British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

 

BA PDF Symposium 2004: Abstracts

21 April 2004

Dr Cedric Barnes

Somali Poetry and Proto-Nationalist Discourse

The paper asks how Somalis perceived their ‘national’ identity in relation to clan-based society in the context of European colonialism and Ethiopian imperialism in the first half of the twentieth century. The paper uses Somali oral poetry as historical source since poetry is widely acknowledged as the most profound expression of cultural and political discourse in (northern) Somali society. Somali poetry and Somali history have been closely linked, not least because Somali poetry reflects the contemporary events and processes of the era in which it is composed. Its composers are the ‘traditional intellectuals’ with the knowledge and insight necessary to ‘sniff the air’ and formulate coherent narratives of the ‘raw events of the real world’.

I intend to show here how one of the most famous and enduring examples of ‘classical’ Somali poetry - a series of linked poems known as Gubo - sheds light on an important but neglected period of Somali history. The Gubo poems map the experience of three clans who are situated along the eastern Ethiopian border with the colonial Somali-lands, and span the period in which the Ethiopian and the colonial administrations (British and Italian) demarcated the borders between their Somali-inhabited territories (circa 1920-1950). The poems also form link between the poetic discourse of the proto-nationalist and famed poet Sayyid Mohammed Abdille Hasan (a.k.a. the ‘mad Mullah’) and the first ‘nationalist poets’. The Gubo poems comment on two issues that continue to preoccupy Somali politics and history today, namely the division of the Somali peoples into different ‘national territories, and the primacy of ‘clan’ in Somali political life. The content and context of the gubo poems reveals how Somali clans combined local and colonial politics to advantage against their rivals – an important corrective to the idea that Somalis have been the passive victims of arbitrary boundaries and imperialism.

Cedric Barnes was an undergraduate and masters student in the Africa department of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He undertook post-graduate research at Trinity College and the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge, and gained his PhD (entitled ‘The Ethiopian State and its Somali Periphery, circa 1888-1948’) in 2000. His British Academy postdoctoral project is entitled ‘Poets, politicians and pastoralists – national and clan identity in the northern Somali-lands’, hosted by the Department of Languages and Cultures of Africa, SOAS. He has undertaken two periods of fieldwork (1998 and 2002) in the eastern Somali speaking areas of Ethiopia collecting oral and documentary material.