Abstract
For those holding political and economic power, ‘improvement’ has always been
both a promise and an experiment – part of a collective endeavour to realize
unbridled opportunities and overcome the supposed poverty of others. For those
less fortunate, ‘the angel of progress’ unleashes a storm that leaves individual
lives and whole communities shuddering in its wake. That the past is a nightmare
from which we are trying to wake begs the further question, a question that
continues to resonate today and that demands urgent attention: how are
catastrophic famines to be prevented? One possible answer is provided by those
who resisted famine policies in the 1840s: ‘stop creating them’. (Nally, 2011:
231)
Human Encumbrances was a particularly difficult read for me because the images (political, economic, and human) that are analysed and presented are exceptionally agonizing. I have been witness to the destruction of human life in large numbers over the last two decades due to the opaque nature of ideological/security models in the minds of those who wield power or who cater to them – intellectual, political, and military. Nally’s book reminded me of another book entitled Modernizing Hunger (Raikes, 1998). Phil Raikes wrote this book to explain the ways in which the modernization of African agriculture through EEC aid and trade was reproducing hunger in the continent rather than eliminating the scourge. He concluded that ‘what is politically feasible is usually too minor to make any difference, while changes significant enough to be worthwhile are often unthinkable (Raikes, 1988: v). It appears that this has been the case during the Great Irish Famine as narrated in Human Encumbrances.
In my view, Nally provides two lenses that illuminate the complexity and simplicity of the Great Irish Famine or any other life-threatening colonial deprivation: discursive analytical tools that help us understand how life is defined and homogenized in order to justify the desire for ‘progress’; and ways of understanding institutional and techno-political logics that carry out the experiment (Chapter 6). Using this architecture, the book lays bare the models, agenda, institutions, and agencies that created the vulnerabilities of the Irish people and then used that misfortune as an opportunity to remake Ireland. This is exceptionally powerful stuff.
Let me take some of these ideas and see how well they can illuminate the production of indignity and vulnerability in one of the African countries I have worked: Somalia. The two issues I will focus on are: the recasting of identity as a way of defining the value of people and shaping their future; and the case of piracy off the Somali coast to show the illogic of current anti-piracy policy and its costs to the people and the world at large.
Creating people by recasting their identity
Nally shows that saving Ireland did not necessarily mean saving the people themselves who were, in fact, considered an obstacle to the British elite's project of improvement. Saving Somalis as ethnics and not as citizens has been the hallmark of much of the literature as well as the policies emanating from the international community (IC). Let me take this frame and provide two glimpses of what has been taking place in Somalia over the last 20 years. How has the Somali problem been defined and how does the population’s culture fit into the scheme? One of the approaches of the IC towards the Somali case has been to depict political modernization of Somalia as the source of the problem. As such, the IC and its intellectual footsoldiers have been adamant that Somalis need to go back to their old and tribal tradition. The logic of this project is the antithesis of what is narrated in Human Encumbrance, but its effect is exactly the same as it denies Somalis the will to change and to create their own political order in the 21st century. Here the attempt is to lock Somalis into the presumed tradition and in the process reject their right to mould their collective civic belonging.
Three features are fundamental to the way in which the IC and most writers of the dominant world depict the origins of the Somali crisis: irredentism, the clan system, and piracy.
Defining Somalia’s political problem: Irredentism
The Somali people live in the Horn of Africa proper. Their old traditional mode of livelihood entailed pastoral nomadism, and rain-fed agriculture. Culturally it is one of the most homogeneous populations in Africa as they share a common religion, a common language, and a mode of subsistence economy. With the scramble for Africa after 1884, the Somali population was carved up into five areas: a British Protectorate, an Italian colony, a French colony, part of the British Kenya Colony, and a region grabbed by expanding Ethiopia. As Somalis strove for reunification, others who were invested in the emerging order began to articulate Somali desire for reunification as irredentism. Somalis considered their wish for a reunion as their birthright (compare this to the Irish’s desire for autonomy and the imposition of the Union). Although there were individual colonial administrators who were sympathetic to the Somali point of view, the political elite in the Colonial and Foreign Office pushed the policy. After independence Somalia pursued the unification project through peaceful and democratic means, but France and Ethiopia were not interested in conducting referendums in those areas. By contrast, the British conducted one in the Somali region in Kenya in 1963 and a significant majority (66%) of the population voted in favour of joining Somalia, but the British discarded the wishes of the population to curry favour with the emerging postcolonial government of Kenya, and the rest is history. These decisions drove Somalia to reluctantly seek help from the USSR and the cold war was on in the Horn of Africa. It is not possible to understand the Somali condition today without this history, but most western writers and the IC see Somalis as the source of the problem. In a nutshell the contest is between the right to self-determination and the ideology of irredentism. It appears that justice and democratic rights have been put aside among key members of the IC to accommodate what is politically feasible, to use Phil Raikes’s phrase.
Intellectual merchants and defining Somali character
To legitimate the desire to institutionalize the postcolonial order, most European
and American writers endorsed irredentism and ethnic politics as the way to frame
the issues. Although contemporary western authors on Somalia do not use the language
of Human Encumbrances, nevertheless they have depicted Somalis as a
violent group driven by deep ethnic politics. These notions have been deployed to
undermine the autonomy of the Somali as well as their wish for a democratic and
civic country of their own. Here is an example of the thinking of the leading
British authority on Somalia regarding their identity and struggles against British colonialism: Nearly 80 years ago, a brave servant of the empire called Richard Corfield
tried to bring order to the Somalis, when they were in rebellion under a
religious leader dubbed the Mad Mullah by the British. All Corfield got for
his pains was a bullet in the head in the battle and a place in the epic
poetry of Somalis – a bloodthirsty hymn to victory that has lived on in a
society steeped in antagonism to outsiders. The first thing to underscore
about Somalis is that they are not as other men. (Lewis, 1992)
So Somalis are bloodthirsty when they try to defend their land and the empire considers their resistance disorder.
Similarly Somalis’ political identity as reimagined by the colonial authorities and by scholars had far-reaching legacy for postcolonial times. Again Lewis took the lead by emphatically arguing that ‘Somalis receive their fundamental social and political identity at birth through membership of their father’s clan’ (Lewis, 2001, quoted in Samatar, 2010: 50). His argument is that, given the nature of the male genealogical system, individual Somalis politically think like their fellow genealogical groupings. Lewis’s political frame has been influential among the EU, US and many junior American and European academics. Using this ideological logic Lewis convinced the EU to fund a project that was designed to reshape Somalia’s internal political division in the minds of the IC. Leading this project in 1991–1992, he brought together a dozen writers none of which have done work on Somalia, except himself (Samatar, 2010). No Somali scholar was included in the group since Lewis thought that all Somalis are guided by what he describes as ‘my clansmen right or wrong’. The political/tribal map that this study ultimately produced is now the guide for the IC. When a Somali visits any of their diplomatic offices the definitive question he/she confronts is ‘what clan do you belong to?’ and to locate her/himself on the map. The assumption is that such identification and location definitively defines the person’s political views. As a result, Somali warlords and the IC have revamped Somali politics in such a way that political representation (not election) is on a tribal basis. The consequences of this approach have been the destruction of civic belonging and the idea of Somali people in the minds of the IC. Such restructuring of political identity has completely disabled Somalis, at least for now, and the dominant project dovetails quite neatly with conceptual arguments put forward in Human Encumbrances.
Piracy and Somalia
Another illustration of the way in which identity politics is deployed by the IC and most western writers in the Somali case pertains to the piracy question (Samatar et al., 2010). It is estimated that piracy costs the world economy US$7 billion a year. Bringing this cost to an end is said to be the driving force behind the militarist strategy that the UN Security Council has sanctioned in two resolutions. Rarely do we hear about the Somali view of piracy and its cost to the Somali people. The IC and western analysts work from the dubious assumption that all the pirates are Somalis without any consideration of the facts and the history of the country in the last 40 years. Contrary to their presumptions, there are four types of pirates when the issue is examined historically. These are political pirates, resource pirates, defensive pirates, and ransom pirates. The first was an armed political group that was opposed to the western supported military government in Somalia. Once the regime was defeated these pirates disappeared. But as the national institutions collapsed and Somalia became a stateless country, resources pirates, in the form of waste dumpers and fish pirates, were attracted to this country. The former brought industrial or toxic waste from Europe and disposed of it in Somali waters or land, while the fish pirates continue to freely loot Somali fisheries. Elements within the Somali community tried to defend their resources and hijacked a number of fishing trawlers. These are considered to be defensive pirates. In the meantime local criminals recognized that they could make a fortune by mimicking the defence pirates by hijacking some of the 30,000 merchant ships that ply in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. These are ransom pirates and they dominate the headlines.
Rather than see the complexity of piracy, and by focusing on ransom pirates only, the IC and its intellectual footsoldiers at best ignore the cost of resources pirates on the Somalis. In addition, the IC has also criminalized Somalis’ legitimate grievances and the IC’s direct or indirect interventions in Somali affairs continue to undermine their ability to establish a national government of their own. The latter is particularly important since piracy did not exist along the Somali coast when the country had a government, unlike other third world regions (Bay of Bengal, Nigeria, Indonesia-Malaysia, and Colombia) where piracy continues to flourish despite the existence of national government and security forces. This last point indicates that the conditions that made piracy possible in Somalia are political, the absence of government, and that the IC should assist Somalis to re-establish their government in order to terminate piracy, particularly since the cold warriors were party to the demise of the state. All credible estimates indicate that helping Somalis rebuild their government will cost a fraction of what the IC spends on naval presence in the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden.
Although David Nally did not conceive Human Encumbrances to have much to say about places like Somalia, its domestic context, and global politics that have significantly shaped the misfortunes of the population, I found the book’s analytical framework exceptionally valuable in recasting the Somali story. Despite the absence of such intentionality, it is to Nally’s eternal credit that he has crafted a theoretically rich book whose intellectual architecture can accommodate cases far afield and possibly inspire others to rethink old tales. The idea of critically assessing the ways in which dominant elites and their intellectual partners try to recast people by redefining their identity and traditions is central to any understanding of the ways in which vulnerability and indignity is created.