In late August 2009, Kenyans throughout the country waited to be counted. The decennial national census had always been an important event for citizens of Kenya. This particular year's undertaking, however, was especially significant, as it coincided with the drafting of a long-awaited constitution, which called for the devolution of power and resources. President Kibaki, who declared the first day of this national exercise to be a public holiday, enjoined citizens to stay indoors and await census agents. Even inhabitants from some of the most marginalised regions, where people are often suspicious of government agents, were eager to be enumerated and thus ‘counted’ as citizens.Footnote 1
A year later, in September 2010, the Kenyan government disclosed the results of the census, which held important implications for the distribution of political power under the newly ratified constitution. Among the most controversial findings was that Somalis (at almost 2.4 million in a country of 38.6 million people) were the sixth largest ethnic group in Kenya. Somalis had lived within the boundaries of Kenya for generations, but previous censuses had counted them as only a relatively small minority among the country's 42 bureaucratically recognized, ‘official’ ethnic groups. Due to this seeming anomaly, Kenyan Planning Minister Wycliffe Oparanya announced that the government was nullifying the results in eight districts, five of which were in North Eastern Province (NEP), a region that shares a border with Somalia and is heavily populated by nomadic, Somali people.Footnote 2 The NEP has also served as one of the main entry points for Somali refugees seeking asylum in Kenya.
Kenyan officials based their decision on population projections gleaned from earlier decennial censuses, whose veracity they left virtually unquestioned. Citing several ‘inconsistencies’, such as the disproportionate ratio of men to women and population figures that far exceeded expected birth and death rates, Oparanya argued that the 2009 results were at odds with previous counts. By comparing the 1999 census figures with those of 2009, government administrators concluded that the Somali population had increased by over 140 per cent in a mere decade – a number, they maintained, that could not be attributed to natural growth rates.Footnote 3 While invoking these statistics gave their conclusions the appearance of objectivity, it also reflected a serious oversight. Northern Kenya has historically been one of the most marginalized regions of the country. Since the early colonial era, administrators in the north had run into numerous obstacles to the accurate collection of data.Footnote 4 As MPs from the Kenyan Somali community argued, government officials had shifted blame onto ‘illegal’ immigration, obscured the underlying problems with earlier censuses, and failed to consider the possibility that Somalis had been underreported in previous decades.
This article argues that the difficulties faced by postcolonial census agents cannot be solely attributed to the large refugee movements triggered by the recent Somali civil war. It also traces the genesis of these recent demographic controversies to the period of colonial rule. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, protectorate and colonial officials were incapable (and frequently disinterested) of obtaining a reliable count of the number of people living within the colony of Kenya.Footnote 5 Even after the Second World War, when the colonial state was at the height of its surveillance capacity, government officials never knew with any certainty how many Somalis (or, for that matter, many other communities) resided within the country. African leaders in Kenya inherited long-standing practices laid down by the colonial state, which was unable to transform its subjects into a countable, traceable population or fully police their mobility.
The shortfalls of historical and contemporary censuses call into question the applicability of James C. Scott's thesis to countries such as Kenya. In his seminal work, Seeing like a State, Scott argues that the function of the modern state is to make society ‘legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions’ and to reduce the opacity of the ‘local’.Footnote 6 Legibility, Scott contends, is the outcome of a variety of bureaucratic processes, which range from ‘the creation of permanent last names’ to ‘the standardization of weights and measures’ to ‘the establishment of cadastral surveys and population registers’.Footnote 7 However, critics such as Christopher Lee and Stephan Miescher have noted that Scott's theories cannot be applied wholesale to the colonial situation in Africa, where state power was far from monolithic.Footnote 8 As Steven Pierce argues of northern Nigeria, the history of ‘state formation is not one of a government's coming to “see like a state” but rather of a transformation that enabled it to look like one’.Footnote 9 Through registration and census efforts, colonial officials in Kenya created the appearance of a bureaucratically efficient, panoptic state and mimicked the forms of authority that were so central to the modernist conceits of colonialism. Yet, in practice, Kenyan administrators could only loosely enforce the concept of a permanent population.
Reflecting upon the early years of colonial rule also calls into question the paradigm of the ‘weak’ or ‘failed state’.Footnote 10 Social scientists have often judged the African state by a set of normative assumptions about sovereignty. In his influential work on African governance, Jeffrey Herbst argues that: ‘states are only viable if they are able to control the territory defined by their borders’.Footnote 11 Social scientific literature of this nature, as critics such as Achille Mbembe have pointed out, consistently defines postcolonial African states in terms of ‘lack’.Footnote 12 While many scholars have written about what African states are not and what they ‘ought’ to be, comparatively fewer have focused on the ways in which African leaders and bureaucrats actually exercised power.Footnote 13
Since independence, ordinary Kenyan citizens, local state officials, and foreign policymakers have come to see Somalis as a ‘foreign’ presence in the country and a threat to national security. Many security analysts have laid blame on the Kenyan government for failing to regulate ‘illegal’ immigration or properly secure its international borders.Footnote 14 Yet these normative prescriptions obscure the fact that Somali regional networks, in many cases, long predated the advent of colonial borders or the imposition of immigration controls. Such judgments also misrepresent the history of governance in Kenya and elide the legacy of colonial rule. Accurately enumerating the Somali population was not a major priority for colonial administrators and thus can hardly be deemed a ‘failure’. Attempting to closely regulate Somali immigration or attain precise census data would have been expensive, provoked significant resistance, and, ultimately, served few administrative needs. Moreover, the colonial policy of light surveillance enabled Somalis in Kenya to enjoy at least a limited degree of mobility and move across international borders with relative ease. This tenuous arrangement, however, broke down in the postcolonial era, when the census became an important tool for securing political representation and economic entitlements.
