On 28 December 1963, a State of Emergency was declared in Kenya's North Eastern Region (NER). The declaration came just over two weeks after Kenya gained independence, and represented the first serious challenge to the integrity and stability of the new state. At issue was the status of the area known during British administration as the Northern Frontier District (NFD). This region was comprised of six districts, Garissa, Isiolo, Mandera, Marsabit, Moyale, and Wajir that were inhabited almost entirely by the pastoral Somali, Boran, Gabra, and Rendille.Footnote 1 From 1960, when the British were preparing to leave Kenya, these groups formed a political alliance (with the exception of a small minority of Boran, and the Gabra and Burji from Marsabit district) under the banner of the Northern Province Progressive Peoples Party (NPPPP) to campaign for secession of the NFD from Kenya to the Somali Republic.Footnote 2
The movement for secession in the NFD developed from the experience of colonial rule in northern Kenya. Due to sectional conflict between the resident communities, and a lack of exploitable resources, the area was considered a ‘closed district’ by the British and administered as a separate entity within Kenya. At the same time, the porous and ill-policed border between the NFD and the Somali Republic reinforced existing relationships between the communities that straddled the peripheries of both states that were of much greater significance. This enabled political leaders in the NFD to rally people behind a campaign for secession, which played on feelings of cultural and economic isolation that were common to all inhabitants. The demand for NFD secession was supported by the government of the Somali Republic, which was also campaigning for the creation of a ‘Greater Somali’ state, the unification of all Somali inhabited territories across the Horn of Africa.Footnote 3 The inclusion of NFD representatives by the British in the political negotiations that led to Kenyan independence appeared to give official recognition to the prospect of secession, and suggests that there was a legitimate case to be addressed. However, by the time that Kenya gained independence on 12 December 1963, a British alliance with the Kenya African National Union (KANU), which formed Kenya's first government and which resisted territorial adjustment, resulted in the incorporation of the NFD within independent Kenya. In protest, on the night of the 12th, there were a series of violent attacks on police posts and administrative camps in Kenya's northern regions by radicalised members of the NPPPP. This marked the beginning of the so-called shifta (bandit or rebel) conflict, which lasted until November 1967. It should be noted that in the British and Kenyan archives, the shifta conflict is referred to interchangeably as the ‘NFD dispute’ or ‘Somali question’. Use of the term ‘shifta conflict’ has been applied retrospectively due to the labeling of participants in the conflict as shifta by the Kenyan government.
The historiography of the shifta conflict is dominated by a relatively small body of literature that puts Somali nationalism at the centre of analysis.Footnote 4 Critical attention has been focused on the links between violent insurgency in northern Kenya, and the broader aims of Somali nationalism at this time. This scholarship argues that participants in the shifta conflict were inspired by the idea of a ‘Greater Somalia’ and, thus, from this perspective, shifta was a movement of militant Somali nationalism; the only published monograph dedicated to the shifta conflict focuses on factors that gave rise to militant Somali nationalism. Nene Mburu highlights discriminatory colonial legislation as the cause of the Somali ethnic community's disaffection with Kenya which, combined with Somali nationalism emanating from the Somali Republic, provided a motive for secession. Mburu's conclusion is that the shifta struggle failed because those involved allowed the Somali Republic to run the campaign from 1963, and so compromised its credibility and lost internal cohesion.Footnote 5
Taking as its point of departure Mburu's conclusions regarding the conduct of guerrilla insurgency in northern Kenya, this article reconsiders the legacy of the Somali nation-building programme for understanding the events of the shifta conflict. It does so for two reasons. First, recent research into the political economy of intrastate armed conflict has dispensed with singular explanations for understanding individual participation, and emphasises the role of multiple economic, political, cultural, and strategic factors.Footnote 6 During the shifta conflict, Somali identity was only one of a number of possible reasons to join the insurgency. Second, those historians who have provided nationalistic interpretations of the conflict have focused their analyses almost exclusively on the activities of Somali insurgents. In doing so, they overlook the participation of Boran and Rendille groups in shifta.Footnote 7 These groups share a long history of conflict and competition, as well as collaboration and interdependence, with the Somali over access to scarce water and pasture resources.Footnote 8 To see the violence of the shifta conflict solely in terms of a nationalist struggle ignores other dynamics that were at work within the NFD during the conflict period, namely clan and sectional rivalry. The militarisation of northern Kenya after 1963, therefore needs to be understood in relation to on-going resource struggles between these various communities living on the periphery of the Kenyan state, and in relation to the experience of violence following the outbreak of the insurgency, as well as in relation to Somali nationalism. Shifta combined militant secessionists with a nationalist agenda and more narrowly-based groups that sought the protection or aggrandisement of their individual clan sections through access to firearms that being shifta provided, and used the Kenya-Somalia border as a resource in pursuit of those interests.Footnote 9 As such, to borrow the metaphor Daniel Branch has used to describe the interweaving of anti-colonial and civil war violence during the Mau Mau rebellion, the shifta conflict is best conceptualised as a helix, where strands of a nationalist insurgency intertwined with local-level resource conflict.Footnote 10
A more nuanced discussion of shifta motivations allows for a better understanding of the Kenyan government's responses to the conflict. It also provides new insights into the development of the early postcolonial Kenyan state, and the ways in which the colonial experience defined Kenya's postcolonial ‘governmentality’, particularly in relation to dealing with populations deemed problematic. The independent Kenyan government's counter-shifta strategy was grounded in experiences gained during the Mau Mau rebellion. Scholarship on decolonisation in Kenya has already documented that independence did not entail significant ideological or structural breaks in state policies.Footnote 11 Examination of the shifta conflict reveals additional continuities between the colonial and postcolonial state, and demonstrates how those policies contributed to the long-term decline of pastoralism across the Horn of Africa.
THE SHIFTA
Self-styled as the Northern Frontier District Liberation Front (NFDLF), those who took up arms in northern Kenya during the 1960s were referred to as shifta.Footnote 12 Originally derived from the Amharic expression for banditry, the term has been used to describe nineteenth-century Ethiopian noblemen with political aspirations, and twentieth-century Ethiopian nationalists in Eritrea who used banditry as a method of political protest.Footnote 13 More broadly across eastern Africa, shifta is used to denote a bandit or rebel.Footnote 14 In Kenya it has most frequently been applied to criminal bandit gangs engaged in livestock raiding and poaching.Footnote 15 In relation to the movement for secession, the term was first applied by the Kenyan government in November 1963. Jomo Kenyatta, then Kenya's prime minister, referred to those who engaged in violence against the Kenyan government as ‘hooligans or armed groups of youths called shifta. Those people who go raiding here and there.’Footnote 16 Such use of the term implied that those seeking secession were no more than criminal bandits. While this categorisation of shifta is important to note for our later discussion of the Kenyan government's responses to secessionism, it is also indicative of the multi-faceted nature of the movement.
Broadly speaking three types of shifta insurgent can be identified. At the apex of the movement was a leadership group, made up of ‘radical’ members, committed secessionists who established the NPPPP, and acted as political spokesmen for the NFD between 1960 and 1963. They were school-educated men and often from wealthy lineages who wielded significant influence within their communities. They were able to establish personal commands at shifta base camps in the Somali Republic, from where they negotiated for arms with Somali officials, and organised the recruitment and training of secondary members.Footnote 17
Directly beneath this leadership was a small cadre of individuals who led local shifta groups made up of rank-and-file members. Although these group leaders were not prominent figures in the NPPPP, most had joined the party at the local branch level, and were involved in the political rallies and demonstrations that preceded the outbreak of the insurgency. They were often defectors from the administration police, or the sons of former colonial chiefs.Footnote 18 Like their commanders above them, these men had been exposed to some form of schooling, offered organisational skills, and, in most cases, had some experience in handling guns.Footnote 19 It is these two top tiers of shifta that we can consider as the NFDLF.
