Review: British Somaliland: An Administrative History, 1920–1960

Reviewed Work(s): British Somaliland: An Administrative History, 1920–1960 by Brock

Millman
Review by: Lidwien Kapteijns
Source: Northeast African Studies , Vol. 15, No. 1 (Spring 2015), pp. 206-210
Published by: Michigan State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/nortafristud.15.1.0206

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Michigan State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to Northeast African Studies

This content downloaded from

138.237.15.168 on Mon, 04 Dec 2023 17:50:51 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
206 n Book Reviews

British Somaliland: An Administrative History, 1920–1960,

by Brock Millman
London and New York: Routledge, 2014; pp. xi + 314, maps. $152.00 cloth.

Imagine a book on Apartheid South Africa, written in 2014, that would

praise Apartheid as the best possible form of rule for South Africans and
portray leaders of the anticolonial national liberation movement such as
Mandela as a wrong- and hotheaded group of detribalized évolués, totally
alienated from the people and misled by subversive political influences
from recently independent African states. Imagine further that the author
of this book would explicitly take pride in ignoring scholarly analyses of
colonial rule in general and would almost completely disregard existing
scholarship about the country and people under study. Millman’s book is
precisely such a study of the British Somaliland in the period from 1920
to independence.
Throughout the book, Millman reports the points of view of his colo-
nial interlocutors, that is to say, the long list of British colonial administra-
tors whose official communications to the Colonial Office he has carefully
studied, without methodically contextualizing these sources or probing
them for their truth value and blind spots. On the one hand, this leads to a
long series of contradictions, as the author too often uncritically reproduces
the different points of view recorded by various colonial officers at different
moments of time. On the other hand, this produces a consistently reduc-
tive—one is tempted to say racist—interpretation of Somali people and
history. To Millman and the colonial officials he studies, the real Somalis are
the rural tribesmen, “stiff-necked and occasionally violent” (6), “illiterate
and parochial” (98), and “armed and stoic, . . . schooled since infancy in
the art of raiding” (118‒19); they are people “who could not understand,
and ultimately despised any other way of life than their own” (12) and “who
still live their lives by ancient patterns” (9).
In contrast to the people “back in the bush” (200), members of the
post‒World War II Somali urban educated elite, especially members of
political parties such as the Somali Youth League (SYL) and National
United Front (NUF), represent, to the mind of the author, detribalized
urban rabble-rousers with unsavory political opinions and ambitions
for independence. It is these people Millman blames for hijacking the
political process and bringing about the untimely achievement of political

This content downloaded from

138.237.15.168 on Mon, 04 Dec 2023 17:50:51 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Book Reviews n 207

independence and its troublesome aftermath. To Millman, the members

of the growing “detribalized urban population . . . which ultimately con-
stituted the cannon fodder for radical politics in the late Protectorate
period” are not people who organized politically against racist and arbitrary
colonial rulers who signed away large parts of the territory in which they
lived and considered their own, but precursors to the mooryaan, those
marginalized urban youths who were major perpetrators of Somali civil
war violence in 1991 and thereafter (297). That Somalis were capable of
having political opinions and that many regarded these political leaders as
freedom fighters and fathers of the nation is not something Millman and
the colonial sources he cites appear capable of acknowledging.
British colonial rule “proved to be a near-perfect fit for a conservative,
Muslim, nomadic people,” Millman argues, and “was perhaps the best
government ever devised to rule Somalis” (6). Although he characterizes
it as “an ambulatory, occasionally predatory, benign despotism” (6), it
was nevertheless perfect for Somalis because of their nature as a unique
species of noble savages. This mindset allows the author to present a
description of colonial policies and points of view—interlaced with his
own endorsements or critiques—without analyzing the impact of colonial
rule in a systematic or thorough way. Millman consistently ignores most
of the scholarship that deals with such an impact and that has studied
the destructive legacies of colonial rule in Somalia. There is no mention
of the books that have documented the short- and long-term costs of the
more than two-decade-long anticolonial jihad that colonial occupation
provoked. Absent from the analysis is the scholarship that has analyzed
the impact of British colonial boundary making and the signing away
of large parts of Somali-inhabited lands, which left many Somalis as
politically unreconciled, vulnerable minorities in neighboring states.
And the author appears unaware of the studies that have interpreted the
colonial transformation and distortion of Somali custom and the routine
administrative use of collective punishment as a significant dimension
of the prehistory of the Somali civil war. With very few exceptions,
scholarship about Somali history and society remains firmly outside of
this book’s scope of vision.
Millman does not portray British rule as perfect. After British Somalil-
and had been lost to the Italians in 1940 and reconquered by the Allied
forces in 1941, the British military administration that replaced the prewar

This content downloaded from

138.237.15.168 on Mon, 04 Dec 2023 17:50:51 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
208 n Book Reviews

civilian colonial administrators whom Millman calls the “old hands”

