Somalia has an ethnic homogeneity unusual in Africa, with Somalis constituting 85% of the population. Most of its citizens share a common language, religion and culture. Yet it has never achieved lasting stability as a nation. Since the early 1990s its civil war has been one of the most destructive in recent African history. European colonization resulted in the division of Somali territory into five different colonies.
Reunification preoccupied successive elites at the cost of addressing more concrete issues. National issues remained undebated while the cultivation of clan and subclan interests accentuated the demise of kinship and the rise of clannism, the politicisation of the clan structure for personal gain.
Various possibilities have been proposed in seeking to explain why one of the few nations on the continent with predominantly one ethnic group, one religion, culture and language should have become overcome by a devastating civil war. Some scholars relate this political instability to the Somali clan system, in which retaliation for offences committed by rival clans can easily escalate into warfare. Others argue that Somalia’s recent turmoil reflects efforts by elites to manipulate clan loyalties in the hope of increasing their own wealth. Still other contend that Somalia’s homogeneity is in fact a myth that obscures long -standing tensions between nomadic groups and the descendants of Bantu-speaking slaves. Moreover, some analysts trace the roots of conflict to the colonial period, when access to power and pastoral resources – long regulated by Somalia’s many widely dispersed clan leaders – came under the control of the centralized colonial and later post colonial – state.
Look at any map of Africa and there on the Horn of Africa you’ll find a geographic entity labeled Somalia. But the country of Somalia doesn’t exist and hasn’t existed since the government of Siad Barre collapsed in 1991 in the wake of the Cold War. Somalia today remains a state of mind and not much more. It is a dream unfulfilled and yet Western governments persist on continuing the Somali nightmare.
The tragedy of Somalia is ever more harder to comprehend since the Somali are one of the largest and homogeneous ethnic groups in Africa that live in a relatively contiguous territory unlike the Peul, Tuareg or the Hausa who are spread out across the Sahel. More than eight million Somalis live in a territory stretching north from northern Kenya to Djibouti and west from the Indian Ocean into the scrubland desert of the Ogaden in Ethiopia. An unified Somali homeland is in the realm of possibilities but for the fact the West won’t allow borders carved out in Berlin in 1885 to be altered. European maps and American ones by extension, it seems, are sacrosanct.
For over a century, the Horn of Africa has seen foreign powers play their imperial games on this distant shore. Colonialism was not kind to the Somalis, who were largely nomadic. By the end of the 19th century, European powers had partitioned the Somali home territory into the British Somaliland Protectorate, French Somaliland, Italian Somalia, northern Kenya and the Ogaden in Ethiopia. Independence would come in 1960 with a fusion of the British and Italian zones into the Republic of Somalia with the two territories facing the daunting challenge of integration that in truth were never breached but rather unity was achieved through authoritarianism. And with 40% of Somalis living outside Somalia, the government in Mogadishu quickly became an irrendentist one laying claims to the Ogaden, Haud and parts of northeastern Kenya and the whole French Somaliland, present day Djibouti.