On a sunny day in April 2018, I climb the steps to a vegetable wholesaler’s office in Jigjiga’s produce market. The market is part of Jigjiga’s bustling “Taiwan Market,” occupying the center of the city just south of the main road. Outside the office, a young non-Somali man sits on a stool with his head in his hands, apparently crying. The Somali wholesaler, a returnee from South Africa who I will call ʿAli, invites me into his office and then steps outside to speak to the young man in Amharic for a few minutes. When ʿAli returns, he explains the situation: He already paid the young Amhara driver and even has a signed receipt to prove it, but the driver claims he has never been paid. From what I know about ʿAli, it seems equally possible that he is cheating the driver out of money. Whatever the reality, the issue comes down to two conflicting claims, and the driver has little recourse. Eventually, he shuffles down the narrow staircase and disappears into the bustling marketplace. After the driver leaves, ʿAli launches into a monologue about money and culture. “People are important,” he asserts. “Money comes and goes. You can get more money.” He says this to set up an assertion about economic culture: “Habeshas,” he claims, “will sacrifice relationships for money; they are not thinking about tomorrow.” Somalis, in contrast, “will give money for relationships.”Footnote ¹

This stereotype is, of course – like most generalizations about identity groups – unfair and oversimplifying. Nevertheless, the situation points to an important dimension of Jigjiga’s urban economy: People constantly interact and sometimes collaborate closely with ethnically distinct “others,” even as they affirm that there are moral and cultural differences that preclude “real” cooperation across ethnic boundaries. Sometimes, these claims about cultural distinction and mistrust draw on Ethiopian history in which Amharas were the settler-colonizers and Somalis were the colonized. In Jigjiga’s daily market interactions today, however, Somalis are often in positions of relative power. If the driver were to take ʿAli to court to obtain the payment, a regional judge would likely favor ʿAli. Even under colonial rule, a class of Somali merchants was probably wealthier than most Amhara soldiers and administrators who colonized them. At times, as during the Italian and British occupations (1935–1948), Somalis held significant political sway as well. In the context of today’s federal system, where Somalis hold regional power, ethnicity often takes shape in city life less through assertions about politics than through people enacting cultural-economic boundaries in transactions.

In the face of DDSI’s push to Ethiopianize Somalis, Somalis in the business world often embrace Ethiopian citizenship while vocally distinguishing themselves from “Ethiopian” economic culture. I ask one very successful local businessman whether he has business networks inside Ethiopia, but he interprets the question to mean “among Ethiopians.” His response: “We don’t have contacts – like, we don’t have joint investments with any Ethiopians…. Somalis are within themselves. We don’t share things with these other Ethiopians.” Chuckling at his own frankness, he concludes: “Not with Oromos, Amharas, Tigrayans – you rarely find a man dealing with these guys.”Footnote ²

A day on the street in Jigjiga’s market tells a different story. Somalis constantly deal with non-Somalis in business. Then again, it depends on how the participants interpret what “dealing” means. Interethnic transactions are abundant. Equal partnerships and shareholding across ethnic lines are not.

This chapter turns to regional history to address two questions. First, how do ethnic distinctions as well as boundaries among Somali clan groups persist in the city, despite the possibilities for integration created by the shared space and constant market interactions? Second, how do urban interactions relate to the borderwork of upholding, maintaining, or undermining the relevance of geopolitical boundaries?

In response to the first question, I suggest that in the city, it is less ethnic politics that govern everyday interactions, and more expectations about transactability: who is trustworthy, who is not, and who is a legitimate target for cheating or for collaboration. In the absence of uniform legal regulation, mechanisms of reciprocity, shared religion, and social pressure serve to enforce transactions, much as in other “informal” economies.Footnote ³ These mechanisms have developed over a century of recurrent political shifts. Since Jigjiga’s establishment in the 1890s, governance has been weak and intermittent as control shifted from the Ethiopian Empire to fascist Italy, to Britain, back to the Ethiopian Empire, to the socialist Derg, and finally to federal Ethiopia. Perhaps more important than its weakness or intermittent character, economic governance has also been hybrid, characterized by the overlap of imperial or state regimes with the influence of other empires or states.Footnote ⁴ Over a long history of intermittent and hybrid authority, Jigjigan Somalis came to rely on clan and ethnic categories of peoplehood as heuristic devices for who could be trusted, and as structures for enforcing property rights. Somali merchants tend to enforce transactions through the informal mechanisms of personal reputation, kinship, and appeal to religious morality more than through government authority, which when present has been focused more on securitizing Somalis than on incorporating them into effective Ethiopian citizenship.Footnote ⁵

Urbanization in this context carries multiple meanings. On the one hand, the establishment of regional towns under the command of Addis Ababa created new sites and possibilities for “imagining and constructing Ethiopia as a modern and national space” in peripheral areas of the country.Footnote ⁶ On the other, amid intermittent and hybrid authority, urban encounters also entailed possibilities for imagining and constructing Ethiopia as a divided country comprised of multiple distinct and mutually hostile identity groups. The suggestion that cities are important sites of imagining and constructing identity and citizenship is not new, but its implications have not been thoroughly examined in the Somali Horn. As Angharad Closs Stephens points out, citizenship was conceived by classical Greek thinkers as well as modern writers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau in relation to cities, rather than national territories.Footnote ⁷ During the nineteenth–twentieth centuries, however, the imaginary of “the nation” as a universal unit reoriented the focus of many political elites toward constructing this broad identity. Social science scholarship has at times followed this focus, engaging in “methodological nationalism” by using identity groups and their associated territories as the primary units of analysis and comparison.Footnote ⁸ Historical narratives about identity in the Jigjiga area have followed this trend by focusing largely on the conflicts between the Ethiopian state and Somali pastoral periphery, with much less attention to urban encounters.Footnote ⁹

This tendency to think about group interaction in terms of broad political geographies is likely deepened by Ethiopia’s post-1991 federal system that explicitly ties identity and equality to territory. However, for most of the Horn’s inhabitants, meaningful encounters with ethnic and clan “others” today occur primarily in cities – even if many imagine and analyze these interactions in terms of identity groups whose affective centers lie in territories far beyond the city. Addressing when and how these identities emerge in the city prompts a rethinking of eastern Ethiopian history through an urban lens.

The second question points back more directly to this book’s overarching argument. I contend that encounters – and more specifically, interpersonal transactions – in Jigjiga play a central role in how people relate to geopolitical borders outside the city and have done so throughout Jigjiga’s history. Corroborating Rihan Yeh’s perspective that everyday encounters can implicate the border’s logic, geographer Helen Wilson argues, “encounters do not simply take place at the border but are rather central to the making and unmaking of [borders].”Footnote ¹⁰ Chapter 2 introduced how border checkpoints operate transversally across Ethiopia’s landscape. This chapter shows that transversality is not only a feature of top-down geographies imposed by security regimes. People’s urban borderwork is also transversal: Their urban encounters and transactions shape connections and modes of regulation that operate across a broader space. In this sense, similar to Timothy Raeymaekers’ observation about frontiers in central Africa,Footnote ¹¹ the city is simultaneously central and marginal.

To adequately analyze today’s urban marketplaces, we need to understand elements of regional history that continue to resonate in the present as people invoke them to navigate daily life. This requires revisiting the colonial encounter among Somalis, Abyssinians, and Europeans in the Jigjiga area that unfolded from the 1890s onward.

Urbanism and Somaliness

“When do you think Jigjiga was established?”

The question, which a former city official asks me in 2015, carries importance for the local meanings of urbanism. I reply that written histories date its establishment to around 1891, after the forces of Emperor Menelik II conquered the Muslim city-state of Harar and advanced into the Somali-inhabited lowlands. At that time, historical sources assert, the first Ethiopian garrison was established in the Jigjiga Valley.Footnote ¹² The official presses: “But was Jigjiga not an urban site before that?” Jigjiga was a meeting place for Absame clans (which include Jidwaq and Ogaden lineages) long before any permanent settlement. Somali families gathered seasonally to water their livestock, and the Absame garaad (lineage leader) settled disputes. The area was a sociopolitical center before anyone established a town. Moreover, that center had a decidedly Somali character, even if Jigjiga’s permanent buildings were first constructed in the 1890s by Amhara neftegna soldier-settlers.Footnote ¹³ In sum, the official argues, the dating of Jigjiga’s establishment to the 1890s relies on a sedentarist definition of urbanism that sidelines Somali perspectives on socio-spatial organization.

While Somali society has usually been described primarily in relation to pastoralism, local viewpoints on urbanism indicate the need to think about the locally specific meanings and experiences. Since the 1970s, urban theorists have argued for the relevance of “the urban” not as a delimited space, but as a theoretical construct – a way of approaching social analysis that brings into focus how relations of exchange, mobility, and power converge in sites of concentrated human interaction.Footnote ¹⁴ Neil Brenner points out the implications: Urbanism does not look the same everywhere; it takes on local meaning in relation to historically specific processes of social and spatial organization.Footnote ¹⁵ Urbanism in the northern Horn must be understood through a dual lens: on the one hand, theoretically, in terms of sites linking more localized modes of production and social organization to processes of capitalist globalization; on the other, practically, in terms of people’s cultural understandings of socio-spatial centrality, connection, and difference.

Urban histories of the northern Horn of Africa are scarce. This is not because central locations of exchange and power relations did not exist, but, at least in part, because observers have repeatedly reproduced a colonial argument: that Somalis are rural pastoralists who do not build cities. This is manifest in Ethiopia-centered histories that describe Jigjiga’s urbanization mainly in terms of Amhara settlement.Footnote ¹⁶ It also haunts the accounts of colonialists, and of social scientists who have uncritically adopted their perspectives. “The natural state of a Somali is entirely nomadic: and his life in his own country to-day must be exactly the same as it was 500 years ago,” asserted Somaliland official Douglas Jardine in 1923.Footnote ¹⁷ “In their dry savanna homeland,” anthropologist I. M. Lewis wrote in 1965, “the Somali are essentially a nation of pastoral nomads.”Footnote ¹⁸ Echoes of these colonial tropes live on: “The Somalis are pastoralists,” states a 2014 book on Somaliland, “and always have been…. While the intrusion of the modern world has produced towns and a sedentary population, most of the inhabitants of Somaliland continue to live their lives by ancient patterns.”Footnote ¹⁹

Such analyses recognize important elements of Somali pastoralist culture, especially in Somaliland and eastern Ethiopia (the agriculture areas of southern Somalia and parts of the Shabelle River Valley in Ethiopia have important differences).Footnote ²⁰ Somalis in this area were predominantly pastoralists who moved seasonally with extended lineage groups, following herds of camels, sheep and goats, and sometimes cattle. Mobility was essential. Extended kinship groups counted on each other for sharing resources and information and for protecting their livestock assets. These clan groups were segmentary, meaning that there are multiple levels of collective identity that could be mobilized to unify a larger or smaller group of followers, depending on what was needed at the time.

Yet, during the colonial encounter that began in the 1890s, these elements of Somali culture were beginning to interact with a shift toward new forms of urbanism, including permanent settlement and colonial officials’ efforts to create a new built environment for their administrative projects. Somali culture faced the increasing urbanization of social power. This can be discerned by reading against the grain of anti-urban bias in Ethiopian and British historical sources. The evidence shows that by 1890, Somalis were not just camel-herders; they were active in urban economies from Berbera and Aden to Bombay and Cardiff.Footnote ²¹

We also must read against the grain of Somali-language histories from the period, which are mainly oral poetry passed down verbally (much of this poetry began to be recorded in writing in the 1950s–1970s, a process that is still ongoing).Footnote ²² Much of this poetry praises pastoralist tradition and culture. Yet in doing so, it points obliquely to the increasing power of urban merchants in the Ethiopia–Somaliland border area. A corpus of early twentieth-century poetry was authored by the anti-colonial fighter Sayyid Moḥamed ʿAbdullah Ḥassan, his colleagues, and his antagonists and reflects their confrontation with colonial powers. For example, the Dhulbahante poet Ismaʿil Mire, one of Sayyid Moḥamed’s military leaders, juxtaposed the emerging British-oriented cash economy with Somali pastoralism: “neither my ancestors/Nor I ever knew money exchange.”Footnote ²³ In a famous poetic exchange, the Ogaden Bah Magan leader Qaman Bulḥan warned against the temptation to introduce instrumentality into kinship relations: “Allah will not favor the man who has sold his brother,” he claimed. “To be a broker and a lackey is the liability of the ʿArabs.”Footnote ²⁴ Ogaden leaders including Qaman and Sayyid Moḥamed commonly demeaned the more market-oriented (and British-protected) Isaq Somalis as Iidoor: “sell to me.” Specific jabs linked merchants’ marketized livelihoods to urbanization and rising inequality: “From here to the towns,” wrote Sayyid Moḥamed, the Isaq “put the poor in a ditch.”Footnote ²⁵

My point regarding this poetry is that pastoralist ideals as they were handed down to the present did not simply emerge from the semiarid rangelands but were shaped by sustained encounters with urbanism. Somali poets’ attacks on urbanism and market life were voiced in opposition to emerging interactions and alliances taking shape through the dual dynamics of urbanization and geopolitical boundary-making. They also suggest an implicit perception that Somali culture was vulnerable to change through urban encounters.

Leaving aside for the moment British and Ethiopian sedentary bias, what do northern Somali concepts of urbanism reveal? Jigjigan Somalis often translate urbanism or urbanity as reer-magaalnimo, “townspeople-ness,” which connotes civility. Revealingly, this term overlaps with another concept, ilbaxnimo. Etymologically, ilbax suggests a scope of vision (il = eye) that leaves (bax) or transcends the immediate context. The term is used to describe people who can envision the broader world beyond parochial experience. These two Somali terms orient attention toward mobility and encounters with difference. Zeroing in on Jigjiga’s history while reading against the grain of documentary biases reveals some elements of what townspeople-ness has meant in practice.

Corridors, Mobility, and the Foundations of Borderland Urbanization

In 1892, Harald George Carlos Swayne and his brother, Eric John Eagles Swayne (who would become British Somaliland’s commissioner a decade later), visited Jeldessa, the dominant outpost on what was then the major trade route between Harar and the Gulf of Aden coast at Zeyla, near today’s Somaliland–Djibouti border. There they encountered a lively market scene: “a swarm of people of mixed eastern races blocked the way, bartering cloth, tobacco, coffee, and other articles of trade; and among the Abyssinians, Gallas [Oromos], Somalis, and Hararis I observed several men of the black Soudanese type [sic],” wrote Harald.Footnote ²⁶ The market operated under the watchful eye of an “Abyssinian guard-house,” reflecting the Ethiopian Empire’s expansion into the area. To their surprise, these British “explorers” also discovered at least one local inhabitant who had explored their homeland before they arrived in his: An elderly Somali man “had been to London and Bombay as a ship’s fireman.” In addition, Adeni Arab merchants presented the Swaynes with gifts, claiming – like the Somali sailor – to be British subjects.Footnote ²⁷

The Swaynes’s encounter reveals three insights about corridors, mobility, and centrality on the eve of European and Ethiopian colonization in the northern Somali territories. First, there were long-distance market exchanges occurring seasonally (if not more regularly) in villages along the ecological boundary between the Somali-inhabited rangelands and the more fertile (and Oromo-dominated) eastern highlands. This makes Ismaʿil Mire’s assertion about the novelty of monetary exchange appear more an assertion of pastoralism’s moral superiority than a historically factual statement. Monetary markets had operated in coastal centers including Zeyla and Ḥamar (Mogadishu) for hundreds of years. Egyptian dirhams and Harari coins had been circulating through the Harar–Zeyla area since at least 1500, likely alongside numerous other currencies like salt bars, cloth, and iron. By the nineteenth century, Harari coins continued circulating in tandem with firearm cartridges and Austrian-minted Maria Theresa thalers prevalent in the Indian Ocean economy.Footnote ²⁸ One Somali historian suggests that the Somali term magaalo (city or town) derives from an earlier Harari word for marketplace.Footnote ²⁹ Not only were some Somali-speaking groups acquainted with markets; they were active participants in constructing corridors of exchange.

Second, by the 1890s, ethnic distinctions were already associated with political–economic roles in milieus of encounter. Across northern Ethiopia and Eritrea, Orthodox Christian Amharas tended to shun trade livelihoods, leaving Muslims to dominate long-distance commerce and bring trade goods to periodic markets.Footnote ³⁰ The “Abyssinian guard-house” presiding over a market dominated by mobile Muslim merchants was a new development in the Harar–Zeyla corridor. However, it was likely a familiar feature for some of the traders present in Jeldessa if they had ties to Muslim-controlled trade networks stretching into Amhara territory. In the Somali-inhabited plains, shared religion facilitated trust between foreign Muslim merchants and Somali abbaans who represented the traders to Somali clan leaders and guided camel caravans from coastal cities to villages including Jeldessa.Footnote ³¹

Third, inland sites like Jeldessa were already linked to a relatively fluid geography that connected patterns of intra-regional pastoralist transhumance to extra-regional migration. The former seaman who told the Swaynes of his travels was not exceptional. From the 1870s through the 1920s, untold numbers of Somali men traveled British shipping routes and established themselves in port cities abroad. Some returned to the Horn eventually, giving rise to a common impression among Britons that Somalis only traveled abroad to earn money with which to purchase camels and retire as nomads.Footnote ³² In Gulf of Aden ports as well as inland sites like Jeldessa, such extra-regional mobilities intersected with seasonal pastoralist migrations that made coastal towns like Berbera, Bulhar, Zeyla, and Djibouti fluctuating trade emporiums. By the early 1900s, Djibouti may have had the largest stable population of the Horn’s Gulf of Aden ports, estimated by British officials at 15,000 (including 2,000 Europeans). The British War Office estimated that Zeyla’s population reached 15,000 in the trading season but halved during the hot summer months. Bulhar’s population was likewise estimated to seasonally triple from 3,000 to 10,000, and Berbera’s to quintuple from “5,000 in the hot weather” to “25,000 to 30,000 in the trading season.”Footnote ³³ Even for the growing class of Somali merchants joining foreign businesspeople in these ports that were now European-controlled, sedentary city life was perhaps a temporary option, bracketed by possibilities of intra-regional and extra-regional mobility.

