Book Review: Unearthing Apartheid in the horn of Africa

Somalia has a long history of marginalization and discrimination, to the point of labeling fellow Somalis as a lesser Somali, and Somali Bantu, alias Jareer, falls under this category. This community has suffered from psychological damage due to the hatred, abuse, and harassment they received from the so-called ‘majority clans’ of Somalia. The author stated that Somali Muslim scholars dodged and neglected this issue and that they never give efforts to tackle this alarming discrimination against the Somali Bantu community.

Abdulkadir Sheikh Sakhawadin who is from the Jareer community co-initiated SYL-freedom fighting movement, but unfortunately his people never enjoyed the country he strove for and Jareers never felt the fruits of the nationalism and patriotism he stood for. Alas, to make matters worse, his legacy is never celebrated the same way as he is the case with his fellow SYL freedom fighters.

This community is engaged in doing menial jobs and live in the lowest ranks ever in Somalia and the reason is that they have been denied the opportunities unlike their counterparts – the other ‘ennobled’ clans. They have also been subjected to gang rape, conscription, and expropriation in different eras of Somali history and they have never received justice.

The whole apartheid story of Somalia went to another level when the national Reconciliation conference in Kenya was adopted and institutionalized - the 4.5 system which states that Jareers and other outcast communities will get 50% of what other clans get in politics.

Professor Enow stated that the whole conference was a jileec affair along with warlords, IGAD, and some frontline neighbors including Ethiopia, Djibouti, and the host country-Kenya. He said that Jareer and other outcasts plus Somali scholars didn’t get the chance to have their views expressed at the conference.

 

By using the terms “New colony/civilian regimes”, the author blamed both president Abdirashid and Adan Adde for looting agricultural land owned by Somali Bantu. In the book, it is stated that Siad Barre also took a land owned by Jareer community; he has also demoted Jareer top officers in the military, and drafted many jareer youths for the 1977 war.

 

In his book, Professor Enow criticized I.M Lewis for exaggerating the pastoral democracy of Somalia. He also criticized Nuradin Farah for praising Hawa Taka in his Naked Needle masterpiece without making mention of two other jareer martyrs who died at the same scene with Hawa. He also rebuked Maryan Arif Kasim and Abdi Ismail Samatar for calling Adan Adde’s government a democratic one albeit all the tragedies it had committed. 

 

Excerpts from the book including some poems

“Equality for all poses threat to the beliefs of supremacy and nobility of oppressors”.
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“shiiq ii sharaf-kiina sheegataa tihiin

Minaa ishumeeynin waa nii shawihaa”

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“Mugii Aradneedoo Afkaada Uraayi

Aboow Ileheed Adoon ma aheen”

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“The Bantu Jareer people were caught in the middle of a dilemma between two devils-from Somali African repression to white Italian oppression”
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“A Somali does not ask another Somali where he is from, but who he is from”

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“in 1990 several elders approached Barre to save the country from turmoil but the dictator stood by his word that only by the barrel of the gun would he step down, since that was the formula by which he came and not by election or elders’ negotiation”.

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“sawjaa kufsateen, siifna waadhacdeen

Salaama caleykum ma igu sireysid”

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“By this notion, ethnic qualities and physical appearance play a role in being [a] Somali. It is inadequate to be just an indigenous born and bred in the country. A somali has therefore to possess certain physical qualities and culture unrelated to negritude or agrarian mode of production. For one to fall in the category of Somaliness one has to be slender, not stout, has to have a pointed nose, not a flat or broad one; has to have soft hair, but no hard, thick or curly; and after all one has to subscribe to the culture of nomadic pastoralism as the right properties to Somaliness”

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“When a proper census is conducted, believe me, the .5 (point five) community will be 1.5”

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“in the Somali myth, the Isaq and Darod consider themselves as the ordained “super-nobles” while the Hawiye and Digil-mirifle take their places at the subsequent “lower” levels in that order but above the reer Hamar (Banadiri)and Barawaans who rest in almost the same place, atop of the Jareer at the bottom-most”.