State and Clan in Somalia

Society, Security, Sovereignty and the State. Somalia: From Statelessness to Statelessness? by
Maria H. Brons
Review by: Lidwien Kapteijns
African Studies Review, Vol. 45, No. 3 (Dec., 2002), pp. 52-56
Published by: African Studies Association
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52 African Studies Review

STATEAND CLANIN SOMALIA

Maria H. Brons.Society, Security,Sovereignty and the State. Somalia: From

Books,2001. 312 pp. Maps.
Statelessness to Statelessness? Utrecht:International
Diagrams.Glossary.Bibliography.Index.
$29.95. Paper.

This study of Somalia is deeply flawed, conceptually and factually. Instead

of examining historical processes and structures in their true contexts,
Brons projects into the distant and recent Somali past the terms and con-
cepts in which the current civil war is being fought, that is to say, the very
pseudohistorical terms with which the warlords have incited their followers
to civil war. Let us examine this in detail.
As chapter 2 makes clear, Brons bases her study on "critical security
studies." These shift the focus from the state to the people, partly because
it is their security and not that of the state that should be central, and part-
ly because there exist supra- and substate options for instituting security,
political authority, and sovereignty. She adopts three criteria by which to
measure a state: the state as an idea, the state as territory, and the state as
institution. It is with these tools that she sets out to evaluate the political
and security arrangements of Somali society in the past, present, and
future.
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 deal with the precolonial period. These analyze
first geography and economy, then Somali identity, and finally, security
arrangements. Brons distinguishes three kinds of social identity: that based
on ways of livelihood (sedentary versus nomadic), that based on religion,
and that based on clan. Conspicuously absent here is any reflection on
soomaalinimo,the concept of Somali identity itself, or on the historically
well-documented identity of citizenship--of being a citizen of a city-state
such as Zeila, Brava, or Mogadishu. Instead, Brons gives importance only to
clan identity. However, rather than attempting to situate this in its pre-
colonial historical context, she offers a very loose and superficial survey of
some current clan names and territories, only to digress completely from
her stated focus to misrepresent the influx of refugees following the
1977-78 war against Ethiopia as the migration and invasion of one clan.
This is incorrect; the defeated soldiers and civilian refugees of this war
included Somalis of all backgrounds, who were generally welcomed by
Somalis everywhere, north and south. Hostilities between resettled
refugees and their hosts became an issue much later, in the 1980s, when, in
the context of deteriorating state-society relations and active manipulation
by the Barre regime, they came to be politicized along clan lines. This is
just one example of how Brons confuses the outcome of historical process-
es with their origins, producing a deeply anachronistic and partisan
account.
Chapter 5's focus on how (in-)security was maintained in precolonial
Somalia is innovative in that it promises a reading of those arrangements