This fluid context presented a challenge for British and Ethiopian imperialists who converged on the Jigjiga Valley in the 1890s. The governance strategies of the (predominantly Amhara) administrators and soldiers who extended Ethiopian rule into this area had been developed in Abyssinia, where sedentary agricultural populations were ruled and taxed ruthlessly with little possibility for evading control.Footnote ³⁴ In the Jigjiga area, Somalis and foreign merchants could evade governance much more readily simply by leaving towns or villages that hosted garrisons.

Ethiopian efforts to territorialize rule therefore quickly began to shift selectively toward attracting Somali clan representatives to settle in Jigjiga. The collective responsibilities entailed in clanship meant that such representatives played important roles in channeling resource transfers – not only in cases of marriage payments or “blood money” but also in restitution of lost property during trade. Efforts to centralize clan administration in the town started to reorganize exchange corridors. Nevertheless, it is important to note that clan was and remains an often unstable mechanism of social control: Clan leaders sometimes switched loyalties and even risked rejection by their assumed followers if they were perceived as too close to imperial interests.

All of this meant that despite its location in Ethiopian territory, Jigjiga was a locus of hybrid sovereignty, collaborations between merchants and imperial agents, and varied “projects of circulation” that were gradually coalescing into a cross-border corridor between Ethiopia and the Gulf of Aden coast.Footnote ³⁵ A phrase from Sassen’s framing of cities as frontier zones is apt: “Actors from different worlds meet there, but there are no clear rules of engagement.”Footnote ³⁶ Daily life on this urban frontier involved constantly working out shared understandings and rules about what aspects of identity and personality enabled or foreclosed access to trade, commercial influence, and political authority.

As British imperial agents expanded port operations at Berbera, and as British and Ethiopian officials agreed to a territorial borderline between Somaliland and Ethiopia in 1897, Jeldessa all but disappeared from British records. Meanwhile, Jigjiga rose to prominence as a trade center. One can imagine that a few years after the Swaynes’s visit to Jeldessa, when an Ethiopian administrator of Yemeni descent named Abdullah Taha started building up Jigjiga as a commercial center, some of the soldiers, merchants, and pastoralist-traders the Swaynes had encountered likely wound up in the new outpost. At the turn of the century, Jigjiga was a dusty village with a tiny permanent population. It was not a city, but it was at least as urban as any site between Harar and the Somaliland coast.

Border, Town, and Peoplehood, ca. 1897–1925

An important element of Jigjiga’s story is a contradictory aspect of the geopolitical border. As I described in Chapter 2, it was intended to be porous for Somalis. Numerous British-protected Somalis inhabited Ethiopian territory at any given time. While the 1897 Boundary Agreement codified the right of clans on both sides of the boundaries to cross, in practice, the border’s porosity was largely one-directional. British administrators carefully mapped out “traditional” clan grazing lands to legitimize the protection of cross-border access for Somaliland subjects. They solidified their influence in Ethiopia’s economy by establishing a legal framework for British extraterritorial jurisdiction in Ethiopia between 1908 and 1925, which shielded South Asian and Arab merchants as well as Somalis who could claim British subjecthood through their clan identity.Footnote ³⁷

This overlap of empires was empowering for those who could harness interests on both sides. Abdullah Taha, who became Jigjiga’s sub-governor (under Governor Ras Makonnen in Harar) in the 1890s, worked the imperial confrontation. Under his watch, Arab and South Asian merchants – including many British subjects – came to control Jigjiga’s trade as they leveraged connections with British officials and catered to Harar authorities’ financial and political interests. Beyond capitalizing on the borderlands’ effectively hybrid sovereignty, Abdullah Taha also ingratiated himself to local Somalis by building Jigjiga’s central mosque, the Masjid Jamaʿ. This departed starkly from Ethiopian practices of constructing Orthodox churches near town centers. It reflects the unique blend of Ethiopian imperialism, shared Islamic orientation, and an eye for mutual commercial interests that shaped Jigjiga’s early growth.Footnote ³⁸

Sayyid Moḥamed ʿAbdullah Ḥassan’s jihad in 1899–1920 drove Somalis’ settlement in the town and intensified circulations along the Hargeisa–Jigjiga–Harar corridor. Jigjiga served as an advanced base for supplying Ethiopian military expeditions, as well as for coordination between Ethiopian and British officials cooperating to put down the insurgency. The conflict lent Jigjiga a contradictory centrality. On the one hand, violent conflict, livestock raiding, and ecological crisis exacerbated by border closures for pastoralists drove people destitute to towns.Footnote ³⁹ On the other hand, traders simultaneously took up urban work, including Somali abbaans who now operated as brokers in close proximity to the imperial authorities who governed cross-border commerce.

