BETWEEN THE MUSHUNGULI AND THE MAYFLOWER:

The Somali Bantu in the USA

 Alamin Mazrui

Department of African American and African Studies

The Ohio State University

Columbus, Ohio (USA) 

[Presented at a Forum of Governmental and Non-Governmental Agencies of Columbus, Ohio (USA), organized by the Office of Refugee Services, in preparation for the re-settlement of hundreds of the so-called Somali Bantu in the city]. 

          I would like to begin with a confession. When I was first contacted by the Office of Refugee Services to come and address this distinguished audience on the notion of “Bantuness” with specific regard to an ethnic group from Somalia known as the Somali Bantu, I was a bit flabbergasted – And this for two reasons:

First, like many Africans, I had been under the illusion that Somalia is a prime example of a mono-ethnic nation in Africa, never once entertaining the possibility that within that space there could actually exist other ethnic entities. So, while it is still true that Somalia is predominantly homogenous in its ethnic composition, the revelation about the Somali Bantu demonstrated to me how successful successive Somalia regimes and their ideologues had been in effacing this and other minorities within Somalia.

Secondly, I was astounded because as a linguist of the African condition, I had not been accustomed to thinking of Bantu as an ethnic designation at all. While the word Bantu (people) and its singular Muntu (person) exist in a number of Eastern, Central and Southern African languages, it was European colonizers who first applied the term (Bantu) to hundreds of ethnic groups speaking related (though not necessarily mutually intelligible) languages – much as we use the term Germanic to refer to speakers of related languages that include English, German, Dutch etc. The Bantu languages more widely known to Americans, of course, include Swahili in East Africa, Zulu in South Africa and perhaps Lingala in Central Africa.

Historically, Bantu speakers are said to have originated in what is today Eastern Nigeria and the adjoining areas of Cameroon. Some 4000 years ago, they began to migrate eastwards and southwards in a series of movements that came to be dubbed the “Bantu Dispersal.” In the process, they popularized their agricultural form of production and a sedentary mode of living. As significantly, many groups of speakers of non-Bantu languages came to be assimilated, linguistically and culturally, acquiring in the process the identity of the respective Bantu-speaking groups. From the linguistic point of view, Bantuness is an expansive multi-ethnic umbrella that covers a wide range of groups – from West to East Africa, from Central to South Africa, – groups that need not share any genetic affiliation..

In this respect, Bantuness contrasts sharply with Somaliness.  Somaliness is an ethnic-specific identity. It is to belong to one large ethnic group, sharing a belief in a common ancestry traced to a mythical founder-figure, Samaale, and a common language – albeit with several regional varieties, just as English has several different dialects.  Linguistically, the Somali are not Bantu. Rather, with speakers of several languages of the Horn of Africa (like Oromo, Bilin, Saho, Afar and Beja), they belong to what is called the Cushitic family (of languages). Comparatively speaking, then, Somali is a specific signification, while Bantu has a more generic representation.

The question that confronts us, then, is how “Bantu” as a multi-ethnic designation came to acquire a mono-ethnic meaning in the context of the troubled region of Somalia. Here, a comparison with African America is indeed in order.  We will remember that enslaved Africans transported to the Americas came from many ethnic groups, some of which did not even know of each other’s existence and whose languages were often so different that they could not communicate with each other. It was the gradual realization that their bondage and their humiliation were pegged to their skin color and their African origin that ultimately fostered a collective consciousness of their Africanity. So, while those in the Mother-Continent have continued to regard the term “Africa” as a conglomeration of hundreds of ethnic groups, the specificity of the Black experience in the racial context of America has accorded the term a mono-ethnic meaning.

Similarly, the Bantu of Somalia may have come from a variety of Bantu-speaking groups in East and Southern Africa. We know, of course, that some of them are indigenous to Somalia, having arrived there as part of the larger wave of the Bantu Dispersal I alluded to earlier. For others, however, their presence in the space of Somalia was a consequence of their enslavement. Together, these divergent entities of Bantu-speaking Somalians came to share a common destiny as victims of domination and marginalization over the years. And, increasingly, this common fate came to be seen as a direct product of their over-arching Bantuness. Within the context of Somalia, then, this growing Bantu consciousness eventually crystallized into an independent ethnic reference.

We know, of course, that with Black people in the USA, the source-identity (African) became the qualifier/adjective, while the recipient-identity, American, became the noun. So we talk of African Americans rather than American Africans. The case of the Somali Bantu, on the other hand, is exactly the reverse. Their source-identity, Bantu, is the noun that is qualified by their recipient-identity, Somali. How, then, do we account for this difference – in the word order -- between African Americans and the Somali Bantu?

With African Americans, we can suggest that the people have lost enough (though by no means all) of their African cultural heritage and acquired enough of the heritage of their new location to increasingly see themselves as Americans of African origin. The vast distance between Africa and the Americas naturally contributed a great deal to this weakening of the linguistic and cultural umbilical chord between Africa and its children in the Diaspora.

In the case of the Somali Bantu, on the other hand, the Bantu cultural heritage has continued to endure in significant measure, and the people themselves have experienced far less (than African Americans) by way of cultural assimilation into the new cultural milieu. The cultural (and subsequently identitarian) primacy of their Bantuness, then, has not been sufficiently eroded by the hegemonic force of the dominant culture.

