Somali (ethnic group)

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Somali children
The star of the Somali flag symbolizes the five Somali settlement areas: Italian Somaliland and British Somaliland , which make up today's Somalia, as well as the former province of Ogaden in Ethiopia , the northern border district of Kenya and Djibouti .

The Somali (own name Soomaali ; with German plural also Somalis , Somalen or imprecise Somalis ) are an ethnic group in the Horn of Africa , which is estimated to have at least 8 million people.

They make up the vast majority of the population in Somalia - which was considered the Somali nation state until its political collapse in the Somali civil war - and also live in neighboring areas of Kenya ( northeast region ), where they make up around six percent of the population, Ethiopia ( Somali region or Ogaden ) and Djiboutis . Outside of this traditional area, numerous Somali people live as emigrants and refugees in the states of the Arabian Peninsula, in Europe, North America and other parts of the world.

Somali society is divided into clans to which every Somali belongs through his paternal lineage. The majority of Somali traditionally live from mobile livestock farming . Common features are Sunni Islam and the Somali language , which belongs to the Kushitic branch of the Afro-Asian language family .

designation

The name is Soomaali in the plural and Somal in the singular . There are various theories on etymology . According to one assumption, it comes from soo maal - “go and milk” - as an invitation to guests to drink milk. Others attribute it to a Cushitic word for "dark" or "black," which would refer to their skin color. The clans of Dir, Isaaq, Darod and Hawiye as "real Somali" can be traced back to a common ancestor Samaale , who could also have been named.

Way of life, society and culture

A Somali with his herd of goats near Beledweyne (Belet Uen), December 1993

Most Somali people are traditionally nomadic shepherds , who travel with their animals - mainly camels , but also sheep and goats or cattle, depending on the terrain and region - through the plains of the Horn of Africa in search of pastures and watering points for their animals. In south-western Somalia , the Somali clans of the Rahanweyn (Reewin, Digil-Mirifle) practice agropastoralism , so they live as sedentary farmers on both arable and livestock farming. Nowadays, many Somali people have settled in cities and villages, and a large part of them live semi-nomadically from mobile animal husbandry. The proportion of traditionally fully nomadic shepherds is small and is getting smaller and smaller.

Most of the Somali are Sunni Muslims from the Shafiite school of law. They were among the first peoples in Africa to embrace Islam . By the end of the 1st millennium, parts of them had already converted, mainly in the trading towns on the coast such as Zeila , Mogadishu , Berbera and the surrounding areas. The schools of faith spread by the missionary sheikhs of various Sufi orders in the 19th century are present in everyday life. The oldest and largest of these brotherhoods is the Qadiriyya , followed by the Salihiyya in the north and various smaller groups. Since the 1970s there have been radical Wahhabi currents, especially in the cities , which, like religion as a whole, gained in importance during the civil war.

Somali women often wear a kind of cotton sari ( guntiino ) and a cloth ( garbasaar ) over it, which covers their hair; Face veils are traditionally not common, but have been worn more often, especially in cities, since the 1980s. The circumcision (circumcision) of boys is as common as the female genital mutilation , which are mostly in the particularly invasive form of infibulation is performed.

The Somali attach great importance to poetry. The greatest historical figures in Somali history were poets, such as B. Mohammed Abdullah Hassan , who at the end of the 19th century fought with his dervish movement against the foreign rule of Ethiopians, British and Italians. The Somali language was largely passed on orally until the 20th century, although the Arabic alphabet ( Wadaad script ) had been used for centuries . In 1972 Somali was officially spelled using the Latin alphabet.

Clan system

Map of the Somali area with the different clans

Somali society is based on tribes or clans to which every Somali belongs through his or her paternal lineage . The largest units are the large clan families (qaabiil) of the Dir, Isaaq, Darod, Hawiye and Rahanweyn. These clan families are further subdivided into sub-clans, sub-sub-clans, etc., down to the smallest units (reer) who collectively pay or receive the blood money (diya) due for crimes . The Somali are thus a segmental society .

All clan families can be traced back to a common ancestor Hill , who is said to have been the descendant of Abu Talib , an uncle of Mohammed . Hill's descendant Samaale is considered to be the progenitor of the Dir, Isaaq, Darod and Hawiye clans, while Sab , another descendant of Rahanweyn, is said to be descended from (the exact relationships are stated differently depending on the clan and publication):

Linguistic and cultural differences exist between the Samaal clans and the Rahanweyn. Most of the Rahanweyn do not live as nomads, but as settled farmers. The variant of Somali they speak, Af-Maay , differs from Af-Maxaa or Maha of the rest of Somali; so they are called by these Rahanweyn , but their own name is Reewin . They also have members of other clans and non-Somali (" Bantu " and Oromo ) members in their ranks to a greater extent than other clans . The Samaal are generally considered to be the real Somali , whereas the Rahanweyn are sometimes regarded as "fake Somali".

origin

The origin of the Somali is disputed. The Somali themselves trace their oral traditions back to immigrants from the Arabian Peninsula , through whom all Somali are ultimately supposed to descend patrilineally from Arab tribes. They clearly see themselves as different from black African peoples. This view was adopted, especially in the 1950s, by European researchers working on the Somali, such as Ioan M. Lewis .

Linguistics, on the other hand, comes to the conclusion that the forerunners of the Somali came from the southern Ethiopian highlands and from there immigrated to the lowlands together with other linguistically related groups (e.g. BHS Lewis 1966, Turton 1975, Heine 1978). According to this, the traditions of the Somali reflect the later cultural influence and also mixing with Arabs, especially in the coastal cities, and in particular the importance of Islam for the Somali. But precisely because of the obvious interest of the Somali in claiming Arab descent for themselves, they should not be regarded as historically truthful.

It is possible that the agropastoralism of the Rahanweyn (Reewin) in south-western Somalia corresponds more to the original way of life of the forerunners of the Somali, some of whom later switched to pure livestock farming and nomadism; Earlier assumptions, however, assumed that the Rahanweyn had immigrated as nomads from the north and settled down.

The term Somali appears for the first time in writing in a hymn from the 15th century, which documents the victories of the Ethiopian Emperor Isaac (Yeshaq) over his Muslim opponents. As early as the 14th century, the geographer Ibn Said mentions a Somali clan by naming Merka as the "capital of the Hawiye country " with more than 50 villages.

Genetic analyzes indicate a partial Arab / Eurasian ancestry, but their results are inconsistent with regard to the proportion of this ancestry and the degree of kinship with other inhabitants of Africa. According to a study, male Somali are closest to the - neighboring and also Cushitic-speaking - Oromo and also have 15% Eurasian and 5% sub-Saharan African Y chromosomes . Various studies of the mtDNA have shown that the Somali are closest to the Eurasian within the African population or are positioned in the middle between the African and Eurasian populations. Further investigations on other chromosomes came to the conclusion that the gene pool in Somalia and Ethiopia is 60% African and 40% Eurasian.

Political situation

The area inhabited by Somali has never been politically united in history, but was under the rule of local clans and various sultanates until the colonial era . From the 19th century, the region experienced its colonial division, which continues to have an impact today, through which the Somali are currently distributed to the states of Somalia , Kenya , Ethiopia and Djibouti .

There were efforts within the Somali population to end this state of division and to unite all Somali in one state of Greater Somalia . Thus united British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland in 1960 to Somalia , which as a nation state tried for the Somali peaceful and military means to annex the companies located outside its territory Somali territories. Somali in north-eastern Kenya and eastern Ethiopia tried unsuccessfully to connect these areas to Somalia. Today, many Somali people in these areas are dependent on food aid as a result of drought and political conflict (which continues to this day in the Somali region of Ethiopia) . In 1977 the Issa- Somali in Djibouti achieved independence from France, but not annexation to Somalia. In the politics of Djibouti they still dominate against the Afar minority.

In Somalia itself there has been no functioning government since the fall of the Siad Barres dictatorship in 1991, so that the Somali are distributed over different parts of the country under the control of different clans and warring factions. While Somaliland and Puntland in northern Somalia are relatively stable and have de facto established independent regional governments, the civil war in southern and central Somalia is ongoing . This political fragmentation of Somalia has meant that large Somali endeavors have lost importance since the 1990s.

Diaspora

Map of the global Somali diaspora, 2006

The emigration of Somali to areas outside the Horn of Africa has a long history and initially took Somali to the states of the Arabian Peninsula for commercial activities, training or for the purpose of looking for work . Already at the beginning of the 20th century there were Somali emigrants in Great Britain who were employed in the Royal Navy and in the merchant navy. Their number continued to increase during the Second World War and in the 1950s. Others made it to North America. The growing prosperity of the Arab states through oil exports attracted more Somali to these countries, which until the 1980s had the largest Somali population outside the Horn of Africa.