As elsewhere in Africa, the deployment of local identity categories as mechanisms of governance tended to calcify and politicize kinship and identity structures that were probably more fluid before this time.Footnote ⁴⁰ In the northern Horn, Somali clan identity congealed as a key concept through which imperial authorities interpreted loyalty and applied governance – not least through collective punishment.Footnote ⁴¹ In asserting clanship as a basis for subjecthood, imperial authorities tacitly incentivized competition among Somali groups. They also affirmed stereotypes that marked certain clans as loyal to foreign interests – for example, Sayyid Moḥamed’s dismissal of the Isaq as mere “porters” (duudxamaal) for foreigners.Footnote ⁴² Such accusations, combined with poets’ other condemnations of self-interested instrumentality, indicate how cultural ideals and existing hierarchies were being reshaped amid colonial encounters.

In the close contact of multiethnic urban settings like Jigjiga, clan and ethnic stereotyping became intertwined with people’s efforts to demarcate access to legal rights to protection and subjecthood. Such generalizations also upheld and legitimized networks that enabled access to cross-border markets. Claiming British subjecthood, for example, was a form of everyday borderwork by which Isaq and Gadabursi Somalis could attempt to avoid Ethiopian taxation or prosecution. The growing importance of clan identity in imperial governance, however, does not mean that people’s everyday activities were structured primarily by patrilineal kinship. Urban encounters enhanced existing possibilities for interclan alliances as well as efforts to restructure the role of genealogical organization. Jigjigans who hail from “non-local” clans sometimes describe opting to pay mag with a local section of the Bartire or Yebarre. In doing so, they functionally joined that clan, even though they maintained their old clan identity. Distinct clan identities thus elided more complicated alliances and collaborations.

Likewise, assertions of cultural distinction between Somalis and Amharas often emerged in a context of interethnic collaboration. A local historical account provides a potent example of how struggles to define the boundaries of ethnic and clan loyalty were intertwined. In Aḥmed “Dowlo” ʿAbdi Haybe’s analysis of Qaman Bulḥan’s poetry and life, he shows how mounting pressure from colonial intrusion pushed nine lineages of the Ogaden Rer Warfaa to create the Bah Magan alliance, organized partly around maternal descent, in 1893. The alliance subsequently rejected the Ethiopian-recognized suldan of the Rer Warfaa, accusing him of colluding with the Amharas to inflict culturally unacceptable taxes on his own people.Footnote ⁴³ Such accounts also highlight the importance of town-based interethnic encounters in such struggles over Somali kinship organization. Clan leaders traveled to Harar, Jigjiga, Hargeisa, or Berbera to assert their loyalty and to claim favors from imperial authorities.

As Ethiopian-protected Somalis found themselves squeezed between imperial authorities and Sayyid Moḥamed’s jihad (which inflicted violence on Somalis who did not support the movement), some town-based administrators and traders – including Abdullah Taha and merchants in Jigjiga – were reaping wartime profits. This trade-oriented administrative approach that capitalized on the overlap of empires began to shift toward a more assertive politics of cultural assimilation after Emperor Menelik II’s death. Following the brief and contested efforts of Lij Iyasu to garner Muslim support for his bid for emperorship, Empress Zewditu and her regent, Ras Tafari – later coronated as Emperor Haile Selassie – installed Amhara administrators in Jigjiga. As part of his efforts to modernize Ethiopia’s colonial administration, Tafari and his local appointees worked to incentivize agriculture and sedentary life among Somalis in the Jigjiga area, sought to enforce tax administration, and rejected the idea that Somalis were subject to British extraterritorial jurisdiction.Footnote ⁴⁴ This led to a series of border-related disputes over tax and subjecthood that brought British officials to Jigjiga regularly as they worked to exempt their assumed Somali subjects from Ethiopian rule.

I mentioned in Chapter 2 that these disputes came to a head in the 1925 trial of Gadabursi smugglers who claimed British subjecthood. The details of this incident convey something about the expectations and tensions surrounding ethnic difference in the imperial borderlands: According to British reports, the “Abyssinian soldiers” who sought to stop the smugglers “were promised money,” at which they let down their guard, after which the Somalis strangled them.Footnote ⁴⁵ Evidently, the Amhara soldiers expected that the issue would be settled through a financial transaction rather than enforcement of imperial policy. These expectations suggest that bribery may have been a familiar means of settling tax enforcement. In this case, the transaction broke down and gave way to violence, and an eventual attempt at retribution by state authorities. This event signals a selective shift from transactions toward state-backed force in interethnic relations. If at least some confrontations between Somali smugglers and non-Somali officials had previously been settled through bribes, imperial intervention on behalf of the Amhara soldiers signaled the fragility of such arrangements.

Other scholars have demonstrated how the Italian and British occupations from 1935 to 1948 deepened ethnic tensions (like divide-and-rule policies elsewhere in the colonial world)Footnote ⁴⁶ and gave rise to new imaginings of pan-Somali unity and independence from Ethiopian colonialism.Footnote ⁴⁷ Without rehashing these more detailed accounts, I turn to focus on mechanisms of differentiation amid close encounters in urban life.

Transactions and Segregation in the Colonial City

“Jigjiga is a divided city – by common, though unspoken, consent,” writes Nega Mezlekia in a memoir of his childhood in the 1960s. “The northern half is inhabited by Christians, mostly Amharas, and the southern by Muslims, mainly Somalis.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Mezlekia’s account of the ethnically divided city corroborates those of Somali informants who grew up in Jigjiga between the 1950s and 1970s. But there is a more interesting facet of urban life hidden behind such generalizations. After advancing the “divided city” narrative, Mezlekia’s account unselfconsciously describes people’s social ties that transected the ethno-territorial boundary. As it turns out, a Somali man, Mustafa, lived in the guest house of Mezlekia’s Amhara family. Mustafa was not someone from outside the area, but evidently a local. His brother operated a large retail store in the Somali part of town. Mustafa himself also owned property in south Jigjiga, renting out his part of the family house there to “a renowned contraband smuggler.”Footnote ⁴⁹