The majority of the shifta, however, were ‘light lads’ or ‘the youth’; men aged between 18 and 40 who engaged in livestock keeping and had little or no formal schooling.Footnote 20 They were recruited into the movement and were subsequently taught how to use guns, grenades, and later landmines.Footnote 21 Data gathered from interviews reveals them to be a diverse mix of individuals, who today express varying levels of commitment to the movement's stated aim of secession.Footnote 22 It is possible that there has been a rejection of secessionist aspirations in northern Kenya because the Kenyan government has now established some authority in the region, and because state collapse in the Somali Republic has made Somali unification not only undesirable but also unworkable. Nonetheless, while some former shifta state that they were attracted to the rhetoric of the ‘liberation struggle’, others were only marginally aware of the broader political context of the conflict at the time.Footnote 23 For some recruits, becoming shifta was less about the fight for the liberation of the NFD and more about respecting the traditional role of the youth or ‘warrior’ within the community. One Somali Ajuran shifta fighter explained quite simply that ‘if a community goes to war then it is the youth who fight’.Footnote 24 Similarly, some who became shifta after the outbreak of the insurgency say that one of the reasons they did so was the violence that this created – this was the case with three Boran members of shifta from Isiolo district, who claimed that they joined the movement in reaction to Kenyan counterinsurgency operations, because of the ‘bullets that the Kenyan government sprayed on us [the Boran]’.Footnote 25
Another common explanation given for why people became shifta was the ‘threat’ of the shifta itself. While the operation of the pastoral economy in northern Kenya is determined by the ability of individual sections to effectively occupy areas where water and pasture exist, as arms became available to those willing to form shifta groups they could be used not only against the Kenyan government in pursuance of secession, but also to make gains in territory at a neighbour's expense. For instance, in Mandera district, rather than unite as one group, chiefs of the Mandera Degodia, Gurreh, and Murille all went to the Somali Republic independently to negotiate for arms on the understanding that they would form their own shifta groups.Footnote 26 As shown below, these arms were then used in a series of raids and counter-raids between the Degodia and Gurreh by ‘shifta gangs’.Footnote 27 Likewise, in the Waso area of Isiolo, Boran, who joined the shifta after the start of the conflict, stated explicitly that once the Somali had access to guns, the Boran also needed guns. The only way they could obtain guns was by going to the Somali Republic and joining the shifta.Footnote 28 Becoming shifta presented the Isiolo-based Boran with an opportunity to prevent the continued Somali encroachment into Boran lands, through which the Somali accessed the NFD.
The loose organisation of the shifta also presented individuals with the opportunity to mould the movement for secession as their own. First, the shifta were divided between two base camps located in the Somali Republic, reflecting clan cleavages.Footnote 29 Horizontal bonds of affiliation rather than loyalty to a central command or person determined authority over individual groups. Representatives of the Somali government met and dealt individually with the leaders of each clan section.Footnote 30 Second, each shifta group was a discrete formation. Titles such as captain or lieutenant gave the appearance of an organised chain of command. Yet, these titles were adopted by individuals and groups and were not centrally designated.Footnote 31
Finally, local circumstance and local interests can also help to explain non-participation in shifta. For instance, although the Boran of Isiolo became shifta, the Boran of Marsabit district did not. Marsabit was at the centre of political opposition to secession in the NFD, and was home to the Northern Province United Association (NPUA), which united Marsabit-based Boran, Burji, and Gabra groups. These were all minority communities in the NFD, who were not Muslim. During the run up to independence, NPUA complained to the Kenya administration about employment preferences being given to Somalis. Their decision to campaign against secession was largely an effort to safeguard and entrench their minority interests, particularly their control over local trade, at the expense of the Somalis.Footnote 32 The marginalisation of Somali families within Marsabit Town during the conflict, which included a general boycott of Somali shops and a refusal to sell them milk, enabled Burji, Boran, and Gabra individuals to enter into the livestock and retail trade, which they still dominate today.Footnote 33 While the local interests of the Isiolo Boran were best served through an alliance with shifta, those of the Marsabit Boran were not.
