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THE UNACCOUNTABLE CENSUS: COLONIAL ENUMERATION AND ITS

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE SOMALI PEOPLE OF KENYA
KEREN WEITZBERG
The Journal of African History / Volume 56 / Issue 03 / November 2015, pp 409 - 428
DOI: 10.1017/S002185371500033X, Published online: 01 October 2015

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S002185371500033X

How to cite this article:
KEREN WEITZBERG (2015). THE UNACCOUNTABLE CENSUS: COLONIAL ENUMERATION
AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR THE SOMALI PEOPLE OF KENYA. The Journal of African History,
56, pp 409-428 doi:10.1017/S002185371500033X
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Journal of African History, (), pp. . Cambridge University Press

doi:./SX

THE UNACCOUNTABLE CENSUS: COLONIAL

ENUMERATION AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR THE
SOMALI PEOPLE OF KENYA*
Keren Weitzberg
University of Pennsylvania

Abstract
In 2010, the Kenyan government annulled national census results due to concerns
that Somalis in the country had been over-counted. This article traces the genesis
of this recent demographic dispute, which held important implications for the distribution of political power. It shows that African leaders inherited long-standing practices laid down by the colonial state, which was unable to obtain a reliable count
of the number of people in Kenya or render its Somali subjects into a countable, traceable population. In regions where expansive Somali networks had long predated
British rule, colonial authorities only loosely enforced the concept of a permanent
population. By yielding to this reality, colonial ofcials developed governance techniques that should not be mistakenly portrayed as state failures. These policies call into
question the applicability of James C. Scotts concept of legibility to Kenya. They also
suggest that recent demographic controversies cannot be reductively blamed on
illegal immigration.

Key Words
Kenya, Somalia, demography, pastoralism, nomadism, migration, state.

In late August , Kenyans throughout the country waited to be counted. The decennial
national census had always been an important event for citizens of Kenya. This particular
years undertaking, however, was especially signicant, as it coincided with the drafting of
a long-awaited constitution, which called for the devolution of power and resources.
President Kibaki, who declared the rst day of this national exercise to be a public holiday,
enjoined citizens to stay indoors and await census agents. Even inhabitants from some of

I would like to extend my gratitude to Richard Ambani and the rest of the staff at the Kenya National Archives
as well as Hassan Kochore, Hassan Ibrahim, Abdi Billow Ibrahim, and Ibrahim Abdikarim, who helped at
different stages of my eldwork, in addition to the many people in Kenya who generously shared aspects
of their lives with me. Thanks are also due to Dr Alden Young, Dr Mathew Barton, Dr Timothy Parsons,
Alice Brown, Pete Tridish, and the three anonymous readers at The Journal of African History, who read
early drafts of this article. Stanford University, the Mellon Foundation, and the Lauder Institute at the
University of Pennsylvania generously supported my writing and research. Authors email: kerenwe@sas.
upenn.edu

 v o l . , n o .

THE UNACCOUNTABLE CENSUS

the most marginalised regions, where people are often suspicious of government agents,
were eager to be enumerated and thus counted as citizens.
A year later, in September , the Kenyan government disclosed the results of the census, which held important implications for the distribution of political power under the
newly ratied constitution. Among the most controversial ndings was that Somalis (at almost . million in a country of . million people) were the sixth largest ethnic group in
Kenya. Somalis had lived within the boundaries of Kenya for generations, but previous
censuses had counted them as only a relatively small minority among the countrys bureaucratically recognized, ofcial ethnic groups. Due to this seeming anomaly, Kenyan
Planning Minister Wycliffe Oparanya announced that the government was nullifying the
results in eight districts, ve of which were in North Eastern Province (NEP), a region
that shares a border with Somalia and is heavily populated by nomadic, Somali people.
The NEP has also served as one of the main entry points for Somali refugees seeking asylum in Kenya.
Kenyan ofcials based their decision on population projections gleaned from earlier decennial censuses, whose veracity they left virtually unquestioned. Citing several inconsistencies, such as the disproportionate ratio of men to women and population gures that far
exceeded expected birth and death rates, Oparanya argued that the results were at
odds with previous counts. By comparing the census gures with those of , government administrators concluded that the Somali population had increased by over
per cent in a mere decade a number, they maintained, that could not be attributed to natural growth rates. While invoking these statistics gave their conclusions the appearance of
objectivity, it also reected a serious oversight. Northern Kenya has historically been one of
the most marginalized regions of the country. Since the early colonial era, administrators in
the north had run into numerous obstacles to the accurate collection of data. As MPs
from the Kenyan Somali community argued, government ofcials had shifted blame
onto illegal immigration, obscured the underlying problems with earlier censuses, and
failed to consider the possibility that Somalis had been underreported in previous decades.
This article argues that the difculties faced by postcolonial census agents cannot be
solely attributed to the large refugee movements triggered by the recent Somali civil war.
It also traces the genesis of these recent demographic controversies to the period of colonial

Samantha Balaton-Chrimes argues that the census provided marginalized minorities in Kenya with a new way
to engage in the politics of recognition. S. Balaton-Chrimes, Counting as citizens: recognition of the Nubians
in the census, Ethnopolitics, : (), , doi:./... Due to increased
sensitivity resulting from the post-election violence and lobbying from minority groups, the government
decided to encode groups for the rst time, which more than doubled the number of legally recognized
ethnicities. Ibid. .
Other historically nomadic communities living in the north, such as the Turkana, were also affected by the
governments decision.
M. Samora, The Somali question, World Policy Journal, : (), , doi: ./
; A. Teyie, Kenya: census delayed over Somali numbers, The Star (Nairobi)
reprinted at All-Africa.com, Jan. (http://allafrica.com/stories/.html).
Not only have nomadic populations posed unique challenges for census agents, but inhabitants of the north
have also been reluctant to cooperate with census efforts due to a long history of political and economic
marginalization. The census may have turned out greater participation, in part, because it was tied to
the promise of political reform.

KEREN WEITZBERG

v o l . , n o .

rule. During the rst three decades of the twentieth century, protectorate and colonial
ofcials were incapable (and frequently disinterested) of obtaining a reliable count of the
number of people living within the colony of Kenya. Even after the Second World War,
when the colonial state was at the height of its surveillance capacity, government ofcials
never knew with any certainty how many Somalis (or, for that matter, many other communities) resided within the country. African leaders in Kenya inherited long-standing practices laid down by the colonial state, which was unable to transform its subjects into a
countable, traceable population or fully police their mobility.
The shortfalls of historical and contemporary censuses call into question the applicability of James C. Scotts thesis to countries such as Kenya. In his seminal work, Seeing like a
State, Scott argues that the function of the modern state is to make society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplied the classic state functions and to reduce the
opacity of the local. Legibility, Scott contends, is the outcome of a variety of bureaucratic
processes, which range from the creation of permanent last names to the standardization
of weights and measures to the establishment of cadastral surveys and population registers. However, critics such as Christopher Lee and Stephan Miescher have noted that
Scotts theories cannot be applied wholesale to the colonial situation in Africa, where
state power was far from monolithic. As Steven Pierce argues of northern Nigeria, the history of state formation is not one of a governments coming to see like a state but rather
of a transformation that enabled it to look like one. Through registration and census
efforts, colonial ofcials in Kenya created the appearance of a bureaucratically efcient,
panoptic state and mimicked the forms of authority that were so central to the modernist
conceits of colonialism. Yet, in practice, Kenyan administrators could only loosely enforce
the concept of a permanent population.
Reecting upon the early years of colonial rule also calls into question the paradigm of
the weak or failed state. Social scientists have often judged the African state by a set of

