Keren Weitzberg's book We Do Not Have Borders explores Somali identity in Kenya, mapping quandaries of social and political belonging in northern Kenya and among Somali urbanites from the eve of colonialism until the present day. The book examines the interconnected histories of Somalis who historically have been pastoralists in northern Kenya and Isaaq and Harti Somalis who came to Kenya during colonial times from British Somaliland, Aden and Kismayo. Weitzberg's book is a welcome contribution to the literature on the history of Somalis in Kenya, which has concentrated on the post-1991 situation of Somali refugees and the political marginalization of northern Kenya following the 1960s separatist war. Through its breadth and attention to detail, the work speaks to pivotal debates in African studies and beyond about citizenship, sovereignty and transnationalism.
Following a narrative arc from the late nineteenth century into the post-Cold War era, We Do Not Have Borders traces how, as people whose lives and relations straddle borders, Somalis in Kenya have conceptualized alternative political futures. Weitzberg has amassed a wide variety of sources, combining archival work with oral sources, conducting interviews and collecting poems in Kenya. She skilfully interweaves the array of sources; much of the strength of the book lies in the way in which Weitzberg places ‘multiple, sometimes incommensurable, narratives’ (p. x) in conversation rather than searching for a univocal narrative. By tracing silences and divergent framings of people and events, she conjures up the unease that hovers over historical memory in northern Kenya and the ongoing Somali struggle for political inclusion in Kenya.
The book opens by examining the redefinition and negotiation of ‘Somaliness’ during the late nineteenth century by Somali and Oromo speakers as well as by British colonial officials. The first two chapters trace competing ideas of transnational belonging, pitting cosmopolitan ideals and tools to navigate difference used by Somali speakers against the heavily racialized imperial hierarchies of citizenship and subjecthood. The author focuses on the experience of Isaaq and Harti Somalis who arrived in Kenya as soldiers, guides, porters and translators, occupying an ambiguous position in the new colony. The next three chapters examine nationalist imaginaries from the 1940s onwards, beginning with an examination of the rise of ethnoterritorial logics of governance and new conceptions of progress and modernity in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 traces debates over the idea of Greater Somalia across northern Kenya while Chapter 5 focuses on the moment of decolonization and the war between northern separatists and the Kenyan government. Chapter 6 then turns to the era after the failure of the separatist war, underlining how the historically determined marginality of Somalis in Kenya is embedded in wider and global processes. The final chapter of the book poignantly captures the emergence and puncturing of a moment of hope among Kenyan Somalis for increased political inclusion before the Kenyan army invaded Somalia in 2011.
Weitzberg points out the weakness of methodological nationalism, highlighting the long-standing relevance of political, social and economic ties that defy territorial borders but also, in turn, shape the history of those borders and the territories they delineate. In addition, the book unsettles teleological understandings of postcolonial nationalism. Weitzberg unearths ‘past futures’, imagined alternatives to the postcolonial nation state, and looks at the way in which these futures are given new life or resignified at critical junctures. As she traces the history of the future in Kenya, she foregrounds the political debates of Somali and northern Kenyan political thinkers, an essential contribution to histories of Kenya that have thus far emphasized the silencing of northern Kenya through historical militarization, political repression and economic marginalization visited upon the area.
Perhaps because the story Weitzberg tells is so broad and the data by nature fragmented, the final third of the book is less tightly woven. Her explanations of Isaaq identity at times sit a little awkwardly next to the book's more generalized focus on ‘Somaliness’. There is also scope for the book to say more about the role prominent Somalis have played in Kenyan politics since the 1990s – as the book does for earlier periods. Finally, when reflecting on the present, the book occasionally elides the fact that people's abilities to enact, maintain and benefit from relations across borders are highly unequal. Somali transnationalism in recent decades has been shaped by personal relations, lineage ties, access to citizenship documents and the very historical dynamics Weitzberg writes about earlier in the book. She thus misses an opportunity to emphasize the ongoing variation in the ability of Somalis in Kenya to be mobile, seek political inclusion and propose alternative futures. Nevertheless, We Do Not Have Borders is above all a creative and innovative study. It opens a range of questions central to understanding not just colonial and postcolonial pasts but diverse imaginations of the future of borders, sovereignty and the nation state.