The story contains stereotypes: Jigjiga is presented in terms of Amhara Christians and Somali Muslims. Some Somalis are contraband smugglers. And yet a local Somali man chooses to reside in a compound with Amhara “colonizers” in order to profit by leasing out his own property. The Somali and the Amhara interact enough for Mezlekia to know significant details of Mustafa’s personal affairs. Attention to such relationships and interactions provides a different view of urban life. Spaces of the city can be seen as transactional frontiers where ethnicity does not determine relationships, but rather exchanges and the relationships that emerge from them feed back into constructions of peoplehood in a shared built environment. Following Charles Tilly, I am interested in “how transactions clump into social ties, social ties concatenate into networks, and existing networks constrain solutions” through which social groupings maintain their efficacy and relevance.Footnote ⁵⁰

Like Mezlekia and ʿAli (in this chapter’s introduction), Jigjigan Somalis routinely make assertions about cultural difference, mistrust, and division between Somalis and “other Ethiopians,” especially the Amharas and Tigrayans whom they label Abyssinians or Habeshas. But also like Mezlekia and ʿAli, people transact with and develop relationships with these “others.” Both the assertions and the interactions are intertwined as people construct social boundaries even as they selectively transgress them in their efforts to seek stability and to realize material gains.

Scripts and Transactions

Oral histories from Somali informants who grew up in Jigjiga in the 1950s–1990s corroborate the suggestion that, despite local inhabitants’ participation in discursive scripts and stereotypes about ethnic division, a limited range of interethnic transactions was the norm. The residual effects of religious segregation and Euro-colonial planning remained visible in informants’ descriptions of Jigjiga in the 1960s–1970s (Figure 3.1). But sketch-mapping interviews with several informants revealed how people simultaneously affirmed and transgressed both spatial and ethnic boundaries. The north side of town (Suq Habeshi or Jaraaqato) was not only where government functions were concentrated; it was also described in terms of moral degradation. Aden, a diaspora businessman who grew up in Jigjiga, explains: “Anybody who goes there, they’d be like prostitutes, drunks, and all those things, at that time. And so the mentality was … you know, bad people go there.”Footnote ⁵⁷ In other words, Somalis went to the north side of town to engage in illegitimate transactions with Amharas for sex and booze. The same Somali men who voiced such assertions, however, often had their own stories of crossing the intra-urban boundary and interacting with non-Somalis in somewhat more morally acceptable ways – such as shooting billiards or listening to bands from Addis Ababa.

Figure 3.1 Sketch map of Jigjiga in the 1960s–1970s, with landmarks as recalled by three informants who grew up in the town during that period.

Map by author.

This combination of residential spatial segregation with interaction – often market-oriented – is evident as an enduring aspect of Jigjiga’s urbanism. One young government official who grew up in the city during the 1990s describes the city of his youth in terms of “the Amhara areas and the Somali areas.” Yet he continues by making a point of connection: “Only the market was a shared place.”Footnote ⁵⁸ The first part of the statement simplifies the urban geography and connects it to history via heuristic categories. The second part of the statement points to the marketplace as a space where the potential for animosity turns into exchange.

Even amid the violent marginalization Somalis experienced in the 1960s–1970s, market linkages crosscut ethnic and clan divisions and created several intersecting exchange corridors that articulated in Jigjiga. Somaliland was a source of imported consumer goods and a market for fresh produce, including the chat produced in eastern Oromia that became increasingly popular in Somaliland during the 1980s–2000s.Footnote ⁵⁹ Agricultural goods flowed from Oromo farms to supply Jigjiga’s population. Bartire merchants opened restaurants, and Somali women sold locally produced grain, milk, and fruits. Extended households engaged in a variety of urban niches, with women often playing a key role in urban-regional trade, much as they do today. A diaspora investor building a multistory mall in Jigjiga’s central market (Taiwan or “Old Taiwan” Market) today says: “My mother used to sell hadhuudh from the same site.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Roads and cars sped up livestock export as well as circulations of agricultural goods – especially chat, which must be raced quickly from the Harar–Awaday area down to Somaliland in time for early afternoon marketing of the fresh leaves.

In this context, Somali businesspeople strategically constructed relationships across ethnic boundaries that might enhance their own commercial potential by enabling access to resources managed by non-Somalis. For example, Aden’s father, a longtime smuggler, married a Harari woman and kept a second family in the Harar area. This connection gave him a family connection to chat producers, easing access to the cut chat (tajaro) he brought to market in Jigjiga. In general, Granovetter’s now-classic concept of “strong ties” can be a useful way to think about intra-ethnic solidarity and trust that emerge from shared commitments and enduring kinship links, while “weak ties” of temporary collaborations and information-sharing characterize interethnic relations.Footnote ⁶¹ However, a history of interethnic collaborations and marriages shows how people constantly work to renegotiate the boundaries between in-group and out-group, laboring to strengthen weak ties, or to weaken the hold of strong ties.

Among Somalis, clanship has often been affirmed as a foundational principle of social organization, even “the categorical imperative of Somali political practice.”Footnote ⁶² Yet the functions and economic relevance of kinship relations were flexible and negotiated in the urban environment. While Bartire and Yebarre clans owned much of the land in Jigjiga and its surroundings, markets rather than clanship have long been a primary means of obtaining urban property. A former municipal official asserts: “every town of our region – of Somali – every town, if you want to live there, you have to join with that clan. But here, that doesn’t work.”Footnote ⁶³ Markets also, as Qaman Bulḥan warned, introduce the potential for people to act instrumentally and disentangle themselves from mutual obligation. For example, the growth of grain markets – which was fueled both by demand in Ethiopia and by the cross-border market for smuggled grain in Somaliland – created competition and even violence among Bartire and Yebarre lineages.Footnote ⁶⁴ In Jigjiga’s context, markets have long coexisted with kinship networks, ethnicized categories, and sometimes forceful state interventions. This creates a plurality of normative orders by which people navigate access to land and opportunities and enact their belonging in the city as well as mobility across surrounding borders.Footnote ⁶⁵

The Ethiopian Revolution

The Ethiopian Revolution of 1974 was a watershed moment in the country’s political history. Its aftermath had major impacts on ethnic relations in the eastern borderlands. As the socialist Derg regime deposed Emperor Haile Selassie, Somalis in Jigjiga and beyond saw opportunities for shifting the balance of power between identity groups. In Jigjiga, some local researchers note, the 1974 revolution had a unique meaning as a rejection of “Amhara chauvinism.”Footnote ⁶⁶ More broadly, the Ethiopian Empire’s overthrow opened opportunities for armed resistance backed by Somalia and supported by Jigjigan Somalis who resented Ethiopia’s imperial governance.