The Colony and Protectorate of Kenya was technically known as the East Africa Protectorate prior to .
J. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New
Haven, ), .
Ibid.
C. Joon-Hai Lee, The native undened: colonial categories, Anglo-African status and the politics of kinship in
British Central Africa, , The Journal of African History, : (), , doi: ./
S; S. F. Miescher, Building the city of the future: visions and experiences of modernity
in Ghanas Akosombo township, The Journal of African History, : (), , , doi: ./
S.
S. Pierce, Looking like a state: colonialism and the discourse of corruption in Northern Nigeria, Comparative
Studies in Society and History, : (), , doi: ./S, emphasis in
original. See also E. Bhre and B. Lecocq (eds.), The drama of development, Special Issue, African
Studies, : (), ; K. Sivaramakrishnan (ed.), Moral economies, state spaces, and categorical
violence: anthropological engagements with the work of James Scott, Special Issue, American
Anthropologist, : (), .
A useful examination of the failed state paradigm is to be found in R. I. Rotberg, Failed states, collapsed
states, weak states: causes and indicators, in R. I. Rotberg (ed.), State Failure and State Weakness in a
Time of Terror (Washington, DC, ), . Shahar Hameiri argues that both the neo-Weberian and
the neoliberal literature on this topic are predicated on an overly technocratic view of the state. See
S. Hameiri, Failed states or a failed paradigm? State capacity and the limits of institutionalism, Journal of
International Relations and Development, : (), , doi: ./palgrave.jird..

 v o l . , n o .

THE UNACCOUNTABLE CENSUS

normative assumptions about sovereignty. In his inuential work on African governance,

Jeffrey Herbst argues that: states are only viable if they are able to control the territory
dened by their borders. Social scientic literature of this nature, as critics such as
Achille Mbembe have pointed out, consistently denes postcolonial African states in
terms of lack. While many scholars have written about what African states are not
and what they ought to be, comparatively fewer have focused on the ways in which
African leaders and bureaucrats actually exercised power.
Since independence, ordinary Kenyan citizens, local state ofcials, and foreign policymakers have come to see Somalis as a foreign presence in the country and a threat to national security. Many security analysts have laid blame on the Kenyan government for failing to
regulate illegal immigration or properly secure its international borders. Yet these normative prescriptions obscure the fact that Somali regional networks, in many cases, long predated the advent of colonial borders or the imposition of immigration controls. Such
judgments also misrepresent the history of governance in Kenya and elide the legacy of
colonial rule. Accurately enumerating the Somali population was not a major priority for
colonial administrators and thus can hardly be deemed a failure. Attempting to closely
regulate Somali immigration or attain precise census data would have been expensive, provoked signicant resistance, and, ultimately, served few administrative needs. Moreover, the
colonial policy of light surveillance enabled Somalis in Kenya to enjoy at least a limited
degree of mobility and move across international borders with relative ease. This tenuous
arrangement, however, broke down in the postcolonial era, when the census became an
important tool for securing political representation and economic entitlements.

COLONIAL DEMOGRAPHICS
Difculties assessing population rates and gures are not problems unique to Kenya or the
Somali population. Alex de Waal, for example, writes that it is possible for a researcher
studying Darfur to collect every statistic, published and unpublished, in a single slender
le and have condence that every number is almost certainly wrong. Population data

J. Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton, NJ, ),
. The intellectual roots of Herbsts argument can be traced to Max Weber, who drew a link between state
power and the ability to maintain a monopoly on the use of violence within a given territory.
A. Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley, CA, ), . A number of inuential philosophical texts have
explored the association between Africa and incompleteness, such as C. L. Miller, Blank Darkness:
Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago, (), ; and V. Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa
(Bloomington, IN, ), .
There are, however, notable exceptions to this trend, such as J. F. Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of
the Belly (London, ), .
Whereas the popular image of the Somali in the s was that of the shifta or bandit, today many Kenyans
perceive Somalis to be potential terrorists. For more on why Somalis came to be constructed as security
threats, see J. Prestholdt, Kenya, the United States, and counterterrorism, Africa Today, : (),
, doi: ./africatoday...; and H. A. Whittaker, The socioeconomic dynamics of the shifta
conict in Kenya, c. , The Journal of African History, : (), , doi: ./
S.
A. de Waal, Famine That Kills: Darfur, Sudan (New York, ), . Finding colonial and postcolonial
government statistics to be unreliable, de Waal instead grounds his analysis in ethnography.

KEREN WEITZBERG

v o l . , n o .

was usually the least reliable in less closely administered regions. As Sara Berry and
Frederick Cooper argue, understaffed and underfunded colonial regimes could not build
bureaucracies capable of extending across their territories. Instead, they concentrated
power in key cities, ports, and other export-oriented and agriculturally rich regions. In addition, they ruled indirectly by co-opting (or, at times, helping to invent) local chiey authorities. However, even in countries like South Africa, where the state was not lacking in
capacity, colonial authorities often neglected to collect the most basic . . . information
about their subjects. The paucity of reliable statistics was not merely a reection of
state weakness. Unlike European nation-states, colonial administrators were rarely interested in producing citizens. They did not share the same goals as their European counterparts, who collected detailed demographic information, not only for surveillance and
extractive purposes, but also to apportion political representation and assess welfare needs.
In the early years of British rule, protectorate ofcials in East Africa possessed vague and
often widely divergent ideas of how many people they were governing. While administrators
in Kenya gradually developed more accurate census methods over the course of the early
twentieth century, they often used indirect means of assessing population gures.
According to C. J. Martin, Director of the East African Statistical Department, local authorities tended to rely upon rough estimates derived from calculations based on the total number of male taxpayers. By the late s, however, the British government had begun to
promote a more interventionist form of imperialism, which demanded access to more reliable statistics. In the early s, the Colonial Ofce enlisted Robert Kuczynski, a wellknown demographer of Africa, to help train administrators and improve the quality of colonial population statistics. Recent studies have shown that, while the late colonial state
yielded far more data about African populations, their methods did not always guarantee
accuracy. In , for instance, the government of Kenya for the rst time embarked
on a colony-wide census, which made use of trained enumerators and house-to-house visits.
Although the census was a substantial achievement, as John Blacker notes, it nevertheless underestimated the countrys population by over per cent. According to
Patrick Manning, colonial censuses systematically under-enumerated African populations

S. Berry, No Condition Is Permanent: The Social Dynamics of Agrarian Change in Sub-Saharan Africa
(Madison, WI, ), ; F. Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French
and British Africa (Cambridge, UK, ), . The limited reach of the colonial state, however, did not
preclude the use of coercion and performative violence. See C. Young, The African Colonial State in
Comparative Perspective (New Haven, ), .
K. Breckenridge, No will to know: the rise and fall of African civil registration in twentieth-century South
Africa, in K. Breckenridge and S. Szreter (eds.), Registration and Recognition: Documenting the Person in
World History, Proceedings of the British Academy, (Oxford, ), .
C. J. Martin, The East African population census, : planning and enumeration, Population Studies, :
(), , doi: ./.
K. Ittmann, Where nature dominates man: demographic ideas and policy in British colonial Africa,
, in K. Ittmann, D. D. Cordell, and G. H. Maddox (eds.), The Demographics of Empire: The Colonial
Order and the Creation of Knowledge (Athens, OH, ), .
See M. Jerven, Poor Numbers: How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What to Do about
It (Ithaca, NY, ), . Morten Jervens work, which calls into question indicators such as GDP, has
sparked a reevaluation among economic historians of the uses and misuses of statistical data.
J. Blacker, The demography of Mau Mau: fertility and mortality in Kenya in the s: a demographers
viewpoint, African Affairs, : (), , doi: ./afraf/adm. Blacker critiques Caroline

 v o l . , n o .