Emigration increased significantly when numerous Somali people left Somalia under Siad Barre for political and economic reasons in the 1970s and 1980s . It peaked in the late 1980s and 1990s when many Somali people fled the Somali civil war and sought asylum in Europe and North America.

Today Somali live as emigrants and refugees in Arab states, in Europe, North America and Australia as well as in other parts of Africa (especially South Africa ). Their number is difficult to determine, but it is generally estimated at over a million. Through their money transfers, they are of great importance for the economy of Somalia , but also for politics.

See also

literature

  • Bogumil Witalis Andrzejewski, Ioan Myrddin Lewis: Somali Poetry. An Introduction. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1964 ( Oxford Library of African Literature ), (on poetry).
  • Bernd Heine : The Sam Languages. A History of Rendille, Boni and Somali. In: Afroasiatic Linguistics. 6, 2, 1978, ISSN  0362-3637 , pp. 1-92.
  • Abdi M. Kusow, Stephanie R. Bjork (Eds.): From Mogadishu to Dixon. The Somali Diaspora in a Global Context. Red Sea Press, Trenton (NJ) / Asmara 2007
  • Herbert S. Lewis: The Origins of the Galla and Somali. In: The Journal of African History. Vol. 7, No. 1, 1966, ISSN  0021-8537 , pp. 27-46.
  • Ioan M. Lewis: Blood and Bone. The Call of Kinship in Somali Society. Red Sea Press, Lawrenceville NJ 1994, ISBN 0-932415-93-8 (on the clan system).
  • Ioan M. Lewis: Understanding Somalia and Somaliland. Culture, History and Society. Hurst, London 2008, ISBN 978-1-85065-898-6 (English).
  • Ioan M. Lewis: A Modern History of Somalia. Nation and State in the Horn of Africa. Revised Edition. Longman Group LTD., London et al. 1980, ISBN 0-582-64657-X .
  • ER Turton: Bantu, Galla and Somali Migrations in the Horn of Africa. A reassessment of the Juba / Tana Area. In: The Journal of African History. Vol. 16, No. 4, 1975, pp. 519-537.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ According to Ioan M. Lewis: Understanding Somalia and Somaliland: Culture, History and Society , 2008, ISBN 978-1-85065-898-6 (p. 1).
    Other estimates go much higher. Due to the situation in the country, population figures for Somalia are generally uncertain and fluctuate between 7.5 and 12.9 million for 2009. For the whole of Ethiopia, official figures give almost 4.6 million ethnic Somali for 2007 (the Ogaden National Liberation Front , however, claims up to 8 million). There are often no exact figures for Somali immigrants in other countries, as     Somali are not always registered as a separate group in censorship surveys and this term is defined differently: Partly all people originating from Somalia or born there are meant, partly including ethnic Somali understood in the real sense. Finally, Somali people who are unannounced / illegally present are not included in such censuses.
  2. ^ Rifts in the Rift, The Economist, January 23, 2016
  3. ↑ cf. IM Lewis: The Somali Conquest of the Horn of Africa , in: The Journal of African History , Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 213-230 (1960)
  4. ^ Herbert S. Lewis: The Origins of the Galla and Somali , in: The Journal of African History , Vol. 7, No. 1 (1966)
  5. ↑ a b Abdi Kusow : The Somali Origin: Myth or Reality, in: Ali Jimale Ahmed (Ed.): The Invention of Somalia , Red Sea Press 1995, ISBN 0932415997
  6. ^ Ioan M. Lewis: A Modern History of the Somali , 2002 (p. 19)
  7. ↑ European Journal of Human Genetics (2005): High frequencies of Y chromosome lineages characterized by E3b1, DYS19-11, DYS392-12 in Somali males
  8. ↑ European Journal of Human Genetics (1999): Analysis of mtDNA HVRII in several human populations using an immobilized SSO probe hybridization assay (PDF; 250 kB)
  9. ↑ IRIN News: South Africa: Fleeing war, Somalis are targets of violence in adopted home
  10. ^ Mark Bradbury: Becoming Somaliland , 2008, ISBN 978-1847013101 (pp. 174f.)