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Just days ago, a Norwegian football supporter drew sharp criticism for refusing to join the rhythmic rowing cheer that swept through the stadium stands. To many football fans, his solitary resistance looked absurd. I could not help but laugh because it perfectly captured what it feels like to be a Somalilander attempting to step outside the all-encompassing pull of tribalism: one lone dissenter amid a roaring crowd, the ultimate contrarian.
In the dusty streets of Hargeisa and across Togdheer, Sool, Sanaag, Awdal, and Sahil, a young Somalilander today navigates life not merely as a citizen of Somaliland but as a member of a specific qabiil, a clan whose genealogy stretches back generations. Clan affiliation often shapes access to jobs, dispute resolution through mag (blood compensation), political endorsements, and informal welfare. This is not primordial harmony. It is the product of history, particularly British indirect colonial rule, which took pre-existing kinship networks and transformed them into instruments of administration, patronage, and political competition.
Jean-François Bayart’s seminal concept of the “politics of the belly” captures the essence of this system. Postcolonial governance often revolves around accumulation, clientelism, and the distribution of resources through kinship networks. In Somaliland, clan became the primary channel for this process. What began as an adaptive social organization in a stateless pastoral society was rigidified, politicized, and eventually weaponized under empire, then inherited and amplified afterward. The result is a system that provided short-term order but has proven chronically incapable of building an inclusive, meritocratic modern state.
Pre-Colonial Realities: Adaptive Order, Not Utopia
Before the British arrived, society in what is now Somaliland operated through a segmentary lineage system. Clans and sub-clans formed fluid but powerful corporate groups bound by patrilineal descent. The most functional unit was the mag-paying group, consisting of a few hundred to a few thousand men descended from a common ancestor within four to eight generations who collectively bore responsibility for mag, traditionally one hundred camels for homicide.
Anthropologist I.M. Lewis, in his classic A Pastoral Democracy (1961), described this arrangement as a “pastoral democracy” in which elders (oday) mediated disputes through xeer, customary contracts and precedents enforced by consensus in shir assemblies. Clans served as a social safety net in a harsh nomadic environment. They provided mutual insurance against drought, livestock loss, and violence, offered collective defence, and created mechanisms to transform revenge cycles into compensation.
Authority was decentralized and constrained by consensus, yet inherently limited in scale and vulnerable to feuds when obligations overwhelmed groups. Emerging Y-DNA and haplogroup studies further illuminate the picture by showing that many Somaliland clans share deep common paternal lineages, pointing to substantial shared ancestry and historical fluidity in group formation through alliances, absorption, and social genealogies rather than purely unbroken biological descent. Clan identities have long contained constructed and adaptive elements.
This was not tribalism as a modern political pathology. It was kinship functioning as governance in the absence of alternatives.
The Colonial Forge: British Indirect Rule and the Institutionalization of Clan
British engagement began with treaties in the 1880s, signed with clan leaders and existing sultanates amid strategic interests in the Gulf of Aden. The territory became the British Somaliland Protectorate. While sultanates and chiefly roles predated the British, colonial administrators formalized, salaried, and bureaucratized them. They recognized or appointed Aqils at multiple grades, paid stipends, and granted them roles as intermediaries, judges, and revenue collectors.
The British did not invent clans, nor did they create clan loyalty. They did something more consequential. They transformed flexible kinship structures into administrative and political institutions. Clan territories became administrative units. Grazing rights and disputes were adjudicated through clan channels. Economic interactions were routed through clan leaders. Clan evolved from a primarily social and jural identity into a political identity tied to state benefits and access to authority.
Mahmood Mamdani’s framework in Citizen and Subject (1996) is particularly illuminating. Indirect rule created what he termed “decentralized despotism.” Native authorities enforced customary law with colonial backing, freezing and formalizing social categories that had once been more fluid. The British excelled at using existing systems because it minimized costs and resistance while embedding long-term fragmentation.
Colonialism lit the fuse, but subsequent generations inherited the incentives and continued feeding the fire.
Post-Colonial Mutation: From Safety Net to Enduring Political Logic
The clientelist dynamic of the “politics of the belly” persisted and adapted in Somaliland. Clan affiliation continued to function as a de facto form of identification for political participation, access to positions, and informal support systems. The mag mechanism remained in use as a parallel system of compensation and collective responsibility.