THE UNACCOUNTABLE CENSUS

due to the limited reach of the state as well as the patriarchal biases of administrators, who
tended to focus on the taxable male heads of households. In some cases, Africans also
evaded population counts, which were linked to taxation. In spite of their questionable reliability, colonial statistics have retained an aura of validity and, in many cases, have become
the basis for calculating modern growth rates and population sizes.
While less-than-accurate population counts were the norm in many regions of Kenya,
administrators faced particularly profound impediments to enumerating their Somali subjects. The majority of Somalis living in Kenya were nomads who inhabited an area abutting
Ethiopia and Somalia known as the Northern Frontier District (NFD). As scholars such as
Nene Mburu, Gnther Schlee, and Hannah Whittaker have shown, the protectorate and
colonial administration governed the NFD as a region distinct from the rest of Kenya.
Conceived of as an economically marginal buffer zone for the white highlands, colonial
authorities invested little manpower and few resources in the north, which they isolated
from other parts of the colony. Consequently, local administrators were particularly ill
equipped to monitor population rates along the Kenyan/Somali and Kenyan/Ethiopian
borderlands. In addition, northern inhabitants were highly mobile and lived collective
lives that stretched across colonial frontiers. In the late nineteenth century, Italian,
British, and Ethiopian authorities had divided the people of this region into three major
territories with little heed to their patterns of mobility and transhumance. However,
these international boundaries which separated pastoralists from their kin, water
resources, and wet and dry season pasture remained highly porous throughout colonial
rule. This greatly impeded colonial registration and census efforts.
Ofcials also had difculty monitoring Somalis who had come to Kenya from Aden and
British Somaliland. These migrants were part of a wider diaspora who had traveled
through the circuits of British Empire in the late nineteenth century. After the opening
of the Suez Canal, European ship owners, white settlers, and British ofcials had begun
to enlist Somalis living along the Gulf of Aden as seamen, sailors, soldiers, porters, and
navigators. These recruits, most of whom belonged to the Isaaq or Harti clans, formed
small settlements in areas as dispersed as the UK, Australia, and South Africa.

Elkinss use of the and national censuses to derive Mau Mau casualty gures. His study provides
important cautionary advice against the uncritical use of census data.
P. Manning, African population: projections, , in K. Ittmann, D. D. Cordell, and G. H. Maddox
(eds.), The Demographics of Empire: The Colonial Order and the Creation of Knowledge (Athens, OH,
), .
N. Mburu, Bandits on the Border: The Last Frontier in the Search for Somali Unity (Trenton, NJ, ),
; G. Schlee, Identities on the Move: Clanship and Pastoralism in Northern Kenya (Manchester, );
H. Whittaker, Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Kenya: A Social History of the Shifta Conict,
c. (Leiden, ), ; interview with Ahmed Maalin Abdalle, Habasweyn, July ;
interview with Aden Hassan Baraki, Habasweyn, July ; Kenya National Archives (KNA) DC GRA/
/, H. B. Sharpe, The Somali general history, Jan. .
L. Cassanelli, The opportunistic economies of the Kenya-Somali borderland in historical perspective, in
D. Feyissa and M. Virgil Hhne (eds.), Borders & Borderlands As Resources in the Horn of Africa
(Woodbridge, Suffolk, ), .
Some Somali traders also immigrated from Kismayo, a port city in southern Somalia.
Clan should be understood as an imprecise label. The term is dened relationally and what it means in any
given context varies. It is also likely that members of other clans who immigrated to Kenya ultimately came to
identify as Isaaq or Harti.

KEREN WEITZBERG

v o l . , n o .

Although colonial regimes generally sought to restrict the mobility of their subjects, they
also demanded exibility for the movement of laborers, soldiers, and traders across territorial borders. British protectorate authorities, for instance, relied heavily on battalions of
soldiers from British Somaliland to secure effective military control over East Africa. Over
the course of the twentieth century, through various waves of immigration, a small, but
vibrant Isaaq and Harti community developed in Kenya. Colonial ofcials classied
this comparatively privileged group of Somalis as legal immigrants within the colony
and often referred to them as the Alien Somali. Much like their nomadic counterparts
in the NFD, the Isaaq and Harti often moved across territorial borders and, thus, proved
difcult for colonial ofcials to register and enumerate. Many Somalis also claimed descent
from the Arab world and thus deed colonial categories of native and non-native one
of the central distinctions of the census.
The colonial census was never purely an enumerative endeavor; it also involved the creation of legal categories and territories. Through head counts and population surveys, colonial ofcials assigned their subjects singular ethnic and racial identities and linked them
to territorial homelands. The census was predicated on the notion that Africans were
members of bounded tribes, who could be contained in distinct territories. Somali
nomads and members of historic Somali diasporas, however, imagined community in
ways that could not be easily mapped onto European ideas of race, ethnicity, and territory
and thus challenged many of the central assumptions of colonial demographics.

WORKING FAILURES IN THE NFD

One reason that authorities in East Africa began to develop more accurate census methods,
as Meshack Owino notes, was to better mobilize African labor and thus make the colony
pay for itself. This was not, however, the case in the NFD, where attaining accurate
population data was very far from the minds of protectorate and colonial ofcials.
During the rst two decades of British rule, protectorate authorities did not so much administer the north, as attempt to suppress southward migration into the fertile highlands
of the Rift Valley. British ofcials also came to think of the NFD as an ungovernable borderland analogous to the North-West Frontier of India. Since creating accurate census
methods was at least partially tied to hopes of economic development, it was not a priority
in regions that British administrators perceived to be of little nancial value.

Interview with Farah Mohamed Awad, Nairobi, Oct. ; interview with Hussein Nuur, Nairobi, Oct.
; E. R. Turton, The Isaq Somali diaspora and poll-tax agitation in Kenya, , African Affairs,
: (), .
KNA VQ /, The position of alien Somalis in Kenya Colony, letter from the Secretariat circulated to all
members of Executive Council, Apr. .
M. Owino, The discourse of overpopulation in Western Kenya and the creation of the Pioneer Corps, in K.
Ittmann, D. D. Cordell, and G. H. Maddox (eds.), The Demographics of Empire: The Colonial Order and the
Creation of Knowledge (Athens, OH, ), .
I. N. Dracopoli, Across southern Jubaland to the Lorian Swamp, The Geographical Journal, : (),
.
Some of the material in this article is based upon previous and forthcoming publications by the author. See
K. Weitzberg, Producing history from elisions, fragments, and silences: public testimony, the Asiatic

 v o l . , n o .

