A Modern History of the Somali. I. M. LewisЧитать онлайн книгу.
installed themselves in the Harar–Jigjiga region. And in the south, as the Oromo withdrew on one front to attack on another, northern Somali settlers gathered in increasing numbers. New groups of Hawiye immigrants fought their way to the Shebelle and began to challenge the authority of the Ajuran, eventually overwhelming them. The city of Mogadishu was also invested and the ancient Muzaffar dynasty overthrown. Both documentary and oral evidence place these events early in the seventeenth century.8 After their defeat the Ajuran and their allies the Madanle – to whom so many striking wells and stone works are attributed – were harried south eventually into what is today the North-Eastern Region of Kenya where they appear to have been amongst the earliest recorded inhabitants. Here they were joined later by the Boran and Warday Galla who established a local ascendancy which was only finally overcome by the massive wave of Somali migration in the nineteenth century. But this is to anticipate.
About the time of the overthrow of the Muzaffar dynasty in Mogadishu, it appears, again from local tradition, that much of the zone between the Shebelle and Juba rivers, including Bur Hacaba, was still mainly in Galla hands. Thus the situation was now that, from the coast about Mogadishu westwards towards the hinterland, the country was occupied first by the Hawiye, then by the Galla, and finally by the Rahanweyn Somali.9 Farther north, in Majerteynia, a strongly entrenched party of Galla at Galkayu were finally dislodged about the middle of the century.
In the following decades the Rahanweyn continued their pressure and, probably about the end of the seventeenth century, succeeded after hard fighting in driving the remaining Galla from their stronghold at Bur Hacaba. These Galla withdrew westwards, eventually crossing the Juba and moving on to its right bank. This, of course, increased the pressure upon the Zanj whose traditional capital, Shungwaya, was at this time in the Juba region. Thus by the turn of the century, the Oromo, whose strength must have been very greatly reduced by their massive drive into Abyssinia, had lost to the Somali all their former territory in Somaliland to the north of the Juba River. Of their former presence, however, they left behind firm evidence in the many minority groups of Oromo origin which are found today in various degrees of absorption amongst the Rahanweyn and Digil Somali of the Shebelle and Juba regions.
Finally, groups of Dir Somali whose displacement from the east and centre of northern Somaliland must by now have been almost complete, reached the south. Their most important representatives here are the Bimal who, encountering the Digil, fought and overcame them, and eventually established themselves near Merca where they are today. Thus by the eighteenth century southern Somaliland as far south as the Juba River had assumed more or less its present ethnic complexion.
But the main Somali advance did not long halt at the Juba. Darod from the north and Ogaden continued to push south, often against the fierce resistance of those who had preceded them.10 Eventually these new northern invaders reached the Shebelle, and began to press heavily upon the Digil of the region early in the nineteenth century. Their progress was arrested, however, by the Rahanweyn, from about 1840 onwards under the strong leadership of the Geledi clan based on the Shebelle. This opposition forced these new Darod immigrants to move up to the Juba and brought them into contact with the Galla on the right bank of the river. Although so much of their territory had been lost in Somaliland, the Galla were still tenaciously clinging to what land was left to them, and from their centre at Afmadu, launched occasional raids across the river into what was now Somali territory. Their power in this region was thus by no means yet broken; and from time to time their raiding parties menaced the Somali religious centre at Bardera, founded in 1820 on the middle reaches of the Juba. Thus the new Darod invaders encountered a formidable neighbour whom, for the present, it was more expedient to appease than to provoke. Hence having gained their protection, parties of Darod clansmen crossed the river as clients and allies of the Oromo. The trans-Juban Oromo seem to have welcomed this new support and to have turned it to advantage in their relations with the turbulent Akamba and Masai to their west.