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 Review Essays 53

for legal, social, economic, environmental, political, and military security

that might be relevant to Somalia's current condition of state collapse.
Unfortunately, this brief chapter fails to offer a coherent or comprehensive
analysis. Most problematic is the failure to describe or conceptualize pre-
colonial political authority, even as Brons's assumptions on this matter
become a central pillar of her interpretation of, and prescriptions for,
Somalia today. A casual reference to the "elders and the traditional heads
of clans and lineages" (125) is no substitute for providing an adequate his-
torical baseline.
With chapter 6 we come to the colonial era and an examination of
state and security arrangements in the period c.1880-1960. Brons draws
the significant conclusion that colonial occupation and the armed resis-
tance it called into being deepened political, military, and economic inse-
curity for most Somalis. However, her reading of the legal and political
dimensions of colonial rule is uninformed. The British and Italian admin-
istrations did indeed undermine Somali structures of authority, but not, as
Brons claims (155), by ignoring customary law and traditional sociopoliti-
cal structures and imposing their own alien legal systems. On the contrary,
obsessed with clans and native custom, they did not ignore those structures
but rather transformed them. It is this transformation that makes casual
references to "traditional"clan elders so ahistorical and inadequate.
Brons's decision to examine the anticolonial jihad of Sayyid
Muhammed 'Abdallah Hasan (1898-1921) as a project of state formation
is again innovative. Unfortunately, she chooses to measure it by the state of
affairs at the time of its temporary colonial confinement at Ayl in 1905
rather than during its heyday at Taleex in the decade before its demise,
when its political reach, economic development, and international (Pan-
Islamic) relations were at their height. She hurriedly moves on to its fail-
ure, missing the opportunity to size up seriously the Sayyid's polity accord-
ing to her own criteria of (1) the idea of the state-which would require a
reading of the Sayyid's poetry and Arabic treatises, (2) its territorial and
economic base over time, and (3) its institutions, whose inadequacy may
well have been its Achilles heel.
Chapter 7 deals with the period 1960-91, from the establishment of
the independent state to its collapse. Here the worst distortion of Brons's
lens is caused by her determination to read back into the beginning of this
period two divides that have become prominent since (and because of) the
Barre dictatorship and its demise, namely that between north and south
(or better, the SNM-based breakaway government of the north and the rest
of Somalia) and that between the clan-family to which Barre belonged and
everyone else. Since these two divides do not map onto each other, given
the clan constitution of the north, this leads to incoherence and inconsis-
tency. The gravest consequence, however, is a falsification of history, as
Brons performs a magical disappearing act on the historically well-docu-
mented nationalist project of state formation in which Somalis of all back-

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54 AfricanStudies Review

grounds and across multiple divides pulled together to build a state. Brons
goes out of her way to conceal this unity and does so by seriously misrep-
resenting the historical facts. For example, in contrast to what she claims
(152), neither the leadership nor the rank-and-file of the Somali Youth
League (SYL) derived from a single clan or clan family. Thus, of the found-
ing fathers, only four belonged to the so-called dominating clan family;
names such as Abdulqadir Sakhaawadin, Haji Mohamed Husein,
Mohamed Farah Hilowle, and Mohamed Abdalla Hayesi should be a suffi-
cient reminder. Moreover, it was the president of the breakaway northern
republic of Somaliland who, as late as 1967-69, was both the head of the
SYLand the prime minister of Somalia.
Other errors: The Somali Youth Club was not made up primarily of
members of the Somali Police Corps (162); the Act of Union was indeed
confirmed by both the northern and southern parliaments (161); the ide-
ology of "Greater Somalia" was not the dream of one clan or clan family, as
even a cursory glimpse at Somali popular songs and plays (from Djibouti to
Mogadishu) will reveal; Somaliairredentawas not populated by only one clan
or clan family. Furthermore, the lands of riverine farmers were not alienat-
ed by members of one clan family. The cronies of Barre's government who
alienated such lands in the 1980s included Somalis from all kinds of back-
grounds, even-until the very last years of the regime and at a time that
Barre was wreaking increasing destruction in the north-prominent north-
erners. It is only a simplistic clan reading that distorts such basic historical
facts.
Equally misguided is Brons's attempt to translate regional demograph-
ic data for 1963 into conclusions about the sizes of clans (167). Instead of
pointing out that the south was substantially more populous than the small-
er north, Brons misrepresents regional demographic data to claim numer-
ical superiority for just two southern clans. At the same time, rather than
estimating the population of the north and all its different regions and
groups, she reduces the north to the one clan family that dominates the
breakaway republic of Somaliland (and one smaller group in the west),
omitting all other groups. Such an intentional sleight-of-hand reveals her
beholdenness to narrow sectarian mythmaking. It is true that the national-
ist project of state formation failed even before the state collapse of 1991.
When, how, and why it did so are serious and urgent research questions.
However, interpreting the historical genesis of the independent state in
terms of the conflicts that eventually sealed its fate, terms which are the
very ones with which the ethnocidal warlords of the 1990s incited their
militias and justified their acts, is unacceptable.
The Barre regime (1969-91) and the opposition fronts that took up
armed resistance against it receive the same reductive clan reading. In con-
trast to what Brons claims, the Barre regime, until the very end, had Soma-
lis of all backgrounds both in the ranks of its high government officials and
in its prisons. Moreover, Brons is blind to the fact that groups that did not