COLONIAL DEMOGRAPHICS
Difficulties assessing population rates and figures are not problems unique to Kenya or the Somali population. Alex de Waal, for example, writes that ‘it is possible for a researcher studying Darfur to collect every statistic, published and unpublished, in a single slender file and have confidence that every number is almost certainly wrong’.Footnote 15 Population data was usually the least reliable in less closely administered regions. As Sara Berry and Frederick Cooper argue, understaffed and underfunded colonial regimes could not build bureaucracies capable of extending across their territories. Instead, they concentrated power in key cities, ports, and other export-oriented and agriculturally rich regions. In addition, they ruled indirectly by co-opting (or, at times, helping to invent) local ‘chiefly’ authorities.Footnote 16 However, even in countries like South Africa, where the state was not lacking in capacity, colonial authorities often neglected to collect ‘the most basic … information’ about their subjects.Footnote 17 The paucity of reliable statistics was not merely a reflection of state ‘weakness’. Unlike European nation-states, colonial administrators were rarely interested in producing citizens. They did not share the same goals as their European counterparts, who collected detailed demographic information, not only for surveillance and extractive purposes, but also to apportion political representation and assess welfare needs.
In the early years of British rule, protectorate officials in East Africa possessed vague and often widely divergent ideas of how many people they were governing. While administrators in Kenya gradually developed more accurate census methods over the course of the early twentieth century, they often used indirect means of assessing population figures. According to C. J. Martin, Director of the East African Statistical Department, local authorities tended to rely upon rough estimates derived from calculations based on the total number of male taxpayers.Footnote 18 By the late 1930s, however, the British government had begun to promote a more interventionist form of imperialism, which demanded access to more reliable statistics. In the early 1940s, the Colonial Office enlisted Robert Kuczynski, a well-known demographer of Africa, to help train administrators and improve the quality of colonial population statistics.Footnote 19 Recent studies have shown that, while the late colonial state yielded far more data about African populations, their methods did not always guarantee accuracy.Footnote 20 In 1948, for instance, the government of Kenya for the first time embarked on a colony-wide census, which made use of trained enumerators and house-to-house visits. Although the 1948 census was a ‘substantial achievement’, as John Blacker notes, it nevertheless underestimated the country's population ‘by over 10 per cent’.Footnote 21 According to Patrick Manning, colonial censuses systematically under-enumerated African populations due to the limited reach of the state as well as the patriarchal biases of administrators, who tended to focus on the taxable male heads of households.Footnote 22 In some cases, Africans also evaded population counts, which were linked to taxation. In spite of their questionable reliability, colonial statistics have retained an aura of validity and, in many cases, have become the basis for calculating modern growth rates and population sizes.
While less-than-accurate population counts were the norm in many regions of Kenya, administrators faced particularly profound impediments to enumerating their Somali subjects. The majority of Somalis living in Kenya were nomads who inhabited an area abutting Ethiopia and Somalia known as the Northern Frontier District (NFD). As scholars such as Nene Mburu, Günther Schlee, and Hannah Whittaker have shown, the protectorate and colonial administration governed the NFD as a region distinct from the rest of Kenya. Conceived of as an economically marginal ‘buffer zone’ for the white highlands, colonial authorities invested little manpower and few resources in the north, which they isolated from other parts of the colony.Footnote 23 Consequently, local administrators were particularly ill equipped to monitor population rates along the Kenyan/Somali and Kenyan/Ethiopian borderlands. In addition, northern inhabitants were highly mobile and lived collective lives that stretched across colonial frontiers. In the late nineteenth century, Italian, British, and Ethiopian authorities had divided the people of this region into three major territories with little heed to their patterns of mobility and transhumance. However, these international boundaries – which separated pastoralists from their kin, water resources, and wet and dry season pasture – remained highly porous throughout colonial rule.Footnote 24 This greatly impeded colonial registration and census efforts.