As time passed, the Darod movement continued and further Darod clansmen entered the area, sought alliance with the Galla, and crossed the river to join their kinsmen. Thus the strength of the Darod immigrants under Oromo protection gradually increased. This situation of uneasy Darod-Galla alliance, however, continued for some time and is that described by the French explorer Charles Guillain when he visited the southern Somali coast in 1847. Much the same position is recorded also by the ill-fated German traveller, von der Decken, who, in 1865, made history by sailing up the Juba River in his shallow-draught steamship Welf, only to founder in the rapids above Bardera.11 It was apparently in this same year that a severe epidemic of smallpox amongst the Galla provided the opportunity for which their Darod, neighbours had obviously been waiting. Almost immediately, the Darod fell upon their Galla hosts on all sides and inflicted very heavy losses. The few Oromo who survived fled to the south; and, by the turn of the century, most of the southern Galla had been cleared from the area, retaining footholds only at Wajir and Buna. A new factor now made itself felt in the form of desperate Ethiopian raids into the Ogaden and down the Juba. This, with further waves of new Somali immigrants – some of whom had sailed down the coast by dhow – maintained and even increased the Somali pressure. Indeed, by 1909, parties of Darod immigrants had pressed as far south as the Tana River with livestock estimated to number as many as fifty thousand beasts.
By 1912, when administrative and military posts were opened by the British in this turbulent northern part of the East African Protectorate, the situation was still fluid. The Darod were still on the move and were now seeking to dominate completely the whole region from Buna in the west, through Wajir, to the Tana in the south-east. Many of those non-Hamitic WaBoni hunters who had survived the tides of migration and battle had now become the serfs of the Darod, and most of the Warday Galla who remained had to be moved across the Tana River to prevent their extinction by the Somali. A good number, however, chose to stay with their former Darod subjects as clients, thus completely reversing the earlier position when the Oromo had been masters of Jubaland. To the west, the once powerful Ajuran, who after their defeat in the seventeenth century had been so ignominiously harried south-wards, had now lost much of their cohesion and were rapidly being infliltrated by other Somali. Finally, the southern Boran Galla were being thrust north-west by the continued Darod pressure.
By 1919, feeling between the Darod and those Warday Galla who had been moved across the Tana River reached such a pitch that it was again necessary for the British authorities to intervene. The consequence was an undertaking by both sides, known as the Somali–Orma (Galla) agreement, which allowed the Galla who remained with the Darod on the left bank to choose finally between accepting the formal position of serfs, or of moving across the river to join their free kinsmen. Those who decided to cross the Tana were obliged to leave behind them with their Somali patrons half the cattle which they had acquired during their bondage. Under these conditions it is perhaps not surprising that few of the Warday Galla moved.
Some twelve years later, further unrest broke out among the Galla subjects of the Darod, and a rumour began to circulate that the Somali were about to disregard the 1919 agreement. Whether on this account, or for other reasons, about eight hundred Oromo dependents with ten times as many head of livestock made a forlorn bid for freedom, trekking towards the Tana River at the very height of the dry season. The result was disastrous; nearly half their number perished, and the few who survived were ignominiously returned to the left bank of the river. In 1936, the agreement ended and the government of Kenya tacitly recognized that, except for those on the right bank of the Tana, the Warday Galla with whom the Somali had so long been struggling had been finally assimilated. Of the Oromo who had once occupied so much of this territory, only the Boran and Gabbra remained.
Thus ended the great series of migrations which, over a space of some nine hundred years, had brought the Somali from their northern deserts into the more fertile regions of the centre and south and finally into the semi-desert plains of northern Kenya. These movements had far-reaching social repercussions. Through contact with the Oromo and the absorption of those Galla who remained behind, and with an added leaven from the earlier Bantu communities, the Digil and Rahanweyn tribes emerged with their distinctive characteristics. From the Bantu they adopted cultivation, and from the Galla temporarily adapted their system of age-grades to their expanding military needs. In much the same way, the Darod who later crossed the Juba briefly assumed the Galla warrior age-grade system,