The failure of the Somali Bantu to acquire a Somali ethnic identity is, in a sense, a curious fact given the history of enslavement in the lands of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Most of the East and South Africans who were captured, enslaved and transported to countries in North Africa, the Middle East and Asia were predominantly from Bantu-speaking backgrounds. Until today we know that there are large enclaves of people of Bantu descent in the Dekan in India or in Dhofar in the Gulf state of Oman. Yet, we do not hear of Indian Bantu/Bantu Indians or Omani Bantu/Bantu Omanis. Why? This is partly because the paradigms of ethnicity in parts of India and the Middle East, as in much of Africa, allow for the acquisition of local ethnic identities by the sheer force of cultural and linguistic assimilation. As a result, descendants of enslaved Africans in Oman, for example, have virtually lost their African consciousness because, as time passed they acquired an Arab identity once Arabic became their native language. In Africa too, there are many Africans of one ethnic origin or another – some surely descendents of slaves -- who have become Hausa or Baganda, for instance, simply because the Hausa language and the Luganda language, respectively, have become their mother tongues.

In the same vein, after centuries in Somalia, one would have expected the descendants of enslaved Bantu and other Bantu communities in that country to have become, by now, Somali in ethnic identification. But, this did not, in fact, take place! It did not happen because, as indicated earlier, the process of their lingo-cultural assimilation was incomplete. But even if it were complete, the Bantu would still not be Somali for reasons that have to do with the peculiarities of Somali identity itself.

Unlike many other African societies that are defined by the primacy of culture, genealogy constitutes the very heart and fabric of the Somali social system. According to David Laitin and Said Samatar, demonstration of genealogical links to the major clan-families of the Somali – the four pastoral ones (Dir, Darood, Isaaq and Hawiye) and the two agricultural ones (Digil and Rahanwayn) -- is absolutely essential to the act of belonging to Somali society. This fact partially explains “the suspiciousness and even paranoia (remarked on by numerous foreign observers) that color the Somalis’ relations with outsiders and strangers, mainly because the latter are beyond the scope of [Somali] genealogical identification. [And the genealogical] system guards itself against alien penetration and outside influences by a defensive bulwark of kinship solidarity, at best, and at worst by clannish exclusiveness.”[1]

Under these circumstances, there was little chance of the Bantu of Somalia getting admitted to a Somali identity even if they desired to be. Indeed Laitin and Samatar allude to numerous urban families of Arab and Persian ancestry in Somalia cities like Mogadishu, Merka and Baraawe, and Bantu communities in the south of the country who, lacking genealogical links with the major Somali clan-families have tried to construct fictitious ones in an attempt to place themselves within the system and, therefore, within the society, but all in vain.  In time, this genealogical foundation of society also came to translate into silent political, social and economic policies of the state of Somalia itself, further consolidating both the marginalization and discrimination of people of Bantu origin in the country.

There is a sense, then, in which the fate of people of Bantu descent in Somalia is more akin to that of people of African descent in America than that of fellow Bantu descendents in parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Unlike in the latter three cases where culture has been more fundamental as a criterion for belonging or not belonging, among the Somali (as in the USA) “genes” have had greater weight in determining the boundaries between the “self” and the “other,” between “we” and “them.”  To be Anglo is to be born into it: No matter how culturally assimilated African Americans may be, they could not acquire an Anglo identity without being genetically white.  Likewise, to be Somali is to be born into it: No matter how assimilated the Bantu of Somalia may be, they could not acquire a Somali identity without having blood ties with one or more clan-families of the Somali. Located outside the boundaries of the Somali social organism, therefore, it was natural that a Bantu consciousness would loom large in the minds of the Mushunguli (the self-designated name of the Somali Bantu).

I must point out here, however, that by drawing a distinction between these different paradigms of identity, I do not mean to suggest that one is somehow better than the other. Certainly, we know that the assimilation paradigm can sometimes be a denial of diversity. Indeed the absorptive capacity of Arab identity, for example, has led one poet of Southern Sudan to lament the “loss” of his own cousin who has acquired Arab identity by linguistic and cultural assimilation. He says:

My cousin Mohamed

Thinks he is very clever…

With pride,

He says he’s an African who speaks

Arabic language,

Because he’s no mother tongue

 

Among the Arabs,

My cousin becomes a militant Arab –

A black Arab

Who rejects the definition of race

By pigment of one’s skin.

 

He says,

If an African speaks Arabic language

He’s an Arab!

If an African is culturally Arabized

He’s an Arab.[2]

 

The poet sees this form of identity-conversion through lingo-cultural assimilation as a negation of the nationalist spirit that has fuelled the liberation struggle of the Southern Sudanese.

Nor do I mean to suggest, by erecting these paradigms, that assimilation into the identity of the “other” necessarily obliterates all forms of discrimination. There are many people of Black African ancestry who, having acquired Arab identity, continue to be victims of “colorism,” for example.

So, my objective here has not been to establish a hierarchy of culpability of one paradigm of identity over another. Rather, it has been to describe the conditions that have inspired the Mushunguli to continue imagining themselves as Bantu rather than simply as Somali over the centuries of established residence in Somaliland.

This brings me to my two-point conclusion. First, to the extent that Somali is a specific ethnic designation of sorts, I find the term Somali Bantu to be quite a misnomer. We do not have, in this case, a Bantu people of Somali ethnic ancestry. What we do have rather is a Bantu people originating from the space referred to as Somalia. I humbly submit, therefore, that they should be called, more appropriately, Somalia Bantu.

Secondly, the fate of the Somalia Bantu underscores the problem of the unitary state that has bedeviled much of the rest of Africa, that quest for homogeneity as a precursor to state-national unity. This thinking, as we all know, has unfortunately led to much bloodshed in various parts of the continent. But, in this new space of America that is our exile, can we discover each other anew, and begin to appreciate the possibilities of a unity within our diversity? Can we learn to celebrate the pluralism that is our common heritage as Africans, as Black people, without seeking to erase each other from the rich, multicultural tapestry that binds us?  Only time will tell. In the meantime, as the blood of innocent victims meanders in the African river of time, let us pray that it be the blood of the maternity ward signaling the painful birth of a new Africa. Amen.         

                            

January 20, 2004.