Most Somalis are nomadic pastoralists they look down on farming
Agriculture land by country, Africa
- Thread starter 𐒋𐒖𐒆𐒔𐒖𐒕𐒈
- Start date
Many are still settled farmers or agro-pastoral regardless. Pretty much in every region where the soil is fertile enough and you don't have issues like the tsetse fly you will find tribes that farm despite all the brouhaha around "qotis". Arabs are the same. The proud Badu spits on the man who farms and settles down but even so when they find an oasis...
Somalis are agro-pastoralists not nomads, they did both farming and herding. At times they combined both.
Geeljire means camel herding , it does not mean nomad. We didn't just keep camels, they kept a bunch of other livestock Donkeys, horses, cows even. There is no geeljire culture.
If anyone is curious about it you can check out my thread on Agriculture. Somalis engaged in farming in almost every region of Historical Somalia, with most of the dense farming communities being clustered in the NorthWest , Harar Uplands and South.Central.
Somali Agricultural Revolution( 900-1600s) ?
I have been looking at various historical trends and linkages and came across. The Arab Agricultural Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Agricultural_Revolution which took places through the entirety of the medieval period. Which made me think that Somalia might have been connected to...
www.somalispot.com
Bantus never existed in NorthWest Somalia, Ogaden/Harar Uplands etc where Somali farming communities cultivated and exported exorbinant of amount of wheat, coffee and sorghum out of the port of Berbera and Zayla.
And the date palm plantations along the Eastern coast of Bari was similarly cultivated by local clans, not Bantus.
Outsourcing of farm labour to slaves only happened in the 19th century in the Southern Somalia, to increase production capacity and cut costs. This is before industrialization and machinery undercut large human labour requirements. It was driven by pure profit motive rather than some aversion to farming. It's similar to what happened in the New Age Americas.
And the farmland that was labored on was owned by native Somali farming communities who had been farming for centuries, they were the ones who purchased them.
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Most farmers today in Somalia are not even Bantus. All communities where it's farmeable engage in farming, it's not restricted to a single sub-set or group.
Somalia was pretty much food secure or self-sufficient throughout the 1970s-1980s and prior to colonialism they was net food exporters , even during the middle ages. Back then they didn't just farm in the south along the two rivers, there was even small scale local substistence farming happening everywhere , even in places like Hafun people farmed and produced food locally to support their communities. They carry out similar subsistence activities in many places today throughout the north as well.
It's not because they are not good at farming or we have unproductive lands that there is higher food insecurity in many places today, it has to do with the fact that cheap outdated produce and aid from America and Western world is flooding the markets that undermine local production and they can't even compete with their produce in the markets, they end up losing money they invested in their farms and have to scale back.
What Somalia needs is better economic protection and some form of subsidies for farmers.
Watch this video it goes throughout it :
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Here is source from year 1876 describing that most Hawiye are settled farmers in the inland regions away from the drier coastal plains.
''In the inland regions most of them appear to be settled agriculturalists, which is doubtless due to the greater elevation of this region, which is also better watered and more fertile than the low-lying coastlands"
Source: The Earth and Its Inhabitants, Africa: South and east Africa by Elisée Reclus
Wherever the soil was fertile enough and where it was farmeable the same clans farmed the land.
You can also see this in the more fertile rainfed elevated interior of the NorthWest throughout the 1800s-1900s there was various farming villages labored by various Dir and Isaaq families. Towns like Gebiley, Burco, Borama and Hargeisa grew out of agricultural settlements.
Only the interior modern cities grew around fertile agricultural settlements like Burco, Borama and Hargeisa. They were essentially centers connected to farming villages . So i have no idea what @berberaboy66 @Garaad.XIV are on about, where there is suitable fertile land , Somalis farmed. Whether they farm or not has nothing to do with being lazy
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Arabsiyawi
HA Activist.
This is such a big lie. Southern tribes are agropastoral with a huge emphasis on the agro part. To say only slaves or "bantus" were farmers is not only insulting to them but to us as well. Somali culture isn't "geeljire culture" only.
