Writing Biographies of Boorana: Social Histories at The Time of Kenya's Independence

Abstract

In June 1963 Daudi Dabaso Wawera, who at that time was District Commissioner of Isiolo, and Chief Hajji Galma Diida were killed in a Somali ambush near Mado Gashi, fifty kilometers from Garba Tulla, in the area surrounding the Waso Nyiro river in Eastern Kenya. While both of them were killed, their companions and escorts were not touched, in an ambush that was premeditated and calculated. It was a political assassination, insignificant for the processes leading to Kenya's independence later that year, but quite significant for the subsequent historical responses offered by the Boorana of the area, to their eventual integration into a newly-created independent African nation.That integration was not at all easy; in particular, the time leading to Kenya's independence was a turbulent one for the Waso Boorana. They were part of a larger group of semi-nomadic pastoralists who made up most of the population of that colonial administrative segment of northern Kenya, known as the Northern Frontier District (N.F.D.) As a result they lived in a territory claimed by ethnic Somali to be part of the newly created Somali republic, and who still wanted the actual constitution of a Greater Somalia, a political and symbolic construction that would include all Somali living in northeast Africa.While support for the Somali cause was not unified among the peoples of northern Kenya, the Muslim Boorana of the Waso area of the Isiolo District in particular showed an immediate support for the claims of secession expressed by their Muslim Somali brothers.