Somali studies is very fortunate to have been blessed with such a keen cultural anthropologist as Catherine Besteman, one of the very few nuanced non-Somali scholars who have been studying Somali society since the 1980s. Her incisive analysis draws on her extensive fieldwork in Bantu Somali communities in the US and Somalia. Unlike some in Somali studies who have not conducted direct field-based research, Besteman lived and stayed in a small farming village on the banks of Bu'aale in Jubbada Dhexe (the Middle Juba) region during her doctoral project between 1987 and 1988. This research culminated in two single-authored significant books, one co-edited book and numerous essays, academic articles and book chapters.
Making Refuge displays the power and tendency of anthropology for connecting subjects through objects, as Besteman reconnects with her former ethnographic subjects in Banta. In her previous work, Unraveling Somalia: race, class, and the legacy of slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), Besteman anonymized Banta, using the invented name of ‘Loc’. This led I. M. Lewis, the late dean of English-speaking Somali studies, to assume that Loc was the Southern Somali town of Luuq and to berate her for misspelling the name of the town. In fact, Luuq was known by Somalis during the precolonial era as Luuq Ganaane and by Italian colonial authorities as Lugh Ferrandi, named after the Italian explorer Ugo Ferrandi.
The ‘civil’ war that devastated Southern Somalia has destroyed and displaced a considerable number of Bantu Somalis, but it has also opened unique spaces for them to more freely express themselves and discuss their trials and tribulations in the diaspora. Yet simple words, especially in foreign languages, cannot be used with feeling to describe the loss of a homeland. The nostalgic manner through which Somali Bantu refugees in the US talk of their villages in Southern Somalia reveals the mismatch between a life in one's homeland, even under oppression, and a life in a foreign country as a refugee. Although few like to speak of their pasts, once they do, the Bantu Somalis reminisce about the ‘good old days’, even if those days were in fact harsh and cruel.
Each part of the book begins with an introductory story that sets the stage and showcases the author's beautiful writing. Besteman traces Bantu Somali stories from the 1991–92 wars in which the Bantu Somalis were not fully involved, through their traumatic experiences in refugee camps in Kenya, and finally to their painful settlement in the US, when efforts to relocate them to Tanzania and Mozambique had failed. She offers excellent overviews of their experiences during the military regime, the pressures they experienced during the Cold War, their daily encounters with the assaults of rival Darod and Hawiye militias during the wars, and the post-war (re-)emergence of their identity as Bantu Somalis. The first chapter presents a particularly brilliant summary of their situation from the 1980s onwards. The bulk of the book then explores their expectations of life in the US, where they had imagined immediate employment and education while in refugee camps. They never imagined that they would be living in poverty in the land of opportunity. Many others did not even get the opportunity to go to the US.
The book also describes the strain that the unexpected influx of refugees and immigrants from Somalia put on the town of Lewiston, highlighting the (in)famous letter written by Mayor Laurier T. Raymond Jr in October 2002, which restricted their early interaction with local white people. Using the stories of Bantu Somalis and their resettlement contacts – city staff, health providers, administrators, teachers, social workers – Besteman describes how Foucauldian formal state institutions including the police, hospitals and schools treated these new immigrants, and, in so doing, she assesses the notion of humanitarianism and how those on the receiving end see it. Describing their experiences of racism and the pressures of adapting to existing community structures, she debunks the stereotype that Bantu Somalis are dependent on welfare and that the welfare system provides them with everything for free. Parents struggled to raise their children in a culture contrary to their own, which supposedly allows children unparalleled autonomy. They also grappled with inter-community fractures and competition over scarce resources. Thus, the community struggles with internal divisions, despite their denigration back in Somalia, and with a form of suffering that the Bantu Somali academic and activist Mohamed Abdulkadir Eno aptly described as the ‘untold apartheid’ perpetrated by Somali pastoralists.
The value of this study is clearly bolstered by Besteman's careful treatment of her subjects. However, her argument would have been developed even more if she had engaged with the recent burgeoning scholarship produced by Bantu Somali scholars such as Mohamed Eno and his late brother Omar Abdulkadir Eno. Be that as it may, Making Refuge should be read by anyone interested in understanding the plight of Somali refugees worldwide, in East or West, North or South.