THE UNACCOUNTABLE CENSUS

In , however, the NFD came under civilian rule and local authorities began to develop more sophisticated techniques for governing this region, which was sparsely populated and stretched across more than , square miles. Throughout the s and
s, the administration worked out a form of sovereignty that, in many ways, blended
territorial governance with nomadic forms of mobility. Local authorities in Wajir, for example unable to mark out denitive ethnic homelands or neatly impose their visions of
order on the region instead divided the wells in the district between the major clans.
As Schlee notes, this was a precolonial governance strategy common among the Borana,
which colonial ofcials appear to have reappropriated. Capitulating to nomadic patterns
of transhumance, administrators often developed techniques that had far more continuity
with precolonial practices of governance than with Weberian ideals of bureaucracy.
Until well into the s, ofcials in the NFD also abandoned hope of registering individuals or determining exact population gures. In , F. G. Jennings, the district commissioner (DC) of Wajir, argued that implementing a census would serve no useful
purpose so long as the Somali adopts the attitude of moving over the boundary into
Italian territory at will. The Degodia and Ogaden clans, whose leaders and kin lived
in Ethiopia and Italian Somaliland, frequently took advantage of the porous borders
and indeterminacy of population gures to evade burdensome government requirements.
When the colonial government imposed cash taxation in the north in , many of
these Somali communities ed into Ethiopia and Italian Somaliland. In , Jennings
estimated that the population of Wajir District was approximately ,, but conceded
that at time of writing this report the majority of the Tribesmen nominally resident in
the district are either on or across the International Boundary owing to the recent rains
being more plentiful in that area. These patterns of movement deed the sedentary
logic of the colonial state.
The tenuous nature of sovereignty on the frontier as well as the nomadic practices of its
inhabitants frustrated colonial attempts to gain reliable population estimates, regulate
international migration, or draw up maps of clan and ethnic homelands. In , in
an effort to control mobility and accrue revenue for the otherwise unprotable task of governing the north, the NFD administration instituted individual taxation. Ofcials hoped

poll-tax campaign, and the Isaaq Somali population of Kenya, Northeast African Studies, : (),
; and K. Weitzberg, Rethinking the Shifta War fty years after independence: myth, memory, and
marginalization, in M. M. Kithinji, M. M. Koster, and J. P. Rotich (eds.), Kenya at Fifty: History, Policy,
Politics (New York, ).
For more on hybrid forms of governance on the borderlands of colonial states, see A. Walraet, State-making
and emerging complexes of power and accumulation in the Southern Sudan-Kenyan border area: the rise of a
thriving cross-border business network, in C. Vaughan, M. Schomerus, and L. de Vries (eds.), The
Borderlands of South Sudan: Authority and Identity in Contemporary and Historical Perspectives
(New York, ), .
KNA PC NFD //, F. G. Jennings, Wajir District annual report, ; G. Schlee, Territorializing ethnicity:
the imposition of a model of statehood on pastoralists in Northern Kenya and Southern Ethiopia, Ethnic and
Racial Studies, : (), .
KNA PC NFD //, F. G. Jennings, Wajir District annual report, .
Interview with Ali Hassan, Nairobi, Nov. ; KNA PC/NFD///, F. G. Jennings, Wajir annual report,
.
KNA PC NFD //, F. G. Jennings, Wajir annual report, .

KEREN WEITZBERG

v o l . , n o .

that tax receipts could be used to differentiate between paying British subjects and nonpaying Italian and Ethiopian immigrants. However, they were unable consistently to enforce this new policy, particularly among the elusive camel keeping populations, who
could travel vast distances. In , the DC of Wajir complained Nearly all the
Degodia sections have imperceptibly increased their numbers from Abyssinia. Until individual taxation is imposed this is almost impossible to stop.
As the case of the NFD suggests, colonial administrators were often far more concerned
with enforcing some semblance of state control than with rendering their subjects legible.
One might be tempted to portray colonial power as weak, incapable (as Herbst suggests) of
broadcasting its power across this arid, northern expanse. Yet, in many respects, conceding to nomadic practices proved to be commensurate with broader colonial goals, which
were aimed at keeping governance in the NFD as cost effective and minimal as possible.
Cultivating an image of the north as ungovernable was also partially the outcome of bureaucratic logic, as it enabled colonial ofcials to justify the nancial and administrative
neglect of the region and naturalize its isolation from the rest of the colony.
However, even in regions where mobility was left unchecked, colonial authorities went
through the performative act of recording population gures. The annual report for
Wajir District, for example, attests to the uidity of population movement and the vagueness
of district and international boundaries. In that year, the Ogaden had crossed back into Wajir
from Italian Somaliland, partly to escape Italian recruitment drives. In addition, the British administration, in an effort to delineate tribal borders and consolidate all of the Somali clans in
one area, had moved the Ajuran from Moyale and readjusted the district boundaries to administer them from Wajir. Despite the large population exchanges that had occurred over the previous year, the author concludes the report with precise population gures. In , he writes,
Wajir District had Europeans, Asiatics, and , Natives.
Every year, provincial and district commissioners aggregated data and produced annual
reports that listed population estimates, rainfall data, and livestock exports, among other statistics. Through the conventions of report making, ofcials cultivated an image of a panoptic state
capable of extracting transparent knowledge about its territories. Yet, in practice, the local
administration in the NFD governed, not by trying to project its power over the entire geographic
expanse of the north, but by nding exible, workable methods of managing uncertainty along
the frontier. These writing practices reveal the messiness of the day-to-day, working mechanisms
of colonial rule and show that colonial states mimicked normative forms of statecraft, even as
they developed a diverse array of techniques for ruling over their colonial possessions.

GOVERNING THROUGH ILLEGIBILITY

Outside of the NFD, administrators were far more numerous and colonial power far more
spatially continuous. However, even in regions where they exerted greater control over the

KNA PC NFD //, Wajir annual report, .

Ibid. .
Herbst, States, .
KNA PC NFD //, Annual report for the year , Wajir District, NFD, , .

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THE UNACCOUNTABLE CENSUS

population and territory, ofcials were unable to gain an accurate count of the number of
Somalis living in Kenya. This was partly because the colonial administration did not possess
the capacity to properly monitor immigration in and out of the colony, outside of a few key
border checkpoints and port cities, such as Mombasa. They also lacked a consistent rubric for
identifying and classifying Somalis who originated from Kismayo, Aden, and British
Somaliland. In addition, Isaaq and Harti Somalis were often in a unique position to either
resist or reappropriate colonial census and registration techniques. Consequently, colonial
ofcials often avoided imposing a strict system of legibility on their subjects.
Mahmood Mamdani argues that the colonial state constructed an articial distinction between non-natives, who were designated separate races and subject to civil law, and
natives, who were deemed ethnicities and governed by traditional, customary law.
Protectorate and colonial authorities, however, were at odds over how to legally dene the
Somali, Swahili, and other groups who lived on the African continent, yet had long-standing
ties with the Arab world. In the eyes of most colonial ofcials, Somalis were racially hybrid.
They did not t neatly within reied colonial ideas of race, which were structured by the binary distinctions between African and Arab, native, and non-native.
The Isaaq and Harti population of East Africa was, nevertheless, well positioned to negotiate for greater rights within the emerging racial hierarchy. By serving as guides, soldiers, translators, and porters, they had lled many of the economic and political
demands of empire and could invoke their service to the Crown to make claims on the
state. In the rst few decades of British rule, Isaaq and Harti leaders mobilized against
efforts to treat them as natives. Eventually, protectorate ofcials relented to their grievances and, in , the governor enacted special legislation that exempted Somalis
from the denition of native under certain ordinances. This policy effectively gave the
Isaaq and Harti many of the privileges of non-natives. Like the Asian community of
Kenya, they could legally reside in the urban centers of the colony, access the special
wards of hospitals, and enjoy greater rights to mobility. In addition, they paid higher, nonnative taxation rates. The Isaaq and Harti were not only exempt from carrying a kipande
(a pass card that restricted African movement), but some also possessed British passports
for international travel.
These privileges were, however, fragile. Throughout the interwar period, Kenyan colonial ofcials expressed concerns about giving Somali elites many of the rights of Asians,
which they feared could have unintended repercussions for other groups and regions.

M. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ,
), .
Sir Richard Burton helped to popularize this image of the Somalis in the mid-nineteenth century. R. F. Burton,
The Somal, their origin and peculiarities, in I. Burton (ed.), First Footsteps in East Africa or, An Exploration
of Harar, Two Volumes Bound as One, vol. I (New York, [orig. pub. ]), .
KNA PC NFD //, Somali Exemption Ordinance and the Somali exemption rules , letter from
Chief Native Commissioner to all Provincial Commissioners, Feb. ; interview with Zaynab Sharif,
Nairobi, Jan. ; interview with Hassan Ahmed Warsame, Nairobi, Oct. .
KNA PC Coast //, Re: status of Somalis, letter from H. W. B. Blackall, Ag. Crown Council to Chief
Native Commissioner, Apr. ; The National Archives of the UK (TNA) CO //, letter from
Edward Grigg, Governor of Kenya Colony and Protectorate to Lord Passeld, Secretary of State for the
Colonies, Sept. ; TNA CO //, Re: hospital accommodation-native civil hospital, letter

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In , Sir Harold Kittermaster, governor of British Somaliland, warned his colleagues in

Kenya
There is frequent interchange of Somali residents in Nairobi with their homes here, and they maintain their roots here even after years of absence. To give them a status in Kenya so different from
what they must have here [in British Somaliland] would tend greatly to embarrass the administration of this Protectorate.

As Kittermasters remarks suggest, ofcials were anxious about unsettling the empire-wide
color bar. Consequently, the colonial administration never settled on a coherent denition
of the Somalis racial and legal status. There was no consensus among ofcials as to which ethnic and racial aggregate the Isaaq and Harti belonged. Nor was there agreement as to
whether they should be technically classied as natives or non-natives. In , for example,
administrators in the Central Province of Kenya lled out a template census form. One ofcial
in Machakos listed Somalis under Asiatic: Other Races, another in North Nyeri included
Somalis with Arabs, while yet another in Meru grouped them under Natives.
Benedict Anderson argues that census takers are notoriously intolerant of multiple, politically transvestite,, blurred, or changing identications. Similarly, Homi Bhabha
asserts that colonized subjects with hybrid identities threatened colonial power by destabilizing the line between ruler and ruled. Yet ambiguity could also be conducive of colonial power. As Talal Asad contends, radical critics are mistaken to assume that power
always abhors ambiguity; rather, state authority has depended on its exploiting the dangers and opportunities contained in ambiguous situations. Authorities in Kenya appear
to have ruled their alien Somali subjects, in part, by keeping their status undened, ambiguous, and contestable. This enabled them to selectively reward Isaaq and Harti soldiers
and intermediaries, without calling into question the broader logic of the color bar or creating a legal precedent that might hold implications for other regions or other ambiguous
populations, such as the Swahili.
Keeping Somali elites in an awkward, liminal legal position was, however, a tenuous
compromise. In the s, British authorities throughout the empire debated how best
to shore up the racial order, which had been destabilized by the spread of Western education and the recruitment of soldiers from the colonies during the First World War. It was
against this backdrop that the Kenyan government, in , implemented a new

from representatives of the Isaak Sheriff Community, Arabs to Governor of Kenya, May ; KNA AG /
, letter from Attorney General to Colonial Secretary, May .
TNA CO //, letter from H. Kittermaster to Lord Passeld, Secretary of State for the Colonies, Sept.
.
It is worth noting, however, that colonial ofcials often struggled to give their subjects singular and
unambiguous ethnic labels. See T. Parsons, Being Kikuyu in Meru: challenging the tribal geography of
colonial Kenya, The Journal of African History, : (), , doi: ./S.
KNA PC CP //, Population of Colony and Protectorate of Kenya: Machakos, North Nyeri, and Meru.
B. R. OG. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London,
), .
H. K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York, ), .
T. Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore,
), .
Lee, The Native, .

 v o l . , n o .

THE UNACCOUNTABLE CENSUS

Non-Native Poll Tax Ordinance, which called for a revision of the existing taxation system. This ordinance introduced a sliding payment scale for Europeans, Asians, and
other non-natives. Others were dened as Arabs, Swahilis, and Somalis populations
whom colonial authorities had difculty legally differentiating. This new legislation also
reduced Somali tax obligations from thirty to twenty shillings.
Out of concern that tendering a lowered tax would lessen their privileges, many Somalis
began petitioning the colonial government and in an unusual reversal of typical forms of
tax resistance demanded to the pay the higher Asian rate of thirty shillings. To rework
colonial racial categories, Isaaq leaders drew attention to their communitys discrete patrilineal genealogy and claims of descent from the prophet. Mobilizing through their diaspora
in the UK, British Somaliland, and East Africa, they initiated a campaign for Asiatic status. In , in a petition to the Colonial Secretary, the Elders of the British Shariff Ishak
Community of Kenya Colony maintained that they can neither be classied as Arabs or
Somalis. Your Petitioners Community are a race of Asiatic Origin. Isaaq representatives
toyed with the vagueness of the term Asiatic, which colonial authorities had used, often
inconsistently, as a legal, geographic, and racial category.
The use of the term Asiatic, provocative in its ambiguity, sparked concern among colonial
authorities, who feared losing control over the power to dene race. Colonial ofcials
scrambled to give the Isaaq and Harti a xed position within the segregated colonial order.
Anxious about their vague and indeterminate boundaries, the Colonial Secretary, in ,
demanded that a census be prepared of the number of alien Somalis resident in each district.
The outbreak of the Second World War exacerbated their anxieties. Expressing fears that
there was no adequate means of ascertaining the numbers and whereabouts of Somalis in
the Colony and that it was not even possible to identify a Somali or to trace his past history,
the Kenyan government began to devise plans for a Somali Registration Bill.
While colonial ofcials imagined that Somalis could be pinned down through the use of
census and registration methods, they were rarely willing or able to put such grand visions
of administrative order into effect. Plans for a Somali Registration Bill were quickly abandoned out of concerns that racially discriminatory legislation would provoke protest from
the Kenya Somali Associations, whom ofcials feared would endeavor . . . through their
helpers in Cardiff to bring the issue before the House of Commons. Kenyan administrators likely feared that such heavy-handed measures would upset public opinion.

Kenya, The Ofcial Gazette of the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya (Special Issue) : (Nairobi, Oct.
), . For more on the campaign for Asiatic status, see Turton, The Isaq; and Weitzberg, Producing.
KNA AG /, letter from E. J. A. Musa, President, British Shariff Ishak Community of Kenya Colony to
Colonial Secretary.
KNA PC SP //, Status of Somalis in Kenya: rate of payment under Non-Native Poll Tax Ordinance, letter
from A. de V. Wade, Colonial Secretary to Secretariat, Apr. .
KNA AG /, Note on the status and control of Somalis in Kenya Colony in time of war, letter from
P. Wyn Harris, Ofcer-in-Charge of Native Intelligence, Oct. .
KNA AG /, Objects of the Somali Registration Bill.
KNA AG /, letter from G. Reece to G. M. Rennie, Chief Secretary, Jan. .
A concern that no doubt grew as increasing numbers of Somali soldiers began ghting in the Second World
War on behalf of the British Empire. To preempt accusations of racial discrimination, the governor of Kenya
instead implemented a far more limited system of registration for non-natives residing in the NFD. KNA AG
/, Government notice No. : The defence (Northern Frontier District) regulations, in Kenya, The

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Ultimately, the colonial state helped to put an end to the poll tax controversy not by
attempting to control Somali immigration, rendering the Isaaq and Harti into a countable
population, or resolving the ambiguities of the color bar, but rather by altering its own tax
policies. In , to raise money for the war effort, the administration increased the
amount of taxes owed by non-natives and based the new rates on income, rather than
race. This policy effectively disaggregated taxation from the thorny question of race
and political rights.
Ironically, the only comprehensive census to be generated during this period was compiled
by the Shariff Ishakian Community on the request of Abby Farah, their representative in
London, and B. W. P. Margan, their legal adviser in the UK. In order to substantiate their petition for Asiatic status and differentiate themselves from other Somali clans, the Isaaq leadership produced a detailed count of the number of Shariff Ishakians in Kenya, Uganda, and
Tanganyika, whom they distinguished from Somalies who paid the non-native poll tax.
According to their calculations, which were published in , there were , Shariff
Ishakians and Somalies living in Kenya. Far from a purely disciplinary procedure,
the census could serve as a means for colonized subjects to make claims on the state and situate themselves within the colonial taxonomic order. Colonial administrators, however,
seem to have ignored the communitys self-assessment. They waited well over a decade before
committing the necessary resources to execute their own colony-wide census of the alien
Somali population. In some cases, Africans sought to render themselves legible to colonial
authorities, while state agents, eager to avoid becoming embroiled in complex legal disputes,
were responsible for preserving a degree of illegibility.

