Tabea Scharrer

Based at: Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

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In 1991 around 400.000 people from Somalia fled to Kenya. While the Kenyan government tried to contain these forced migrants in camps, many people settled outside either in the north eastern part of Kenya, with its ethnic Somali population, or in cities like Nairobi, Mombasa or Nakuru. At the same time, Kenyan Somalis from North Eastern Province also moved into the urban areas from the 1990s onwards. From the beginning onwards, various conflicts evolved in the various localities, during which Somali migrants have been depicted as Muslim fundamentalists bringing terrorism to Kenya and/or as ruthless businessmen getting control over the Kenyan economy. This research project looks behind these stereotypes by asking what specific impact the migration of Somalis to Kenyan cities had on the local communities.

In Nakuru, a town with approximately 350.000 inhabitants and the main field site, around 10.000 Somalis are living, the vast majority of them came since 1990. Already in the colonial time, a small Somali settlement existed in the town, mainly populated by Somalis from British Somaliland, working for the colonial army or administration. In the early 1990s the Somali population in town changed considerably. While people from Somalia and the North Eastern Province came to the urban centres, young people from the already settled Somali families left, many of them migrating to Europe or North America. From the 2000s onwards, a fourth group of Somali migrants can be seen in the urban centres - people ‚coming back’ from Europe, North America and Arab countries. In addition to looking at the impact of Somali migrants on the local communities, the focus of this research project lies on cities as fields of interaction between the different groups of Somali migrants, their distinct ways of integration into the local communities and the diverse ways of constructing identity and difference.