Officials also had difficulty monitoring Somalis who had come to Kenya from Aden and British Somaliland.Footnote 25 These migrants were part of a wider diaspora who had traveled through the circuits of British Empire in the late nineteenth century. After the opening of the Suez Canal, European ship owners, white settlers, and British officials had begun to enlist Somalis living along the Gulf of Aden as seamen, sailors, soldiers, porters, and navigators. These recruits, most of whom belonged to the Isaaq or Harti clans, formed small settlements in areas as dispersed as the UK, Australia, and South Africa.Footnote 26 Although colonial regimes generally sought to restrict the mobility of their subjects, they also demanded flexibility for the movement of laborers, soldiers, and traders across territorial borders. British protectorate authorities, for instance, relied heavily on battalions of soldiers from British Somaliland to secure effective military control over East Africa. Over the course of the twentieth century, through various waves of immigration, a small, but vibrant Isaaq and Harti community developed in Kenya.Footnote 27 Colonial officials classified this comparatively privileged group of Somalis as legal immigrants within the colony and often referred to them as the ‘Alien Somali’.Footnote 28 Much like their nomadic counterparts in the NFD, the Isaaq and Harti often moved across territorial borders and, thus, proved difficult for colonial officials to register and enumerate. Many Somalis also claimed descent from the Arab world and thus defied colonial categories of ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ – one of the central distinctions of the census.
The colonial census was never purely an enumerative endeavor; it also involved the creation of legal categories and territories. Through head counts and population surveys, colonial officials assigned their subjects singular ethnic and racial identities and linked them to territorial ‘homelands’. The census was predicated on the notion that Africans were members of bounded ‘tribes’, who could be contained in distinct territories. Somali nomads and members of historic Somali diasporas, however, imagined community in ways that could not be easily mapped onto European ideas of race, ethnicity, and territory and thus challenged many of the central assumptions of colonial demographics.
WORKING FAILURES IN THE NFD
One reason that authorities in East Africa began to develop more accurate census methods, as Meshack Owino notes, was to better mobilize African labor and thus ‘make the colony pay for itself’.Footnote 29 This was not, however, the case in the NFD, where attaining accurate population data was very far from the minds of protectorate and colonial officials. During the first two decades of British rule, protectorate authorities did not so much administer the north, as attempt to suppress southward migration into the fertile highlands of the Rift Valley. British officials also came to think of the NFD as an ‘ungovernable’ borderland analogous to the North-West Frontier of India.Footnote 30 Since creating accurate census methods was at least partially tied to hopes of economic development, it was not a priority in regions that British administrators perceived to be of little financial value.Footnote 31
In 1926, however, the NFD came under civilian rule and local authorities began to develop more sophisticated techniques for governing this region, which was sparsely populated and stretched across more than 100,000 square miles. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the administration worked out a form of sovereignty that, in many ways, blended territorial governance with nomadic forms of mobility.Footnote 32 Local authorities in Wajir, for example – unable to mark out definitive ethnic homelands or neatly impose their visions of ‘order’ on the region – instead divided the wells in the district between the major clans. As Schlee notes, this was a precolonial governance strategy common among the Borana, which colonial officials appear to have reappropriated.Footnote 33 Capitulating to nomadic patterns of transhumance, administrators often developed techniques that had far more continuity with precolonial practices of governance than with Weberian ideals of bureaucracy.
Until well into the 1930s, officials in the NFD also abandoned hope of registering individuals or determining exact population figures. In 1930, F. G. Jennings, the district commissioner (DC) of Wajir, argued that implementing a census ‘would serve no useful purpose so long as the Somali adopts the attitude of moving over the boundary into Italian territory at will’.Footnote 34 The Degodia and Ogaden clans, whose leaders and kin lived in Ethiopia and Italian Somaliland, frequently took advantage of the porous borders and indeterminacy of population figures to evade burdensome government requirements. When the colonial government imposed cash taxation in the north in 1930, many of these Somali communities fled into Ethiopia and Italian Somaliland.Footnote 35 In 1932, Jennings estimated that the population of Wajir District was approximately 16,533, but conceded that ‘at time of writing this report the majority of the Tribesmen nominally resident in the district are either on or across the International Boundary owing to the recent rains being more plentiful in that area’.Footnote 36 These patterns of movement defied the sedentary logic of the colonial state.
The tenuous nature of sovereignty on the frontier as well as the nomadic practices of its inhabitants frustrated colonial attempts to gain reliable population estimates, regulate international migration, or draw up maps of clan and ethnic ‘homelands’. In 1932, in an effort to control mobility and accrue revenue for the otherwise unprofitable task of governing the north, the NFD administration instituted individual taxation. Officials hoped that tax receipts could be used to differentiate between paying British subjects and non-paying Italian and Ethiopian ‘immigrants’. However, they were unable consistently to enforce this new policy, particularly among the ‘elusive’ camel keeping populations, who could travel vast distances.Footnote 37 In 1935, the DC of Wajir complained ‘Nearly all the Degodia sections have imperceptibly increased their numbers from Abyssinia. Until individual taxation is imposed this is almost impossible to stop.’Footnote 38
As the case of the NFD suggests, colonial administrators were often far more concerned with enforcing some semblance of state control than with rendering their subjects ‘legible’. One might be tempted to portray colonial power as weak, incapable (as Herbst suggests) of broadcasting its power across this arid, northern expanse.Footnote 39 Yet, in many respects, conceding to nomadic practices proved to be commensurate with broader colonial goals, which were aimed at keeping governance in the NFD as cost effective and minimal as possible. Cultivating an image of the north as ‘ungovernable’ was also partially the outcome of bureaucratic logic, as it enabled colonial officials to justify the financial and administrative neglect of the region and naturalize its isolation from the rest of the colony.
