History, Territory and the Road Effect in Post-conflict Somaliland Luca Ciabarri1
The road that connects the port of Berbera in the Gulf of Aden to the Ethiopian border and which continues to the Ethiopian highlands was at the heart of the process of formation and consolidation of the neo-state of Somaliland.2 It is, indeed, no exaggeration to argue that this road ‘made’ the state. Representing a major axis along which the new polity took shape and new institutions were formed out of the Somali civil war in the early 1990s, this road has since entailed many of the hopes, realities and failures of the country’s development. The aim of this chapter is to qualify this assertion by developing an ethnographic analy-sis of the road and to reflect upon the possibilities and limitations of such an approach. The situation of institutional vacuum that was initially created by the Somali war has highlighted specific features of the relationship between the road – conceived as a potential for mobility and connection – the territory it came to occupy, and its inhabitants. Before analysing the ethnographic data however, this chapter begins by providing a few methodological and historical remarks.
1 The chapter draws on fieldwork carried out between 2007 and 2008 along Somaliland roads.
Fieldwork and writing have been possible thanks to substantial support from the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle-Saale, Germany, where I worked from 2006 to 2009 and in 2011 from the Wenner-Gren Foundation (Hunt fellowship). Earlier versions of the ar-ticle were presented in conferences in Djibouti, Leipzig and Thurnau. I’d like to thank the participants of these gatherings for their invaluable feedback, specifically the members of the ‘African roads group’ convened in Thurnau 2012 and Lisbon 2013 workshops under the organisation of Kurt Beck, Gabriel Klaeger and Michael Stasik.
2 Somaliland, internationally not recognised, is a de-facto state, occupying the territory of the former British Protectorate. It emerged in 1991 from the dissolution of Somalia after three years of internal struggle with the central regime.
The State and the Road, or Who Builds What along the Road:
Ethnographic Approaches
In recent anthropological studies, roads have frequently been associated with the colonial or postcolonial state and with international institutions involved in development and nation building projects. Ethnographic accounts (Dalak-oglou 2010; Harvey 2005; Masquelier 2002; Pina-Cabral 1987) have described roads as expressing a set of official meanings (modernity, national integration, development, future) whilst simultaneously showing the multiple ways in which local actors appropriate roads (how they are reworked practically and symbolically and, at times, even rejected, often in the very process of their con-struction). Roads thus also come to be linked to creativity, change, ambiguity, risk and danger, as well as to the threat of losing control and to external influ-ences. In this respect, the case that is presented in this chapter is slightly dif-ferent and it helps to focus on other facets of roads. The Somaliland case does not fall into the kind of narrative of ‘built by the state, the road represents…
(modernity, development, speed, connection, threat, local tensions etc.)’. Rath-er it can be conceived by the hypothetical narrative of ‘built by the road, the state represents…’, which simply hints at the effects generated by a road in its relationship with the territory and its inhabitants, including political effects.
Alongside its material configurations (paved road, gravel road etc.), a road is also a form of territorial integration that requires, among others, a mode of regulation of transit and movement. The road is therefore not only a physical construction but also a social and political one, which requires a number of preconditions to ensure that things and people can actually move along it. This became all the more evident in a situation of institutional breakdown, like in Somalia during the civil war. The processes of reconstruction and reformula-tion of these condireformula-tions have basically corresponded to the processes of the formation of Somaliland. By integrating the road – alongside the port and the border zone – into a specific economic and political project, these dynamics gave rise both to a transit economy as well as to a commercial state. Territo-rial and historical dimensions also play a role: as a form of territoTerrito-rial organisa-tion, the road has represented a site of opportunity in times of crisis, dictating specific patterns of economic and political behavior and articulating specific geopolitical designs deeply rooted in local social memories. In the long run, roads do not simply adapt to their territory but produce and refashion it too.
