I spoke it about in another thread. Nomadic Somalis can’t really be compared to many other Nomadic societies of other African nations. When Burton visited Somalis, he was shocked they were informed about the Crimea war. Somali nomads understood lunar mansions and developed sophisticated oral literature. There were also large Sufi settlements of learning and literate wadaads who taught Deen. It would have been normal for a nomad to learn elementary aspects of Deen in the countryside, move to a small town to advance, then Move to the major cities or abroad at times. This same individual may then return to the baadiya to herd his animals and stay with his clan at certain times. Sayid Muhammad is a good example of this. My grandfather was a nomad for most of his life yet he spent some time in Arabia, working as a young man, then returning as he did not like it there. The major cities of Somalis especially the coastal ones traded heavily with the nomadic interior base, hence why you have medieval visitors finding abundance of camel and other metas being slaughtered there. Nomads were also central to the abaan system which the traders used to travel safely around the interior.
The smaller towns and settlements were also an important facet of life in Somalia. Many of them have been abandoned and little studies have been carried out on them. The Ulema of Mareer were writing fatwas in Arabic, Ba The Hobyo Sultanate recruited many Ogaden to act as Qadis for the sultanate. Arabic manuscripts with buranbur about the prophet’s life have been found in Somalia. I don’t think we have scratched the surface for understanding the towns and large settlements of Somalia which were intermediate between the cities and nomadic interior.
Shaikh Ibrahim Dheere here talks about his early life in a Sufi settlement where people farmed and wadaads taught Deen to the community.
“Nomad” isn’t really the right word I’d use here. A more accurate framing would be pastoralism, herding, and mobility.
Somali society was never shaped by aimless wandering. It was shaped by trade, by seasonal and strategic movement, and by an interwoven relationship between different livelihoods: herding, farming, fishing, and commerce.
Mobility didn’t mean separation , it meant connection. The same people who herded animals in the interior often engaged in farming or fishing on the coast and lived in or passed through towns, villages, cities and settlements both on the interior and the coast. Some switched livelihoods depending on the season. So the wide dispersal of towns, trade posts, and religious learning centers wasn’t some coincidence , it was a natural outgrowth of a fluid and adaptive economic and social structure.
The economic engine behind this trade and movement was the camel kept by pastoralists and herders which enabled long-distance travel and sustained interior-to-coast commerce. Towns like Barawa depended heavily on this dynamic:
''The same clan - the Tunni - formed a large part of the urban population and occupied the immediate hinterland of Brava and almost the entire region that was bordered in the west by the Shebelle River"
''Although prevently herdsmen, the Tunni were not nomads, and had settled within a welll defined territory, supplementin livestock with farming activities. They supplied the town with agricultural crops (for consumption and export) as well as cattle on the hoof, hides and clarified butter that in last decade of the nineteenth century were among the main items of export from Brava"
Literacy was also far more widespread than is often assumed. Many pastoralists, agro-pastoralists, and farmers were literate, they could read and write, particularly in Arabic.
Scholars and Quranic teachers frequently traveled across the countryside, earning a living by teaching communities who, in turn, supported them
It was common to see boys in the interior carrying wooden slates used to learn Quranic verses. As noted by visitors at the time:
''Most of the men understand Arabic; and you scarcely ever see a boy without his little flat board, on which are written verses from the Koran''
As for Barawa and its people: if you are Hatimi, Bidha, Ashraf, or from any other lineage, it takes nothing away from your identity to see yourself as part of the broader Somali historical and cultural fabric. It shouldn't come at the expense of displacing the Tunni or other Somali clans from their place in that story.
In fact, what we often see today is that Somalis with partial migrant ancestry, especially in coastal areas, are more likely to fixate on one locality say, Barawa or Mogadishu , whereas clans like the Tunni, with a long standing presence across both rural and urban landscapes, have maintained a broader territorial and collective identity. That’s why you see newer terms like Barawani or Benadiri emerge identifiers rooted more in urban localization than in a pan-Somali sense of identity.
Compare that to a Somali from Hargeisa, Jigjiga, Harar, or Bosaso, Luuq, Afqooye , Kismaayo, they rarely name themselves after the town in a culturally exclusive sense. Their identity spans wider than one city or town.
That's what i think is also plays into this and the comments you see on this thread.