However, even in regions where mobility was left unchecked, colonial authorities went through the performative act of recording population figures. The 1934 annual report for Wajir District, for example, attests to the fluidity of population movement and the vagueness of district and international boundaries. In that year, the Ogaden had crossed back into Wajir from Italian Somaliland, partly to escape Italian recruitment drives. In addition, the British administration, in an effort to delineate ‘tribal’ borders and consolidate all of the Somali clans in one area, had moved the Ajuran from Moyale and readjusted the district boundaries to administer them from Wajir. Despite the large population exchanges that had occurred over the previous year, the author concludes the report with precise population figures. In 1934, he writes, Wajir District had 4 Europeans, 52 Asiatics, and 16,425 Natives.Footnote 40
Every year, provincial and district commissioners aggregated data and produced annual reports that listed population estimates, rainfall data, and livestock exports, among other statistics. Through the conventions of report making, officials cultivated an image of a panoptic state capable of extracting transparent knowledge about its territories. Yet, in practice, the local administration in the NFD governed, not by trying to project its power over the entire geographic expanse of the north, but by finding flexible, workable methods of managing uncertainty along the frontier. These writing practices reveal the messiness of the day-to-day, working mechanisms of colonial rule and show that colonial states mimicked normative forms of statecraft, even as they developed a diverse array of techniques for ruling over their colonial possessions.
GOVERNING THROUGH ILLEGIBILITY
Outside of the NFD, administrators were far more numerous and colonial power far more spatially continuous. However, even in regions where they exerted greater control over the population and territory, officials were unable to gain an accurate count of the number of Somalis living in Kenya. This was partly because the colonial administration did not possess the capacity to properly monitor immigration in and out of the colony, outside of a few key border checkpoints and port cities, such as Mombasa. They also lacked a consistent rubric for identifying and classifying Somalis who originated from Kismayo, Aden, and British Somaliland. In addition, Isaaq and Harti Somalis were often in a unique position to either resist or reappropriate colonial census and registration techniques. Consequently, colonial officials often avoided imposing a strict system of legibility on their subjects.
Mahmood Mamdani argues that the colonial state constructed an artificial distinction between ‘non-natives’, who were designated separate ‘races’ and subject to civil law, and ‘natives’, who were deemed ethnicities and governed by ‘traditional’, customary law.Footnote 41 Protectorate and colonial authorities, however, were at odds over how to legally define the Somali, Swahili, and other groups who lived on the African continent, yet had long-standing ties with the Arab world. In the eyes of most colonial officials, Somalis were racially hybrid.Footnote 42 They did not fit neatly within reified colonial ideas of race, which were structured by the binary distinctions between ‘African’ and ‘Arab’, ‘native’, and ‘non-native’.
The Isaaq and Harti population of East Africa was, nevertheless, well positioned to negotiate for greater rights within the emerging racial hierarchy. By serving as guides, soldiers, translators, and porters, they had filled many of the economic and political demands of empire and could invoke their service to the Crown to make claims on the state. In the first few decades of British rule, Isaaq and Harti leaders mobilized against efforts to treat them as ‘natives’. Eventually, protectorate officials relented to their grievances and, in 1919, the governor enacted special legislation that exempted Somalis from the definition of ‘native’ under certain ordinances. This policy effectively gave the Isaaq and Harti many of the privileges of non-natives. Like the Asian community of Kenya, they could legally reside in the urban centers of the colony, access the special wards of hospitals, and enjoy greater rights to mobility. In addition, they paid higher, non-native taxation rates. The Isaaq and Harti were not only exempt from carrying a kipande (a pass card that restricted African movement), but some also possessed British passports for international travel.Footnote 43
These privileges were, however, fragile. Throughout the interwar period, Kenyan colonial officials expressed concerns about giving Somali elites many of the rights of Asians, which they feared could have unintended repercussions for other groups and regions.Footnote 44 In 1926, Sir Harold Kittermaster, governor of British Somaliland, warned his colleagues in Kenya
There is frequent interchange of Somali residents in Nairobi with their homes here, and they maintain their roots here even after years of absence. To give them a status in Kenya so different from what they must have here [in British Somaliland] would tend greatly to embarrass the administration of this Protectorate.Footnote 45
As Kittermaster's remarks suggest, officials were anxious about unsettling the empire-wide color bar. Consequently, the colonial administration never settled on a coherent definition of the Somali's racial and legal status. There was no consensus among officials as to which ‘ethnic’ and ‘racial’ aggregate the Isaaq and Harti belonged. Nor was there agreement as to whether they should be technically classified as natives or non-natives.Footnote 46 In 1936, for example, administrators in the Central Province of Kenya filled out a template census form. One official in Machakos listed Somalis under ‘Asiatic: Other Races’, another in North Nyeri included Somalis with ‘Arabs’, while yet another in Meru grouped them under ‘Natives’.Footnote 47
Benedict Anderson argues that census takers are notoriously intolerant ‘of multiple, politically “transvestite,”, blurred, or changing identifications’.Footnote 48 Similarly, Homi Bhabha asserts that colonized subjects with ‘hybrid’ identities threatened colonial power by destabilizing the line between ruler and ruled.Footnote 49 Yet ambiguity could also be conducive of colonial power. As Talal Asad contends, radical critics are mistaken to assume ‘that power always abhors ambiguity’; rather, state authority ‘has depended on its exploiting the dangers and opportunities contained in ambiguous situations’.Footnote 50 Authorities in Kenya appear to have ruled their ‘alien’ Somali subjects, in part, by keeping their status undefined, ambiguous, and contestable. This enabled them to selectively reward Isaaq and Harti soldiers and intermediaries, without calling into question the broader logic of the color bar or creating a legal precedent that might hold implications for other regions or other ‘ambiguous’ populations, such as the Swahili.
