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Somalia Social Change
Colonial domination had various effects, such as the formal
abolition of slavery in the years preceding World War II,
particularly in the interriverine area. The effects of Western
rule had a greater impact on the social and economic orders in
urban than in rural areas. After World War II, the institution of
the trusteeship in the Italian-administered south and greater
attention to education in the British-run north gradually led to
further change
(see
British Military Administration;
Trusteeship and Protectorate
, ch. 1).
The late colonial period and the first decade of independence
saw the decline, in part legally enforced, of caste-like
restrictions and impediments to the equality of habash and
traditional occupational groups. In the south, although nobles
were more likely to take advantage of educational opportunities,
habash increasingly did so.
The growing importance of manual skills in the modern economy
gave some occupational groups an economic, if not an immediate
social, advantage. For example, many Tumaal blacksmiths became
mechanics and settled in towns. In southern port towns,
carpenters, weavers, and other artisans formed guilds to protect
their common interests. As skilled manual work became more
available and socially acceptable, tolerance of members of the
traditional groups increased to the point where some
intermarriage occurred in the towns. In the rural areas, members
of these groups formed their own diya-paying units and in
a few cases began to take part in the councils of the Somali
lineages to which they remained attached.
Somali leaders tried to eliminate the traditional
disabilities of low-status groups. In early 1960, just before
independence, the legislative assembly of the Italian trust
territory abolished the status of client, that is, of
habash dependent on Somalis for land and water rights. The
law stated that Somali citizens could live and farm where they
chose, independent of hereditary affiliation. Patron lineages in
the riverine area resisted the change and retaliated against
habash assertions of independence. They withheld customary
farming and watering rights, excluded habash from
diya-paying arrangements, and, in some cases, sought to
oust them from the land they had farmed for generations as
clients. Some habash brought cases in court, seeking to
affirm their new rights, but initially many continued to live
under the old arrangements. Clientship appeared by the early
1990s to have diminished in fact as it had been abrogated in law.
Whereas some features of traditional stratification were
eroded, new strata based on education and command of a foreign
language--English or Italian--were forming in the late colonial
period
(see Education
, this ch.). With independence, a new elite
arose as Somalis assumed the highest political and bureaucratic
positions in national government. A subelite also emerged,
consisting of persons with more modest educational qualifications
who filled posts in local and regional government. In many cases,
however, these government workers were the sons of men who had
acquired a degree of wealth in nonprofessional activities such as
landholding, trading, and herding, in part because the costs of
secondary education in the colonial period could be met only by
relatively affluent families.
Two somewhat contradictory forces affected educated urban
Somalis in the 1950s and 1960s. On the one hand their income,
education, and, above all, their literacy in a foreign language
distanced them from most other Somalis. On the other hand,
lineage and clan remained important to most of this new elite.
Thus descent groups acquired a new importance in national
politics.
Locally, particularly in the larger towns, a combination of
outsiders and area residents provided middle-level
administration. One administrative component would consist of
members of the national subelite brought in by the Somali
government. Typically, this group would include the district
commissioner, the judge, the secretary to the municipality, the
staff of some of these officials, teachers, and the national
police. Locally elected councillors would constitute the other
administrative component. Some councillors were lineage heads;
others were businessmen or had some other basis for their local
status. Some of the local notables had sons serving as district
officials but, by regulation, not in their home communities. In
Afgooye, a town in which the Geledi, the Wadaan (a group of the
Hawiye clan-family), and others were represented, the local
people and the subelite meshed well in the mid- and late 1960s,
but Afgooye was not necessarily representative of local
communities in the riverine areas or elsewhere.
Beginning in the nineteenth century, there was a growing
distinction between the bulk of nomadic Somalis and their kinsmen
in the towns acting as middlemen in the livestock trade with
Aden. Some of these townsmen became relatively wealthy and
appeared to have more influence in council than their pastoralist
relatives.
By the 1960s, the demand for livestock in the Middle East had
led to a great expansion of the livestock trade through the port
of Berbera. Hargeysa and Burao became the points from which 150
to 200 major livestock dealers and their agents--all but a few of
them Somalis--operated. The nomadic producers directed their
activity toward the commercial market, but the traders controlled
the terms of trade, the feedlots, and some of the better grazing
land. The government did not interfere because the livestock
trade was too important as a source of foreign exchange, and
because the traders marketed the animals efficiently.
