The Gaboye of Somaliland: Legacies of Marginality, Trajectories of Emancipation

Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2014 and 2015 in Hargeysa, the capital of the Republic of Somaliland (Somalia), the dissertation presents the historical and ethnographic reconstruction of the social position held by a cluster of minority groups. They have a much lower population than the other Somalilander genealogical groups and are instantly identified as being subject to certain forms of discrimination such as marriage segregation and being associated with occupational tasks despised by the rest of society. The most common denomination applied to them, across all Somali territories, is Gaboye. The main objectives of this research are to define the dynamic contours of this form of marginality and to reconstruct how it gradually lost the attributes of a social institution. Scholars and travellers of the colonial period defined this institution in terms of ‘caste’ because it implied the integration of ascribed status, notions of ritual impurity, occupational and marriage segregation. The analysis examines the trajectories of emancipation and the plastic ways of being at the ‘margins’ of political institutions and of economic networks that have affected the lives of the Gaboye from the colonial period until today. This historical and ethnographic investigation encompasses a range of aspects of the social, political and economic life of the people of the north-western Somali territories, the first of which is the urbanisation waves that started in the 1920s in the British Protectorate of Somaliland, and their implications for local populations. The subsequent ones are the transformations of ‘traditional’ institutions such as the co-contribution to blood compensation and the establishment of their genealogical group leadership, the different forms of inhabiting urban areas in the post-colonial and the post-civil war periods, the transformations of urban based businesses intended either as economic sectors or objects of social representations and finally the connections between contemporary forms of transnational migration and the reproduction of economic vulnerability.

A partire da una ricerca etnografica condotta tra il 2014 ed il 2015 nella città di Hargeisa, capitale della Repubblica del Somaliland (Somalia), la tesi illustra la traiettoria storica di trasformazione di una forma di marginalizzazione socio-politico-economica di cui sono oggetto i Gaboye, un agglomerato di gruppi minoritari locali. Tale marginalizzazione veniva descritta da autori di epoca coloniale (viaggiatori, studiosi, funzionari coloniali) come segregazione di “casta”. L’oggetto in questione apre squarci analitici sia su importanti snodi storici di mutamento sociale che hanno interessato l’area – quali i processi migratori che determinarono l’espansione urbana nell’area ed altre trasformazioni del tessuto economico occorse a partire dall’epoca coloniale – sia su temi e strumenti concettuali su cui antropologi e storici si interrogano in relazione ad altri contesti africani (e non solo), quali la relazione tra status ascritti, segregazione professionale, esclusione dagli scambi matrimoniali e stratificazione sociale.