Keeping Somali elites in an awkward, liminal legal position was, however, a tenuous compromise. In the 1930s, British authorities throughout the empire debated how best to shore up the racial order, which had been destabilized by the spread of Western education and the recruitment of soldiers from the colonies during the First World War.Footnote 51 It was against this backdrop that the Kenyan government, in 1937, implemented a new Non-Native Poll Tax Ordinance, which called for a revision of the existing taxation system. This ordinance introduced a sliding payment scale for Europeans, Asians, and ‘other’ non-natives. ‘Others’ were defined as Arabs, Swahilis, and Somalis – populations whom colonial authorities had difficulty legally differentiating. This new legislation also reduced Somali tax obligations from thirty to twenty shillings.Footnote 52
Out of concern that tendering a lowered tax would lessen their privileges, many Somalis began petitioning the colonial government and – in an unusual reversal of typical forms of tax resistance – demanded to the pay the higher Asian rate of thirty shillings. To rework colonial racial categories, Isaaq leaders drew attention to their community's discrete patrilineal genealogy and claims of descent from the prophet. Mobilizing through their diaspora in the UK, British Somaliland, and East Africa, they initiated a campaign for ‘Asiatic’ status. In 1938, in a petition to the Colonial Secretary, the ‘Elders of the British Shariff Ishak Community of Kenya Colony’ maintained that they ‘can neither be classified as Arabs or Somalis. Your Petitioners’ Community are a race of Asiatic Origin.’Footnote 53 Isaaq representatives toyed with the vagueness of the term ‘Asiatic’, which colonial authorities had used, often inconsistently, as a legal, geographic, and racial category.
The use of the term Asiatic, provocative in its ambiguity, sparked concern among colonial authorities, who feared losing control over the power to define race. Colonial officials scrambled to give the Isaaq and Harti a fixed position within the segregated colonial order. Anxious about their vague and indeterminate boundaries, the Colonial Secretary, in 1938, demanded that a census be prepared of the number of ‘alien’ Somalis resident in each district.Footnote 54 The outbreak of the Second World War exacerbated their anxieties.Footnote 55 Expressing fears that there was ‘no adequate means of ascertaining the numbers and whereabouts of Somalis in the Colony’ and that it was ‘not even possible to identify a Somali or to trace his past history’, the Kenyan government began to devise plans for a Somali Registration Bill.Footnote 56
While colonial officials imagined that Somalis could be pinned down through the use of census and registration methods, they were rarely willing or able to put such grand visions of administrative order into effect. Plans for a Somali Registration Bill were quickly abandoned out of concerns that racially discriminatory legislation would provoke ‘protest from the Kenya Somali Associations’, whom officials feared would ‘endeavor … through their helpers in Cardiff’ to bring the issue before ‘the House of Commons’.Footnote 57 Kenyan administrators likely feared that such heavy-handed measures would upset public opinion.Footnote 58 Ultimately, the colonial state helped to put an end to the poll tax controversy – not by attempting to control Somali immigration, rendering the Isaaq and Harti into a countable population, or resolving the ambiguities of the color bar, but rather by altering its own tax policies. In 1940, to raise money for the war effort, the administration increased the amount of taxes owed by non-natives and based the new rates on income, rather than race.Footnote 59 This policy effectively disaggregated taxation from the thorny question of race and political rights.
