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THE UNACCOUNTABLE CENSUS: COLONIAL ENUMERATION AND ITSIMPLICATIONS FOR THE SOMALI PEOPLE OF KENYA

KEREN WEITZBERG

The Journal of African History / Volume 56 / Issue 03 / November 2015, pp 409 - 428DOI: 10.1017/S002185371500033X, Published online: 01 October 2015

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S002185371500033X

How to cite this article:KEREN WEITZBERG (2015). THE UNACCOUNTABLE CENSUS: COLONIAL ENUMERATIONAND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR THE SOMALI PEOPLE OF KENYA. The Journal of African History,56, pp 409-428 doi:10.1017/S002185371500033X

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THE UNACCOUNTABLE CENSUS: COLONIALENUMERATION AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR THESOMALI PEOPLE OF KENYA*

Keren WeitzbergUniversity of Pennsylvania

AbstractIn 2010, the Kenyan government annulled national census results due to concernsthat Somalis in the country had been over-counted. This article traces the genesisof this recent demographic dispute, which held important implications for the distri-bution of political power. It shows that African leaders inherited long-standing prac-tices laid down by the colonial state, which was unable to obtain a reliable countof the number of people in Kenya or render its Somali subjects into a countable, trace-able population. In regions where expansive Somali networks had long predatedBritish rule, colonial authorities only loosely enforced the concept of a permanentpopulation. By yielding to this reality, colonial officials developed governance techni-ques that should not be mistakenly portrayed as state ‘failures’. These policies call intoquestion the applicability of James C. Scott’s concept of ‘legibility’ to Kenya. They alsosuggest that recent demographic controversies cannot be reductively blamed on‘illegal’ immigration.

Key WordsKenya, Somalia, demography, pastoralism, nomadism, migration, state.

In late August , Kenyans throughout the country waited to be counted. The decennialnational census had always been an important event for citizens of Kenya. This particularyear’s undertaking, however, was especially significant, as it coincided with the drafting ofa 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

* I would like to extend my gratitude to Richard Ambani and the rest of the staff at the Kenya National Archivesas well as Hassan Kochore, Hassan Ibrahim, Abdi Billow Ibrahim, and Ibrahim Abdikarim, who helped atdifferent stages of my fieldwork, in addition to the many people in Kenya who generously shared aspectsof their lives with me. Thanks are also due to Dr Alden Young, Dr Mathew Barton, Dr Timothy Parsons,Alice Brown, Pete Tridish, and the three anonymous readers at The Journal of African History, who readearly drafts of this article. Stanford University, the Mellon Foundation, and the Lauder Institute at theUniversity of Pennsylvania generously supported my writing and research. Author’s email: kerenwe@sas.upenn.edu

Journal of African History, (), pp. –. © Cambridge University Press doi:./SX

the most marginalised regions, where people are often suspicious of government agents,were eager to be enumerated and thus ‘counted’ as citizens.

A year later, in September , the Kenyan government disclosed the results of the cen-sus, which held important implications for the distribution of political power under thenewly ratified constitution. Among the most controversial findings was that Somalis (at al-most . million in a country of . million people) were the sixth largest ethnic group inKenya. Somalis had lived within the boundaries of Kenya for generations, but previouscensuses had counted them as only a relatively small minority among the country’s bur-eaucratically recognized, ‘official’ ethnic groups. Due to this seeming anomaly, KenyanPlanning Minister Wycliffe Oparanya announced that the government was nullifying theresults in eight districts, five of which were in North Eastern Province (NEP), a regionthat shares a border with Somalia and is heavily populated by nomadic, Somali people.

The NEP has also served as one of the main entry points for Somali refugees seeking asy-lum in Kenya.Kenyan officials based their decision on population projections gleaned from earlier de-

cennial censuses, whose veracity they left virtually unquestioned. Citing several ‘inconsist-encies’, such as the disproportionate ratio of men to women and population figures that farexceeded expected birth and death rates, Oparanya argued that the results were atodds with previous counts. By comparing the census figures with those of , gov-ernment administrators concluded that the Somali population had increased by over per cent in a mere decade – a number, they maintained, that could not be attributed to nat-ural growth rates. While invoking these statistics gave their conclusions the appearance ofobjectivity, it also reflected a serious oversight. Northern Kenya has historically been one ofthe most marginalized regions of the country. Since the early colonial era, administrators inthe north had run into numerous obstacles to the accurate collection of data. As MPsfrom the Kenyan Somali community argued, government officials had shifted blameonto ‘illegal’ immigration, obscured the underlying problems with earlier censuses, andfailed 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

Samantha Balaton-Chrimes argues that the census provided marginalized minorities in Kenya with a new wayto engage in the ‘politics of recognition’. S. Balaton-Chrimes, ‘Counting as citizens: recognition of the Nubiansin the census’, Ethnopolitics, : (), , doi:./... Due to increasedsensitivity resulting from the post-election violence and lobbying from minority groups, the governmentdecided to encode groups for the first time, which more than doubled the number of legally recognized‘ethnicities’. Ibid. .

Other historically nomadic communities living in the north, such as the Turkana, were also affected by thegovernment’s decision.

M. Samora, ‘The Somali question’, World Policy Journal, : (), , doi: ./; A. Teyie, ‘Kenya: census delayed over Somali numbers’, The Star (Nairobi)reprinted at All-Africa.com, Jan. (http://allafrica.com/stories/.html).

Not only have nomadic populations posed unique challenges for census agents, but inhabitants of the northhave also been reluctant to cooperate with census efforts due to a long history of political and economicmarginalization. The census may have turned out greater participation, in part, because it was tied tothe promise of political reform.

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rule. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, protectorate and colonialofficials were incapable (and frequently disinterested) of obtaining a reliable count of thenumber of people living within the colony of Kenya. Even after the Second World War,when the colonial state was at the height of its surveillance capacity, government officialsnever knew with any certainty how many Somalis (or, for that matter, many other commu-nities) resided within the country. African leaders in Kenya inherited long-standing prac-tices laid down by the colonial state, which was unable to transform its subjects into acountable, traceable population or fully police their mobility.The shortfalls of historical and contemporary censuses call into question the applicabil-

ity of James C. Scott’s thesis to countries such as Kenya. In his seminal work, Seeing like aState, Scott argues that the function of the modern state is to make society ‘legible, to ar-range the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions’ and to reduce theopacity of the ‘local’. Legibility, Scott contends, is the outcome of a variety of bureaucraticprocesses, which range from ‘the creation of permanent last names’ to ‘the standardizationof weights and measures’ to ‘the establishment of cadastral surveys and population regis-ters’. However, critics such as Christopher Lee and Stephan Miescher have noted thatScott’s theories cannot be applied wholesale to the colonial situation in Africa, wherestate power was far from monolithic. As Steven Pierce argues of northern Nigeria, the his-tory of ‘state formation is not one of a government’s coming to “see like a state” but ratherof a transformation that enabled it to look like one’. Through registration and censusefforts, 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 modernistconceits of colonialism. Yet, in practice, Kenyan administrators could only loosely enforcethe 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’. Social scientists have often judged the African state by a set of

The Colony and Protectorate of Kenya was technically known as the East Africa Protectorate prior to . J. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New

Haven, ), . Ibid. C. Joon-Hai Lee, ‘The native undefined: colonial categories, Anglo-African status and the politics of kinship in

British Central Africa, –’, The Journal of African History, : (), –, doi: ./S; S. F. Miescher, ‘Building the city of the future: visions and experiences of modernityin Ghana’s Akosombo township’, The Journal of African History, : (), , , doi: ./S.