was quite critical of the quaint and myopic policies in existence in the
Protectorate. In chapter 5, the author chronicles these critical appraisals
approvingly. However, when, in later chapters, he once again draws on
the documents produced by the same type of “old hands” now returned
to power, he again presents them as the best possible rulers without any
reference to the earlier critiques. Such contradictions are numerous.
The author presents as evidence of the “near-perfect fit” of British
colonial rule in Somaliland the idea that the Somalis were generally “com-
fortable subjects” (15) who were content with British rule. He writes:
“Tribal Somalis were a conservative people, and despotic paternalism
appears to have given them everything they wanted from the Government
while avoiding unnecessary innovation” (201). This was particularly true,
he writes, with regard to the colonial administration of justice. Millman
insists that, rather than resisting, the Somalis liked and accepted the mix of
Indian codes, Protectorate ordinances, and the colonial version of Somali
custom or xeer that the British imposed and enforced in the Protectorate.
However, as he himself details, in 1957 all of the Somali members of the
newly established Protectorate Legislative Council voted to abolish xeer as
a source of Protectorate law. In this they were opposed and outvoted by the
Council’s British members, who could not countenance Somali rejection of
what the colonial administrations had throughout the decades produced
as authentic Somali custom. That Millman does not see the absurdity of
this late-colonial moment is one thing; that he fails to regard this kind
of principled political initiative for reform by educated Somali political
leaders such as Michael Mariano as Somali resistance to the colonial justice
system is inexcusable (269‒70).
Millman dutifully chronicles other forms of Somali resistance but
always attributes it implicitly or explicitly to Somali conservatism and
parochialism. That uneducated Somalis too may have held political convic-
tions and been anticolonial on principle is one of the book’s giant blind
spots. When such awareness occasionally surfaces, it does so in the context
of a particular colonial report that explicitly refers to Somali political
convictions. For example, when the British antilocust campaign led to
violence and many Somalis destroyed locust bait, a colonial report referred
to Somalis’ fears that the government wanted to poison their livestock. The
author cites this reference (239) but fails to connect these fears causally to

This content downloaded from

138.237.15.168 on Mon, 04 Dec 2023 17:50:51 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Book Reviews n 209

the contemporary colonial policy debates about countering overgrazing

by culling Somali herds (236). When, in the early 1930s, colonial attempts
to impose primary education using Somali (rather than Arabic) as the
language of education led to violent clashes, the author interprets this as
Somali parochialism and incitement by bad elements and troublesome
wadaads (local men of religion). He fails to emphasize that the resistance
to making Somali the language of education was connected to the fact
that the first Europeans ever to publish books in Somali were missionar-
ies printing Bibles. In other words, the author ignores that dimension of
Somali resistance that represented not just Somali rejection of education
but Somali rejection of British colonial education.
Unfortunately, for none of these topics does Millman engage the
relevant existing scholarship, whether that of Abdi Samatar on the colonial
economy, especially livestock production and farming; Patrick Kakwenzire
on education; Charles Geshekter on the emergence in the Protectorate of
a Somali middle class; Saadia Touval on Somali nationalism; John Johnson
on a new genre of popular songs that took the country by storm and gained
legitimacy because of its anticolonial themes; or Mark Bradbury’s excellent
2008 study, Becoming Somaliland.1 Given the inadequate index and the
numerous spelling mistakes in the English as well as in Somali terms and
names, it appears, moreover, that the author has not been well served by
his publisher.
Nevertheless, this flawed study is of great value in one important way.
For the whole period 1920‒60, Millman systematically worked through all
the Colonial Office files and many of the relevant Foreign Office and War
Office files in the British National Archives. And he carefully annotated his
study. This careful and comprehensive footnoting makes British Somaliland
a valuable source guide for students and scholars who will follow in Mill-
man’s footsteps.

NOTE

1. Mark Bradbury, Becoming Somaliland (Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 2008); Charles L. Geshekter, “Anti-Colonialism and Class Formation:
The Eastern Horn of Africa before 1950,” International Journal of African
Historical Studies 18, no. 1 (1985): 1‒32; John William Johnson, Heellooy,
Heelleellooy: The Development of the Genre Heello in Modern Somali Poetry

This content downloaded from

138.237.15.168 on Mon, 04 Dec 2023 17:50:51 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
210 n Book Reviews

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974); Patrick K. Kakwenzire,

“Colonial Rule in the British Somaliland Protectorate, 1905‒1939” (PhD
diss., University of London, 1976); Abdi Ismail Samatar, The State and Rural
Transformation in Northern Somalia, 1884‒1986 (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1989); and Saadia Touval, Somali Nationalism:
International Politics and the Drive for Unity in the Horn of Africa
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lidwien Kapteijns is Kendall/Hodder Professor of History and teaches

African and Middle Eastern history at Wellesley College. Before turning
to Somali studies in the late 1980s, she lived and worked in the Sudan
and published on late precolonial Sudanese history. Her 1999 book,
Women’s Voices in a Man’s World: Women and the Pastoral Tradition in
Northern Somali Orature, c. 1899‒1980 (with Maryan Omar Ali), dealt
with notions of proper womanhood in Somali folklore texts and the
Somali popular songs of the 1960s‒1980s. Clan Cleansing in Somalia:
The Ruinous Legacy of 1991, an analysis of Somali civil war violence
in text and context, was published by the University of Pennsylvania
Press in 2013 and is now in paperback.

Regional Integration, Identity, and Citizenship in the

Greater Horn of Africa, edited by Kidane Mengisteab
and Redie Bereketeab
Woodbridge, UK: James Currey, 2012; pp. 280. $50.00 cloth.

Kidane Mengisteab and Redie Bereketeab’s edited collection, Regional

Integration, Identity, and Citizenship in the Greater Horn of Africa, appears
at an important moment in which scholars, governments, and, most
importantly, citizens of the Horn of Africa are facing extreme economic,
political, and humanitarian challenges. To help mitigate many of the
ongoing military, economic, and resource-based conflicts that plague the
region, Mengisteab and Bereketeab develop a broad conceptualization for
how this part of the continent, which the authors term the Greater Horn

This content downloaded from

138.237.15.168 on Mon, 04 Dec 2023 17:50:51 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms