Somali emigration refers to the historic process whereby people have emigrated from Somalia to other parts of the world. Because of Somalia’s position as a maritime nation, it has a long tradition of people immigrating to other parts of eastern Africa and elsewhere around the Indian Ocean as merchants, fishermen and the like. More recently the long-running Somali Civil War, which in one form of another has been ongoing since the late 1980s down to the present day, has seen mass emigration from Somalia, with the people here travelling by land over the border to countries like Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda, by sea to Yemen and other parts of the Arabian Peninsula, and further afield to countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Canada, Norway and the Netherlands. United Nations’ estimates suggest that owing to the crisis in Somalia over the last three and a half decades, around two million Somalian-born emigrants live outside of the country.[1]
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History of Somali emigrationHistory of Somali emigration
Somalia has a very long tradition of emigration. This is largely the result of its geographical location. Somalia dominates the coastline of the Horn of Africa and occupies a geopolitically important position, both at the mouth of the Red Sea and dominating the sea routes from Arabia southwards to east Africa. As a result, it has a long tradition of maritime activity, with fishermen and traders active here for millennia. As far back as the second millennium BCE, the ancient Egyptians detailed their extensive trade with the people of the Land of Punt, a region which most scholars identify as being synonymous with Somalia and other parts of the Horn of Africa. Thus, we have ancient Egyptian murals and paintings depicting Somalian emigres bringing goods to Egypt from their homeland to the south.[2]
This position as a major trading nexus between North Africa, Arabia and eastern Africa continued into medieval times. The relatively swift conversion of Somalia to Islam in the ninth and tenth centuries indicates that the region was closely connected to the Arabian Peninsula and Maghreb through trade. Between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries, Somalia was generally tied into the maritime and colonial empires of the rulers of Oman in south-eastern Arabia. All of this ensured that there was regular emigration of Somalians to places like Oman, Yemen and further down the east African coastal region to the island of Zanzibar and other parts of the Omani trading network.[3]
As important as this earlier flow of Somalian emigres around the Red Sea, Indian Ocean and Gulf of Persia undoubtedly was, Somalian emigration is primarily understood as a modern phenomenon, one which began in the late 1980s. In 1988, after years of growing disquiet over his ineffective rule and political repression, a rebellion began in Somalia to overthrow the dictator of the country since 1969, Mohammed Siad Barre. He fell from power in 1991, though this simply precipitated a much bloodier and chaotic civil war, one which saw Somalia fragment into dozens of entities ruled over by regional warlords. By the mid-1990s it was considered a failed state. A transitional government thereafter did manage to introduce slightly more stability, but the rise of new radical Islamist groups like the Islamic Courts Union and Al-Shabaab has seen the conflict drag on and on into the 2000s, 2010s and now the 2020s. As all of this has occurred, millions of people have been displaced internally and externally. Whether one calls them emigrants or refugees, the result is the same. Millions of people who were born in Somalia now live outside of the country, or are the children of people who were born in Somalia and left because of the violence over the last three and a half decades. The Somali Civil War is the primary basis of the Somalian diaspora in modern times.[4]
The Somalian diasporaThe Somalian diaspora
As with any country, it is almost impossible to establish the impact which Somali emigration over the last several thousands of years has had in places like Egypt, Oman, Zanzibar and the like with any precision, though clearly there are people around the wider world of the Indian Ocean who have ties back to the Horn of Africa. Things are much more precise when it comes to the modern Somalian diaspora. The Somali Civil War has led to upwards, or perhaps over, a million Somalians migrating over the border to countries like Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and Djibouti, or crossing the Gulf of Aden to Yemen. There are an estimated 300,000 Somalians in Kenya today and roughly 275,000 in Ethiopia. The numbers are smaller in Uganda, Yemen and Djibouti but still stretch into the tens of thousands in each jurisdiction.[5]
The Somalian diaspora today is closer to two million than one million.[6] This means half of the diaspora is found beyond the Horn of Africa. Many Somalians have emigrated from their homeland and found refuge in the United States since the late 1980s. The Somalian American community consists of around 170,000 people today. Half of these were born in Somalia, the other half are the children or grandchildren of refugees who arrived as a result of the Civil War. There are particularly dense pockets of Somalian settlement in the US, notably in Minnesota and adjoining parts of the Midwest.[7] The Cedar-Riverside district of Minneapolis in Minnesota has come to be known as Little Mogadishu, such is the level of Somalian emigrant settlement here, east Africans making up roughly half of the population.[8] Beyond the US, there are approximately 100,000 Somali emigres in the United Kingdom, making Britain home to about 5% of the Somalian diaspora today, while there are also substantial Somalian communities in Canada, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, Finland, Denmark, Australia and Italy.[9]
See alsoSee also
Explore more about Somali emigrationExplore more about Somali emigration
- Somali Civil War at The Organization for World Peace
- Conflict with Al-Shabaab in Somalia at the Center for Preventative Action
- Somalia: a history of events from 1950 to the present - in pictures on The Guardian
References
- ↑ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/06/01/5-facts-about-the-global-somali-diaspora/
- ↑ https://www.worldhistory.org/punt/
- ↑ Jatin Dua, ‘Somalia and the Indian Ocean World’, in Danish Institute for International Studies, Working Papers 12 (2017), pp. 8–11.
- ↑ https://theowp.org/crisis_index/somali-civil-war/
- ↑ https://www.unrefugees.org/news/somalia-refugee-crisis-explained/
- ↑ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/06/01/5-facts-about-the-global-somali-diaspora/
- ↑ https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2017/02/us/somali-minnesota-photos/
- ↑ https://digitours.augsburg.edu/tours/show/1
- ↑ https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/45685718.pdf