S. Pierce, ‘Looking like a state: colonialism and the discourse of corruption in Northern Nigeria’, ComparativeStudies in Society and History, : (), –, doi: ./S, emphasis inoriginal. See also E. Bähre and B. Lecocq (eds.), ‘The drama of development’, Special Issue, AfricanStudies, : (), –; K. Sivaramakrishnan (ed.), ‘Moral economies, state spaces, and categoricalviolence: anthropological engagements with the work of James Scott’, Special Issue, AmericanAnthropologist, : (), –.

A useful examination of the failed state paradigm is to be found in R. I. Rotberg, ‘Failed states, collapsedstates, weak states: causes and indicators’, in R. I. Rotberg (ed.), State Failure and State Weakness in aTime of Terror (Washington, DC, ), –. Shahar Hameiri argues that both the neo-Weberian andthe neoliberal literature on this topic are predicated on an overly technocratic view of the state. SeeS. Hameiri, ‘Failed states or a failed paradigm? State capacity and the limits of institutionalism’, Journal ofInternational Relations and Development, : (), –, doi: ./palgrave.jird..

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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 territorydefined by their borders’. Social scientific literature of this nature, as critics such asAchille Mbembe have pointed out, consistently defines postcolonial African states interms of ‘lack’. While many scholars have written about what African states are notand what they ‘ought’ to be, comparatively fewer have focused on the ways in whichAfrican leaders and bureaucrats actually exercised power.

Since independence, ordinary Kenyan citizens, local state officials, and foreign policy-makers have come to see Somalis as a ‘foreign’ presence in the country and a threat to nation-al security. Many security analysts have laid blame on the Kenyan government for failing toregulate ‘illegal’ immigration or properly secure its international borders.Yet these norma-tive prescriptions obscure the fact that Somali regional networks, in many cases, long pre-dated the advent of colonial borders or the imposition of immigration controls. Suchjudgments also misrepresent the history of governance in Kenya and elide the legacy ofcolonial rule. Accurately enumerating the Somali population was not a major priority forcolonial administrators and thus can hardly be deemed a ‘failure’. Attempting to closelyregulate Somali immigration or attain precise census data would have been expensive, pro-voked significant resistance, and, ultimately, served few administrative needs. Moreover, thecolonial policy of light surveillance enabled Somalis in Kenya to enjoy at least a limiteddegree of mobility and move across international borders with relative ease. This tenuousarrangement, however, broke down in the postcolonial era, when the census became animportant tool for securing political representation and economic entitlements.

COLONIAL DEMOGRAPHICS

Difficulties assessing population rates and figures are not problems unique to Kenya or theSomali population. Alex de Waal, for example, writes that ‘it is possible for a researcherstudying Darfur to collect every statistic, published and unpublished, in a single slenderfile and have confidence that every number is almost certainly wrong’. Population data

J. Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton, NJ, ),. The intellectual roots of Herbst’s argument can be traced to Max Weber, who drew a link between statepower and the ability to maintain a monopoly on the use of violence within a given territory.

A. Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley, CA, ), . A number of influential philosophical texts haveexplored the association between Africa and ‘incompleteness’, such as C. L. Miller, Blank Darkness:Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago, (), –; and V. Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa(Bloomington, IN, ), –.

There are, however, notable exceptions to this trend, such as J. F. Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics ofthe Belly (London, ), –.

Whereas the popular image of the Somali in the s was that of the shifta or bandit, today many Kenyansperceive Somalis to be potential terrorists. For more on why Somalis came to be constructed as ‘securitythreats’, see J. Prestholdt, ‘Kenya, the United States, and counterterrorism’, Africa Today, : (),–, doi: ./africatoday...; and H. A. Whittaker, ‘The socioeconomic dynamics of the shiftaconflict in Kenya, c. –’, The Journal of African History, : (), –, doi: ./S.

A. de Waal, Famine That Kills: Darfur, Sudan (New York, ), . Finding colonial and postcolonialgovernment statistics to be unreliable, de Waal instead grounds his analysis in ethnography.

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was usually the least reliable in less closely administered regions. As Sara Berry andFrederick Cooper argue, understaffed and underfunded colonial regimes could not buildbureaucracies capable of extending across their territories. Instead, they concentratedpower in key cities, ports, and other export-oriented and agriculturally rich regions. In add-ition, they ruled indirectly by co-opting (or, at times, helping to invent) local ‘chiefly’ au-thorities. However, even in countries like South Africa, where the state was not lacking incapacity, colonial authorities often neglected to collect ‘the most basic . . . information’about their subjects. The paucity of reliable statistics was not merely a reflection ofstate ‘weakness’. Unlike European nation-states, colonial administrators were rarely inter-ested in producing citizens. They did not share the same goals as their European counter-parts, who collected detailed demographic information, not only for surveillance andextractive 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 administratorsin Kenya gradually developed more accurate census methods over the course of the earlytwentieth century, they often used indirect means of assessing population figures.According to C. J. Martin, Director of the East African Statistical Department, local author-ities tended to rely upon rough estimates derived from calculations based on the total num-ber of male taxpayers. By the late s, however, the British government had begun topromote a more interventionist form of imperialism, which demanded access to more reli-able statistics. In the early s, the Colonial Office enlisted Robert Kuczynski, a well-known demographer of Africa, to help train administrators and improve the quality of co-lonial population statistics. Recent studies have shown that, while the late colonial stateyielded far more data about African populations, their methods did not always guaranteeaccuracy. In , for instance, the government of Kenya for the first time embarkedon a colony-wide census, which made use of trained enumerators and house-to-house visits.Although the census was a ‘substantial achievement’, as John Blacker notes, it never-theless underestimated the country’s population ‘by over per cent’. According toPatrick Manning, colonial censuses systematically under-enumerated African populations

S. Berry, No Condition Is Permanent: The Social Dynamics of Agrarian Change in Sub-Saharan Africa(Madison, WI, ), ; F. Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in Frenchand British Africa (Cambridge, UK, ), . The limited reach of the colonial state, however, did notpreclude the use of coercion and performative violence. See C. Young, The African Colonial State inComparative Perspective (New Haven, ), –.

K. Breckenridge, ‘No will to know: the rise and fall of African civil registration in twentieth-century SouthAfrica’, in K. Breckenridge and S. Szreter (eds.), Registration and Recognition: Documenting the Person inWorld History, Proceedings of the British Academy, (Oxford, ), .

C. J. Martin, ‘The East African population census, : planning and enumeration’, Population Studies, :(), –, doi: ./.

K. Ittmann, ‘“Where nature dominates man”: demographic ideas and policy in British colonial Africa, –’, in K. Ittmann, D. D. Cordell, and G.H. Maddox (eds.), The Demographics of Empire: The ColonialOrder and the Creation of Knowledge (Athens, OH, ), .