A new class of merchants thus emerged. They retained their
connections with their lineages, but their interests differed
from those of nomadic herders. If they were not educated, they
tried to ensure that their children attended school.
After World War II and during the first decade of
independence, the government stressed loyalty to the nation in
place of loyalty to clan and lineage. The segmental system was
seen as a divisive force, a source of nepotism and corruption;
Somali politicians denounced it as "tribalism." A few Somalis
rejected reference to clan and lineage. Nevertheless, persons
meeting for the first time asked each other about their "ex-
clans." Clan-families, once functionally unimportant, became
increasingly significant as political rallying points,
particularly as Somalia approached independence, and they
continued to be so in the 1990s. Clans and lineages remained the
basic unit of society, serving many social, political, and
economic functions regionally and locally. Although the Somali
government opposed clans and lineages, it continued to appoint
and pay lineage heads; lineages and clans were in fact voting
blocs. Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1964 effected a major
change in the role of the diya-paying group. The court's
judgments forbade collective payment for premeditated homicide.
Payments for unpremeditated homicide and injury, however, were
defined as compensation for a tort and were permitted. In this
era, too, the diya-paying group's responsibilities were
extended to cover traffic fatalities.
The military leadership that took power in October 1969
introduced elements that constituted a radical break with the
past. The new regime soon declared socialism as its frame of
reference, in part as a means of obtaining Soviet aid
(see Siad Barre and Scientific Socialism
, ch. 1). The regime's basic ideas
constituted a pragmatic version of Marxism adapted to local
social and economic conditions. In this version, class struggle
did not apply; the bourgeoisie was very small, composed of the
new elite and subelite (chiefly employed in government), a few
traders, and a few professionals. There was no significant
proletariat, rural or urban, and no great Somali entrepreneurs or
landholders.
In its initial zest for change, the new regime focused on the
divisions in Somali society: the cleavages between clans and
lineages, the settled and the nomadic, strong and weak pastoral
lineages competing for grazing and water, patrons and clients in
the cultivating regions, and urban and rural dwellers. Attention
was also given to the continuing disdain shown to those of low
status. Under the new regime, clan and lineage affiliations were
irrelevant to social relations, and the use of pejorative labels
to describe specific groups thought inferior to Somalis were
forbidden. All Somalis were asked to call each other
jaalle (comrade), regardless of hereditary affiliation.
Within limits the language of public discourse can be changed
by fiat; much pejorative language was expurgated. Nevertheless,
Somalis continued to learn each other's clan or lineage
affiliation when it was useful to do so, and in private it was
not uncommon for Somalis to refer to habash by the phrase
"kinky hair." The term jaalle was widely used in the media
and in a range of public situations, but its use cannot be said
to have reflected a change of perspective.
The government also sought to change the function of the
clans and lineages by abolishing the title of elder and
replacing it with peacekeeper. Peacekeepers were the
appointed spokesmen of what were officially regarded as local
groups composed of either cultivators or pastoralists. In the
early 1970s, collective responsibility (diya payment) in
any guise was abolished.
Like most governments required to deal with a large nomadic
population, the pre- and post-revolutionary regimes sought to
find ways to settle the pastoralists, both to improve the
pastoral economy and to facilitate control and services. Efforts
to convert the nomads into ranchers made little progress, and in
the early 1990s most herders were still nomadic or seminomadic.
The 1974 drought, however, drove many nomads to seek government
help; by 1975 about 105,000 had been resettled, 90,000 as
cultivators and 15,000 as fishermen. Clans were deliberately
mixed within the settlements, and the settlers were expected to
deal as individuals with local councils, committees, and courts,
whose membership was also heterogeneous. Three years later,
nearly 45 percent of the adult males had left the cultivating
settlements, perhaps to resume herding. Most of those living in
fishing communities remained. Neither the farmers nor the
fishermen had been economically successful.
The dismantling of the diya system; the institution of
several political and administrative offices intended to
eliminate power vested in lineages and clans; and the
establishment of committees, councils, and cooperatives were all
part of a policy to replace the descent group system as the
primary means of organizing political, economic, and social life.
Another manifestation of this policy was the banning in 1972 of
weddings, burials, and religious rites organized on a lineage or
clan basis. Wedding ceremonies were henceforth to be held at
orientation centers or other public places. Money could not be
collected from lineage members for the burial of a dead member,
and the law forbade religious rites tied to local traditions.
Most published observations refer to the continuing role of
clan affiliation in national politics. The clan-family, which
rose to considerable importance in Somali politics in the 1950s
and 1960s, seemed in later years to lose its force as a rallying
point. With the exception of northern Somalia's Isaaq people, the
groups that exerted influence either for or against the regime
were mostly of a single clan-family, the Daarood; President
Mohammed Siad Barre's clan, Mareehaan; his mother's clan, Ogaden;
his son-in-law's clan, Dulbahante; and the opposition clan,
Majeerteen.
Among the revolutionary regime's concerns was the status of
women. After World War II, all political parties had established
women's committees. In the Italian-administered south, women
voted for the first time in the 1958 municipal elections; in the
formerly British north, women voted in the 1961 national
referendum on the constitution. Women's role in public affairs
remained minimal, however, and little was done to change their
legal situation in the first decade of independence.
Under Somali customary law, a woman was under the legal
protection of a male--her father or husband, or one of their
kinsmen in the event of their deaths. In blood compensation, her
life was usually valued at half that of a man. Islamic law
permitted daughters to inherit half of what was inherited by
sons, but in Somali practice daughters ordinarily did not share
in the inheritance of valued property (camels or land). Few girls
attended school and even fewer continued beyond the elementary
level.
The revolutionary government quickly changed women's legal
and political status. In principle, the question of diya
payment for injuries to women became moot following the formal
termination of the traditional system. Soon after the revolution,
the government established committees to deal with women's
affairs. Women also began participating in government,
committees, sports, and other social and cultural activities. In
early 1975, Siad Barre announced a decision by the Supreme
Revolutionary Council (SRC) and the Council of Ministers to give
equal rights to women in several respects, including equal
inheritance rights, a move that led to protests by some Islamic
leaders
(see Challenges to the Regime
, ch. 1). Perhaps more
important was the government's insistence that girls attend
school, particularly beyond the elementary level.
There were women in visible public posts in Somalia in 1990.
Until the 1991 collapse of the state, 6 of the 171 elected
members of the People's Assembly were women. Increasing numbers
of females were attending secondary school and university.
Further progress for women was interrupted by the civil war and
would have to await reconstruction of the country.
The Siad Barre government also acted in the economic sphere,
fostering various government agencies at the national, regional,
and local levels. The regime initiated some enterprises and
placed others under state control. Much productive and
distributive enterprise remained in private hands, however.
In the rural areas, the government (beginning with colonial
administrations) and large-scale private farmers had acquired
much of the irrigated land. In the late 1970s, small-scale
farmers had worked some of the irrigated land and much of the
flood land, but by the mid-1980s much of the latter had been
converted to controlled irrigation and had come under state
control. For the most part, rain-fed land cultivation remained in
the hands of traditional smallholders engaged in subsistence
farming, some of whom earned the cash they needed by working on
state farms. Most extensions of the irrigation system facilitated
development of large state farms, rather than small farms. Some
rural Somalis held no land and relied on wage labor on state
farms and large private holdings (chiefly banana plantations) for
their livelihood.
Under Siad Barre's regime, animal husbandry remained
primarily in the hands of individual pastoral Somalis. The chief
change lay in the readiness of these pastoralists to sell their
livestock in response to overseas demand. Marketing was in the
hands of private traders who had accumulated enough capital to
construct water storage units and invest in a transport fleet. In
addition, a number of traders had enclosed rangeland to produce
hay, thereby excluding herders who formerly had used the land.
These traders benefited not only from the government construction
of roads and other facilities but also from arrangements whereby
their overseas earnings might be used in part to buy imports for
domestic sale.