THE SPECTRE OF POPULATION GROWTH

The poll tax campaign made colonial ofcials both more aware and more anxious about
the inadequacies of their surveillance techniques. Yet, until the s, they lacked the
resources, manpower, or ideological drive to invest signicant time or money in census procedures. In , however, parliament passed the Colonial Development and Welfare Act,
which pledged to invest more funding and manpower in the African colonies. In order to
fuel the war effort, increase economic output, and mitigate African demands for greater
rights, the newly elected Labor government began to advocate for the reorganization
and modernization of rural societies in colonial Africa. The postwar years ushered in
interventions from a host of ecological experts, who brought new techno-rationalist
views about population growth to the colonies. As Joseph M. Hodge notes, surplus

Ofcial Gazette of the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya (Supplement No. ) : (Nairobi, June ),
.
Turton, The Isaq, .
The Managing Committee of the Shariff Ishakian Community, Memorandum of the Population of The Shariff
Ishakians and Somalies in East Africa (Nairobi, Jan. ), courtesy of Dr Tabea Scharrer.
For example, see C. Vaughan, The Rizeigat-Malual borderland during the condominium: the limits of
legibility, in C. Vaughan, M. Schomerus, and L. de Vries (eds.), The Borderlands of South Sudan:
Authority and Identity in Contemporary and Historical Perspectives (New York, ), .
Cooper, Decolonization, .

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THE UNACCOUNTABLE CENSUS

population had become the specter and planning and state agency the panacea of colonial advisers and policy makers in London. Inuenced by this new imperial mindset, colonial administrators in Kenya became increasingly worried about population pressure,
over-grazing, and erosion and began to intervene more extensively in the lives of their
African subjects.
Concerns with rapid population growth began to shape colonial policy toward the
Somali population. In the s and s, the colonial government had begun to transfer
the Isaaq and Harti population to the Isiolo Leasehold, which served as a corridor between
the NFD and the rest of Kenya. Ofcials hoped that, by containing the alien Somali on
what was effectively a native reserve, they could better monitor their movement and govern
them more explicitly as a tribe. However, the settlement scheme quickly ran afoul of this
new ecological mindset. In , Gerald Reece, the provincial commissioner (PC) of the
NFD, wrote that: Alien Somalis have dumped here many thousand head of cattle and
many tens of thousands of sheep and goats. The owners often live at Moyale or
Mombasa or Nakuru. By , he had dismissed the viability of a settlement program.
Harping on their supposedly irrational nomadic mentality, Reece argued that alien
Somalis would welcome their seemingly limitless kin into the region and and after a
short time we will be embarrassed with an even more serious shortage of land.
Reeces anxieties, however, were not the outcome of careful empirical investigation.
Rather, they were products of broader shifts in the colonial imagination. In , Thomas
G. Askwith became district commissioner of Isiolo. Development-minded and more liberal
in orientation, he appeared, unlike his predecessors, to be far more optimistic about the capacity of the alien Somali population to be modernized. Yet his most iconoclastic position was
his dismissal of former ofcials fears of over-grazing: We appear to be ignorant of the real
factors governing the holding capacity of the land, and although the area is supposed to have
room for about a third of the stock existing at present, the grazing still appears to survive.
In , after conducting a census of non-natives in the north, Askwith noted, to his own surprise, that despite colonial concerns with Somali overpopulation the number of houses in
Isiolo appeared to have decreased, rather than increased: It will thus be seen that the number
of houses at Isiolo far from increasing since has actually decreased by about . The
settlements appear to have increased by reason of the fact that the new tin roofs render

J. M. Hodge, Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British
Colonialism (Athens, OH, ), . Ironically, as Ittmann points out, only a few decades earlier, most
colonial ofcials thought of Sub-Saharan Africa as underpopulated. Ittmann, Where nature, .
For more on the history of postwar development projects in Africa, see F. Cooper, Modernizing bureaucrats,
backward Africans, and the development concept, in F. Cooper and R. Packard (eds.), International
Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley, CA,
), .
KNA VQ /, The position of Alien Somalis in Kenya Colony, letter from the Secretariat circulated to all
members of Executive Council, Apr. .
KNA DC ISO //, Crown Lands Ordinance, letter from G. Reece, Ofcer-in-Charge, Northern Frontier
District to Attorney General, May .
KNA DC ISO //, Alien Somali settlement scheme, letter from G. Reece, Ofcer-in-Charge, Northern
Frontier District to Chief Secretary, Mar. , .
KNA DC ISO //, Alien Somalis, letter from T. G. Askwith, District Commissioner, Isiolo District to the
Ofcer-in-Charge, Northern Frontier District, June .

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them more conspicuous than previously. One can imagine these conspicuous tin roofs,
catching the light and the eye of colonial ofcials as they monitored the vast pastoral terrain
in airplanes. Legitimacy hinged on that which could be rendered visible, measurable, and
quantiable. Askwith, however, challenged the reliability of colonial surveillance techniques
and called into question the preoccupation with overgrazing and overpopulation.
His observations, however, went largely overlooked by colonial administrators, whose
anxieties soon became commonsense. By the end of the war, ofcials had become increasingly concerned with the ecological impact of unregulated Somali mobility. In , D. C.
Edwards, the senior agricultural ofcer, published an inuential study on ecological deterioration in the rangelands of the north. In it, he connected land degradation to the breakdown
of tribal authority. Reece echoed Edwards suggestions. In , he argued that the damage that is taking place in the country was due to the failure of the Government to maintain
the old tribal organizations and advocated for the formation of clan grazing reserves.
By portraying these schemes as a return to a traditional way of life, the colonial administration obscured the novelty of this new vision of the rangeland. James E. Ellis and David
M. Swift refer to this way of thinking as the equilibrium myth. Experts who have studied
pastoral ecosystems, they argue, have often operated from the assumption that they are
potentially stable and become destabilized by overstocking and overgrazing.
However, equilibrium conditions are rarely attainable in nature. While colonial ofcials
held pastoralists responsible for ecological degradation, the quality of the rangeland, as
Ellis and Swift show, is frequently dictated by external forces, such as rainfall, rather
than internal biotic factors, like population or livestock numbers.
Edwards dubious conclusions, nevertheless, quickly became accepted administrative
logic. In the years after the Second World War, the NFD administration made a much
more concerted effort to regulate population movement and implement clan grazing
zones. Buoyed by an array of ecological and agricultural experts, ofcials hoped that,
by conning different clans to distinct grazing lands, they could rein in populations
whose boundaries, numbers, and property were far too indistinguishable (in their eyes)
for comfort. To enforce these tribal areas, ofcials relied heavily on the help of local
chiey authorities, whom they co-opted into the structures of the colonial administration.
Ofcials also recruited grazing guards, who policed these new clan and tribal boundaries
and ned trespassers by conscating a portion of their livestock.