Ironically, the only comprehensive census to be generated during this period was compiled by the Shariff Ishakian Community on the request of Abby Farah, their representative in London, and B. W. P. Margan, their legal adviser in the UK. In order to substantiate their petition for Asiatic status and differentiate themselves from other Somali clans, the Isaaq leadership produced a detailed count of the number of ‘Shariff Ishakians’ in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika, whom they distinguished from ‘Somalies’ who paid the non-native poll tax. According to their calculations, which were published in 1940, there were 2,444 ‘Shariff Ishakians’ and 510 ‘Somalies’ living in Kenya. Far from a purely disciplinary procedure, the census could serve as a means for colonized subjects to make claims on the state and situate themselves within the colonial taxonomic order.Footnote 60 Colonial administrators, however, seem to have ignored the community's self-assessment. They waited well over a decade before committing the necessary resources to execute their own colony-wide census of the ‘alien’ Somali population. In some cases, Africans sought to render themselves legible to colonial authorities, while state agents, eager to avoid becoming embroiled in complex legal disputes, were responsible for preserving a degree of illegibility.Footnote 61
THE SPECTRE OF POPULATION GROWTH
The poll tax campaign made colonial officials both more aware and more anxious about the inadequacies of their surveillance techniques. Yet, until the 1940s, they lacked the resources, manpower, or ideological drive to invest significant time or money in census procedures. In 1940, however, parliament passed the Colonial Development and Welfare Act, which pledged to invest more funding and manpower in the African colonies.Footnote 62 In order to fuel the war effort, increase economic output, and mitigate African demands for greater rights, the newly elected Labor government began to advocate for the reorganization and ‘modernization’ of rural societies in colonial Africa. The postwar years ushered in interventions from a host of ecological experts, who brought new techno-rationalist views about population growth to the colonies. As Joseph M. Hodge notes, ‘“surplus” population had become the specter – and planning and state agency the panacea – of colonial advisers and policy makers in London’.Footnote 63 Influenced by this new imperial mindset, colonial administrators in Kenya became increasingly worried about population pressure, over-grazing, and erosion and began to intervene more extensively in the lives of their African subjects.Footnote 64
Concerns with rapid population growth began to shape colonial policy toward the Somali population. In the 1920s and 1930s, the colonial government had begun to transfer the Isaaq and Harti population to the Isiolo Leasehold, which served as a corridor between the NFD and the rest of Kenya. Officials hoped that, by containing the ‘alien’ Somali on what was effectively a native reserve, they could better monitor their movement and govern them more explicitly as a ‘tribe’.Footnote 65 However, the settlement scheme quickly ran afoul of this new ecological mindset. In 1939, Gerald Reece, the provincial commissioner (PC) of the NFD, wrote that: ‘Alien Somalis have dumped here many thousand head of cattle and many tens of thousands of sheep and goats. The owners often live at Moyale or Mombasa or Nakuru.’Footnote 66 By 1940, he had dismissed the viability of a settlement program. Harping on their supposedly ‘irrational’ nomadic mentality, Reece argued that ‘alien’ Somalis would welcome their seemingly limitless kin into the region and ‘and after a short time we will be embarrassed with an even more serious shortage of land’.Footnote 67
Reece's anxieties, however, were not the outcome of careful empirical investigation. Rather, they were products of broader shifts in the colonial imagination. In 1942, Thomas G. Askwith became district commissioner of Isiolo. Development-minded and more liberal in orientation, he appeared, unlike his predecessors, to be far more optimistic about the capacity of the alien Somali population to be ‘modernized’. Yet his most iconoclastic position was his dismissal of former officials’ fears of over-grazing: ‘We appear to be ignorant of the real factors governing the holding capacity of the land, and although the area is supposed to have room for about a third of the stock existing at present, the grazing still appears to survive.’Footnote 68 In 1943, after conducting a census of non-natives in the north, Askwith noted, to his own surprise, that – despite colonial concerns with Somali overpopulation – the number of houses in Isiolo appeared to have decreased, rather than increased: ‘It will thus be seen that the number of houses at Isiolo far from increasing since 1939 has actually decreased by about 40. The settlements appear to have increased by reason of the fact that the new tin roofs render them more conspicuous than previously.’Footnote 69 One can imagine these conspicuous tin roofs, catching the light and the eye of colonial officials as they monitored the vast pastoral terrain in airplanes. Legitimacy hinged on that which could be rendered visible, measurable, and quantifiable. Askwith, however, challenged the reliability of colonial surveillance techniques and called into question the preoccupation with overgrazing and overpopulation.
His observations, however, went largely overlooked by colonial administrators, whose anxieties soon became ‘commonsense’. By the end of the war, officials had become increasingly concerned with the ecological impact of unregulated Somali mobility. In 1943, D. C. Edwards, the senior agricultural officer, published an influential study on ecological deterioration in the rangelands of the north. In it, he connected land degradation to the breakdown of ‘tribal’ authority.Footnote 70 Reece echoed Edwards’ suggestions. In 1945, he argued that ‘the damage that is taking place in the country was due to the failure of the Government to maintain the old tribal organizations’ and advocated for the formation of clan grazing reserves.Footnote 71