See M. Jerven, Poor Numbers: How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What to Do aboutIt (Ithaca, NY, ), –. Morten Jerven’s work, which calls into question indicators such as GDP, hassparked a reevaluation among economic historians of the uses and misuses of statistical data.

J. Blacker, ‘The demography of Mau Mau: fertility and mortality in Kenya in the s: a demographer’sviewpoint’, African Affairs, : (), , doi: ./afraf/adm. Blacker critiques Caroline

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due to the limited reach of the state as well as the patriarchal biases of administrators, whotended to focus on the taxable male heads of households. In some cases, Africans alsoevaded population counts, which were linked to taxation. In spite of their questionable re-liability, colonial statistics have retained an aura of validity and, in many cases, have becomethe 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 sub-jects. The majority of Somalis living in Kenya were nomads who inhabited an area abuttingEthiopia and Somalia known as the Northern Frontier District (NFD). As scholars such asNene Mburu, Günther Schlee, and Hannah Whittaker have shown, the protectorate andcolonial 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, colonialauthorities invested little manpower and few resources in the north, which they isolatedfrom other parts of the colony. Consequently, local administrators were particularly illequipped to monitor population rates along the Kenyan/Somali and Kenyan/Ethiopianborderlands. In addition, northern inhabitants were highly mobile and lived collectivelives that stretched across colonial frontiers. In the late nineteenth century, Italian,British, and Ethiopian authorities had divided the people of this region into three majorterritories with little heed to their patterns of mobility and transhumance. However,these international boundaries – which separated pastoralists from their kin, waterresources, and wet and dry season pasture – remained highly porous throughout colonialrule. This greatly impeded colonial registration and census efforts.Officials also had difficulty monitoring Somalis who had come to Kenya from Aden and

British Somaliland. These migrants were part of a wider diaspora who had traveledthrough the circuits of British Empire in the late nineteenth century. After the openingof the Suez Canal, European ship owners, white settlers, and British officials had begunto enlist Somalis living along the Gulf of Aden as seamen, sailors, soldiers, porters, andnavigators. These recruits, most of whom belonged to the Isaaq or Harti clans, formedsmall settlements in areas as dispersed as the UK, Australia, and South Africa.

Elkins’s use of the and national censuses to derive Mau Mau casualty figures. His study providesimportant cautionary advice against the uncritical use of census data.

P. Manning, ‘African population: projections, –’, in K. Ittmann, D. D. Cordell, and G. H. Maddox(eds.), The Demographics of Empire: The Colonial Order and the Creation of Knowledge (Athens, OH,), –.

N. Mburu, Bandits on the Border: The Last Frontier in the Search for Somali Unity (Trenton, NJ, ), –; G. Schlee, Identities on the Move: Clanship and Pastoralism in Northern Kenya (Manchester, );H. Whittaker, Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Kenya: A Social History of the Shifta Conflict,c. – (Leiden, ), –; interview with Ahmed Maalin Abdalle, Habasweyn, July ;interview with Aden Hassan Baraki, Habasweyn, July ; Kenya National Archives (KNA) DC GRA//, H. B. Sharpe, ‘The Somali general history’, Jan. .

L. Cassanelli, ‘The opportunistic economies of the Kenya-Somali borderland in historical perspective’, inD. Feyissa and M. Virgil Höhne (eds.), Borders & Borderlands As Resources in the Horn of Africa(Woodbridge, Suffolk, ), –.

Some Somali traders also immigrated from Kismayo, a port city in southern Somalia. ‘Clan’ should be understood as an imprecise label. The term is defined relationally and what it means in any

given context varies. It is also likely that members of other clans who immigrated to Kenya ultimately came toidentify as Isaaq or Harti.

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Although colonial regimes generally sought to restrict the mobility of their subjects, theyalso demanded flexibility for the movement of laborers, soldiers, and traders across terri-torial borders. British protectorate authorities, for instance, relied heavily on battalions ofsoldiers from British Somaliland to secure effective military control over East Africa. Overthe course of the twentieth century, through various waves of immigration, a small, butvibrant Isaaq and Harti community developed in Kenya. Colonial officials classifiedthis comparatively privileged group of Somalis as legal immigrants within the colonyand often referred to them as the ‘Alien Somali’. Much like their nomadic counterpartsin the NFD, the Isaaq and Harti often moved across territorial borders and, thus, proveddifficult for colonial officials to register and enumerate. Many Somalis also claimed descentfrom the Arab world and thus defied colonial categories of ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ – oneof the central distinctions of the census.The colonial census was never purely an enumerative endeavor; it also involved the cre-

ation of legal categories and territories. Through head counts and population surveys, co-lonial officials assigned their subjects singular ethnic and racial identities and linked themto territorial ‘homelands’. The census was predicated on the notion that Africans weremembers of bounded ‘tribes’, who could be contained in distinct territories. Somalinomads and members of historic Somali diasporas, however, imagined community inways that could not be easily mapped onto European ideas of race, ethnicity, and territoryand 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 colonypay for itself’. This was not, however, the case in the NFD, where attaining accuratepopulation 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 ad-minister the north, as attempt to suppress southward migration into the fertile highlandsof the Rift Valley. British officials also came to think of the NFD as an ‘ungovernable’ bor-derland analogous to the North-West Frontier of India. Since creating accurate censusmethods was at least partially tied to hopes of economic development, it was not a priorityin regions that British administrators perceived to be of little financial value.

Interview with Farah Mohamed Awad, Nairobi, Oct. ; interview with Hussein Nuur, Nairobi, Oct.; E. R. Turton, ‘The Isaq Somali diaspora and poll-tax agitation in Kenya, –’, African Affairs,: (), –.

KNA VQ /, ‘The position of alien Somalis in Kenya Colony’, letter from the Secretariat circulated to allmembers of Executive Council, Apr. .

M. Owino, ‘The discourse of overpopulation in Western Kenya and the creation of the Pioneer Corps’, in K.Ittmann, D. D. Cordell, and G. H. Maddox (eds.), The Demographics of Empire: The Colonial Order and theCreation of Knowledge (Athens, OH, ), .

I. N. Dracopoli, ‘Across southern Jubaland to the Lorian Swamp’, The Geographical Journal, : (),–.

Some of the material in this article is based upon previous and forthcoming publications by the author. SeeK. Weitzberg, ‘Producing history from elisions, fragments, and silences: public testimony, the Asiatic

