exploration in Somalia?).

Move on to Somaliland.  In the old days of the British Raj in the Somaliland Protectorate, the English were universally acknowledged to have joined in alliance with the Muusa ‘Arre sub-clan of the Habar Yoonis clan-family, a relationship that was cemented by Resaldar Major Haaji Muusa Faarah (better known by the unflattering nickname of “Muuse Egarre”), the highest ranking officer in the Protectorate’s native administration.  Mr. Faarah hailed from the Muusa ‘Arre sub-clan of the Habar Yoonis.  Hence his success in grafting the English onto the Muusa ‘Arre sub-clan.  As a result, the humor-gifted Somalilanders coined the fresh aphorism: “Muusa ‘Arre iyo Engriis ‘Arre,” or the (“New Muusa ‘Arre and English ‘Arre confederacy of clans!) Taking advantage of Somaliland’s historic relationship with Britain, British oil companies have now descended on Somaliland, mapping the entire territory into oil-exploration zones.

Move on to the Ogaadeen region, comprising Ethiopia’s 5^th Kilil (Somali State) where the Ethiopian overlords have become virtual Ogaadeenis , chewing Chaat and drinking camel milk.  When I was in Addis Ababa (2009), I was told by a reliable source that the late Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, had been the biggest chaat-chewer in town!

Move on to Jubaland.  Here the Jubalanders have co-opted both Ethiopia and Kenya as their new clan allies.  Kenya, especially, has morphed into a Daarood love fest.  Uhuru Kenyatta, the new Kenya president has not only given the Daarood top posts in his cabinet (including the crowning of a Daarood female as Kenya’s Foreign  Minister) but has so embraced the Jubaland Daaroods that he could intone with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “How do I love thee? / Let me count the ways!” He has allegedly masterminded Jubaland’s recent smashing victory over a Mareehaan/Hawiye clan alliance on the outskirts of the port city of Kisimayu.  His commitment to the Daarood Jubaland is immortalized in the coinage of a new word:  “the new Daarood Ismaa’iil and Uhuru Ismaa’iil clan!”

Move on to central Somalia, principally Mogadishu and adjacent regions where a confederacy of Hawiye clans hold sway.  The Hawiye went one better than either the Daarood or the Isaaq, having garnered the support of four foreign alliances, principally Turkey, Egypt, Djibouti and Uganda.  Quite a remarkable achievement, though the fact that both Turkey and Egypt –the two that really count—are embroiled in their own social cataclysms that threaten their very existence does not bode well for the cause of Mogadishu.  And, while you are at it, don’t forget Rahanweyn land, where the Rahanweynis have been triumphantly Rahanwenizing the Abyssinians for two decades—and counting.

The genius of Somali clanism is so mighty and mysterious that it even, on occasion, exercises seasoned scholars.  At the African Studies Association’s annual convention, held in Philadelphia (end of Nov. 2012), at a panel on Somalia chaired by Fowsia Abdulkadir, where Faisal Roble presented an excellent piece on the death of Maandeeq, Prof. Lidwien Kapteigns’ new book, Clan Cleansing in Somalia: the Ruinous Legacy of 1991, was featured and drew praise from Professor Lee Cassanelli as a top-quality work.  As well, Cassanelli has penned a brief warm endorsement of the book in the dust jacket.  Still, at the meeting, the normally mild-mannered Cassanelli thundered forth his strong disagreement with some claims in the book.  I have yet to read the book in its entirety, but from what I’ve been able to skim through here and there, it advances the argument, expressed in the title, and backed by a formidable array of evidence, that a horrible “clan cleansing,” unparalleled in Somali history, had taken place in the months following the fall of Siyaad Barre’s regime early in January, 1991, and that victims of this barbaric massacre were largely members of the Daarood ethnicity.  The point of Dr. Cassanelli’s declamation was uncertain but the perception it left was unmistakable.  He was perceived to be rooting for the Hawiye clan-family while Professor Kapteijns was seen to have drawn a pro-Daarood agenda!  Thus does Somali clanism work up the allegiance and imagination of tried and tested professors?  Still, it’d be a pity if Kapteijn’s well researched expose of massive clan killings and assorted crimes were crowded out by the obfuscating fog of clannish sentiments.

If staid scholars can get exercised over Somali clan consciousness, what chance do mostly unlettered Somalis stand before the irresistible clutch of clanism?  What is truly puzzling is that the average Somali is at once individualist/egalitarian to the point of perpetual anarchy and blindly collectivist in his allegiance to clan imperatives, as Faisal Roble explains in his creative piece on “The Culture of Politics and the Somali Experience.”  Anthropologists explain these baffling character contradictions by reference to the Somali “Segmentary Lineage System,” a crazy kind of collective temperament which at the same enshrines anarchic individualism and clannish collectivsm.  Segmentation, that is, is a system (or rather a non-system) that entrenches institutional instability as the norm.

The late distinguished Somali psychologist, Daud Hassan Ali, (assassinated along with three fellow teachers in the town of Beled-weyn in Somalia by order, allegedly, of the also late but unlamented jihadist H. ‘Eyrow) had , in a conversation with me, characterized “all Somalis as being afflicted with a collective mental condition akin to madness.”  Thus, clanism prompts Somalis to succumb to a feverish state of national insanity.  It keeps an estimated 15 million Somalis in a state of abject poverty, disease and starvation, as well as an existential black hole of irredeemable mental slavery.  It holds its nefarious, malignant grip on the wellbeing and creativity of an entire nation.  It haunts the individual Somali from the crib to the grave, leading him to an inevitable self-destruction.  It makes enemies of people he has never seen, and who have done him no harm, just because they belong to another clan.  It predisposes him/her never to enter a mosque or other places of worship, if they are worshiped in by another clan.  It is the Somali’s patrimony of death and degradation, a national curse that trumps all other Somali curses, of which there are a legion.

Reportedly, clanism is responsible for the rise of divided, segregated, clan-based mosques among the Somali diaspora in north America.  The savvy Somali diplomat, ‘Umar Jamaal, reports the story, maybe apocryphal, of a “pious” Somali bolting breathlessly, by-passing mosques belonging to a clan different from his, in order to reach his own clan’s mosque, only to forfeit the credit of the Maghrib Salaat (evening prayer) because the time of the salaat has passed while on his way to his own clan mosque, reportedly in Minneapolis, Minn.  Therefore, allegedly, if you are in Minneapolis, depending on your ethnicity, you can enjoy the wonders of a Daarood mosque, a Hawiye mosque, and an Isaaq mosque, etc.

Twenty years ago the nations of the earth came in force to Somalia to rescue the Somalis bent as they were on committing national suicide, hoping to nationize them.  Instead, the Somalis tribalized them, with the result that there emerged an Italian-Majeerteen clan-family, an English-Isaaq clan-family, a Rahanweyn Abyssinian clan-family, a Daarood-Ethiopian-Kenyan clan-family, a Turkish-Egyptian-Djibouti-Ugandan-Hawiye clan-family.  Long live Somali clanism.  Somalis of the world, stay clannishly-divided, you’ve everything to gain from your clan chains!

Prof Said Sh. Samatar