Friday, December 4, 2020

Apartheid in Somali?

While I'll be using Somali-Bantu and Somali-Jareer interchangeably in my essay, the two names mean the same. The term 'jareer' implies kinky or hard haired. Having kinky hair is not limited only to communities having Bantoid features, because there are uncountable number of pride filled Somalis with the same hair types. Likewise, there are Somalis with charcoal colored skin pigmentations, broad nosed, flat lips, and who are extremely uglier than the Somali-Bantu. While some Somali scholars claim that the Somali-Bantu experienced apartheid before the collapse of Somalia in 1991, such claims appear complete exaggerations. The terminology apartheid is of Afrikaans origin, a language spoken in South Africa and brought in the 19th century by the expansionist Dutch invaders from Holland. Afrikaans is a hybridized language or a kind of creole that incorporates Malay, Indonesian, Portuguese, Khoekhoe and the San languages. From Apart meaning separateness or apart-hood where the 'hood' in Afrikaans is 'heid', claiming that Somali-Bantus suffered apart-hood, separateness or apartheid in Somalia is a misnomer. Somali-Bantus never experienced apartheid in schools in Somalia like in South Africa where separateness affected the Black community in education, transportation, access to medical centers and specific areas within cities that were exclusive to Whites only, and even separate toilets and water fountains that were reserved for only Blacks. In Somalia, there was no separation of communities along beachfronts since everyone had access to swimming in the two waters of the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea respectively. While South Africa had ten homelands for the Black community, in Somalia, it was unheard of because, to the contrary, Somali-Bantus had towns and villages of their own. It would be futile to mention 'apartheid' imposed on Somali-Bantus in anyway or form whatsoever in Somalia before and during the military regime. They served in the police and military forces, enjoyed privilege in educational institutions as pedagogues, as administrators in government and private institutions, and above all, pioneered business entrepreneurships. The Somali-Bantus of Somalia, when compared to the United States racial discrimination practices of the sixties, had more freedom than the African-Americans who were denied equal treatment by the Whites who even slammed church doors on the progenies of those who were forced into slavery to cultivate sugarcane plantations against their wishes across the Trans-Atlantic in delapidated ships. In Somalia, Somali-Bantus had ablutions with their fellow Somalis from the same streaming taps and stood up for prayers, five times a day, with shoulders and feet touching each other without any sense of trepidation.

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