By portraying these schemes as a return to a ‘traditional’ way of life, the colonial administration obscured the novelty of this new vision of the rangeland. James E. Ellis and David M. Swift refer to this way of thinking as the equilibrium myth. Experts who have studied pastoral ecosystems, they argue, have often operated from the assumption that they ‘are potentially stable’ and ‘become destabilized by overstocking and overgrazing’.Footnote 72 However, ‘equilibrium’ conditions are rarely attainable in nature. While colonial officials held pastoralists responsible for ecological degradation, the quality of the rangeland, as Ellis and Swift show, is frequently dictated by ‘external forces’, such as rainfall, rather than ‘internal biotic factors’, like population or livestock numbers.Footnote 73
Edwards’ dubious conclusions, nevertheless, quickly became accepted administrative logic. In the years after the Second World War, the NFD administration made a much more concerted effort to regulate population movement and implement clan grazing zones.Footnote 74 Buoyed by an array of ecological and agricultural experts, officials hoped that, by confining different clans to distinct grazing lands, they could rein in populations whose boundaries, numbers, and property were far too indistinguishable (in their eyes) for comfort. To enforce these ‘tribal’ areas, officials relied heavily on the help of local ‘chiefly’ authorities, whom they co-opted into the structures of the colonial administration. Officials also recruited grazing guards, who policed these new clan and tribal boundaries and fined trespassers by confiscating a portion of their livestock.Footnote 75
The territorialization of ethnicity, however, was never a fait accompli, but rather a fragile accomplishment that had to be continually sustained through strategic compromises with Somali leaders. In 1948, for example, during a meeting with chiefs and headmen, the local administration in Wajir responded to a request by the Ajuran chief to extend his community's tribal boundaries. The chairman explained that: ‘any consideration to extend boundaries would entirely depend on tangible evidence of an increase in population. This could most effectively be shown by an increase in tax collection’.Footnote 76 In many cases, population figures were, in essence, negotiable and the size of a community was often a nominal fiction of bureaucratic arrangements and tax payments.Footnote 77 Colonial administrators and Somali representatives also negotiated temporary and permanent border adjustments to accommodate changing climatic conditions.Footnote 78 In 1951, for instance, the administration made a ‘slight amendment’ to the borders in order to give the Degodia access to salt grazing, which, the administration admitted, was probably ‘indispensable to the well-being of their beasts’.Footnote 79 As Mohamed Farah notes, ‘no clan boundary, no matter how well-adjudged, could be said to contain all that was necessary for the needs of the livestock’ or, for that matter, accommodate changing climatic conditions.Footnote 80
The creation of clan boundaries did not fully inhibit the mobility of pastoralists or prevent groups from continuing to cross the porous frontiers between Kenya, Ethiopia, and Italian Somalia.Footnote 81 By conceding to this reality, the colonial state effectively created an uncountable population. This was evident in 1948, when the government undertook the first colony-wide census. The 1948 census did not provide a concrete assessment for the Northern Frontier Province (only an estimate of 186,500 people). Nor did census takers bother to include Somalis under the main ‘tribes’ of Kenya, due most likely to the difficulty of assessing their numbers.Footnote 82 Many features of the north remained illegible to colonial authorities.
Outside of the NFD, officials also struggled to monitor and control Somali immigration. Migrants whom colonial administrators considered ‘illegal’ were often perceived by Somalis living in Kenya to be fellow kin. In 1952, R. G. Turnbull, then PC of the NFD, cautioned another official stationed in southern Kenya: ‘Our experience in the N.F.D. has been that once a Somali – especially one of the immigrant people from Somalia or British Somaliland – gets himself dug in, he will not rest until he has established a small community of his tribespeople around him.’Footnote 83 According to Turnbull, the Isaaq and Harti frequently requested passes for their relatives under false pretenses. He gave the hypothetical example of a Somali who asks for ‘a temporary pass for an aged uncle who is at death's door and wishes to see his nephew before he dies’, who then proves ‘to be a robust young man with seven children’.Footnote 84 Such accusations reflected colonial paranoia about the unregulated nature of Somali kinship networks.
Despite these concerns, it was not until 1956 – only seven years before British rule formally ended – that the colonial government finally registered, issued identity cards, and conducted a census of Somalis permanently domiciled in the colony who lived outside of the NFD. Between 1956 and 1957, the census team collected detailed information about Isaaq and Harti households.Footnote 85 This undertaking cannot be solely attributed to the increased capacity of the colonial state. It seems that colonial administrators, by tying enumeration to the promise of greater benefits, such as hospital and educational facilities, were able to enlist the cooperation of the United Somali Association and the Central East Africa Ishakia Association in Nairobi.Footnote 86 It is also quite likely that the Somali leadership viewed the process of being counted and registered as a means of attaining bureaucratic recognition as a ‘tribe’ and thus securing access to the new political and economic entitlements of the late colonial era.Footnote 87
By the closing years of British rule, due in large part to the cooperation of Somali elites, colonial officials succeeded in imposing cadastral politics in the north and enumerating the Isaaq and Harti population. They also transformed the idea of ‘population’ into a key site of government intervention. Yet officials never managed to fully deter ‘illegal’ international migration or attain an accurate count of the number of people in the NFD. Even in the postwar era, at the height of its surveillance capacity, the colonial administration was unable to render the vast majority of Somalis into a countable, traceable population.