THE SHIFTA CONFLICT, C. 1963–8
The following reconstruction of the shifta conflict is based on the premise that there are two languages of conflict, archival and oral, that can be applied to northern Kenya in the period 1963 to 1968. In the language of the archives, which details the official interpretation of events, the term ‘shifta’ refers to all forms of violent conflict occurring in northern Kenya during the 1960s. Documents describe ‘groups of shifta’ or ‘shifta tribesmen’, who engage in activities such as ‘ambush’, ‘rifle and grenade fire’, ‘abduction’, ‘raiding’, and ‘cattle raiding’.Footnote 34 Interviewees also used the term shifta to refer to those engaged in insurgency activity against the Kenyan government. However, interviewees did not always describe ‘raiding’ and ‘cattle raiding’ as being part of the shifta insurgency, even though shifta groups staged cattle raids in order to draw Kenyan security forces into a confrontation. In reflection of the multiple pressures that pushed people to become shifta, some interviewees described raiding in terms of conflicts between clan sections. One Gabra informant described how Boran groups from Ethiopia moved through northern Kenya during the shifta conflict, and on numerous occasions raided the Rendille in Marsabit district. The Gabra and Rendille competed for territory in this area, and so the Gabra joined with the Ethiopian Boran during these raids. This began a series of what the interviewee termed ‘routine’ raids between the Gabra and Rendille.Footnote 35 Numerous other interviewees related similar accounts involving various Somali and Boran sections.Footnote 36 The distinction between sectional raiding and the shifta insurgency is by no means definitive. Nonetheless, the subsequent attempts by some northern Kenyans to categorise violence shows that the shifta insurgency fed into and criss-crossed with other local struggles.
Nationalist insurgent activity was characterised by ambushes of police and army camps, foot patrols, and vehicle convoys.Footnote 37 Such activity featured prominently during the initial stages of the conflict, through 1964, when shifta groups ranged from between one and five hundred strong, and used grenade and rifle fire to attack and raid Kenyan police posts and army camps from across the Somali border.Footnote 38 In mid-1964, shifta also began operating outside of the contested districts of the former NFD. By and large, these operations involved raids for plunder and were conducted in areas of Coast Province and Meru District.Footnote 39 During the latter part of 1966 and into 1967, shifta also placed Somali-supplied landmines along strategic trade and supply routes.Footnote 40
However, this type of shifta activity was not a constant throughout the conflict period. For one, shifta groups were dependent upon supplies of arms from the Somali Republic, and these were not always readily available.Footnote 41 Moreover, the intensity of shifta activity in a particular area also depended on the disposition of the gang stationed there. As the shifta insurgency progressed, there was a tendency for shifta gangs to engage more and more in what the authorities regarded as criminal or bandit activity. Shifta bands were reported to be splitting up and returning to their manyattas (homesteads) where raids were made for material gain.Footnote 42 In June 1964, Kenyan intelligence analysts distinguished three types of shifta engagement. These were hit and run ambushes on soft targets by small gangs, ambushes of convoys by large gangs, and stock raids by armed ‘tribesmen’.Footnote 43 By 1965, it was the third form of engagement that dominated shifta activity, making it increasingly difficult for security forces to differentiate between those incidents that had origins in ‘tribal’ differences and those that were somehow related to the secessionist cause.Footnote 44 This was a consequence of the fact that the issue of NFD secession created ‘new’ political groupings, manifest in support or opposition to the NPPPP, and then later the nationalist insurgency, which sat atop of already existing relationships.
Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, inter-ethnic and clan relationships in northern Kenya were determined by competition for scarce water and pasture resources. At the time of the establishment of British administrative posts in the NFD, between 1909 and 1912, a long process of Somali migration into northern Kenya from the Gulf of Aden was still underway.Footnote 45 Not only were various Somali groups competing for occupation of areas around Wajir and the Uaso Nyiro River, but in doing so they were also encroaching on already established Boran settlements.Footnote 46 A similar set of circumstances existed in Moyale and along the Daua River, where there was mutual raiding between the Somali Marehan, Gurreh, Ajuran, and Degodia.Footnote 47 Although provincial and district commissioners were given legal authority to define grazing boundaries and control movement in 1934 and 1946, recurrent feuds persisted between the Somali Degodia and Aulihan, Aulihan and Abd Wak, Degodia and Gurreh, as well as between the Somali and Boran.Footnote 48 When Kenya gained independence, and the civil and military apparatus of the Kenyan state became focused on combating secessionism, an opportunity was presented to disregard previously set grazing boundaries.Footnote 49 This gave competing sections an opportunity to capitalise territorially using guns obtained as shifta.Footnote 50