He's a hooyo mataalo who seems to know close to nothing about the homeland. The way these kids talk you'd think they believe the Raxanweyn are Bantus or something. Every idiot knows practically half of the RX tribes living along the Jubba and Shabelle valley were historically settled agriculturalists or agro-pastoral and are certainly not Bantus. It's literally in the name of one of their main tribal divisions:
Rahanweyn - Wikipedia
Digil iyo Mirifle. Though even the tribes who don't come under Digil practice cattle keeping and agriculture. My own mtDNA N1a1a3 comes from my maternal great grandmother who mothered my paternally Majeerteen grandmother and was Raxanweyn herself of the Maalin Weyn who are "Mirifle". She herself belonged to a settled cultivator family and owned many cattle. And guess what? There's no genetic difference between her and northern Somalis. These kids are cringe to read, wallahi.
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Part of the problem is that there is this narrative spread by revisionist somali scholars that the authcnous pouplation of the jubba River valleys are actually somali bantu. And that the other somalis are recent arrivals and that they taught us agriculture. One of the biggest scholars behind this Theory was omar eno.He's a hooyo mataalo who seems to know close to nothing about the homeland. The way these kids talk you'd think they believe the Raxanweyn are Bantus or something. Every idiot knows practically half of the RX tribes living along the Jubba and Shabelle valley were historically settled agriculturalists or agro-pastoral and are certainly not Bantus. It's literally in the name of one of their main tribal divisions:
Rahanweyn - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Digil iyo Mirifle. Though even the tribes who don't come under Digil practice cattle keeping and agriculture. My own mtDNA N1a1a3 comes from my maternal great grandmother who mothered my paternally Majeerteen grandmother and was Raxanweyn herself of the Maalin Weyn who are "Mirifle". She herself belonged to a settled cultivator family and owned many cattle. And guess what? There's no genetic difference between her and northern Somalis. These kids are cringe to read, wallahi.
If that is true why is that the case? Any armchair here or elsewhere knows that Bantus being the main farmers is blatantly wrong.
People started propagating this narrative after the collapse of the Somali govt. But the reason is that there's no real proper books on somali history. There's some papers and articles here and there . But it's all fragmented nobody has gathered manuscripts and other materials to write even a basic survey of somali history. Let alone books on the different sultnates.
I think if you were gonna write a basic history of somalia i would first focus on the last 500 years. My sources at minium would be
1) futuh al habesha
2) the gadbursui chronicles
3) that one majeeerten chronicles idinlaa mentioned
4) the sources sharif aydrus used in his book on somali history
5) books on the darwish
6) geledi chronicles
7) European Explorer accounts
8) the later chronicles from harar
He's a hooyo mataalo who seems to know close to nothing about the homeland. The way these kids talk you'd think they believe the Raxanweyn are Bantus or something. Every idiot knows practically half of the RX tribes living along the Jubba and Shabelle valley were historically settled agriculturalists or agro-pastoral and are certainly not Bantus. It's literally in the name of one of their main tribal divisions:
Rahanweyn - Wikipedia
Digil iyo Mirifle. Though even the tribes who don't come under Digil practice cattle keeping and agriculture. My own mtDNA N1a1a3 comes from my maternal great grandmother who mothered my paternally Majeerteen grandmother and was Raxanweyn herself of the Maalin Weyn who are "Mirifle". She herself belonged to a settled cultivator family and owned many cattle. And guess what? There's no genetic difference between her and northern Somalis. These kids are cringe to read, wallahi.
Remember in another thread where i was explaining that Raxanweyn are just a confederation of different Somali clans and a big chunck of them are from other neighboring pasotral clans that integrate with the nucleas founding Somali clans.
For example certain Tunni clans like the Da'faarat, include Hawiye clans like Abgaal/Habr Gidir and Ajowa include Hawiye and Ajuuran clans like Waaqsheyn and Nijey. Daqitira includes Bimaal clans like Kumurto and Goygal includes Sheekhaal and Hawiye clans like Hamar and Doyle.
But the largest chunk of them actually seem to be Garre, like Gaafle, Geesi, Madowe, Matangalle, that exist across all 4 out of the 5 confederations. The rest being Mirifle and Digil clans.
Tunni were sedentary agro-pastoralists that engaged in farming acitvities
But it goes to show what i try to stress this but often falls on deaf ears. The simple fact that Somali clans are not political units, they are fluid economic units meant to facilitate cooperation and resource sharing. People are not grouped into them to separate and distinguish themselves from each-other but to create family networks coordinate production and trade
We were all part of a shared economic system and also that almost all Somali clans engaged in diverse economic activities, they weren't strictly herders who tended to only livestock
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Do people forget that those Bantus were farming in servitude on land belonging to Somalis? When the Italians abolished slavery in the early 1900s, much of the land owned by the Somali plantation-owning class was then gifted to these freed slaves.