KNA DC ISO //, Somali settlement, letter from T. G. Askwith, District Commissioner, Isiolo District to
Ofcer-in-Charge, Northern Frontier District, Apr. .
KNA PC NFD //, D. C. Edwards, Senior Agricultural Ofcer (Pasture Research), Nov. .
KNA DC MDA /, G. Reece, Control of grazing areas, July .
J. E. Ellis and D. M. Swift, Stability of African pastoral ecosystems: alternate paradigms and implications for
development, Journal of Range Management, : (), , doi: ./.
Ibid. . See also E. M. Fratkin and E. A. Roth (eds.), As Pastoralists Settle: Social, Health, and Economic
Consequences of the Pastoral Sedentarization in Marsabit District, Kenya (New York, ), .
KNA PC NFD //, Northern Province annual report, , ; KNA SA /, Wajir District
handing-over report, letter from P. G. P. D. Fullerton to J. M. Golds, May .
KNA DC WAJ //, Chiefs Meeting, Jan. ; KNA DC WAJ //, Meeting of Chiefs, Dec. ;
interview with Abdi Salat Abdille, Kotulo, June ; interview with Saman Ali Aden and Abbas Aden
Amin Osman, Wajir, Apr. ; Schlee, Territorializing, .

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THE UNACCOUNTABLE CENSUS

The territorialization of ethnicity, however, was never a fait accompli, but rather a fragile
accomplishment that had to be continually sustained through strategic compromises with
Somali leaders. In , for example, during a meeting with chiefs and headmen, the local
administration in Wajir responded to a request by the Ajuran chief to extend his communitys tribal boundaries. The chairman explained that: any consideration to extend boundaries would entirely depend on tangible evidence of an increase in population. This could
most effectively be shown by an increase in tax collection. In many cases, population
gures were, in essence, negotiable and the size of a community was often a nominal
ction of bureaucratic arrangements and tax payments. Colonial administrators and
Somali representatives also negotiated temporary and permanent border adjustments to accommodate changing climatic conditions. In , for instance, the administration made
a slight amendment to the borders in order to give the Degodia access to salt grazing,
which, the administration admitted, was probably indispensable to the well-being of
their beasts. As Mohamed Farah notes, no clan boundary, no matter how welladjudged, could be said to contain all that was necessary for the needs of the livestock
or, for that matter, accommodate changing climatic conditions.
The creation of clan boundaries did not fully inhibit the mobility of pastoralists or prevent
groups from continuing to cross the porous frontiers between Kenya, Ethiopia, and Italian
Somalia. By conceding to this reality, the colonial state effectively created an uncountable
population. This was evident in , when the government undertook the rst colony-wide
census. The census did not provide a concrete assessment for the Northern Frontier
Province (only an estimate of , people). Nor did census takers bother to include
Somalis under the main tribes of Kenya, due most likely to the difculty of assessing
their numbers. Many features of the north remained illegible to colonial authorities.
Outside of the NFD, ofcials also struggled to monitor and control Somali immigration.
Migrants whom colonial administrators considered illegal were often perceived by
Somalis living in Kenya to be fellow kin. In , R. G. Turnbull, then PC of the NFD,
cautioned another ofcial stationed in southern Kenya: Our experience in the N.F.D.
has been that once a Somali especially one of the immigrant people from Somalia or
British Somaliland gets himself dug in, he will not rest until he has established a small

KNA DC WAJ //, Minutes of Chiefs and Headmens Meeting Held at Wajir, Jan. .
As Andrew S. Mathews has shown of Mexico, ofcial knowledge rarely arises from the imposition of
legibility, but is more often the relatively fragile product of negotiations between ofcials and their
audiences in meeting halls and ofces. A. S. Mathews, Instituting Nature: Authority, Expertise, and Power
in Mexican Forests (Cambridge, MA, ), .
As Mohammed Farah notes, no clan boundary, no matter how well-adjudged, could be said to contain all
that was necessary for the needs of the livestock. M. I. Farah, From Ethnic Response to Clan Identity: A
Study of State Penetration Among the Somali Nomadic Pastoral Society of Northeastern Kenya (Uppsala,
), .
KNA PC NFD //, Northern Frontier Province annual report, , .
M. I. Farah, From Ethnic Response to Clan Identity: A Study of State Penetration Among the Somali Nomadic
Pastoral Society of Northeastern Kenya (Uppsala, ), .
KNA PC NFD //, letter from R. G. Turnbull to J. W. Cusack, Northern Province handing-over report,
Mar. .
East African Statistical Department, African Population of Kenya Colony and Protectorate: Geographical and
Tribal Studies, (Nairobi, Sept. ), .

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community of his tribespeople around him. According to Turnbull, the Isaaq and Harti
frequently requested passes for their relatives under false pretenses. He gave the hypothetical example of a Somali who asks for a temporary pass for an aged uncle who is at deaths
door and wishes to see his nephew before he dies, who then proves to be a robust young
man with seven children. Such accusations reected colonial paranoia about the unregulated nature of Somali kinship networks.
Despite these concerns, it was not until only seven years before British rule formally ended that the colonial government nally registered, issued identity cards, and
conducted a census of Somalis permanently domiciled in the colony who lived outside
of the NFD. Between and , the census team collected detailed information
about Isaaq and Harti households. This undertaking cannot be solely attributed to the
increased capacity of the colonial state. It seems that colonial administrators, by tying enumeration to the promise of greater benets, such as hospital and educational facilities, were
able to enlist the cooperation of the United Somali Association and the Central East Africa
Ishakia Association in Nairobi. It is also quite likely that the Somali leadership viewed
the process of being counted and registered as a means of attaining bureaucratic recognition as a tribe and thus securing access to the new political and economic entitlements of
the late colonial era.
By the closing years of British rule, due in large part to the cooperation of Somali elites,
colonial ofcials succeeded in imposing cadastral politics in the north and enumerating the
Isaaq and Harti population. They also transformed the idea of population into a key site
of government intervention. Yet ofcials never managed to fully deter illegal international
migration or attain an accurate count of the number of people in the NFD. Even in the
postwar era, at the height of its surveillance capacity, the colonial administration was unable to render the vast majority of Somalis into a countable, traceable population.

CONCLUSION
Numerous scholars of the postcolonial world have written about the impact of the colonial
census. Nicholas Dirks, Bernard Cohn, Mamdani, and Scott, among others, have provided
nuanced accounts of colonial knowledge production and have persuasively shown that

KNA PC NGO //, letter from R. G. Turnbull, Provincial Commissioner, Northern Province to E. A.
Sweatman, Ofcer-in-Charge, Maasai, Nov. .
Ibid.
KNA PC NGO //, letter from Ag. Secretary for African Affairs to Provincial Commissioners of Nyanza,
Coast, Rift Valley, Southern, and Central Provinces and Ofcer-in-Charge of Nairobi Extra-Provincial
District, June .
KNA DC MUR //, The Somali Census in Kenya Colony, letter from Ofcer-in-Charge of Somali Census
to Ag. Provincial Commissioner, Central Province, Nov. .
Between and , Somali political associations petitioned the government to give Somalis outside of the
NFD employment opportunities as well as their own member in the Legislative Council. There were
approximately , Somalis living outside of the NFD at this time. (Somali veterans of the Second World
War had augmented their numbers). KNA CS //, letter from A. Warsame, Vice President of the United
Somali Association to Chief Secretary, Oct. ; KNA CS //, letter from President, Somali National
Association to Chief Secretary, Feb. ; KNA CS //, letter from W. F. Coutts, Chief Secretary to
M. Blundell, Minister for Agriculture, Apr. .