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In , however, the NFD came under civilian rule and local authorities began to de-velop more sophisticated techniques for governing this region, which was sparsely popu-lated and stretched across more than , square miles. Throughout the s ands, the administration worked out a form of sovereignty that, in many ways, blendedterritorial governance with nomadic forms of mobility. Local authorities in Wajir, for ex-ample – 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. Capitulating to nomadic patternsof transhumance, administrators often developed techniques that had far more continuitywith precolonial practices of governance than with Weberian ideals of bureaucracy.Until well into the s, officials in the NFD also abandoned hope of registering indi-

viduals or determining exact population figures. In , F. G. Jennings, the district com-missioner (DC) of Wajir, argued that implementing a census ‘would serve no usefulpurpose so long as the Somali adopts the attitude of moving over the boundary intoItalian territory at will’. The Degodia and Ogaden clans, whose leaders and kin livedin Ethiopia and Italian Somaliland, frequently took advantage of the porous bordersand indeterminacy of population figures to evade burdensome government requirements.When the colonial government imposed cash taxation in the north in , many ofthese Somali communities fled into Ethiopia and Italian Somaliland. In , Jenningsestimated that the population of Wajir District was approximately ,, but concededthat ‘at time of writing this report the majority of the Tribesmen nominally resident inthe district are either on or across the International Boundary owing to the recent rainsbeing more plentiful in that area’. These patterns of movement defied the sedentarylogic 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, regulateinternational migration, or draw up maps of clan and ethnic ‘homelands’. In , inan effort to control mobility and accrue revenue for the otherwise unprofitable task of gov-erning the north, the NFD administration instituted individual taxation. Officials hoped

poll-tax campaign, and the Isaaq Somali population of Kenya’, Northeast African Studies, : (), –; and K. Weitzberg, ‘Rethinking the “Shifta War” fifty years after independence: myth, memory, andmarginalization’, in M.M. Kithinji, M.M. Koster, and J. P. Rotich (eds.), Kenya at Fifty: History, Policy,Politics (New York, ).

For more on ‘hybrid’ forms of governance on the borderlands of colonial states, see A. Walraet, ‘State-makingand emerging complexes of power and accumulation in the Southern Sudan-Kenyan border area: the rise of athriving cross-border business network’, in C. Vaughan, M. Schomerus, and L. de Vries (eds.), TheBorderlands of South Sudan: Authority and Identity in Contemporary and Historical Perspectives(New York, ), –.

KNA PC NFD //, F. G. Jennings, ‘Wajir District annual report’, ; G. Schlee, ‘Territorializing ethnicity:the imposition of a model of statehood on pastoralists in Northern Kenya and Southern Ethiopia’, Ethnic andRacial Studies, : (), .

KNA PC NFD //, F. G. Jennings, ‘Wajir District annual report’, . Interview with Ali Hassan, Nairobi, Nov. ; KNA PC/NFD///, F. G. Jennings, ‘Wajir annual report’,

. KNA PC NFD //, F. G. Jennings, ‘Wajir annual report’, .

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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 en-force this new policy, particularly among the ‘elusive’ camel keeping populations, whocould travel vast distances. In , the DC of Wajir complained ‘Nearly all theDegodia sections have imperceptibly increased their numbers from Abyssinia. Until indi-vidual taxation is imposed this is almost impossible to stop.’

As the case of the NFD suggests, colonial administrators were often far more concernedwith 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) ofbroadcasting its power across this arid, northern expanse. Yet, in many respects, conced-ing to nomadic practices proved to be commensurate with broader colonial goals, whichwere 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 bur-eaucratic logic, as it enabled colonial officials to justify the financial and administrativeneglect 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 annual report forWajir District, for example, attests to the fluidity of population movement and the vaguenessof district and international boundaries. In that year, the Ogaden had crossed back into Wajirfrom Italian Somaliland, partly to escape Italian recruitment drives. In addition, the British ad-ministration, in an effort to delineate ‘tribal’ borders and consolidate all of the Somali clans inone area, had moved the Ajuran fromMoyale and readjusted the district boundaries to admin-ister them from Wajir. Despite the large population exchanges that had occurred over the pre-vious year, the author concludes the report with precise population figures. In , he writes,Wajir District had Europeans, Asiatics, and , Natives.

Every year, provincial and district commissioners aggregated data and produced annualreports that listed population estimates, rainfall data, and livestock exports, among other statis-tics. Through the conventions of report making, officials cultivated an image of a panoptic statecapable of extracting transparent knowledge about its territories. Yet, in practice, the localadministration in theNFDgoverned, not by trying to project its powerover the entire geographicexpanse of the north, but by finding flexible, workable methods of managing uncertainty alongthe frontier. Thesewriting practices reveal themessiness of the day-to-day, workingmechanismsof colonial rule and show that colonial states mimicked normative forms of statecraft, even asthey 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 morespatially continuous. However, even in regions where they exerted greater control over the

KNA PC NFD //, ‘Wajir annual report’, . Ibid. . Herbst, States, . KNA PC NFD //, ‘Annual report for the year , Wajir District, NFD’, –, .

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population and territory, officials were unable to gain an accurate count of the number ofSomalis living in Kenya. This was partly because the colonial administration did not possessthe capacity to properly monitor immigration in and out of the colony, outside of a few keyborder checkpoints andport cities, such asMombasa. Theyalso lacked a consistent rubric foridentifying and classifying Somalis who originated from Kismayo, Aden, and BritishSomaliland. In addition, Isaaq and Harti Somalis were often in a unique position to eitherresist or reappropriate colonial census and registration techniques. Consequently, colonialofficials often avoided imposing a strict system of legibility on their subjects.MahmoodMamdani argues that the colonial state constructed an artificial distinction be-

tween ‘non-natives’, who were designated separate ‘races’ and subject to civil law, and‘natives’, who were deemed ethnicities and governed by ‘traditional’, customary law.

Protectorate and colonial authorities, however, were at odds over how to legally define theSomali, Swahili, and other groups who lived on the African continent, yet had long-standingties with the Arabworld. In the eyes ofmost colonial officials, Somalis were racially hybrid.

They did not fit neatly within reified colonial ideas of race, which were structured by the bin-ary distinctions between ‘African’ and ‘Arab’, ‘native’, and ‘non-native’.The Isaaq and Harti population of East Africa was, nevertheless, well positioned to ne-

gotiate for greater rights within the emerging racial hierarchy. By serving as guides, sol-diers, translators, and porters, they had filled many of the economic and politicaldemands of empire and could invoke their service to the Crown to make claims on thestate. In the first few decades of British rule, Isaaq and Harti leaders mobilized againstefforts to treat them as ‘natives’. Eventually, protectorate officials relented to their grie-vances and, in , the governor enacted special legislation that exempted Somalisfrom the definition of ‘native’ under certain ordinances. This policy effectively gave theIsaaq and Harti many of the privileges of non-natives. Like the Asian community ofKenya, they could legally reside in the urban centers of the colony, access the specialwards 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 passportsfor international travel.

These privileges were, however, fragile. Throughout the interwar period, Kenyan colo-nial 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.

M. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ,), –.

Sir Richard Burton helped to popularize this image of the Somalis in the mid-nineteenth century. R. F. Burton,‘The Somal, their origin and peculiarities’, in I. Burton (ed.), First Footsteps in East Africa or, An Explorationof Harar, Two Volumes Bound as One, vol. I (New York, [orig. pub. ]), –.

KNA PC NFD //, ‘Somali Exemption Ordinance and the Somali exemption rules ’, letter fromChief Native Commissioner to all Provincial Commissioners, Feb. ; interview with Zaynab Sharif,Nairobi, Jan. ; interview with Hassan Ahmed Warsame, Nairobi, Oct. .

