Summary

It is apparent from the earliest extant written sources that slave labor had always formed part of the socioeconomic texture of Somali-speaking society. In both livelihood systems, farming and pastoralism, slaves were an important part of the labor force. Slaves were drawn from Cushitic-language-speaking areas, coming overland along caravan routes across the Ethiopian borders, and from Bantu-speaking groups whose members were sold in coastal ports. An important dynamic of dependency, sometimes regarded as slavery, asserted itself with the recurring migrations in Somalia prompted by the movements of pastoralist nomadic Somali-speaking people in search of pasture land and water for dromedaries. In connection with political changes in the Western Indian Ocean countries after 1800, imports of slaves from Bantu-speaking countries to the Somali territories increased. An unquantifiable percentage of imported slaves were absorbed in a patron-client system whose features have yet to be clearly described and which constitutes a central characteristic of enslavement in the Somali country. Abolition and pre-Independence post-abolition policies did not erase the inequalities accompanying the patron-clientship system; rather, they fixed and solidified such earlier social stratification in a simplified racial designation of those who had to perform compulsory labor and those who were entitled to privileges within the colony.