CONCLUSION
Numerous scholars of the postcolonial world have written about the impact of the colonial census. Nicholas Dirks, Bernard Cohn, Mamdani, and Scott, among others, have provided nuanced accounts of colonial knowledge production and have persuasively shown that European authorities shaped the self-representations of colonized subjects through the creation and imposition of census categories.Footnote 88 This scholarship, however, has tended to overstate the reach and power of the colonial state. By focusing so exclusively on the consequences of classification, moreover, most scholars have overlooked the enumerative functions of the census as well as the broader implications of quantification. In administrative reports, colonial officials often treated their Somali subjects as though they were quantifiable abstractions. In practice, however, international migration remained unchecked and reliable censuses were few and far between. Only a small number of scholars have considered how this demographic uncertainty may have affected colonial classification.Footnote 89
This is an unfortunate elision, since state practices of enumeration have taken on renewed significance since independence. The introduction of electoral politics tied rights to what Amitav Ghosh refers to as the ‘language of quantity, of number’.Footnote 90 Long-standing patterns of assimilation and migration became much more problematic in a context in which numerical predominance determined seats in local and central government. By implementing an electoral system without deinstitutionalizing the colonial legacy of ethnic boundaries, the Kenyan government also linked demographics and political rights with ethnicity. Fearful of losing demographic control over districts and constituencies now thought of as ethnic ‘homelands’, many groups came to think of international and internal migrants as ‘outsiders’ on their land. Elections often became sites of violence in the decades after independence.Footnote 91
These electoral contests have had particularly negative implications for Kenyan Somalis, whose citizenship was already considered suspect due to the ‘Shifta’ War. As journalists and scholars such as Mohammed Adow and Richard Hogg have shown, the Kenyatta regime criminalized Somalis and northerners more broadly due to their support for pan-Somali irredentism in the early 1960s.Footnote 92 The Kenyan government also instituted various discriminatory policies as people fled the rapidly deteriorating political situation in Somalia. In 1989, on the eve of multi-party elections, the Moi regime implemented a screening process for Somalis living in Kenya, which was widely decried by Muslim leaders to be unjust and xenophobic. Some Kenyan officials took advantage of the screening exercise to ‘reclaim’ constituencies for certain Somali clans and deter the growing number of Somali refugees from swaying the outcome of future elections.Footnote 93
The transition towards multi-party democracy, especially when it has coincided with large-scale population movements, has often triggered heated debates over ‘autochthony and ethnic citizenship’.Footnote 94 By the early 1990s, approximately half-a-million Somali asylum seekers were living within Kenya. Turning away from overcrowded and under-equipped refugee camps, many refugees began to settle in urban centers within the country and, in some cases, managed to illegally purchase Kenyan identification cards from underpaid civil servants. This only further blurred the already tenuous distinction between a ‘legal’ citizen and an ‘illegal’ foreigner.Footnote 95
Due to the political significance of population counts and the ambiguities surrounding citizenship, routine demographic exercises are often fraught and contentious. The 2009 decennial census, for instance, held important repercussions for the ways in which resources and power would be distributed under the new devolved constitution. It also reignited debates over the legal status of the Somali people. When Kenyan officials decided to annul the results in several northern districts, many of the region's leaders accused the government of deflating their population numbers and politically disenfranchising citizens. While some commentators blamed the irregularities of the census on misreporting and the inclusion of refugees, others pointed to the omission of citizens from counts in previous decades.Footnote 96 As the census controversy reveals, difficult empirical problems can become virtually inseparable from contentious political matters. If politics depends so heavily on demographic figures, one wonders if Somalis are fated to remain second-class citizens in Kenya – always marked by the ambiguity of their nationality and their threatening potential to become a ‘majority’.
It is misleading to see conflicts like the 2009 census dispute as relatively recent phenomena triggered solely by the rapid migration and demographic shifts of the post-Cold War era. Arjun Appadurai suggests that: ‘the idea of a containable and countable population, the idea of a reliable census, and the idea of stable and transparent categories’ have come ‘unglued in the era of globalization’.Footnote 97 This article, however, has shown that these ideas were always tenuous abstractions of colonial authorities. The colonial state hardly fit the image of a modernist social planner closely monitoring or busily enumerating its subjects. In addition, the notion of a permanent population was little more than a bureaucratic fiction in many parts of the colony, especially northern Kenya.
It would also be a mistake to view the lack of reliable census data as a ‘failure’ of colonial governance. Firstly, as James Ferguson notes, even ‘failed’ government initiatives can bring about important changes and often ‘succeed’ in bringing power to bear in unexpected ways.Footnote 98 Through registration and census endeavors, colonial authorities promoted the notion that populations could and should be enumerated, institutionalized the idea that ethnic groups ‘naturally’ belonged on defined territories, and constructed the distinction between a ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ immigrant. The colonial state created a set of bureaucratic norms, which (though it was unable to fully enforce) came to define the boundaries of legal citizenship. Secondly, the absence of accurate demographic data had few negative political consequences prior to independence. Colonial officials were able to rule their Somali subjects in an inexpensive and largely effective manner, even if they occasionally wished they could better regulate Somali mobility. This policy of limited surveillance was also fairly accommodating of Somali groups, who were able to maintain regional networks that, in many cases, had long predated the establishment of colonial borders.
The colonial period was a time when a delicate set of compromises regarding Somali immigration reigned. Under empire, older forms of mobility, kinship, and nomadism came to coexist with the more recent territorial state. The kinds of arrangements that colonial officials were able to work out under empire may no longer be feasible in today's political climate. Population data is too closely tied to political power and demographic uncertainty can easily become fodder for xenophobic and majoritarian violence. Nevertheless, examining the history of the colonial census suggests that Kenya's contemporary demographic controversies cannot be reductively blamed on ‘illegal’ immigration. Nor can they be understood through an ahistorical and idealized model of Weberian state surveillance.
