Public History and Private Knowledge: On Disputed History in Southern Somalia

Abstract

Beginning about 1830, the Jubba Valley of Somalia was settled by agricultural and pastoral slaves of East African origin and their descendants. Reconstructing the nature of the relationship between fugitive slave communities in the valley and the surrounding Somali slave-owning pastoralist groups on the plains points to some important issues in analyzing oral histories of groups with a denigrated and subjugated past. The need to sort out what really happened, what people think happened, and what people think about what they think happened continually plagues historians and historical anthropologists interested both in reconstructing the past and in cognitive questions of historical consciousness. How do we separate the real from the imagined, one interpretation from another, and which interpretation do we privilege? The question of why people hold different interpretations of historical events has a generally straightforward answer: the shifting significance of historical events and time periods may be very much a product of contemporary political struggles and ideology. Human agency is critical in historical recall and interpretation, and agency is in part motivated by social and political strategizing. The interesting analytical question is not why people remember history differently, rather what is significant about the different interpretations people hold of a shared past. How are these interpretations created and why do these particular interpretations carry contemporary meaning? The growing use of oral data in reconstructing and analyzing African histories makes these issues particularly trenchant. The problematic nature of oral data in historical reconstruction is especially pronounced in Ethnohistory 40:4 (Fall I993). Copyright ? by the American Society for Ethnohistory. ccc 0014-I801/93/$I.50. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.223 on Wed, 24 Aug 2016 05:43:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms