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

Abstract

In 1991 the Somali state collapsed. Once heralded as the only true nation-state in Africa, the Somalia of the 1990s suffered brutal internecine warfare. At the same time a politically created famine caused the deaths of a 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. In Unraveling Somalia, Catherine Besteman challenges this view and argues that the actual pattern of violence -- inflicted disproportionately on rural southerners -- contradicts the prevailing model of ethnic homogeneity and clan opposition. 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. Unraveling Somalia makes this argument by focusing on those particularly targeted in the recent violence: 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, Unraveling Somalia reveals the critical significance of racial and class divisions in contemporary Somalia. In addition to offering a new explanation of the collapse of the Somali state, Unraveling Somalia contributes to our understanding of how constructions of raceand class in Africa are related to supposedly tribal warfare on the continent. In drawing connections among race, class, and violence, this book also contributes to the building of a comparative theoretical analysis of the global disintegration of nation-states and the politics of terror.

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