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 Review Essays 55

belong to Barre's so-called MOD alliance reaped major economic benefits

from his rule. The most important opposition fronts initially had a diverse
leadership and following and continued to cooperate until the late 1980s,
as Brons's own narrative indicates (207). The Manifesto group of 1990 was
not primarily the initiative of one clan group (208) but represented an ad
hoc alliance of prominent middle-class inhabitants of Mogadishu from a
variety of clan backgrounds. It was the last such initiative before the
descent into all-out clan militia-based violence. Brons is correct in attribut-
ing the collapse of the state to the failure of the opposition front to agree
on how to fill the vacuum left by Barre's expulsion from the city in January
1991. However, this is only half of the story and does not explain the bru-
tality of the citizens' war: She simply omits from her account the transfor-
mation of the civil war from an increasingly clan-based, multifront struggle
against the dictatorship into attempted ethnocide against one group. The
victims of "the first war of Mogadishu" in January 1991 were not, as Brons
states (222), those who had supported or benefited from the regime;
indeed, the opposite was often true. The warlords who led and condoned
ethnocide do not even receive mention in Brons's account. Further, the
ethnocide that marked the first war of Mogadishu was neither the first
(vide Hargeisa and Bur'o in 1988), nor the last (vide what happened to the
Wagosha afterJanuary 1991), but it marked both the moment of state col-
lapse and the beginning of an intrinsically different stage in the war. Why
does Brons gloss over this most dramatic and bloody transformation of
political agendas?
Chapter 8 deals with "statelessness and after." In it Brons surveys some
of the main events after 1991, the UN involvement, and contemporary
local Somali attempts at state formation in the north, northeast, and river-
ine area. Brons is optimistic about these initiatives, especially that of Soma-
liland, but does not seriously measure them by the three criteria she has
proposed, especially that of public institution building. Moreover, given
her focus on (in-) security, she would have done well to pay attention to the
campaigns of destruction of non-SNM groups in the north which laid the
base for the fragile but real peace that exists there now.
The conclusion poses the question toward which the book has led
throughout: Do Somalis need a state at all? For Brons, clan and state con-
stitute opposite ends of a simple continuum and move in seesaw fashion:
When the one is up, the other is down and vice versa. Moreover, clan is the
heavyweight in this relationship and the moving factor in Somali history.
Given this view, it is not surprising that she sees no internal need for a
Somali state, although she acknowledges other imperatives (such as the
structure of international relations). On the contrary, she regards "the col-
lapse of the Somali state as a liberation for Somali society. Somalia now...
is a showcase for the 'second liberation of Africa,' the liberation from states
and their leaders who have been superimposed on societies to the detri-
ment of freedom and development" (286).

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56 AfricanStudies Review

In the eyes of this reviewer, it is hard to imagine a more damning com-

mentary on this book than this verdict, for, one may ask, what constitutes
the "liberation" that is the sum of the insights developed in this book?
Today there may exist a bare minimum of peace in many but not all areas,
and one cannot but be impressed with the efforts to survive and rebuild of
war-weary Somali individuals, communities, and organizations. Foreign
governments and international governmental and nongovernmental orga-
nizations are chaotically scrambling for pieces of the Somali pie. All this in
the absence-and without the supports and constraints--of functioning
and accountable public institutions. One example of this so-called second
liberation must suffice here. In 1989, 57 percent of Somali children were
in school. In 2002 that number, in both north and south, is estimated at 7
percent, with girls making up a tiny minority. Could it be that Brons is
proposing to throw out the baby with the bathwater?
LidwienKapteijns
WellesleyCollege
Wellesley,Massachusetts

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