It was clear that Somalis saw the value of agriculture; that’s why we see vast banks of the Jubba and Shabelle rivers turning into plantations in the 19th century. It’s also why Somalis swiftly expanded into Kenya and Ethiopia, seeking more fertile land—partly to profit from this new way of life. Lets be clear a lot of Somalis double dipped, doing what can be described as agro pastoralism.
While Somalis did look down on farming, the strongest disdain was found among those farthest from agricultural communities. Once small Darood and Hawiye communities started successfully farming and relayed that information back to their kinsmen, more Somalis began moving further and further south.
It reminds me of those who hate/fear Jeraarweyne, rarely are they hated among the Somalis closest to them, its the Somalis far away that feel somehow threatened by them.
It was clear that Somalis saw the value of agriculture; that’s why we see vast banks of the Jubba and Shabelle rivers turning into plantations in the 19th century. It’s also why Somalis swiftly expanded into Kenya and Ethiopia, seeking more fertile land—partly to profit from this new way of life. Lets be clear a lot of Somalis double dipped, doing what can be described as agro pastoralism.
While Somalis did look down on farming, the strongest disdain was found among those farthest from agricultural communities. Once small Darood and Hawiye communities started successfully farming and relayed that information back to their kinsmen, more Somalis began moving further and further south.
It reminds me of those who hate/fear Jeraarweyne, rarely are they hated among the Somalis closest to them, its the Somalis far away that feel somehow threatened by them.
Bantus was not given land that was owned by Somali farmers that they worked on, only a small group of them were allocated a separate land elsewhere. The same Somali farming families continue to live and farm the land to this day, nothing has truly changed except that they no longer use slaves.
Hawiye, Bimaal or even Darood established the farm lands and was farming them much like the Isaaq and Gadabursi families in the NorthWest ,and Darood commmunities in the Harar Uplands did , before they imported slaves. Living in settled villages.
Their use of slaves was a profit driven thing, they needed a large cheap labour pool to produce crops for exports. They had built up a significant purchasing power before they bought them as well.
There is a difference between ""cash crop"" farming and "food crop" farming. They did not need/depend on Bantu slaves to cultivate food crops for them to live off like Sorghum etc but they needed a large labor pool for large scale cash crops like Millet etc so they could make money from it as it wasn't meant for domestic consumption but for foreign markets instead. It had more to do with scaling of production and output to increase profits.
They did not look down on farming it's completely false misrepresentation. If yall honestly want to believe this you will just be met with contradictions.
Nobody fears or hates J-weyne and other Somali clans hardly bring them up or talk badly about them. They are just treated as people that share the land with them and are their neighbors.
It's more the opposite, its J-weyne and other smaller communities who feel threatened by the wider Somali collective and thats why we have people like you and others on this thread who seek to divorce them from their lands and reduce their role. In the process you have to imagine realities that are not real.
It's similar to the rabid intense grudge , fear and slander spewed by Kenyans online, who also want to believe we are strangers to our land and they are entitled to it. Whereas Somalis intead behave in the line of mutual cooperation and sharing, they have no trouble tolerating others as shared neighbors.
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My mother's maternal fam are basically reer Baydhabo MJ migrants from the north who assimilated quite a bit into the local RX culture. They even speak Af-Maay alongside Af-Maxaa. My mother, my ayeeyo and great ayeeyo all speak it (spoke in the case of my great ayeeyo, AUN). So she's quite privy to their culture, origins and customs. Growing up she'd confuse me a bit by telling me that the Raxanweyn aren't a "real tribe" but a "coming together" of different Somali peoples and she even translated the name to mean something along those lines that I now forget.
Then when I got older I began reading the sorts of things you're talking about and it tracked with what she'd often tell me. They're like an amalgam of the different Somaloid groups found across Koonfur. Hawiyes, some Daroods, Garres, Jiddus, Tunnis etc.
Mind you, I think this is characteristic of all the Somali tribes in reality. Somali Y-DNA sampling is making it pretty clear that the 4 other tribes of Darood, Isaaq, Hawiye and Dir (especially the first three) aren't truly patrilineal tribes but confederacies of different mainly E-Z813 and T lineages. Somalis banding together to share resources and form beneficial political alliances then creating a shared tribal origin myth and exchanging daughters to cement the union. The exchanging daughters part seems very obvious from their origin myths like how the Darood's mother is a Dir woman and how all the tribes show the same mtDNA diversity, even supposedly Cadcads.
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