KNA PC Coast //, ‘Re: status of Somalis’, letter from H.W. B. Blackall, Ag. Crown Council to ChiefNative Commissioner, Apr. ; The National Archives of the UK (TNA) CO //, letter fromEdward Grigg, Governor of Kenya Colony and Protectorate to Lord Passfield, Secretary of State for theColonies, Sept. ; TNA CO //, ‘Re: hospital accommodation-native civil hospital’, letter

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In , Sir Harold Kittermaster, governor of British Somaliland, warned his colleagues inKenya

There is frequent interchange of Somali residents in Nairobi with their homes here, and they main-tain their roots here even after years of absence. To give them a status in Kenya so different fromwhat they must have here [in British Somaliland] would tend greatly to embarrass the administra-tion of this Protectorate.

As Kittermaster’s remarks suggest, officials were anxious about unsettling the empire-widecolor bar. Consequently, the colonial administration never settled on a coherent definitionof the Somali’s racial and legal status. Therewas no consensus amongofficials as towhich ‘eth-nic’ and ‘racial’ aggregate the Isaaq and Harti belonged. Nor was there agreement as towhether they should be technically classified as natives or non-natives. In , for example,administrators in the Central Province of Kenya filled out a template census form. One officialin Machakos listed Somalis under ‘Asiatic: Other Races’, another in North Nyeri includedSomalis with ‘Arabs’, while yet another in Meru grouped them under ‘Natives’.

Benedict Anderson argues that census takers are notoriously intolerant ‘of multiple, pol-itically “transvestite,”, blurred, or changing identifications’. Similarly, Homi Bhabhaasserts that colonized subjects with ‘hybrid’ identities threatened colonial power by desta-bilizing the line between ruler and ruled. Yet ambiguity could also be conducive of colo-nial power. As Talal Asad contends, radical critics are mistaken to assume ‘that poweralways abhors ambiguity’; rather, state authority ‘has depended on its exploiting the dan-gers and opportunities contained in ambiguous situations’. Authorities in Kenya appearto have ruled their ‘alien’ Somali subjects, in part, by keeping their status undefined, am-biguous, and contestable. This enabled them to selectively reward Isaaq and Harti soldiersand intermediaries, without calling into question the broader logic of the color bar or cre-ating 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 s, British authorities throughout the empire debated how bestto shore up the racial order, which had been destabilized by the spread of Western educa-tion and the recruitment of soldiers from the colonies during the First World War. It wasagainst this backdrop that the Kenyan government, in , implemented a new

from representatives of the Isaak Sheriff Community, Arabs to Governor of Kenya, May ; KNA AG /, letter from Attorney General to Colonial Secretary, May .

TNA CO //, letter from H. Kittermaster to Lord Passfield, Secretary of State for the Colonies, Sept..

It is worth noting, however, that colonial officials often struggled to give their subjects singular andunambiguous ethnic labels. See T. Parsons, ‘Being Kikuyu in Meru: challenging the tribal geography ofcolonial Kenya’, The Journal of African History, : (), –, doi: ./S.

KNA PC CP //, ‘Population of Colony and Protectorate of Kenya: Machakos, North Nyeri, and Meru’. B. R. O’G. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London,

), . H. K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York, ), –. T. Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore,

), . Lee, ‘The Native’, –.

KEREN WE ITZBERG vol . , no .

Non-Native Poll Tax Ordinance, which called for a revision of the existing taxation sys-tem. This ordinance introduced a sliding payment scale for Europeans, Asians, and‘other’ non-natives. ‘Others’ were defined as Arabs, Swahilis, and Somalis – populationswhom colonial authorities had difficulty legally differentiating. This new legislation alsoreduced Somali tax obligations from thirty to twenty shillings.

Out of concern that tendering a lowered tax would lessen their privileges, many Somalisbegan petitioning the colonial government and – in an unusual reversal of typical forms oftax resistance – demanded to the pay the higher Asian rate of thirty shillings. To reworkcolonial racial categories, Isaaq leaders drew attention to their community’s discrete patri-lineal genealogy and claims of descent from the prophet. Mobilizing through their diasporain the UK, British Somaliland, and East Africa, they initiated a campaign for ‘Asiatic’ sta-tus. In , in a petition to the Colonial Secretary, the ‘Elders of the British Shariff IshakCommunity of Kenya Colony’ maintained that they ‘can neither be classified as Arabs orSomalis. Your Petitioners’ Community are a race of Asiatic Origin.’ Isaaq representativestoyed with the vagueness of the term ‘Asiatic’, which colonial authorities had used, ofteninconsistently, 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 officialsscrambled 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 ,demanded that a census be prepared of the number of ‘alien’ Somalis resident in each district.

The outbreak of the Second World War exacerbated their anxieties. Expressing fears thatthere was ‘no adequate means of ascertaining the numbers and whereabouts of Somalis inthe 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.

While colonial officials imagined that Somalis could be pinned down through the use ofcensus and registration methods, they were rarely willing or able to put such grand visionsof administrative order into effect. Plans for a Somali Registration Bill were quickly aban-doned out of concerns that racially discriminatory legislation would provoke ‘protest fromthe Kenya Somali Associations’, whom officials feared would ‘endeavor . . . through theirhelpers in Cardiff’ to bring the issue before ‘the House of Commons’. Kenyan adminis-trators likely feared that such heavy-handed measures would upset public opinion.

Kenya, The Official Gazette of the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya (Special Issue) : (Nairobi, Oct.), . For more on the campaign for Asiatic status, see Turton, ‘The Isaq’; and Weitzberg, ‘Producing’.

KNA AG /, letter from E. J. A. Musa, President, British Shariff Ishak Community of Kenya Colony toColonial Secretary.

KNA PC SP //, ‘Status of Somalis in Kenya: rate of payment under Non-Native Poll Tax Ordinance’, letterfrom A. de V. Wade, Colonial Secretary to Secretariat, Apr. .

KNA AG /, ‘Note on the status and control of Somalis in Kenya Colony in time of war’, letter fromP. Wyn Harris, Officer-in-Charge of Native Intelligence, Oct. .

KNA AG /, ‘Objects of the Somali Registration Bill’. KNA AG /, letter from G. Reece to G.M. Rennie, Chief Secretary, Jan. . A concern that no doubt grew as increasing numbers of Somali soldiers began fighting in the Second World

War on behalf of the British Empire. To preempt accusations of racial discrimination, the governor of Kenyainstead implemented a far more limited system of registration for ‘non-natives’ residing in the NFD. KNA AG/, ‘Government notice No. : The defence (Northern Frontier District) regulations’, in Kenya, The

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Ultimately, the colonial state helped to put an end to the poll tax controversy – not byattempting to control Somali immigration, rendering the Isaaq and Harti into a countablepopulation, or resolving the ambiguities of the color bar, but rather by altering its own taxpolicies. In , to raise money for the war effort, the administration increased theamount of taxes owed by non-natives and based the new rates on income, rather thanrace. This policy effectively disaggregated taxation from the thorny question of raceand 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 inLondon, and B.W. P.Margan, their legal adviser in the UK. In order to substantiate their pe-tition for Asiatic status and differentiate themselves from other Somali clans, the Isaaq lead-ership produced a detailed count of the number of ‘Shariff Ishakians’ in Kenya, Uganda, andTanganyika, whom they distinguished from ‘Somalies’ who paid the non-native poll tax.According to their calculations, which were published in , there were , ‘ShariffIshakians’ and ‘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 situ-ate themselves within the colonial taxonomic order. Colonial administrators, however,seem to have ignored the community’s self-assessment. Theywaitedwell over a decade beforecommitting 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 colonialauthorities, while state agents, eager to avoid becoming embroiled in complex legal disputes,were responsible for preserving a degree of illegibility.