Between December 1963 and May 1966, the Special Branch reported numerous incidents of shifta activity in Moyale. However, of these incidents, only two involved attacks by shifta on Kenyan security forces. The remainder involved security force members responding to ‘raids’ or ‘stock-raids’ by armed groups of shifta.Footnote 51 These raids involved Somali Ajuran and Boran groups, on the one hand, and Sakuye and Boran groups, on the other.Footnote 52 Likewise in Wajir, Somali Degodia trespassed on Somali Ajuran pastures, a common cause of tension between the two groups during the colonial period which was a persistent problem for Kenyan security forces during the insurgency.Footnote 53 Throughout December 1965 and January 1966, the security forces responded to a series of disputes involving various clan-based shifta groups.Footnote 54 In the space of one two-week period there were three Degodia attacks on the Ajuran, and two Ajuran attacks on the Degodia.Footnote 55 That these clashes represented a serious conflict of interest at the local level is noted by the fact that during this time, intelligence records detail no incidents where offensive actions were taken by shifta against the security forces in Wajir.Footnote 56
Again in Mandera, where there are constant reports of shifta activity directed at the Kenyan government during 1963 and 1964, by September 1965 this was replaced by stock raiding between Somali Gurreh and Somali Degodia ‘shifta gangs’.Footnote 57 Between September 1965 and May 1966, Kenyan security forces dealt with 32 raids on manyattas while they only suffered one ambush attempt.Footnote 58 Here we can clearly see how shifta activity during the 1960s reflected long-standing competition for resources. In British administrative reports from the NFD from the 1950s, Degodia-Gurreh feuding was constantly noted around four important water points in the district: Melka Ghersi, Korof Harar, Wangai Dahan, and Takabba.Footnote 59 During the period of the shifta conflict, Melka Ghersi and Wangai Dahan were again at the centre of Degodia-Gurreh tension.Footnote 60 Similar conclusions can be drawn for Isiolo and Marsabit districts, and in these cases it is possible, based on the combination of archival and oral sources, to unravel how the broader movement for secession interacted with already existing territorial disputes.
In 1909, the British reserved the Waso area of Isiolo, which is situated along the Uaso Nyiro River, for the Boran, in an attempt to curtail Somali westward expansion through northern Kenya. Somali Abd Wak and Aulihan sections from neighbouring Garissa and Wajir districts were confined to the east of Isiolo by the so-called ‘Somali-Galla’ line.Footnote 61 However, through their alliance with the Isiolo Boran on the question of NFD secession from 1960, Somali groups from neighbouring Garissa and Wajir districts were able to make use of Boran-reserved grazing areas.Footnote 62 As long as the secession issue united Somali and Boran groups during the run-up to independence, Boran sections were reluctant to remove the trespassers.Footnote 63 But in June 1963, when Somali radicals assassinated a prominent Boran leader, Senior Chief Hajj Galm Dida (who had defected from the secessionist movement in early 1963), older tensions between the two groups resurfaced. In particular, the long-standing issue of grazing rights came to the fore, and Boran reports of Somali trespassing to the administration increased.Footnote 64 As the shifta conflict progressed, Kenyan security forces were drawn into an increasing number of confrontations in the Waso area of Isiolo that involved the Boran, on one side, and the Somali Degodia or Somali Aulihan of Garissa and Wajir districts, on the other.Footnote 65
Territorial dispute and displacement was likewise at the centre of tension between the Boran and Rendille in Marsabit district. Documents report a series of raids on both Rendille and Boran homesteads during the latter part of 1965 and first half of 1966, in Karare and Laisamis.Footnote 66 The Rendille and Boran have a long history of tension in Marsabit, and according to Rendille interviewees, have ‘never lived in harmony’.Footnote 67 At the root of this tension is contested ownership of Karare. Although the Rendille currently occupy the area, the Boran argue that it is ‘rightfully’ theirs.Footnote 68 Colonial records suggest that Boran sections did previously reside in Karare, but slowly dispersed, moving either to areas in Moyale or to Marsabit Town after 1960, under pressure by the district administration, which was keen to reduce grazing pressure on Marsabit Mountain.Footnote 69 The vacated land was then opened up for occupation by the Rendille.Footnote 70 One Rendille from Laisamis explained to me that by becoming shifta after independence, the Rendille were able to consolidate their control of Karare using guns they obtained from the Somali Republic.Footnote 71 A Boran informant from Marsabit confirmed this, stating that at the time of shifta there were two threats, one from the shifta, and the other from the Rendille who were ‘married’ to the shifta and forced the remaining Boran in Karare to move ‘closer to town’.Footnote 72
The shifta struggle against the Kenyan government combined with these local struggles between pastoral communities living on the periphery of the Kenyan state. The result was a complicated web of violence that was at once directed at a common enemy (the state), and a reflection of local feuding that reached back into the unfinished business of the settlement of northern Kenya. While some northern Kenyans now attempt to draw distinctions between these struggles, the authorities at the time were not able or willing to do so.