Although income distinctions existed among Somalis in the
private sphere, until 1991 those who combined comparatively large
incomes with reasonable security were government employees such
as administrators, technical personnel, and managers of state-
owned enterprises. As under the first independence regime,
administrators did not serve in their home territories and were
therefore not linked by kinship to the more affluent Somalis in
the local private sector.
Despite the otherwise fluid character of the system, the apex
of the local hierarchy in a rural settled area consisted of the
high-level (and to some extent the middle-level) representatives
of the state. These included regional and local administrators,
managers of state farms and agro-industries such as the sugar
refinery at Giohar, technicians, and highly skilled workers.
Members of this group had relatively high incomes and could be
reasonably sure of seeing that their children finished school, an
important prerequisite to finding a good position. Because they
often determined the flow of resources to the private sector,
this elite group exercised economic power greater than that of
wealthy merchants or large landholders whose income might be the
same as, or larger than, theirs.
At the bottom of the economic hierarchy were most rural
Somalis, whether sedentary or nomadic. Living primarily by
subsistence cropping or herding, they sold what they could. They
had little contact with government and had been relatively
untouched by development projects because of their isolation or
insufficient government efforts to reach them. The farmers among
them cultivated the poorest land and barely earned survival
incomes with wage work. The pastoralists were most affected by
the demands of a difficult environment. Beginning in the late
1970s, limits on migration resulting from hostile relations
between Somalia and Ethiopia caused them additional hardship.
As of the early 1990s, two other significant categories of
rural residents were workers whose wages derived from state-owned
or state-sponsored activities, and landholders or herders who
operated on a smaller scale than the plantation owners. Neither
of these categories was homogeneous. Wage workers ranged from
landless and relatively unskilled agricultural workers whose
income might be intermittent, to low-level workers in government
agencies whose income was likely to be steadier and who might be
heads of or members of families with subsistence farms or herds.
Plots or herds owned by farmers or herders varied considerably in
size and quality, as did the income derived from them.
Nevertheless farmers and herders fared better than subsistence
farmers. They joined cooperatives, took advantage of adult
education, and participated in government programs that promised
to enhance their incomes and the status of the next generation.
Members of this category sent their children to school and
arranged for some of them to seek more lucrative or prestigious
employment in Mogadishu or other large towns.
Rural petty traders did not clearly belong to any one
economic category. Their incomes were not large, but equaled
those of many lower-level wage workers and small-scale market-
oriented farmers.
Particularly in Mogadishu, the national capital and the
largest town, another social pattern developed prior to the fall
of the Siad Barre regime. Because of their incomes and the power
they wielded, the highest party and government officials became
the new apex of Somali society. In the early 1990s, the salaries
and allowances of cabinet ministers were twice that of the next
highest officials, the directors general of ministries, and
nearly twenty-five times that of the lowest levels of the civil
service. Below the ministers and directors general but well above
the clerks of the bureaucracy were other high-level
administrators, executives, and skilled personnel. For instance,
the manager of a large state-owned factory earned somewhat less
than a minister but more than a director general. An unskilled
laborer in a state farm earned less than the poorest-paid civil
servant, but an unskilled worker in a factory earned a little
more. Unskilled farm and factory workers and bottom-level
government employees earned only 5 to 10 percent of a manager's
salary.
As in the rural areas, in the towns there were many people
involved in the private sector. In some respects, merchants and
traders had the deepest urban roots. Most of them were petty
traders and shopkeepers whose income and status were closer to
those of craftsmen than to those of the wealthier merchants.
In the mid-1970s, a manufacturing census indicated that about
6,000 enterprises in Somalia employed five or fewer persons, most
of them probably family members. Unlike the larger, often
foreign-owned industrial concerns, these had not been
nationalized.
Most urban dwellers were wage workers, but they had various
skills, sources of employment, and incomes. For example, low- and
middle-level clerks in the government bureaucracy and in state
enterprises earned no more (and sometimes less) than skilled
artisans in state firms, and both earned perhaps twice as much as
unskilled factory laborers.
The situation of the urban population had changed radically by early 1992.
Following the fall of Siad Barre, urban areas consisted largely of refugees
or war victims who had migrated from the countryside after the civil war began.
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