The Western Somali Liberation Front (WSLF) launched operations in and around Jigjiga in 1974–1975 and began “‘terrorizing the Christian Amharas in Jigjiga.”Footnote ⁶⁷ In keeping with their legacy of violence across the country, Derg officials responded by lining up Somali and Harari urbanites against a wall and shooting them. Mezlekia’s account describes how these Somalis pleaded with their Amhara acquaintances and friends to intervene on their behalf with pleas such as “Aster, I attended your wedding; please vouch for me!”Footnote ⁶⁸ Perhaps Jigjiga’s Amharas feared being associated with the “rebellious” Somalis. Such state violence deepened ethnic tensions and fueled Somalis’ support for rebellion. The WSLF, working with Somalia’s army, took control of much of eastern Ethiopia, including Jigjiga, by August 1977. The tense frontier relations in the city gave way to actual battles between Somalis and Ethiopian forces in 1977 and again in March 1978 as Derg forces retook the city, expelling Somali fighters. Somalis who had lived for years in close proximity with Amharas and other groups now fled for fear of ethnicized retribution. Even Somalis who had worked with the Derg in its initial years fled after the failure of Somalia’s offensive in 1978, fearful of being persecuted or killed as foreign sympathizers.

The violence of Derg governance during and after the conflict had the counterproductive effect – from Ethiopia’s standpoint, at least – of strengthening many Ethiopian-origin Somalis’ affective and material ties to Somalia. “Between the ages of 10 and 25, I had to flee Ethiopia to Somalia three different times,” recounts Omar, a middle-aged government office director.Footnote ⁶⁹ Some Jigjigan Somalis report feeling excluded and marginalized in Somalia’s massive refugee camps, and some even say that they became convinced that they would never be part of Somalia, despite their shared ethnicity. Jigjigans who reached the Somalian capital, Mogadishu, however, often describe their love of the cosmopolitan city. “It was a little America, from that time until Ḥamar was destroyed,” is how Ḥawa describes her time in Mogadishu after the war.Footnote ⁷⁰ She returned to Jigjiga during the 1980s and began her cross-border trade exploits described in Chapter 2. While Derg soldiers were known to arrest anyone suspected of coming from Somalia, Jigjigan Somalis also found opportunities for commercial enterprise and profits, including smuggling chat. Ḥawa’s husband, in fact, was killed by a landmine while smuggling chat near the end of the Derg regime.

The 1977 war also created the first major wave of Somali refugees who would become the diaspora. Here distinctions in personal histories emerge between three groups. Some Ethiopian-origin Somalis joined the early wave of emigration, using Somalia as a stepping stone to more distant locations including the US and northern Europe. Others, however, stayed in Somalia and became refugees once again when Somalia famously collapsed in 1991. Among these, some fled abroad and joined the diaspora, while others returned to eastern Ethiopia. “In 1991, we fled back,” explains Omar of his own family’s trajectory. “I became a refugee in a camp in Ethiopia, although I am from Ethiopia.”Footnote ⁷¹ This contrasts sharply with the trajectories of Jigjigan Somalis like Aden, who fled to Mogadishu in 1975 and then joined his brother in the US on an I-20 visa in 1984. The same goes for Sadam, another Jigjigan who reached Texas in 1983 with immigrant status. By the late 1980s, Ethiopian-origin Somalis had established burgeoning communities in places like Atlanta, San Diego, and London.

More locally, the Derg regime reworked Jigjiga’s economic landscape in enduring ways. This included the redistribution of land that, in Somalis’ eyes, benefitted Amhara settlers (under the aegis of “equality as Ethiopians”). Proclamation No. 47 of 1975 rendered urban land a state-owned resource and provided for government reallocation of “extra houses,” the formal elimination of private ownership, and the removal of urban land from markets.Footnote ⁷² The regulation was framed as a progressive redistribution of property away from “feudal lords, aristocrats, high Government officials and capitalists” who had abused their political and economic power to create “artificial shortages in the supply of urban land.”Footnote ⁷³ According to Somali landowners, houses were effectively confiscated and given to Amhara settlers. This redistribution occurred while many Somali residents were absent, having fled across the border.

New dimensions of cross-border mobility, diasporization, and urban property distribution under the Derg government set the stage for the emerging conjunctures that link border securitization to diaspora investment and today’s explosive urban growth. Many Jigjigan Somalis who were born before the 1980s have visited or lived in Mogadishu or Hargeisa and developed an affective connection to those cities. Some still hold property and have family members there. Some who fled Jigjiga and its surrounding areas joined the ONLF movement in the 1980s–1990s to struggle for Somali autonomy from Ethiopia. In addition, the Somalian military’s failure to capture Somali-inhabited eastern Ethiopia reverberated in regional politics, destabilizing Siyad Barre’s regime in Somalia and fomenting conflicts that contributed to Somalia’s collapse. As violence began to erupt in Somalia in the 1980s, especially the rebellion of the Somali National Movement in northern Somalia (what is today self-declared Somaliland), Somalis began to trickle back to Jigjiga.