THE SPECTRE OF POPULATION GROWTH

The poll tax campaign made colonial officials both more aware and more anxious aboutthe inadequacies of their surveillance techniques. Yet, until the s, they lacked theresources, manpower, or ideological drive to invest significant time or money in census pro-cedures. In , however, parliament passed the Colonial Development and Welfare Act,which pledged to invest more funding and manpower in the African colonies. In order tofuel the war effort, increase economic output, and mitigate African demands for greaterrights, the newly elected Labor government began to advocate for the reorganizationand ‘modernization’ of rural societies in colonial Africa. The postwar years ushered ininterventions from a host of ecological experts, who brought new techno-rationalistviews about population growth to the colonies. As Joseph M. Hodge notes, ‘“surplus”

Official Gazette of the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya (Supplement No. ) : (Nairobi, June ),.

Turton, ‘The Isaq’, . The Managing Committee of the Shariff Ishakian Community,Memorandum of the Population of The Shariff

Ishakians and Somalies in East Africa (Nairobi, Jan. ), courtesy of Dr Tabea Scharrer. For example, see C. Vaughan, ‘The Rizeigat-Malual borderland during the condominium: the limits of

legibility’, in C. Vaughan, M. Schomerus, and L. de Vries (eds.), The Borderlands of South Sudan:Authority and Identity in Contemporary and Historical Perspectives (New York, ), –.

Cooper, Decolonization, –.

KEREN WE ITZBERG vol . , no .

population had become the specter – and planning and state agency the panacea – of colo-nial advisers and policy makers in London’. Influenced by this new imperial mindset, co-lonial administrators in Kenya became increasingly worried about population pressure,over-grazing, and erosion and began to intervene more extensively in the lives of theirAfrican subjects.

Concerns with rapid population growth began to shape colonial policy toward theSomali population. In the s and s, the colonial government had begun to transferthe Isaaq and Harti population to the Isiolo Leasehold, which served as a corridor betweenthe NFD and the rest of Kenya. Officials hoped that, by containing the ‘alien’ Somali onwhat was effectively a native reserve, they could better monitor their movement and governthem more explicitly as a ‘tribe’. However, the settlement scheme quickly ran afoul of thisnew ecological mindset. In , Gerald Reece, the provincial commissioner (PC) of theNFD, wrote that: ‘Alien Somalis have dumped here many thousand head of cattle andmany tens of thousands of sheep and goats. The owners often live at Moyale orMombasa or Nakuru.’ By , 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 ashort time we will be embarrassed with an even more serious shortage of land’.

Reece’s anxieties, however, were not the outcome of careful empirical investigation.Rather, they were products of broader shifts in the colonial imagination. In , ThomasG. Askwith became district commissioner of Isiolo. Development-minded and more liberalin orientation, he appeared, unlike his predecessors, to be far more optimistic about the cap-acity of the alien Somali population to be ‘modernized’. Yet his most iconoclastic positionwashis dismissal of former officials’ fears of over-grazing: ‘We appear to be ignorant of the realfactors governing the holding capacity of the land, and although the area is supposed to haveroom for about a third of the stock existing at present, the grazing still appears to survive.’

In , after conducting a census of non-natives in the north, Askwith noted, to his own sur-prise, that – despite colonial concerns with Somali overpopulation – the number of houses inIsiolo appeared to have decreased, rather than increased: ‘It will thus be seen that the numberof houses at Isiolo far from increasing since has actually decreased by about . Thesettlements appear to have increased by reason of the fact that the new tin roofs render

J.M. Hodge, Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of BritishColonialism (Athens, OH, ), . Ironically, as Ittmann points out, only a few decades earlier, mostcolonial officials thought of Sub-Saharan Africa as underpopulated. Ittmann, ‘Where nature’, .

For more on the history of postwar development projects in Africa, see F. Cooper, ‘Modernizing bureaucrats,backward Africans, and the development concept’, in F. Cooper and R. Packard (eds.), InternationalDevelopment and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley, CA,), –.

KNA VQ /, ‘The position of Alien Somalis in Kenya Colony’, letter from the Secretariat circulated to allmembers of Executive Council, Apr. .

KNA DC ISO //, ‘Crown Lands Ordinance’, letter from G. Reece, Officer-in-Charge, Northern FrontierDistrict to Attorney General, May .

KNA DC ISO //, ‘Alien Somali settlement scheme’, letter from G. Reece, Officer-in-Charge, NorthernFrontier District to Chief Secretary, Mar. , .

KNA DC ISO //, ‘Alien Somalis’, letter from T. G. Askwith, District Commissioner, Isiolo District to theOfficer-in-Charge, Northern Frontier District, June .

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them more conspicuous than previously.’ One can imagine these conspicuous tin roofs,catching the light and the eye of colonial officials as they monitored the vast pastoral terrainin airplanes. Legitimacy hinged on that which could be rendered visible, measurable, andquantifiable. Askwith, however, challenged the reliability of colonial surveillance techniquesand 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 increas-ingly concerned with the ecological impact of unregulated Somali mobility. In , D. C.Edwards, the senior agricultural officer, published an influential study on ecological deteri-oration in the rangelands of the north. In it, he connected land degradation to the breakdownof ‘tribal’ authority.Reece echoed Edwards’ suggestions. In , he argued that ‘the dam-age that is taking place in the country was due to the failure of the Government to maintainthe old tribal organizations’ and advocated for the formation of clan grazing reserves.

By portraying these schemes as a return to a ‘traditional’ way of life, the colonial admin-istration obscured the novelty of this new vision of the rangeland. James E. Ellis and DavidM. Swift refer to this way of thinking as the equilibrium myth. Experts who have studiedpastoral ecosystems, they argue, have often operated from the assumption that they ‘arepotentially stable’ and ‘become destabilized by overstocking and overgrazing’.

However, ‘equilibrium’ conditions are rarely attainable in nature. While colonial officialsheld pastoralists responsible for ecological degradation, the quality of the rangeland, asEllis and Swift show, is frequently dictated by ‘external forces’, such as rainfall, ratherthan ‘internal biotic factors’, like population or livestock numbers.

Edwards’ dubious conclusions, nevertheless, quickly became accepted administrativelogic. In the years after the Second World War, the NFD administration made a muchmore concerted effort to regulate population movement and implement clan grazingzones. Buoyed by an array of ecological and agricultural experts, officials hoped that,by confining different clans to distinct grazing lands, they could rein in populationswhose 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 boundariesand fined trespassers by confiscating a portion of their livestock.

KNA DC ISO //, ‘Somali settlement’, letter from T. G. Askwith, District Commissioner, Isiolo District toOfficer-in-Charge, Northern Frontier District, Apr. .

