Rural-urban migration and urban settlement in the history of a marginalized minority: the Gaboye of Somaliland

The paper analyzes the changing social and economic positioning of a marginalized minority living in the Somali territories: the Gaboye. Together with other groups in the area they have been classified by the scholars as “professional caste”, a category employed in the analysis of many other African contexts such as Senegal, Nigeria, Ethiopia and so on. The term ‘caste’ in the African studies has been used to label groups affected by professional segregation to stigmatized tasks, by marriage segregation and sometimes by the definition of a degraded human condition. The results presented in the paper have been collected during a research in the British National Archives and a fieldwork carried out between 2014 and 2015 in the town of Hargeisa, the capital of the self-declared independent Republic of Somaliland whose borders correspond to those of the British Protectorate of Somaliland (concluded in 1960). Rural-urban migration and the forms of urban settlement in Hargeisa of the Gaboye, which started during the last two decades of the colonial era, had a deep impact over the configuration of these groups’ marginalization. The paper will outline the context and the premises of the Gaboye settlement in Hargeisa: it was part of a diffused wave of urban expansion which interested the hinterland of the Protectorate since the 1930s and which was triggered by the consolidation of the British control in the area. These processes are related to both the beginning of an ‘emancipatory’ path that reshaped important aspects of the Gaboye’s subordinated condition, and the reproduction of their marginalization through professional and spatial segregation. This twofold historical trajectory, that shows continuities and discontinuities in the marginalizing institution affecting the Gaboye, will be reconstructed throughsome of the features of the group’s presence in the urban area of Hargeisa: the economic activities they have beenperforming; the patterns of settlement which were the by-product of their relationship with colonial and post-colonial authorities, and with the Somali majority clans.