Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Kenya: a social history of the Shifta conflict, c. 1963-1968 by Hannah Whittaker (review)

The Northern Frontier District (NFD) of Kenya, populated by Somalis, was an albatross around the neck of postcolonial Kenya from 1963 to 1968. Misunderstandings over the NFD struggle to secede from Kenya and join the Somali Republic have been recurrent in academic studies and popular discourse. This is illustrated by the title of Nene Mburu’s 2005 study, Bandits on the Border: the last frontier in the search for Somali unity. Similarly, the French political scientist Jean-François Bayart called the Shifta ‘Somali bandits’ in his acclaimed L’État en Afrique: la politique du ventre, likely without understanding the context of their struggle. For most of the NFD population, the Shifta struggle was political because of the widespread desire to join the Somali state. Yet it was also personal because many families had members fighting on both sides of the war.

Hannah Whittaker has presented a fine study of the Shifta conflict based on her doctoral thesis at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Hers is the first detailed, well-researched work which sees the Somalis in the NFD as part of the Kenyan state. The author names her study a social history, but it seems to be more a political - even war - history than a social one. Relying on oral interviews, but foregrounding British perspectives and Kenyan government stances on the Shifta, Whittaker often, perhaps unsuspectingly, accepts the official sides of the story. Overall, the tone of her book reflects the fact that she is not as critical of Kenyan government documents as she is of oral witness testimonies provided by the former members and supporters of the Shifta.

By calling the insurgents Shifta, Kenyatta and the postcolonial Kenyan state followed in the footsteps of its predecessor, the British colonial state, which dismissed anti-colonial rebels as Shifta or bandits (in Somali, burcad). The term Shifta itself originated from the nineteenth-century imperial Abyssinian regime, which used it to refer to the peripheral tribal societies that had resisted its expansionist expeditions, and the Kenyan government adopted the term with a similarly pejorative meaning and method. Thus, both the postcolonial Kenyan government and the imperial Abyssinian state spoke with the same language when it came to dealing with the Somalis under their domain. Despite these continuities, the Shifta conflict was a reflection of the brutal British colonial legacy. Benefiting from the experiences accumulated during the Mau Mau years, the Kenyan authorities, many of whom were former Mau Mau members, adopted tactics of counterinsurgency similar to those they had suffered under colonial rule in order to deal with the Shifta. This included the collective punishment of Somali civilian supporters of the Shifta, which, however, was exacerbated by capital punishment sentences for captured insurgents. As Whittaker does not consider the colonial policies that contributed to the emergence of local rebellion in detail, she sometimes de-emphasizes the historical roots of the armed conflict.

Despite otherwise ‘stable colonial governance’ (p. 8), civilian populations were punished as soon as the Kenyan military was ambushed. After successfully canvassing for support from Somali-affiliated groups, such as Boran and Rendille, the Shifta extended their operations to areas outside the purview of the NFD districts. So strong and elusive were the Shifta that the Kenyan government considered all the NFD population as insurgents. In order to weaken the Shifta’s ability to hide in the bush, a notorious campaign of villagization - unlike the progressive one in Tanzania under Julius Nyerere - was employed in Kenya to avert human and livestock movements. With maximum force and indiscriminate violence, this policy was in line with the colonial mode of counterinsurgency: that is, rounding up civilians seen as the (re)sources of insurgents, as everyone could become ‘a potential security threat’ (p. 100).

In spite of Whittaker’s careful hand, some errors slipped into the book. The Wagalla massacre...