GOVERNMENT RESPONSES TO CONFLICT IN NORTHERN KENYA
Broadly speaking, the Kenyan government pursued three lines of policy following the outbreak of the shifta conflict.Footnote 73 One involved diplomatic engagement with the Somali Republic, in the attempt to reach a political settlement on the status of the NFD area that was acceptable to both governments. The second involved military and police action against shifta and their sympathisers; and the third centred upon an attempt to reach an accommodation with Kenyan Somalis, through political appeasement and development projects.
The Kenyan government's pursuit of diplomacy was inconsistent and slow.Footnote 74 It was not until September 1967, at a meeting of the Organization for African Unity in Kinshasa, Congo, that progress was made. The meeting was organised following the election of Mohammed Ibrahim Egal as the Somali prime minister in June of that year. Egal's election followed a period of growing disillusionment among Somalia's urban elites over the effectiveness of militancy in pursuit of pan-Somalism. While not abandoning the objective of Somali unification altogether, Egal sought to replace diplomatic confrontation with Kenya over the NFD issue, with accommodation.Footnote 75 At the Kinshasa meeting, representatives of Kenya and the Somali Republic issued a joint declaration committing both governments to resolve their outstanding differences over the NFD.Footnote 76 This led to a further meeting, chaired by Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia at Arusha in Tanzania on 28 October 1967, during which a ‘memorandum of understanding’ was agreed upon. Both governments pledged to suspend the emergency regulations that were in operation on both sides of their common border, to re-engage in formal diplomatic relations, and to encourage economic and trade relations.Footnote 77 The Somali government renounced support for shifta, and abandoned its irredentist foreign policy with respect to the NFD.Footnote 78
Without support from the Somali Republic, the prospects for securing the liberation of the NFD through insurgency were drastically reduced. Former shifta insurgents argued that without Somali material assistance, military operations against Kenyan security forces were unfeasible.Footnote 79 Nonetheless, while November 1967 marked the formal or official end to the conflict, there is evidence to suggest that the insurgency had entered into a period of decline before the Arusha memorandum. This was the consequence of government counterinsurgency measures.Footnote 80 According to Farah Mohamed, who joined the shifta from Wajir and who surrendered to the Kenyan government in June 1967, it was the killing of animals and relatives in government villages that made shifta return to civilian life: ‘Everyone went home to save the people.’ ‘What’, he said, ‘was the purpose of fighting for an empty land?’Footnote 81 Similarly, Iftin Hussein, a former shifta from Garissa explained that to prevent the killing of animals, the shifta ceased their fight.Footnote 82
The State of Emergency, declared on 28 December 1963, brought the Preservation of Public Security (North-Eastern Region) Regulations into effect. Under the terms of these regulations, a five-mile ‘prohibited zone’ was established along the entire Kenya-Somali border. Any person found within the prohibited zone without the necessary permission and pass was liable for imprisonment. In order to enforce the measure ‘police authorities’, defined as any person authorised by law to exercise police powers, were sanctioned to enter, search, and seize without warrant any property or vehicle that was deemed to be suspicious. If individuals failed to stop on police request while within the zone, they were deemed guilty of an offence and the ‘police’ were empowered to use firearms to assist in their arrest. An arrest within the prohibited zone could lead to detention without trial for 28 days.Footnote 83 In effect, the regulations legitimised the use of lethal police force against any person found within the prohibited zone, irrespective of who that person was.
