Pre-Trip Information

Demography

 

Somalis have a remarkably homogeneous culture and identity. As early as the 7th century C.E., indigenous Cushitic peoples began to mingle with Arab and Persian traders who had settled along the coast. Interaction over the centuries led to the emergence of a Somali culture bound by common traditions, a single language and the Islamic faith.

 

Today, about 60 percent of all Somalis are nomadic or semi-nomadic pastoralists who raise cattle, camels, sheep and goats. About 25 percent of the population are settled farmers who live mainly in the fertile agricultural zone between the Juba and Shebelle Rivers in southern Somalia.

 

There are a number of smaller ethnic groups of Bantu origin and a modest Arab population. Nearly all inhabitants speak the Somali language, which remained unwritten until October 1973, when the Supreme Revolutionary Council (SRC) proclaimed it the nation's official language and decreed an orthography using Latin letters. Somali is the language of instruction in all schools. Maay is spoken by approximately 11 percent of the population. English is spoken by the well educated in the south and Italian is spoken by the well educated in the north. Arabic is spoken by few people but used widely in prayer.

 

Cultural Legacy

 

A paucity of written historical evidence forces the study of early Somalia to depend on the findings of archaeology, anthropology, historical linguistics and related disciplines. Such evidence has provided insights that in some cases have refuted conventional explanations of the origins and evolution of the Somali people. For example, historians once believed that the Somalis originated on the Red Sea's western coast, or perhaps in southern Arabia, but it now seems clear that the ancestral homeland of the Somalis, together with affiliated Cushite peoples, was in the highlands of southern Ethiopia, specifically in the lake regions. Similarly, the once-common notion that migration and settlement by early Muslims, followers of the Prophet Muhammad, along the Somali coast in the early centuries of Islam had a significant impact on the Somalis no longer enjoys much academic support. Scholars now recognize that the Arab factor-except for the Somalis' conversion to Islam-is marginal to understanding the Somali past. Furthermore, conventional wisdom once held that Somali migrations followed a north-to-south route; the reverse of this now appears to be nearer the truth.

 

Increasingly, evidence places the Somalis within a wide family of peoples called Eastern Cushites by modern linguists and described earlier in some instances as Hamites. From a broader cultural-linguistic perspective, the Cushite family belongs to a vast stock of languages and peoples considered Afro-Asiatic. Afro-Asiatic languages include Cushitic (principally Somali, Oromo and Afar), the Hausa language of Nigeria, and the Semitic languages of Arabic, Hebrew and Amharic. Medieval Arabs referred to the Eastern Cushites as the Berberi.

 

In addition to the Somalis, the Cushites include the largely nomadic Afar (Danakil), who straddle the Great Rift Valley between Ethiopia and Djibouti; the Oromo, who have played a large role in Ethiopian history (in the 1990s constituting about half of the Ethiopian population) and were also numerous in northern Kenya; the Reendille (Rendilli) of Kenya; and the Aweera (Boni) along the Lamu coast in Kenya. The Somalis belong to a sub-branch of the Cushites, the Omo-Tana group, whose languages are almost mutually intelligible. The original home of the Omo-Tana group appears to have been on the Omo and Tana rivers, in an area extending from Lake Turkana in present-day northern Kenya to the Indian Ocean coast.

 

The Somalis form a subgroup of the Omo-Tana called Sam. Having split from the main stream of Cushite peoples about the first half of the first millennium B.C.E., the proto-Sam appear to have spread to the grazing plains of northern Kenya. Establishment of proto-Sam communities seems to have followed the Tana River, and reached the Indian Ocean coast well before the first century C.E. On the coast, the proto-Sam splintered further; one group (the Boni) remained on the Lamu Archipelago, and the other moved northward to populate southern Somalia. There the group's members eventually developed a mixed economy based on farming and animal husbandry, a mode of life still common in southern Somalia. Members of the proto-Sam who came to occupy the Somali Peninsula were called Samaale, or Somaal, a clear reference to the mythical father figure of the main Somali clan-families. This name gave rise to the term 'somali."

 

Health and Welfare

 

In terms of health and welfare, of the 12 million people in Somalia, life expectancy is 49 years of age.  The infant mortality rate is 110.97 deaths per 1000 live births.  The average literacy rate for the total population is 37.8 percent but belies the disparity across genders.  For males, literacy is almost 50 percent; among females, it is just over 25 percent.

 

Written by Dr. Denise Youngblood Coleman, Editor in Chief at CountryWatch.com; see Bibliography for research sources.