KNA PC NFD //, D. C. Edwards, Senior Agricultural Officer (Pasture Research), Nov. . KNA DC MDA /, G. Reece, ‘Control of grazing areas’, July . J. E. Ellis and D.M. Swift, ‘Stability of African pastoral ecosystems: alternate paradigms and implications for

development’, Journal of Range Management, : (), , doi: ./. Ibid. . See also E.M. Fratkin and E. A. Roth (eds.), As Pastoralists Settle: Social, Health, and Economic

Consequences of the Pastoral Sedentarization in Marsabit District, Kenya (New York, ), –. KNA PC NFD //, ‘Northern Province annual report, ’, –; KNA SA /, ‘Wajir District

handing-over report’, letter from P. G. P. D. Fullerton to J.M. Golds, May . KNA DC WAJ //, ‘Chief’s Meeting’, Jan. ; KNA DC WAJ //, ‘Meeting of Chiefs’, Dec. ;

interview with Abdi Salat Abdille, Kotulo, June ; interview with Saman Ali Aden and Abbas AdenAmin Osman, Wajir, Apr. ; Schlee, ‘Territorializing’, .

KEREN WE ITZBERG vol . , no .

The territorialization of ethnicity, however, was never a fait accompli, but rather a fragileaccomplishment that had to be continually sustained through strategic compromises withSomali leaders. In , for example, during a meeting with chiefs and headmen, the localadministration in Wajir responded to a request by the Ajuran chief to extend his commu-nity’s tribal boundaries. The chairman explained that: ‘any consideration to extend bound-aries would entirely depend on tangible evidence of an increase in population. This couldmost effectively be shown by an increase in tax collection’. In many cases, populationfigures were, in essence, negotiable and the size of a community was often a nominalfiction of bureaucratic arrangements and tax payments. Colonial administrators andSomali representatives also negotiated temporary and permanent border adjustments to ac-commodate changing climatic conditions. In , for instance, the administration madea ‘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 oftheir beasts’. 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.

The creation of clan boundaries did not fully inhibit the mobility of pastoralists or preventgroups from continuing to cross the porous frontiers between Kenya, Ethiopia, and ItalianSomalia. By conceding to this reality, the colonial state effectively created an uncountablepopulation. This was evident in , when the government undertook the first colony-widecensus. The census did not provide a concrete assessment for the Northern FrontierProvince (only an estimate of , people). Nor did census takers bother to includeSomalis under the main ‘tribes’ of Kenya, due most likely to the difficulty of assessingtheir numbers. 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 bySomalis living in Kenya to be fellow kin. In , 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 orBritish Somaliland – gets himself dug in, he will not rest until he has established a small

KNA DC WAJ //, ‘Minutes of Chiefs’ and Headmen’s Meeting Held at Wajir’, Jan. . As Andrew S. Mathews has shown of Mexico, ‘official knowledge’ rarely ‘arises from the imposition of

legibility’, but is more often ‘the relatively fragile product of negotiations between officials and theiraudiences in meeting halls and offices’. A. S. Mathews, Instituting Nature: Authority, Expertise, and Powerin Mexican Forests (Cambridge, MA, ), .

As Mohammed Farah notes, ‘no clan boundary, no matter how well-adjudged, could be said to contain allthat was necessary for the needs of the livestock’. M. I. Farah, From Ethnic Response to Clan Identity: AStudy of State Penetration Among the Somali Nomadic Pastoral Society of Northeastern Kenya (Uppsala,), .

KNA PC NFD //, ‘Northern Frontier Province annual report, ’, . M. I. Farah, From Ethnic Response to Clan Identity: A Study of State Penetration Among the Somali Nomadic

Pastoral Society of Northeastern Kenya (Uppsala, ), . KNA PC NFD //, letter from R. G. Turnbull to J.W. Cusack, ‘Northern Province handing-over report’,

Mar. . East African Statistical Department, African Population of Kenya Colony and Protectorate: Geographical and

Tribal Studies, (Nairobi, Sept. ), –.

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community of his tribespeople around him.’ According to Turnbull, the Isaaq and Hartifrequently requested passes for their relatives under false pretenses. He gave the hypothet-ical example of a Somali who asks for ‘a temporary pass for an aged uncle who is at death’sdoor and wishes to see his nephew before he dies’, who then proves ‘to be a robust youngman with seven children’. Such accusations reflected colonial paranoia about the unregu-lated nature of Somali kinship networks.Despite these concerns, it was not until – only seven years before British rule for-

mally ended – that the colonial government finally registered, issued identity cards, andconducted a census of Somalis permanently domiciled in the colony who lived outsideof the NFD. Between and , the census team collected detailed informationabout Isaaq and Harti households. This undertaking cannot be solely attributed to theincreased capacity of the colonial state. It seems that colonial administrators, by tying enu-meration to the promise of greater benefits, such as hospital and educational facilities, wereable to enlist the cooperation of the United Somali Association and the Central East AfricaIshakia Association in Nairobi. It is also quite likely that the Somali leadership viewedthe process of being counted and registered as a means of attaining bureaucratic recogni-tion as a ‘tribe’ and thus securing access to the new political and economic entitlements ofthe late colonial era.

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 theIsaaq and Harti population. They also transformed the idea of ‘population’ into a key siteof government intervention. Yet officials never managed to fully deter ‘illegal’ internationalmigration or attain an accurate count of the number of people in the NFD. Even in thepostwar era, at the height of its surveillance capacity, the colonial administration was un-able 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 colonialcensus. Nicholas Dirks, Bernard Cohn, Mamdani, and Scott, among others, have providednuanced accounts of colonial knowledge production and have persuasively shown that

KNA PC NGO //, letter from R. G. Turnbull, Provincial Commissioner, Northern Province to E. A.Sweatman, Officer-in-Charge, Maasai, Nov. .

Ibid. KNA PC NGO //, letter from Ag. Secretary for African Affairs to Provincial Commissioners of Nyanza,

Coast, Rift Valley, Southern, and Central Provinces and Officer-in-Charge of Nairobi Extra-ProvincialDistrict, June .

KNA DCMUR //, ‘The Somali Census in Kenya Colony’, letter from Officer-in-Charge of Somali Censusto Ag. Provincial Commissioner, Central Province, Nov. .

Between and , Somali political associations petitioned the government to give Somalis outside of theNFD employment opportunities as well as their own member in the Legislative Council. There wereapproximately , Somalis living outside of the NFD at this time. (Somali veterans of the Second WorldWar had augmented their numbers). KNA CS //, letter from A. Warsame, Vice President of the UnitedSomali Association to Chief Secretary, Oct. ; KNA CS //, letter from President, Somali NationalAssociation to Chief Secretary, Feb. ; KNA CS //, letter from W. F. Coutts, Chief Secretary toM. Blundell, Minister for Agriculture, Apr. .

KEREN WE ITZBERG vol . , no .

European authorities shaped the self-representations of colonized subjects through the cre-ation and imposition of census categories. This scholarship, however, has tended to over-state the reach and power of the colonial state. By focusing so exclusively on theconsequences of classification, moreover, most scholars have overlooked the enumerativefunctions of the census as well as the broader implications of quantification. In administra-tive reports, colonial officials often treated their Somali subjects as though they were quan-tifiable abstractions. In practice, however, international migration remained unchecked andreliable censuses were few and far between. Only a small number of scholars have consid-ered how this demographic uncertainty may have affected colonial classification.

