The people with the strongest opinions on Raxanweyn tend to be those who grew up farthest from them. There is an incredibly strange tendency to “otherize” them based on assumptions about how they look and act. Raxanweyn is much more of a pseudo-clan commune based on shared valley culture, the actual legitimate tribal structure is more characteristic of Digil and Mirifle.
As for their origins, the Mirifle are just another pastoralist clan who settled in the valley and intermarried with the Digil, who were there earlier. The Mirifle come from the same cauldron as the pre-Islamic Daroods and Samaales. That represents the first influx of pastoralists. The second was the assimilation of “lost” Daroods, Hawiye, and Dir, who weren’t lost, but simply chose to settle in the fertile valley region. Others have already written about this, but the pastoralist clans were not exclusively pastoralist. They practiced agriculture alongside livestock herding. The valley is one of the few pre-modern areas where one could have a large agricultural-exclusive region, and as history shows, groups tend to adapt and take advantage of such opportunities.
Raxanweyn identity is fluid. You encounter people with lineages that are Madowweyne rather than Cushitic, but there is no lying or deception about it. While intermarriage probably occurred at higher rates, I doubt it was substantial enough to meaningfully change the appearance of the average Raxanweyn.
When it comes to the Digil, there is no definitive verdict. The key question is whether Af-Maay is truly a dialect of (proto-)Somali or a completely different language spoken by an assimilated Cushitic group. In the modern era, it hardly matters, as they have mixed so extensively with nomadic Somalis that their heritage and culture in the region is undoubtedly Somali. Besides you have also clans who became more culturally "nomadic" via competition and living alongside nomads like the Geledi.
I do find them fascinating, and their perspective is very much something I believe can be used to partly reconstruct the pre-Islamic era of Somalia. I think it’s pretty clear that almost all Somali clans existed prior to Islam, but pastoralist clans have largely rewritten and discarded the pre-Islamic history and lore of their peoples.