The legislation was amended in September 1964. This amendment not only widened the areas affected by security legislation to include Isiolo and Marsabit districts in Eastern Region, and Tana River and Lamu districts in Coast Region, but also the scope of legitimate military and police action. First, the term ‘Police Officer’ was amended to reference all administrative personnel, making the civil administration part of the security apparatus. Second, and building upon measures already established under the 1963 legislation, the whole of NER and its contiguous districts were deemed a ‘prescribed area’, within which any person could be arrested without warrant, buildings or structures could be destroyed if they were considered connected to suspicious persons, and livestock or property could be seized from any person suspected of committing a crime.Footnote 84 There was a final revision in 1966. Under the Preservation of Public Security Act, North Eastern and Contiguous Districts Regulations, the five-mile ‘prohibited zone’ was extended to 15 miles, and all adults residing in shifta-affected areas were required to register and carry an identity card.Footnote 85 This culminated in the implementation of a programme of forced villagisation, announced in June.Footnote 86
By this time, similarities between the Kenyan government's anti-shifta strategy, and the British campaign against Mau Mau during the previous decade were abundant. Anti-Mau Mau measures included the use of curfew orders and movement regulations, property confiscations, screening exercises, the issuing of documentation and passes, detention without trial, and the creation of concentrated villages.Footnote 87 Similarly, during the shifta conflict, all those living in shifta-affected areas were required to register and carry identity papers, curfew orders and movement restrictions were in operation, security forces could arrest and detain any person without warrant for 28 days, and all persons were required to live within designated government villages, where screening exercises were used to establish any potential connections between civilians and shifta. Indeed, many of those involved in the implementation of security measures during shifta had personal experience of British anti-Mau Mau measures. This included many of Kenya's postcolonial political elite, but also members of the provincial administration who were stationed in northern Kenya during the shifta conflict.Footnote 88 Certainly, during parliamentary debates regarding the use of emergency regulations in northern Kenya, politicians drew directly on precedents set by the British during Mau Mau. When the initial State of Emergency that had been declared in December 1963 expired in February 1964, the MP for Trans-Nzoia constituency, Masinde Muliro, declared to parliament that: ‘When we had the Emergency in Kenya, all of the Kikuyu, whether they were Mau Mau or Loyalist, or whoever they were, had to have a pass. They were rounded up, locked in concentration camps, and some people were humiliated.’ Muliro then asked the House to consider whether the government should round up all of the Somalis in northern Kenya and place them in detention camps. The opinion of the House was clear. They responded with cries of ‘yes, yes’.Footnote 89
Under the terms of the emergency regulations in operation in northern Kenya, and by 1966, a precedent was also set for the implementation of collective responsibility for shifta activity. Curfew orders were used to regulate movement and were justified as a means to facilitate police and army operations.Footnote 90 Local administrative officers could order a seizure of stock if security forces made a shifta contact and it was suspected that they had been given assistance from the local population.Footnote 91 Stock seizures were also enforced after landmine incidents, since Kenyan security forces reckoned that landmines could not be planted by shifta without the collusion of local residents. By these measures, shifta-affected areas were divided into zones of clan responsibility, and any incident that took place within a particular zone was deemed the responsibility of the clan section residing there.Footnote 92 The overall intention of stock seizures in these contexts was to reduce civilian support for shifta through communal punishment.