In order to further clarify this point, we should first highlight the simple fact that there is no single point of view nor is there a single focus for a road – as much as there is not one single direction. A road can therefore never be
observed in its entirety, and any specific point on a road basically implies a
‘somewhere else’. This also means that a road is external and extraneous to any local context, despite it being intricately interwoven with it. Incidentally, this is why roads are frequently perceived as something ambiguous, as a threat or an adventure. A sense of totality of a road can only be constructed and imag-ined by different social actors aiming at different objectives.3 Generally, this totality refers to the potential of a road for connection and mobility; but this potential is then realised in many different ways and is directed towards mul-tiple goals.
It is through this constructed sense of totality (along the axes of mobility and connection) that the road de facto produces social effects, to paraphrase Mitchell’s (1999) notion of state effect.4 In imagining a form of totality of a road, forcefully partial and subjective, social actors interweave it with their own strategies, plans, actions, hopes, imaginations and tools. The road effect lies in this interweaving, in which a road is no longer an inert infrastructure but a social and political construction, managing, producing or performing mobil-ity and connection.
My main interest for this chapter pertains to the long-term effects of the re-gional commercial corridors in the northeast Horn of Africa. This set of effects results from a number of unrelated actions and actors. Consequently, the eth-nographic representation has to take into account all these factors as well as the entanglements of road stories with various forms of local social histories, constructing a sort of ‘biography of the road’. In the case study under consid-eration, this includes accounts on trade, movement of people, war and peace, transport, the knots along the road in the form of urban centres, the port as well as the border zone.5 In order to account for the different totalities built through the road, we have to intellectually move along it, and consequently connect one point with the other in writing the road.
3 This is true for any phenomenon where presence and absence are simultaneously impli-cated. As for the experience of regionality, Nancy Munn (1990: 2) similarly argues that ‘for a subject, a regional world is not given but lived and created’ through ‘experiential synthesis’
and ‘spatiotemporal connectors’, which are rooted in history and socio-cultural patterns.
4 Timothy Mitchell questions the idea of permanence and solidity of the state by arguing that this idea, rather than being consubstantial to it, is constantly constructed by social actors, producing a state effect and thus the capacity of the state itself to act (Mitchell 1999).
5 The term ‘biography’ refers to Kopytoff’s and Appadurai’s reflections (1986), but is used here in a broad sense, referring to the reconstruction of the social histories and identities of groups, individuals and places found along the road.
Roads for Empires, for Development, for Trade
The Berbera corridor, as it is named in the current developmental terminol-ogy (ec Kenya 2003), runs from the port city of Berbera, Somaliland, to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, with a total length of 937 km (C1 in Map 5.1).6 The Somaliland stretch corresponds to 241 km, even though the Somali-inhabited area runs well inside Ethiopia, reaching the town of Jijiga and the ethnically mixed region of Harar. The stretch between Berbera and Harar represents the historical trading route. The two centres are the most ancient towns along the road, while Jijiga and the current capital city of Somaliland, Hargeysa, emerged more recently (Lewis 2002). Smaller towns and villages took shape along the road in the 20th century, which was due to the road effect, the expansion of the state and the decline of nomadic pastoralism. In addition to the Berbera corridor, the region
6 In this article, the term ‘corridor’ refers to the roads’ function (connecting the sea to the inland, primarily for commercial purposes) that I focus on, irrespective of their particular shape and materiality. As long as the roads fulfill this function, I use terms like road corridor, commercial corridor and commercial route interchangeably.
Map 5.1 Selected road corridors between Ethiopia, Somaliland, Djibouti
is also crossed by other routes leading to the Ethiopian highlands. All these corridors are in direct competition with each other, but, as will be shown, a closer look reveals a number of relevant intersections.
Other corridors include, west of Berbera: (1) the historical route from the port of Zeila7 (Somaliland) to Ethiopia (C2 in Map 5.1), which in colonial times was replaced by (2) the corridor from Djibouti to Addis Ababa (C3 in Map 5.1).
Given Ethiopia’s lack of accessibility to the Eritrean ports, the motor road lead-ing through this corridor is now the principal tradlead-ing route for the land-locked country. East of Berbera (3) is the Boosaso corridor8 (C4 in Map 5.1) which has emerged in recent years as a result of the construction of a road and a port in the late 1980s. This has made Boosaso a leading centre of the new transit econ-omy so peculiar of the 1990s and 2000s Somalia. Finally, from Berbera departs also (4) the Berbera-Burco route (C5 in Map 5.1), which links Berbera to eastern Somaliland as well as to southern Somalia and eastern Ethiopia.
