Annales d'Ethiopie, 2 003, vol. XIX : 323-339.
BANTU ETHNIC IDENTITY IN SOMALIA Ken Menkhaus
Until 1990, Somalia was routinely portrayed as one of the few countries in Africa where nation and state were synonymous, an island of ethnic homogeneity in a sea of multi-ethic states. The country's collapse into extended clan warfare in 1990, and subsequent international attention to the plight of Somali "minorities" as principal famine and war victims, shattered that myth.
One such minority, the Somali Bantu, attracted special attention. In 2002, 12,000 Somali Bantu refugees in Kenya were targeted for resettlement in the US; they are one of the largest refugee groups to receive blanket permission for resettlement to the US in years1. This policy was based on the conclusion that the Bantu face chronic discrimination, are weak and vulnerable to predatory attacks and abuse by ethnic Somalis, and hence cannot be safely repatriated back into lawless Somalia. For the Somali Bantu, this transformation from a virtually unknown minority to a category of Somali society receiving preferential treatment in international refugee resettlement has been an extraordinary turn of events.
Aside from the conventional wisdom that the Bantu are among the most vulnerable communities in Somalia, few observers outside of a very small group of Somali intellectuals and foreign area specialists know anything more about this minority group, which is estimated to constitute roughly five percent of the total population of Somalia2. Most international observers and aid agencies would be surprised to learn that the notion of the "Somali Bantu" which they take for granted never existed prior to 1991. They would be even more surprised to discover that the ethnic category of Somali Bantu was an inadvertent creation of the international community - specifically, aid agencies and the media. For social scientists who subscribe to constructivist theories of ethnic identity, the
1 Rachel Swarns, "Africa's Lost Tribe Discovers American Way," New York Times (10 March 2003). 2 No reliable census figures exist on Somalia; population estimates by region and by clan and ethnic group are even more unreliable and subject to gross exaggeration for political purposes. The five percent figure suggested here is not derived from a census, but is only a "best guess" approximation based on the author's years of fieldwork in Somalia and the opinions of other long-time observers. If Somalia's total population is somewhere near seven million people - again a consensus figure accepted in most publications - then the 5% estimate offered here would amount to a total Bantu population of about 350,000. Given the concentrations of Bantu along the relatively densely populated Jubba and Shabelle river valleys, and the large Bantu populations which have arrived in Mogadishu and Kismayo as internally displaced persons, these figures seem reasonable, but should taken only for what they are - a best guess. Though demographics have obviously changed since the colonial era, a colonial census of Italian Somalia (which would obviously not have included the population of British Somaliland) in 1935 concluded that 6.2% of the population was "Negroid groups" a figure which is not far off the estimate given above. See Istituto centrale di sta- tistica, VII censimento générale délia populazione V (Rome, 1935).