At the same time, stock seizures were also used as a means to control local tensions and conflicts that were not a direct consequence of the movement for secession; such seizures were a way of asserting governmental power and authority over the operation of the pastoral system in northern Kenya. In June 1963, several hundred head of cattle were seized from the Gabra in Marsabit following a raid on the Samburu in which 24 Samburu had been killed; the police believed that if they did not impose this punishment there might be a complete breakdown of law and order in the area.Footnote 93 In many respects, this is a further example of how the Kenyan administration, which had just achieved self-government, had internalised colonial practices.Footnote 94 The progressive application of the 1902 Outlying District Ordinance, the 1926 Closed District Ordinance, and the 1934 Special District Administration Act had established a legal framework that attempted to regulate northern Kenya in response to widespread inter-clan warfare. Non-resident travel to the NFD was restricted, and ‘tribal areas’ were established for each of the resident communities living there.Footnote 95 Any violation of the Special District Administration Act was punishable by either a livestock confiscation or a prison sentence.Footnote 96 Trespassing into the grazing area of a neighbouring clan section was punished by a stock seizure of between 10 and 50 per cent of the herd of the accused.Footnote 97 In the 1960s, stock was confiscated from individuals who grazed their animals in illegal grazing zones, or if they were found beyond the limits of a village during curfew hours: when a police patrol found one hundred head of cattle being grazed by Borana herdsmen in a prescribed area, they were all arrested and the cattle seized.Footnote 98
Underlying these actions, which seemed to target the very local people with whom the Kenyan government sought to reach an accommodation, was a convergence of civil and military measures based on an official conflation of shifta activity and pastoralism. Implicit within this was an attempt to permanently settle pastoral communities. This was a time when international development experts understood pastoral development in terms of the ‘resettlement paradigm’, and efforts were being made to move pastoralists into what were perceived to be more productive and secure ways of life through sedentarisation.Footnote 99 By regulating and restricting movement to and from pasture areas, livestock keepers were left unable to properly care for their herds, and through the application of communal punishment for shifta, livestock holdings were systematically reduced. The campaign against militant secessionism came to include measures that both hindered and controlled the operation of the pastoral economy more broadly. Indeed, according to northern Kenyans, the Kenyan government assumed that all of the region's people were shifta.Footnote 100
One of the most enduring consequences of the Kenyan government's counter-insurgency strategy was to ferment a feeling of victimisation among northern Kenyans, who now attribute impoverishment and livestock losses since the 1960s to governmental action during shifta.Footnote 101 Although impossible to quantify without further investigation, other research that has been conducted on the pastoral economy of northern Kenya has identified the shifta conflict as a period of intensified destitution in the course of a more general process of pastoral decline across the Horn of Africa.Footnote 102 It is certainly the case that since the shifta conflict, a process of sedentarisation in NFD areas has been initiated, with the populations of village and district centres increasing.Footnote 103 Likewise, there has been a rise in the number of people engaged in settled economic activities, such as petty trade and farming.Footnote 104 Yet, while many northern Kenyans have diversified economically, they remain committed to the pastoral ideal.Footnote 105
CONCLUSION
The analysis of postcolonial state formation in Africa cannot begin at the moment of independence.Footnote 106 A growing literature has identified structural determinants of the Kenyan state that were inherited from the colonial era. In the case of the shifta conflict, the postcolonial Kenyan state inherited its problematic relationship with its northern borderland, and pursued policies that were grounded in the experiences of colonial rule. This is illustrated by a comparison of the emergency regulations enacted during Mau Mau and those adopted by the independent Kenyan government to combat the shifta insurgency, and by the measures taken by the colonial and postcolonial state to regulate and control the pastoral economy in northern Kenya. During the shifta conflict, the participation of local groups in nationalist insurgency activity and organised livestock stealing resulted in the convergence of the two strategies for dealing with insecurity. Consequently, comprehensive government action was not only taken against shifta insurgents, but all northern Kenyan pastoralists. This is one of the first examples of what Branch calls the ‘fetishization of order’ in postcolonial Kenya, the often violent discrediting of those who dissent from state-led development policies.Footnote 107 The relationship between northern Kenya and the Kenyan state was thus recast during the shifta conflict, from one of relative colonial disengagement, to one of state ascendancy and penetration, with lasting implications. The North Eastern Region was administered under the terms of the 1966 Regulations until 1991, when it was finally repealed, largely in response to international pressure following accusations from Africa Watch and Amnesty International of state-sponsored violence in the area during the 1980s.Footnote 108 Furthermore, while the residents of northern Kenya are positive about the increase in the provision of schooling in the region since the end of the shifta conflict, they still blame the Kenyan government for impoverishment and livestock loss. The reluctance of government authorities to consider compensation for losses incurred by northern Kenyans during the conflict, stipulated in the 1970 Indemnity Act, only serves to heighten a sense of alienation from state authorities. It remains to be seen how the work of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission, which was established in 2008 in response to violent conflict that followed disputed elections in December 2007, and the subsequent passing of the Indemnity (Repeal) Act by parliament in February 2010, which gives northern Kenyans the right to seek redress for unlawful acts committed by public officers and members of the armed forces between 25 December 1963 and 28 February 2008, will affect relations between people in this peripheral region and the Kenyan state.Footnote 109