The Italian Army built a proper motor road following the ancient caravan routes that connects Harar to Berbera during the invasion campaign of the British Protectorate of Somaliland in 1941. The occupation lasted only a few months before it was brought to an end by the British counteroffensive, but the road layout remained.9 In the 1960s a Lebanese company asphalted the stretch of the road from Berbera to Hargeysa utilising European funds. The project marks the initial years of independence and attests to the importance of the port of Berbera for the new Somali state.
Asphalting the section from Hargeysa to the Ethiopian border was carried out in the late 1970s and 1980s, and proceeded very intermittently: an Italian company completed one section, then a Chinese one took over the task up to the village of Kalabeydh. Approximately 15 more kilometres were eventu-ally realised by Somali constructors until Dilla. The border, however, was nev-er reached and a gravel road rehabilitated by intnev-ernational aid in late 1990s still connects Kalabeydh to the boundary. The entire project suffered from the tense relationship between Ethiopia and Somalia, as a consequence of the 1977–78 Ogaden war fought between the two states, and later on from the growing instability within Somalia. Even today it is still possible to notice the
7 Somali: Saylac.
8 Located in the semi-autonomous region of Puntland, another entity that has emerged from the dissolution of Somalia.
9 Together with the economic and social changes brought about by the expansion of roads in the region due to these competitive imperial designs (Geshekter 1985). For the relevance of motor vehicles and traders to African social history see Gewald, Luning and van Walraven 2009.
differences between these sections of the road: despite uniform repair works, time continues to produce different potholes and damages, which are a conse-quence of the different materials and techniques used by the various construc-tion companies.10
After the civil conflict (1988–1991), a campaign of substantial repair works was launched with eu funds assigned to post-conflict rehabilitation and local institution building (ec Kenya 2003) and a Somaliland Road Authority was es-tablished. Again, the fragility of local development and international rivalries emerged: the eu rehabilitation projects carried out in the 1990s, involving the entire Berbera corridor, remained poorly funded in the 2000s, while in Ethio-pia, Chinese companies stepped in to build an asphalt road from Harar to Jijiga and from there to the international border.
Empire making, war making, development making and commercial designs have over the years thus represented different power configurations that have shaped the road. But whether they are paved or not; rehabilitated gravel roads, or pure sandy tracks, the central feature of the road network in the region is represented by the intricate set of transit corridors connecting the sea to the inland.
Competing Views of the Regional Corridors, Past and Present Within this framework, three general factors directly support my initial claim regarding the link between the road and the emerging nation of Somaliland.
The first factor addresses history and evokes the strengths of the past – of structures of longue durée – in guiding current changes: the Somali coasts have historically played the role of an interface and a transit zone between Ethio-pia and the sea. As mentioned above, the road from Berbera to EthioEthio-pia cor-responds to an historical trading route that has for centuries connected the Ethiopian highlands to the Somali lowlands and the sea with alternating for-tunes (Burton 1987; Robecchi Bricchetti 1896; Swayne 1903).11 This historical dimension resonates with present days and determines patterns of economic and social behaviour and of territorial specialisation. In the contemporary context, the current paved road rests on an infrastructure of memories, social
10 Information on road constructions has been collected through interviews with truck driv-ers and traddriv-ers during fieldwork in 2007–08 – no official records are available after the civil conflict.
11 For classical and recent analysis of the importance of trade and trading routes in the region see Abir 1980; Freitag 2003; Hersi 1977; Lewis 2002; Miran 2010.
institutions and structures of power, which historically served to regulate the flow of goods and people in the region and which today continues to represent horizons of development and opportunities.