In earlier times, elders were often more willing to acknowledge fault within their own group, saying something akin to, “Our son was wrong,” in order to resolve disputes peacefully and preserve collective honour. In the post-colonial era this became far less common. More recently, many tribal elders have come to function more like criminal defence lawyers, defending their clansmen at all costs, even when guilt is obvious or admitted. This shift has entrenched a mentality in which clan loyalty supersedes social cohesion and national unity, a mindset that has been exported and, in some cases, intensified within the Somaliland diaspora.
One feels this dynamic acutely in everyday discourse. Even constructive criticism of public figures is often filtered through a tribal lens, forcing one to consider an individual’s lineage before offering genuine observations. Well-meaning analysis risks being misconstrued as a tribal attack, regardless of intent.
The costs are profound.
Talented young Somalilanders increasingly lose faith in merit. Businesses become less competitive because appointments and opportunities often reward networks over ability. Public institutions remain weak because every major decision is interpreted through clan arithmetic. Investors hesitate because political stability appears dependent on informal understandings rather than predictable rules and institutions. National unity suffers because citizens frequently perceive one another as competing constituencies rather than partners in a common project. The same divisions are then reproduced within diaspora communities, limiting our collective influence and capacity for coordinated action abroad.
Elections and public office illustrate the pattern clearly. Candidates build support through clan elders and networks. Voting frequently follows lineage lines. Power-sharing arrangements and appointments often reflect clan calculations. The Guurti institutionalizes customary authority, an inheritance of the colonial decision to govern through recognized traditional leaders.
A system built upon clan as the primary political currency struggles to produce broad trust, merit-based selection, and impersonal institutions. It rewards loyalty to the group over competence. It turns public allocations into zero-sum contests. It perpetuates informal mechanisms in place of universal systems. This is how Somaliland repeatedly finds itself with institutions that struggle to attract and retain the most capable people and cabinets selected primarily on the basis of clan balancing rather than merit.
Women and minorities often find themselves disadvantaged within these arrangements, while citizens outside powerful networks frequently experience the state less as an impartial institution and more as an arena of negotiated group interests.
Somalilanders rightly take pride in their clan identities. Yet what many celebrate is not an untouched ancient inheritance but a system that was significantly rigidified and politicized during the colonial period.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Tribalism in this form does not scale to the demands of contemporary governance. It can sustain localized order, but it cannot reliably produce the impersonal rule of law, national cohesion, and economic dynamism required for a sovereign state to flourish.
Breaking this cycle does not require abolishing clans. It requires changing the role they play.
Public appointments should be governed by transparent qualifications and merit-based criteria. Schools should teach a shared national civic identity, and drill civic responsibility into students. Reliable public services and stronger local government must gradually reduce dependence on informal networks. Professional associations, civic organizations, sports clubs, and community initiatives should deliberately encourage cooperation across lineage boundaries as with the naming of Hargeisa’s neighborhoods. Customary mechanisms may continue to play valuable social and cultural roles, but the functions of the modern state must increasingly be exercised through formal and impartial institutions.
Somaliland can draw inspiration from societies that successfully transitioned away from dominant tribal logics. In several Gulf Arab states, sustained prosperity and robust public services have allowed citizens to rely increasingly on the state rather than clan elders for security, welfare, and opportunity. Traditional identities remain important, but they no longer function as the primary operating system of governance. Similar patterns have emerged in other formerly segmented societies that invested heavily in education, infrastructure, and impartial institutions.
The tragedy of Somaliland is not that it has clans. Nearly every society on earth began with kinship loyalties. The tragedy is that we have mistaken those loyalties for a permanent political destiny.
Our ancestors built clan structures because they had no state. We have a state, imperfect but real, because previous generations chose cooperation over division. The question confronting Somaliland today is whether we will continue organizing ourselves primarily as descendants of distant ancestors or finally begin acting as citizens of a common republic.
History explains how we arrived here. It does not dictate where we must go next.
If we genuinely believe Somaliland deserves full international recognition as a modern democratic republic, then we must first recognize one another as fellow citizens and not recognize one another as members of competing clans.
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About the Author
Mr. Aar Kaiser is an Associate Editor at Somaliland Chronicle.
Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions, or viewpoints of Somaliland Chronicle, and its staff.
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