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THE UNACCOUNTABLE CENSUS

European authorities shaped the self-representations of colonized subjects through the creation and imposition of census categories. This scholarship, however, has tended to overstate the reach and power of the colonial state. By focusing so exclusively on the
consequences of classication, moreover, most scholars have overlooked the enumerative
functions of the census as well as the broader implications of quantication. In administrative reports, colonial ofcials often treated their Somali subjects as though they were quantiable abstractions. In practice, however, international migration remained unchecked and
reliable censuses were few and far between. Only a small number of scholars have considered how this demographic uncertainty may have affected colonial classication.
This is an unfortunate elision, since state practices of enumeration have taken on renewed
signicance since independence. The introduction of electoral politics tied rights to what
Amitav Ghosh refers to as the language of quantity, of number. Long-standing patterns
of assimilation and migration became much more problematic in a context in which numerical predominance determined seats in local and central government. By implementing an
electoral system without deinstitutionalizing the colonial legacy of ethnic boundaries, the
Kenyan government also linked demographics and political rights with ethnicity. Fearful
of losing demographic control over districts and constituencies now thought of as ethnic
homelands, many groups came to think of international and internal migrants as outsiders
on their land. Elections often became sites of violence in the decades after independence.
These electoral contests have had particularly negative implications for Kenyan Somalis,
whose citizenship was already considered suspect due to the Shifta War. As journalists
and scholars such as Mohammed Adow and Richard Hogg have shown, the Kenyatta regime criminalized Somalis and northerners more broadly due to their support for
pan-Somali irredentism in the early s. The Kenyan government also instituted various discriminatory policies as people ed the rapidly deteriorating political situation in
Somalia. In , on the eve of multi-party elections, the Moi regime implemented a
screening process for Somalis living in Kenya, which was widely decried by Muslim leaders
to be unjust and xenophobic. Some Kenyan ofcials took advantage of the screening

B. S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ, ), ; N. B.
Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ, ); M. Mamdani,
Dene and Rule: Native as Political Identity (Cambridge, MA, ), ; Scott, Seeing, .
A notable exception is Arjun Appadurai. See A. Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the
Geography of Anger (Durham, ), ; A. Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization (Minneapolis, ), .
A. Ghosh, The fundamentalist challenge, in W. H. Gass and L. Cuoco (eds.), The Writer and Religion
(Carbondale, IL, ), .
Mamdani, Citizen; P. Geschiere, The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa
and Europe (Chicago, ), . As Peter Geschiere shows, nativist politics and anti-immigrant
sentiments are also problems within Europe and thus can hardly be considered exclusive to Africa. For
recent work on the relationship between elections, political ethnicity, and multiparty democracy in Kenya,
see M. Bratton and M. S. Kimenyi, Voting in Kenya: putting ethnicity in perspective, Journal of Eastern
African Studies, : (), , doi: ./.
Revisiting Kenyas forgotten pogroms, Al Jazeera, Dec. (http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/
aljazeeracorrespondent///revisiting-kenya-forgotten-pogroms-.html);
R. Hogg, Pastoralism and impoverishment: the case of the Isiolo Boran of Northern Kenya, Disasters, :
(), .

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exercise to reclaim constituencies for certain Somali clans and deter the growing number
of Somali refugees from swaying the outcome of future elections.
The transition towards multi-party democracy, especially when it has coincided with
large-scale population movements, has often triggered heated debates over autochthony
and ethnic citizenship. By the early s, approximately half-a-million Somali asylum
seekers were living within Kenya. Turning away from overcrowded and under-equipped
refugee camps, many refugees began to settle in urban centers within the country and,
in some cases, managed to illegally purchase Kenyan identication cards from underpaid
civil servants. This only further blurred the already tenuous distinction between a legal
citizen and an illegal foreigner.
Due to the political signicance of population counts and the ambiguities surrounding
citizenship, routine demographic exercises are often fraught and contentious. The decennial census, for instance, held important repercussions for the ways in which resources
and power would be distributed under the new devolved constitution. It also reignited
debates over the legal status of the Somali people. When Kenyan ofcials decided to
annul the results in several northern districts, many of the regions leaders accused the government of deating their population numbers and politically disenfranchising citizens.
While some commentators blamed the irregularities of the census on misreporting and
the inclusion of refugees, others pointed to the omission of citizens from counts in previous
decades. As the census controversy reveals, difcult empirical problems can become virtually inseparable from contentious political matters. If politics depends so heavily on
demographic gures, one wonders if Somalis are fated to remain second-class citizens in
Kenya always marked by the ambiguity of their nationality and their threatening potential to become a majority.
It is misleading to see conicts like the census dispute as relatively recent phenomena triggered solely by the rapid migration and demographic shifts of the post-Cold War
era. Arjun Appadurai suggests that: the idea of a containable and countable population,
the idea of a reliable census, and the idea of stable and transparent categories have
come unglued in the era of globalization. This article, however, has shown that these
ideas were always tenuous abstractions of colonial authorities. The colonial state hardly
t the image of a modernist social planner closely monitoring or busily enumerating its
subjects. In addition, the notion of a permanent population was little more than a bureaucratic ction in many parts of the colony, especially northern Kenya.

A. M. Wandati, Screening: no laughing matter, Daily Nation ( November ), ; E. Lochery, Rendering

difference visible: the Kenyan state and its Somali citizens, African Affairs, : (), , doi:
./afraf/ads.
P. Geschiere and F. B. Nyamnjoh, Capitalism and autochthony: the seesaw of mobility and belonging, Public
Culture, : (), , doi: ./---.
E. H. Campbell, Urban refugees in Nairobi: problems of protection, mechanisms of survival, and possibilities
of integration, Journal of Refugee Studies, : (), , doi:./jrs/fel. Many citizens of
Somali descent have also been denied ofcial forms of identication due to government discrimination.
Consequently, ID cards are often a poor marker of legal status.
Jerven, Poor, ; Samora, The Somali; D. Zarembka, Perilous times for Kenyas Somalis, Foreign Policy
in Focus, Oct. (http://fpif.org/perilous-times-kenyas-somalis/).
Appadurai, Fear, .

 v o l . , n o .

THE UNACCOUNTABLE CENSUS

It would also be a mistake to view the lack of reliable census data as a failure of colonial
governance. Firstly, as James Ferguson notes, even failed government initiatives can bring
about important changes and often succeed in bringing power to bear in unexpected
ways. Through registration and census endeavors, colonial authorities promoted the notion that populations could and should be enumerated, institutionalized the idea that ethnic groups naturally belonged on dened territories, and constructed the distinction
between a legal and illegal immigrant. The colonial state created a set of bureaucratic
norms, which (though it was unable to fully enforce) came to dene the boundaries of
legal citizenship. Secondly, the absence of accurate demographic data had few negative political consequences prior to independence. Colonial ofcials were able to rule their Somali
subjects in an inexpensive and largely effective manner, even if they occasionally wished
they could better regulate Somali mobility. This policy of limited surveillance was also fairly accommodating of Somali groups, who were able to maintain regional networks that, in
many cases, had long predated the establishment of colonial borders.
The colonial period was a time when a delicate set of compromises regarding Somali immigration reigned. Under empire, older forms of mobility, kinship, and nomadism came to
coexist with the more recent territorial state. The kinds of arrangements that colonial
ofcials were able to work out under empire may no longer be feasible in todays political
climate. Population data is too closely tied to political power and demographic uncertainty
can easily become fodder for xenophobic and majoritarian violence. Nevertheless, examining the history of the colonial census suggests that Kenyas contemporary demographic
controversies cannot be reductively blamed on illegal immigration. Nor can they be
understood through an ahistorical and idealized model of Weberian state surveillance.

J. Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho
(Minneapolis, ), .