Clan Cleansing in Somalia (2013) by Lidwien Kapteijns: the violence of 1991 and its legacy

The book

Clan Cleansing in Somalia: The Ruinous Legacy of 1991 is by Lidwien Kapteijns, a historian of Africa and the Middle East at Wellesley College in the United States, who has written widely on Somali history, literature and women. It was published in hardback by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2013, in its Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights series, with about 308 pages; a paperback followed in 2014 (MIT Press Bookstore; WardheerNews, Faisal A. Roble review).

How it is built

According to the reviewer Faisal A. Roble, the book has four chapters (WardheerNews):

1. How Somali poets, singers and playwrights interpreted the violence of 1991.
2. The political grievances of the 1970s and 1980s under the military government.
3. The violence in Mogadishu in 1991.
4. The need for genuine reconciliation.

More than sixty pages of notes, bibliography, a timeline and a glossary follow. Its sources include Somali poetry and songs, survivor accounts, and reports by journalists, aid workers and diplomats who were in Mogadishu (WardheerNews; Africa Review of Books, Lee Cassanelli). See Somali poetry.

Its argument

Kapteijns argues that the scale and character of the communal violence of 1991 and 1992 marked a "key shift" in the use of clan labels to separate friends from enemies (Project MUSE review). She writes that mass violence had already been used by the government of Siad Barre, and on a smaller scale by armed opposition fronts. In her account, the decisive change came in Mogadishu in 1991, when forces of the United Somali Congress attacked civilians identified with the Darod clan family as outsiders to the city (WardheerNews). See The collapse, 1991 to 2000 and The United Somali Congress.

She places responsibility on "political leaders who mobilized and organized ordinary people to commit violence in the name of clan", rather than on clans as a whole. She uses the term "clan cleansing" because, in her view, the events fit neither the legal definition of genocide nor that of ethnic cleansing, since Somalis share one ethnicity (WardheerNews). Lee Cassanelli notes that by setting Somalia beside the wider literature on mass violence, the book asks specialists to reconsider the idea that Somalia is a special case (Africa Review of Books).

How it was received

• Faisal A. Roble called it authoritative and meticulously referenced, argued it should be translated into Somali, and wished it had compared Somalia with Ethiopia after 1991 (WardheerNews).
• The writer Ubah Cristina Ali Farah reported that the book aroused deeply contrasting reactions among Somalis (Warscapes).
• The historian Mohamed Haji Ingiriis published a critical review that treated the events as clan hostilities on more than one side; other writers replied that treating clan families as single actors was itself part of the problem the book describes (Africa Review of Books).

Where to read it

• Lending copy: Internet Archive
• In a library: WorldCat
• Online for subscribing libraries: Project MUSE review

Related pages

• Unraveling Somalia (1999), Catherine Besteman
• Clan conflicts
• Books about Somalis since 2006