This is an unfortunate elision, since state practices of enumeration have taken on renewedsignificance since independence. The introduction of electoral politics tied rights to whatAmitav Ghosh refers to as the ‘language of quantity, of number’. Long-standing patternsof assimilation and migration became much more problematic in a context in which numer-ical predominance determined seats in local and central government. By implementing anelectoral system without deinstitutionalizing the colonial legacy of ethnic boundaries, theKenyan government also linked demographics and political rights with ethnicity. Fearfulof 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.

These electoral contests have had particularly negative implications for Kenyan Somalis,whose citizenship was already considered suspect due to the ‘Shifta’ War. As journalistsand scholars such as Mohammed Adow and Richard Hogg have shown, the Kenyatta re-gime criminalized Somalis and northerners more broadly due to their support forpan-Somali irredentism in the early s. The Kenyan government also instituted vari-ous discriminatory policies as people fled the rapidly deteriorating political situation inSomalia. In , on the eve of multi-party elections, the Moi regime implemented ascreening process for Somalis living in Kenya, which was widely decried by Muslim leadersto be unjust and xenophobic. Some Kenyan officials took advantage of the screening

B. S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ, ), ; N. B.Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ, ); M. Mamdani,Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity (Cambridge, MA, ), –; Scott, Seeing, .

A notable exception is Arjun Appadurai. See A. Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on theGeography of Anger (Durham, ), –; A. Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions ofGlobalization (Minneapolis, ), –.

A. Ghosh, ‘The fundamentalist challenge’, in W.H. Gass and L. Cuoco (eds.), The Writer and Religion(Carbondale, IL, ), .

Mamdani, Citizen; P. Geschiere, The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africaand Europe (Chicago, ), –. As Peter Geschiere shows, nativist politics and anti-immigrantsentiments are also problems within Europe and thus can hardly be considered exclusive to Africa. Forrecent work on the relationship between elections, political ethnicity, and multiparty democracy in Kenya,see M. Bratton and M. S. Kimenyi, ‘Voting in Kenya: putting ethnicity in perspective’, Journal of EasternAfrican Studies, : (), –, doi: ./.

‘Revisiting Kenya’s forgotten pogroms’, Al Jazeera, Dec. (http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/aljazeeracorrespondent///revisiting-kenya-forgotten-pogroms-.html);R. Hogg, ‘Pastoralism and impoverishment: the case of the Isiolo Boran of Northern Kenya’, Disasters, :(), –.

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exercise to ‘reclaim’ constituencies for certain Somali clans and deter the growing numberof Somali refugees from swaying the outcome of future elections.

The transition towards multi-party democracy, especially when it has coincided withlarge-scale population movements, has often triggered heated debates over ‘autochthonyand ethnic citizenship’. By the early s, approximately half-a-million Somali asylumseekers were living within Kenya. Turning away from overcrowded and under-equippedrefugee camps, many refugees began to settle in urban centers within the country and,in some cases, managed to illegally purchase Kenyan identification cards from underpaidcivil servants. This only further blurred the already tenuous distinction between a ‘legal’citizen and an ‘illegal’ foreigner.

Due to the political significance of population counts and the ambiguities surroundingcitizenship, routine demographic exercises are often fraught and contentious. The de-cennial census, for instance, held important repercussions for the ways in which resourcesand power would be distributed under the new devolved constitution. It also reigniteddebates over the legal status of the Somali people. When Kenyan officials decided toannul the results in several northern districts, many of the region’s leaders accused the gov-ernment of deflating their population numbers and politically disenfranchising citizens.While some commentators blamed the irregularities of the census on misreporting andthe inclusion of refugees, others pointed to the omission of citizens from counts in previousdecades. As the census controversy reveals, difficult empirical problems can become vir-tually inseparable from contentious political matters. If politics depends so heavily ondemographic figures, one wonders if Somalis are fated to remain second-class citizens inKenya – always marked by the ambiguity of their nationality and their threatening poten-tial to become a ‘majority’.It is misleading to see conflicts like the census dispute as relatively recent phenom-

ena triggered solely by the rapid migration and demographic shifts of the post-Cold Warera. 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’ havecome ‘unglued in the era of globalization’. This article, however, has shown that theseideas were always tenuous abstractions of colonial authorities. The colonial state hardlyfit the image of a modernist social planner closely monitoring or busily enumerating itssubjects. In addition, the notion of a permanent population was little more than a bureau-cratic fiction in many parts of the colony, especially northern Kenya.

A.M. Wandati, ‘Screening: no laughing matter’,Daily Nation (November ), ; E. Lochery, ‘Renderingdifference visible: the Kenyan state and its Somali citizens’, African Affairs, : (), –, doi:./afraf/ads.

P. Geschiere and F. B. Nyamnjoh, ‘Capitalism and autochthony: the seesaw of mobility and belonging’, PublicCulture, : (), , doi: ./---.

E. H. Campbell, ‘Urban refugees in Nairobi: problems of protection, mechanisms of survival, and possibilitiesof integration’, Journal of Refugee Studies, : (), –, doi:./jrs/fel. Many citizens ofSomali descent have also been denied official forms of identification due to government discrimination.Consequently, ID cards are often a poor marker of legal status.

Jerven, Poor, –; Samora, ‘The Somali’; D. Zarembka, ‘Perilous times for Kenya’s Somalis’, Foreign Policyin Focus, Oct. (http://fpif.org/perilous-times-kenyas-somalis/).

Appadurai, Fear, .

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It would also be a mistake to view the lack of reliable census data as a ‘failure’ of colonialgovernance. Firstly, as James Ferguson notes, even ‘failed’ government initiatives can bringabout important changes and often ‘succeed’ in bringing power to bear in unexpectedways. Through registration and census endeavors, colonial authorities promoted the no-tion that populations could and should be enumerated, institutionalized the idea that eth-nic groups ‘naturally’ belonged on defined territories, and constructed the distinctionbetween a ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ immigrant. The colonial state created a set of bureaucraticnorms, which (though it was unable to fully enforce) came to define the boundaries oflegal citizenship. Secondly, the absence of accurate demographic data had few negative pol-itical consequences prior to independence. Colonial officials were able to rule their Somalisubjects in an inexpensive and largely effective manner, even if they occasionally wishedthey could better regulate Somali mobility. This policy of limited surveillance was also fair-ly accommodating of Somali groups, who were able to maintain regional networks that, inmany cases, had long predated the establishment of colonial borders.The colonial period was a time when a delicate set of compromises regarding Somali im-

migration reigned. Under empire, older forms of mobility, kinship, and nomadism came tocoexist with the more recent territorial state. The kinds of arrangements that colonialofficials were able to work out under empire may no longer be feasible in today’s politicalclimate. Population data is too closely tied to political power and demographic uncertaintycan easily become fodder for xenophobic and majoritarian violence. Nevertheless, exam-ining the history of the colonial census suggests that Kenya’s contemporary demographiccontroversies cannot be reductively blamed on ‘illegal’ immigration. Nor can they beunderstood through an ahistorical and idealized model of Weberian state surveillance.

J. Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho(Minneapolis, ), –.

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