Not all Somalis had left in the first place, and even some who did leave had fled only temporarily. Omar sums up the contradictory legacy of his family’s interaction with successive Ethiopian governments: “My grandfather worked for Haile Selassie, my mother worked for the Derg, and I work for the EPRDF.”Footnote ⁷⁴ People’s experience of this recent history varies widely, depending in part on where they grew up. For example, diaspora returnees today who grew up in more rural areas often speak Amharic less fluently than those who grew up in the Jigjiga area or other towns such as Dhagaḥbur or Godey. Yet even for those who grew up in close contact with Amharas, the tensions of the past are sedimented in the way they talk about ethnic distinctions today. “My grandfather was given a rifle as a symbol of his service to Haile Selassie’s government,” continues Omar. “But even though he worked with them, I remember him telling us, ‘If those Amhara come down and try to take our land, I’ll shoot them’.”Footnote ⁷⁵

Urban Borderwork in Historical Context

The boundaries between Somalis’ land and that of other ethnic groups are now formally territorialized in Ethiopia’s regional states. The history of encounters and transactions in multiethnic Jigjiga plays an important role in how Somalis perceive and interact with these internal borders, as well as Ethiopia’s borders with Somalia and Somaliland. Especially in the postcolonial period of pan-Somali nationalism, the Ethiopia–Somalia border was flexible, easily crossed, and largely irrelevant for Jigjigan Somalis’ social ties. Many had links to Hargeisa and Mogadishu. Some even traveled to those sites more freely than to the north side of Jigjiga, and certainly more readily than they traveled past Harar and Dire Dawa into the Ethiopian interior. “Then, for a Somali person to even go past Dire Dawa and to be recognized as Ethiopian was a challenge itself,” says Sadam, a diaspora businessman, about the period before federalism.Footnote ⁷⁶

Somalis were integrated into Ethiopia through federalism, through the political affirmation and territorialization of the ethnic difference that they had experienced and upheld in their urban interactions for a century. At the same time, federalism also differentiated Ethiopian Somalis from neighboring Somalia and Somaliland, which in 1991 split into two separate de facto states without internationally recognized governments. This also reflected elements of urban experience: As I have shown, Jigjiga’s Somalis, unlike “other Somalis,” had often worked closely with Amhara and other non-Somalis, spoke fluent Amharic, and worked to make connections with Oromos and other neighboring groups in Ethiopia. If Omar’s father threatened to shoot Amhara colonizers with the rifle Haile Selassie had given him, he nevertheless accepted the symbolic transaction in the first place. In accepting such gifts, favors, and exchanges, Jigjigan Somalis affirmed their connections with Ethiopia, while their subjective interpretations of these transactions affirmed their differences from Ethiopians.

Jigjiga’s Somali businesspeople still engage in similar practices of simultaneously affirming and transgressing social boundaries. ʿAli, from this chapter’s introduction, is a prime example. After asserting that non-Somalis will sacrifice relationships for money, he goes on to describe his own interethnic relationships. One day while riding a bus through Oromia, he met an Oromo vegetable supplier and decided to utilize this connection to start selling Oromia-produced vegetables in Jigjiga. He lists this supplier as among his most important business contacts. ʿAli then fought a bitter price war with Amhara merchants who dominated the market. After operating his business at a loss for months, he approached the non-Somali merchants. They reached an agreement that they could all raise prices again in order to avoid destroying all their businesses. ʿAli’s narrative points to two important dimensions of urban market practice that become borderwork as they resonate outward into more encompassing forms of socio-spatial organization.

First, the meaning of both ethnic and territorial boundaries continues to be interpreted largely in cultural-economic terms rather than mainly political ones. ʿAli does not describe the Amharas primarily as illegitimate foreigners and colonists. As someone who is native to the Ogaden, not Jigjiga, he recognizes that many non-Somalis are more Jigjigan than he is. Instead, he mobilizes cultural-economic differences to explain the persistence of ethnic tensions. This observation extends insights from Chapter 2 into urban relations: Urban merchants generally tend to make claims about Somaliness in terms of moralities of exchange rather than Somalis’ political dominance or ownership of Jigjiga. What is important to such businesspeople in their everyday activities and personal narratives is often less that Somalis are Jigjiga’s rightful political leaders than that Somalis should be Jigjiga’s dominant capitalists by dint of their entrepreneurial culture and their cross-border connections. Nevertheless, elements of this are potentially changing with DDSI’s forceful economic dominance.

Second, neither the identity categories nor the territorial borders in and around Jigjiga are associated directly in most Jigjigans’ experiences with economic inequality. Despite Somalis’ felt marginalization under successive Ethiopian governments, Somalis have been prominent merchants in Jigjiga for a century. Categorical boundaries between Somalis and Amharas – and under federalism, Tigrayans – are less about economic inequality than about differences in access to state power and resources. To be sure, there are ethnic distinctions in Jigjiga today that signify relative poverty – the Oromo and so-called Debub (a pejorative term for southern Ethiopians) in Jigjiga are often explicitly stereotyped as poor laborers. There are also Somali clan categories that line up with inequalities (especially the “outcaste” Gaboye clans). Yet these inequalities do not tend to map neatly onto spatial segregation in people’s experience. In general, the portrait of Jigjiga as a “divided city” before federalism carries little association with social class as it exists in other contexts. The widely perceived rise in urban inequality that accompanied the new DDSI border regime after 2010 is thus a major transformation.

Toward Economic Segregation?

By the time of my first visit to Jigjiga in 2015, associations between urban differentiation, geopolitical borders, and inequality were changing. One taxi driver described the Badda ʿAs and Qomadaha neighborhoods of Jigjiga as areas inhabited by “royal people” – referencing the predominance of government-connected elites and diaspora returnees in these locations. The old urban borderlands between Somali merchants and Amhara colonizers have yielded to these new boundaries (Figure 3.2). These intra-urban boundaries are not only about class per se. They are about borders. They are inhabited mainly by DDSI officials as well as two groups of businesspeople who have a different relationship to geopolitical borders than do the majority of Jigjiga’s inhabitants: diaspora returnees and government-connected elite traders. Chapter 4 explores how the decentralization of border management began to intersect in new ways with diaspora investment and urban inequality.

Figure 3.2 Sketch map of Jigjiga in 2016–2017, showing selected neighborhoods and landmarks.

Map by author.