The two books under review take up the post-independence struggle known as the ‘Shifta Conflict’ in which a substantial segment of the population of northern Kenya fought to be incorporated into the nascent Somali Republic rather than the Republic of Kenya. These carefully documented books could not be more different from each other: one is a diplomatic history, while the other privileges the perspective of local people. If names and dates had been fictionalized, the reader would not be able to tell that they deal with the same conflict.
Vincent Bakpetu Thompson's admirably rich account of the ‘Shifta’ crisis in northern Kenya from the 1960s focuses particularly upon the Ogaden war in the late 1970s as well as, to a far lesser degree, later developments. ‘Shifta’ refers to the movement of some members of the northern Kenyan population who, at independence and after, wanted to join Somalia and were supported in their guerrilla war by Somalia. Thompson's account is based on official documents and reports from news media and is abundantly substantiated by references to such materials. As a documentary history, it may well be the definitive study of these events up to 1990, as it is hard to imagine how it can be superseded.
From the 1990s onwards, the study is disappointing and the title misleading. Thompson skips the 14th International Peace Process on Somalia, hosted by Kenya in 2002/3, which might have been the central issue for a book on the ‘border problem’. After all, the active engagement of the ‘frontline states’ (Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya) in that process was motivated not only by security issues and the refugee problem, but also by the fact that stateless Somalia had become known at the time as ‘the largest duty free shop of Africa’. The frontline states had a classic border problem: smuggling. Several developments relevant to ‘the Kenya-Somali border problem’ – the incursion of Kenyan forces into Jubaland (the part of Somalia adjacent to Kenya) in 2011, the occupation of the Indian Ocean port Kisimayu in 2011, and their continued presence there – are simply skipped, as if military incursion, justified or not, did not belong to the book's subject matter. The equation of the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), which controlled Mogadishu and surrounding areas before 2006, with al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda ignores the history of the radicalization of al-Shabaab after it split off from the UIC militias. Other products of this split were actually declared ‘moderate’ and sponsored by the international community. The author seems to have stopped following events closely enough to write about them years ago, contributing to numerous errors of detail. For example, Abdullahi Yusuf is said to be the current president of Somalia (297). In fact, Abdullahi Yusuf resigned in 2008 and died in 2012.
Another limitation of the book concerns what one might call local knowledge. At the manuscript stage, the book would have benefited greatly from being read by a person with everyday experience in the region. Many small mistakes could have been corrected. The Embakasi Airport of Nairobi was not renamed Jomo-Kenyatta Airport (223). It still exists and Jomo Kenyatta International Airport was built next to it. Moyale has never been part of North Eastern Province (NEP) (191), but of Eastern Province. IGADD did not stand for Intergovernmental Authority on Diversification and Development. The DD stood for ‘Drought and Development’. Later, ‘drought’ was dropped from the organization's name, and it was renamed IGAD.
Greater sensitivity to local languages would also have been helpful. The place name Qadribdahare in Thompson's spelling becomes Quadrebdaherre; Ishaaqiyya becomes Ishaaquiya; and, even the Libyan leader is renamed Quaddifi. Why is there a u after the q in all these cases? Was it simply inserted because in English a q is followed by a u?
More seriously, local perspectives are largely missing. It is not clear by which criteria half-Somalis are considered to be Somalis, nor does one learn what the other half is. We learn that SALF (Somali Abo Liberation Front) is a misnomer because ‘the Abo’ are not Somali. What we do not learn is that this movement was largely composed of Garre, many of whom claim Somali genealogies but speak the Boran dialect of Oromo, in which ‘abo’ is a form of address (‘Hey man!’). In general, the issue of competing or overlaying ethnic identities remains obscure. Therefore, central questions about the ethnic and linguistic situations and other criteria that might lead northern Kenyans to side with Somalis and Somalia to side with Kenya – which should be a central theme in a book on this topic – remain unanswered. Perhaps the author is not to blame for this. A document-based history cannot be ethnographically more precise than the administrative or diplomatic documents it quotes. An element of oral history would have been helpful. It also would have added a human perspective. The suffering of the local population during the Shifta war does not come through in the twisted administrative and diplomatic language that Thompson quotes and sometimes emulates. Although I was not working on this problem but on other research questions, I was flooded with vivid accounts of that period when I conducted field research in Kenya in the 1970s and 1980s. I find reading about the Shifta period without getting any such local perspectives to be a strange experience.
In contrast, Hannah Whittaker's account draws upon oral material to good effect. She conducted group interviews and collected individual narratives in an effort to generate a broader social historical account. Her work engages with the anthropological and, more generally, social science literature regarding conflict, borderlands, and collective identities, and she frames her analysis accordingly. The focus, however, is not on the secondary or theoretical literature, nor on the archival work that she has done, but on the historical data she has generated through her oral histories. Whittaker's approach provides the reader with a taste of what local people lived through. She describes her book as a ‘social history’, although it is a political history as well. The fissures running through local society become visible as people in government service are killed or their wives raped by their own co-ethnics.
Unlike Thompson, Whittaker does not claim to cover all the time up to the present; nevertheless, she does connect her historical account to the present in the context of her discussion of data collection, in which she reflects upon how present prospects of compensation may have influenced her informants’ accounts and how current security problems prevented her from going to certain areas. She also connects her history of the Shifta period to the present in her conclusions, where she points out the enduring problem of the marginalization of pastoralists by sedentary elites and the effects of the ‘war on terror’ on interethnic relationships in Kenya.
One might have anticipated a third kind of narrative about this violent period: unfiltered individual accounts of victims and participants. My own research in northern Kenya since the 1970s has not had a focus on the Shifta period, but that period has loomed large in the memory of many people, and some volunteered accounts of their experiences. We do not need to go far (self-observation is sufficient) to see that our stories change in the process of telling and retelling. The punchlines become better and better and the stories start to fit narrative patterns. I have come across stories about the Shifta conflict that sound like they come straight out of a picaresque novel. Comical elements are stressed, villains become more villainous and heroes become more heroic. Others are related as adventure stories with the narrator as the protagonist. One account is about a gun, disassembled for cleaning, which the narrator managed to put back together just in the nick of time to ward off an attack. A former fighter, remembering himself as a younger man, relished the memory of government-sponsored recreation periods in Somalia where food, alcohol, and women were provided in abundance. Memories of victims fall into specific patterns because the same events of great symbolic importance get stressed over and over again. Repeatedly I have heard about a baby or babies being smashed against a tree by a soldier ‘to relieve the exhausted mother from carrying it’ when the Sakuye were escorted out of Boran areas on their traumatic march of misery.
Such individual accounts add historical information of a finer grain, but they also tell us a lot about memory as distinct from history. Forms of commemoration − including narrative patterns − help people deal with individual and collective trauma and give structure and sense to what would otherwise just be wanton violence. Despite these two books not exhausting all possible approaches to the Shifta conflict, they complement one another and cover a lot of ground. They transform the Shifta conflict from a neglected episode into one of the better-studied conflicts in Africa.
