4 - Ecology and Politics

Summary

WAJIR DISTRICT

Wajir District was delineated as an administrative unit by the British. Its boundaries, although they were meant to stabilize the ethnic distributions which were found at a given moment – the time colonial rule was established – do not reflect earlier or later ethnic or cultural boundaries nor do they comprise a viable economic or ecological unit. Human and livestock populations have always moved across these boundaries, no matter how hard administrations tried to prevent them from doing so, because the scarce and irregular distribution of the resources which they need for their survival dictates a wide ranging form of mobility.

Composition and demarcation

Populations speaking early forms of Somali stretched before the sixteenth century from Lake Turkana to the Benadir coast and the tip of the Horn. In the sixteenth century the southward expansion of Oromo speakers from Ethiopia drove a wedge into this Somaloid-speaking continuum, separating the Rendille in the west from the ancestral Somali in the east. The Oromo group which had the strongest impact on the history of what is now Wajir District were the Boran. It is due to them that the Gabra, Sakuye, and sections of the Ajuran and Garre have abandoned their ancestral Somaloid form of speech and now speak Boran. Rather than expelling and replacing these earlier groups, the Boran incorporated them into an alliance – the Worr Libin, people of Libin/Liban – which had ritual as well as military aspects.