Unraveling Somalia (1999) by Catherine Besteman: race, class and the Jubba valley

The book

Unraveling Somalia: Race, Violence, and the Legacy of Slavery is by Catherine Besteman, an anthropologist who is a professor at Colby College in Maine (Penn Press). It was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1999 in its series on the ethnography of political violence (Project MUSE). Later printings carry the subtitle Race, Class, and the Legacy of Slavery.

Where the research was done

Besteman carried out her fieldwork among farming communities in the Jubba valley of southern Somalia before the civil war. Her subjects were the Gosha, the people of the river villages, many of them descended from East Africans brought to the Somali coast as slaves in the nineteenth century. The book's chapters trace "Slavery and the Jubba Valley Frontier" and "The Settlement of the Upper Gosha, 1895 to 1988", and include a chapter on her own fieldwork and how it changed her questions (Project MUSE, contents). The communities of the river valleys are described on Minority communities.

What it argues

The book's main argument is that the breakdown of the Somali state cannot be explained by clan rivalry alone. Besteman argues that, over the previous century and a half, a social order had formed in Somalia that was stratified by race, social status, class, region and language. Somalia had often been described as the only true nation-state in Africa, but in her account the pattern of violence after 1991 does not fit that picture: it fell most heavily on rural southerners, including the farming people of the river valleys. The publisher's summary notes that a politically created famine caused about half a million deaths and drove a million people to flee (Project MUSE). The events are covered on The collapse, 1991 to 2000.

How it was received

• A trade review quoted by booksellers described it as an example of how careful scholarship can show the realities behind widely held beliefs (Akademika).
• A review on Project MUSE called the book an achievement for its account of the Jubba valley, and doubted that Somalia's problems in the 1990s could be traced to lasting racial stratification, noting that the Gosha had not organised or sustained the conflicts of that decade (Project MUSE review).
• The book is often read alongside The Invention of Somalia (1995), edited by Ali Jimale Ahmed, as part of the 1990s scholarship that questioned the description of Somalis as one people without internal divisions.

Where to read it

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

Related pages

• The Invention of Somalia (1995), edited by Ali Jimale Ahmed
• Books about Somalis, 1991 to 2005