The second factor draws upon the economic developments of Somaliland after the civil war and is centred on trade. A vibrant private sector and a strong business class have been described as pivotal determinants of the re-configurations of the Somali territories during the civil war as well as in sub-sequent years (Bradbury 2008; Ciabarri 2010; Little 2003; Marchal 1996).12 As the next sections will show, Somaliland business and trade correspond, above all, with the port of Berbera. Besides the port, however, trade and business in the region also comprise roads, including the connection to Ethiopia, border crossing and travel as well as international networks, urban markets and the diaspora (Ciabarri 2010). As a result, none of these aspects can be considered individually; and when combined, they construct a techno-political complex of transit, mobility and connection in which the road – and its effects – clearly plays a crucial role. Trade, in particular long-distance trade and its local ramifi-cations, epitomises the essence of the road and until recent years, the road has literally been a synonym for trade. More specifically, the Berbera corridor is now part of a globalised trade which connects Somaliland to Ethiopia on the one side and the markets of Dubai, South-East Asia and China on the other.
The third and final factor concerns Ethiopian national interests and the re-opening of the border between Somaliland and Ethiopia in the early 1990s which intersected with Ethiopian strategic objectives of safeguarding its access to the sea. Eritrean independence in 1991 and the 1998 Ethiopian-Eritrean bor-der war turned Ethiopia into a land-locked country, depriving it of its habitual sea outlets, the ports of Massawa and Assab in Eritrea. The events set a specific strategic scenario across the region and a tense interplay of primary national interests, involving the entire Horn of Africa and instilling a strong sense of competition between the different seaports and commercial corridors.13 The competition involves a diverse range of actors, such as national states, inter-national institutions, local businessmen and other local actors as well as spe-cific political stakes – access, control, regulation, use and appropriation of the
12 For a regional perspective on the redrawing of the political map of Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea see Schlee 2003. On spatial reconfigurations and political crises see Mbembe 2000, on spatial analysis Howard and Shain 2005.
13 From Ethiopia, possible corridors to the sea run towards Port Sudan, the Eritrean ports, Djibouti, Mogadishu, Berbera and Bosaaso in Somalia or Mombasa and the Lamu port under construction in Kenya.
corridors – and techno-political stakes, ranging from road construction to road maintenance. It is precisely within this variety of socio-political dynamics and actors that ethnography sets in.
Road Users: Truck Drivers and Traders
In 2008, Ahmed ‘Serwai’ was working in the urban transport sector in Awdal, a neighbouring region of the main Berbera road. He was retired as a truck driver as he had been unable to return to his previous job after the civil war. His nick-name, Serwai, came from the fact that he was the first in his region to drive a ZY Hino truck. Introduced in Northern Somalia in the 1980s, the Hino ZY marked a difference from the lighter Japanese trucks of the 1970s. Hino ZYs were the new, heavy trucks that began to replace the European lorries that had been in use since the colonial and early postcolonial years. ‘In the 1960s to buy a truck was relatively cheap, the Somali shilling was linked to the us dollar’, Ahmed Serwai related. ‘Then inflation came. Japanese trucks in the 1970s were cheaper and accessible. Japanese since the 1970s have equipped all Africa.’ Serwai is well known for being one of the best drivers in this region. According to his comments, however:
Nowadays it is no longer important to be a good driver. Normally now there is a second pilot in the cabin who belongs to the subclan of the truck owner and who sooner or later learns how to drive and takes your seat. In the past trust was more important an element in the relation-ships between driver and owner.
Whether it is true or not, the statement points to a common change in post conflict regulations. In the early 1990s, the combination of the owner’s and driver’s clan was associated with the problem of security and protection: for any single tribal territory, numerous roadblocks punctuated the road and trad-ers used to organise themselves into convoys of trucks with armed guards.
Insecurity along the road dates back to the years preceding the civil war. For example, Farah, another retired driver, spent much of our conversation de-scribing how he was repeatedly ambushed along the road in those years. Later, when the roadblocks were dismantled, the relationships between drivers and owners continued to be confined to the clan boundaries – which was also due to the logic of the internal redistribution of resources in times of economic difficulties.
‘Now’, Ahmed added, ‘old ZYs continue to circulate together with Nissan
‘Now’, Ahmed added, ‘old ZYs continue to circulate together with Nissan