The ul gaas thing sounds intresting Can you tell me where I can find the source ?
Zayli grave in mecca from the 9th century
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Toponymy on the Periphery
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Encyclopaedia Aethiopica
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Le verdict de l'arbre
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Idilinaa
VIP
Imma further elaborate using examples from Hornaristocrats thread:
The fabrication of a distinct ''Harari" ethnicity originated mostly with him btw and this is after he was told that they were Adare people, he misrepresented this information. The name was not a reference to the city, Somalis never referred to Harar as “Adari” but used this name for a migrant community originally from the East Gurage-Hadiya region. Burton either misunderstood or deliberately misrepresented this information transmitted to him
(Note: Harari was anyone who was citizen of the city of Harar btw.)
(You can look through the twitter thread for more on the Adare people and their documented history.)
When you compare Richard Burton to the French explorer Rochet d'Héricourt, who attempted to enter Harar through legal and formal means, he documented that the city belonged to Somalis , unlike Richard Burton, who gained access through deception & trickery consequently distorted this reality. His sources about the city came through official and formal channels that held the consistent info that the people of Harar was Somalis and the city belonged to them.
Explaining the why he is more reliable as a source the fact it lies in the circumstances surrounding their access to Harar and who they took their information from:
It is also worth pointing out that his writings were extremely biased, because he was a foreigner who was trying to poke his nose where he shouldn't he ended up being chased away a couple of times by Somalis and those negative interactions would lead him to fabricate negative depictions and narratives.
His fabrications were later adopted by Western academics, further cementing the distorted colonial view of Somali history.
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Non somalis basically had zero acess to most of Somalia. Even after colonization outisde of guided hunting trips there was basically zero contact. This applied Even more to the wadaads and elders who would have had the knwoldege they were looking for.
There's an anectodote I.m Lewis writes about how some somali elder he first meets in the 60s was extremely suspicious of him since he was going around asking questions about somali society and culture. It was to the point that he though this elder might attack him . Decades later he meets him again in the 80s and know the elder copied what i.m lewis did and had been gathering the oral history and poems of the darawiish.
Imagine how much less acess they had to somali ulema who kept manuscripts.
To be honest, walaal, Burton doesn’t really distort much. It’s mostly these people interpreting him through their own agendas who end up twisting things. All Burton really says about Harar is that the Hararis make up 1/3rd of the town’s population and, to be honest, while he does speak of the Emir as "their Emir" he never actually calls the Emir "Harari".
In fact, if he had some deep-seated agenda against Somalis, he’d be pretty strange to state things like: the Emir’s principal wife is a Somali woman from the Bartire; the Amir's family has maintained a marriage pact like this with the Bartire for generations; Shaykh Jami of this same tribe is practically the Amir's most influential minister; Harar is wholly at the mercy of whoever controls Berbera or Saylac—both of which he explicitly says are in Somali hands; and that Somalis, both settled and "Bedouin who come and go", make up 2/3rds of the town’s population. Hardly the work of someone trying to discredit Somalis.
Just, as you say, someone who isn't fully clued in because he got in through lies and deception and it was frankly a short visit.
You have poems like Jidka Adari loo maro (the path to Adari) by Sayid Muhammad Abdullah Hassan. Adari was Harar and the area around it. Adari was also a type of pot which was said to be made in the “Adari” region and is mentioned in the story of Dhegdheer. Somalis also used the word to describe coriander seeds or the tree it stems from. There is a Somali phrase which references Dameeraha Adari (Donkeys from Adari). Adari might have meant different things in different contexts, however it is clear the city of Harar and the area around was called Adari by some Somalis.
Idilinaa
VIP
It’s not that Burton had a deep-seated agenda against Somalis from the outset. I’m not saying he woke up one day and thought, “I hate Somalis, let me write nonsense about them.”
The issue lies in how he collected his information:
- Burton entered Harar illegally through deception, which severely limited his ability to gather reliable data.
- He relied primarily on random locals, meaning his accounts were shaped by secondhand knowledge rather than direct, authoritative sources.
And then there’s the matter of how he processed and interpreted that limited information his biases inevitably influenced his conclusions.
Take, for example, the infamous “Galla origin” theory that marked the beginning of modern Somali historiography in Western academia. Richard Burton was one of its earliest proponents, and later scholars like Enrico Cerulli and I.M. Lewis built upon this fabrication, effectively rewriting Somali history to exclude Somalis from their own past.
Said Shidad even pointed out the irony in this: "Galla" was never a local term Somalis used for the Oromo as a whole, different Somali groups had different localized names for them. Worse still, Western scholars misinterpreted the old Somali pronunciation of Geel (camel) and Gaal (a term found in many Somali place names), linking it to Galla which only led to further distortions of local stories.
So how did a name that Somalis neither used nor recognized become attached to them? And how did they end up being blamed as the source of a fabricated historical narrative when no Somali records or other textual sources support it?
Later, more rigorous scholars like Herbert Lewis were left flabbergasted when they examined the actual recorded history of the region. They saw how a straightforward account of the Oromo expansion into Somali territories was somehow twisted into a narrative of Somalis pushing out Oromos.
It’s the same pattern we see with Spanish archaeologists when they write about us, their work seems to defy logic and common sense. They construct self-contradictory, senseless narratives because their own biases, misconceptions, and motives shape how they interpret the facts.
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Idilinaa
VIP
He mentions that in the thread, it was somehow a name for a plant as well.
Interesting. You may be right it might have meant something different in separate contexts. I'll take a more deep look into the name.
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Idilinaa
VIP
Nvm, i read his thread again and upon re-reading it, I noticed that while 'Adari' did become synonymous with Harar at some point in the 19th century, most Somalis especially those in Harar did not use that name for the city.
And he says "Although it is true that at some point in the 19th century Adari became synonymous with Harar, most Somalis didn't refer to the city of Harar as "Adare" especially if the Somalis in question live in the city itself, as in the case of Burton. In fact, most Somais today have never even heard that word."
He shows a passage from the same time period where Somalis in the area just simply referred to the city as Harar and not Adari. To the point they cried out "Harar" when they were in the vicinity of it.
This suggests that the term 'Adari' had a more nuanced and gradually shifting usage,
I think the context lies in the names gradually altered usage and adoption in the late 19th century and early 20th century.
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