Defining Soomaalinimo: Race, Labor, and Nation in Somalia Italiana

Abstract

Who are the Somali people? This study historicizes the concept of Soomaalinimo, or the Somali collective identity, tracing the development of Somali categories of belonging under Italian colonial rule. The abolition of slavery and the slave trade was a catalyst for the establishment of Italian direct administration in Somalia Italiana. With the influence of race science and colonial anthropology, the state divided its colonized subjects into a racialized hierarchy and used racial theories, including phenotype, fictive lineages of slavery, and physical anthropology, to determine who was fit for different kinds of labor. Through a stratum of native intermediaries, including customary chiefs and native soldiers, the state was able to expand its political authority, recruit workers, and quell dissent. This system of indirect rule, which governed all Somalis through their clan, became one of the primary targets of anti-colonial nationalism. In the period of decolonization, nationalists and counter-nationalists contested the legacies of Italian colonialism and the possibilities of transcending social cleavages to define Soomaalinimo as the renewed basis of post-colonial citizenship.