General Caydiid's Last Book on Somali Origin.

[Libaax-Sankataabte]

Here are excerpts from the late General's 1993 book on the origin of the Somali people. It is actually a very interesting book.

 

 

1.Origin of the Somali People

Mohamed Farah Eideed

 

'The News Week" the International News Magazine of January 11, 1988 carried a very thrilling article "The Search for Adam and Eve" by John Tierney et al.1 It reported that geneticist Rebecca Cann, formerly of the University of California, Berkeley who is now at the University of Hawaii, and her erstwhile colleague Allan Wilson of the University of California, have proved through their startling mitochondrial DNA research that all human beings in the world are descended from a common single woman ancestress Eve who lived two million years ago in Sub-Saharan Africa.

 

Fossil hunters in Asia more than half a century ago found the bones of a Java man and Peking man. Before them, a strange skeleton had been discovered in Germany's Neanderthal valley. Anthropologists have been of the view that "all these ancient humans traced their lineage back to Africa, because that was the only place with evidence of humans living more than a million years ago. Stone tools were invented there about two million years ago by an ancestor named Homo hibilis ("Handy Man"). Before him was Lucy, whose three-million years old skeleton was unearthed in the Ethiopian desert in 1974.2 Anthropologist Dr. Leaky held that Homo hibilis lived in eastern Africa nearly three million years ago.3

 

Both these researches show that the modern man originated in Africa -- in Somalia or at least not very far from Somalia. Let us remind ourselves that in ancient times, the boundaries of Somalia covered a very large area, parts of which are now under the control of Ethiopia, Somalia, and others. Therefore, there is a possibility that ancient Somalia was the home of Even who lived two million years ago.

 

2. According to Historian Basil Davidson:

 

"... We have seen that East Africa's early ancestors of mankind more than two million years ago were people whose heads had big jaws and big brows. The descendents of these and other types of hominid spread gradually across the world during the countless thousands of years of the Early Stone Age. As they did so, they evolved different shapes and sizes of body and appearances. Different skin colours appeared, different kinds of faces, different sorts of hair.

 

Little is known about how all this happened. But what we do know is that most of the different races of modern man, of homo sapiens, had come into existence before the end of the Middle stone Age... main differences between the big families of mankind -- between the so called 'black, 'white' or 'yellow' races -- go far back into the Stone age.

 

Several different 'families' or groups of different types of Africans were living in central and eastern Africa when the Iron Age began here. One of these peoples seem to have been a type of 'tall hunter', but this type has long since disappeared. Another was a type of 'short hunter' who were the ancestors of peoples such as the Bushmen and the Twa (Pygmies) who still survive in some places.

 

Other ancestors of modern East Africans, though not of Central Africans, were another fairly tall people who may be called 'North-East Africans' and who were partly related, in distant times to Western Asians. It is from them that the Cushitic group of languages have descended.

 

... A few groups who speak languages of the Cushitic family still flourish in the north-east: these include the Somali and the Ealia."4

 

3. Renowned archeologist Professor J. Desmond Clark

 

In his authoritative reference volume "The Prehistory of Africa" (1970), he has made the discovery that in the Stone age during the period 50,000 BC to 35,000 BD, the earliest ancestors of the Somalis specialized in making leaf-shaped stone points and scraping equipment, and that since the later Middle Pleistocene age, i.e., since at leas 30,000 years ago, Somalia had definitely been under continuous occupation by man.

 

Let us quote the exact words of the evidence of Professor Clark for the sake of the perfect knowledge and fullest satisfaction of all the Somali people and other foreign readers, for this is a very crucial and important research highlighting the origin of the Somali people:

 

"About seventy thousand years ago, there began a world-wide lowering of temperature that heralded the onset of the last glaciation and the continental ice sheets advanced again in the higher latitude belts. Twenty thousand years later temperatures in the tropical and sub-tropical regions were already some 5o to 6o Centigrade lower than they are today and there is some indication of increased rainfall and greater availability of surface water supplies.

 

... By sixty thousand years ago, there is evidence from both north Africa (Haua Fteah) and the Mediterranean basin generally as well as from tropical Africa (Kaiamto Falls) for wetter as well as cooler conditions. At an estimate, this climatic adjustment from the warmer, humid middle Pleistocene to the cooler and wetter conditions of Upper Pleistocene took about ten thousand years or less to complete.

 

... It was at this time (i.e. 60,000 - 10,000 = 50,000 years ago) also that the various sub-species of Homo Sapiens made their appearance in the archeological record in Africa.

 

... With the coming of Homo Sapiens, there is now for the first time evidence for regular occupation of the equatorial forest on the one hand, and on the other, of what are today the desertic and semi-arid steppe lands of the Horn and north-east Africa. The earliest evidence of continuous occupation of regions such as the Congo forests, as of Somalia, and Nubian Section of the Nile Valley, dates from this time.5

 

... South of the Sahara, a number of more specialized equipment traditions make their appearances after 35,000 B.C. ... That in the Horn, to begin with (described as "Levalloisian"), shows connections with northeast Africa but this later gives place for an industry ('Somali land still Bay') with finely retouched leaf shaped points and scraping equipment which shows association with those of east and south African Savanna and grass lands where many variations in the scrapper and point forms are formed."6

 

4. According to Historian Robin Hallet:

 

"In Somalia, southern Ethiopia, and Darfur, local chronicles throw some light on developments in the last seven or eight hundred years. But the earlier history of these areas is almost completely dark.

 

... In time archeological research should be able to throw a flood of light on the early history of many more parts of North-east Africa. But for the time being the historian must make do with the hypotheses put forward by physical anthropologists and linguistic scholars.

 

... The evidence provided by physical types is vague and confusing. Broadly speaking, the region is divided between two great linguistic families,

 

Afro-Asiatic and

Nilo-Saharan.

Three branches of Afro-Asiatic have existed in the area.

 

Ancient Egyptian,

Cushitic and

Semitic.

Of these the first is now extinct. The Cushitic branch of Afro-Asiatic has been divided into five sections: Northern, Central, Western, Eastern, and Southern.

 

The most prominent of the Northern Cushitic are the Beja, a pastoral peopled living between the Sudanic Nile and the Red Sea.

Central Cushitic today form a small group - the Agau and Kindred people - in northern Ethiopia; but Central Cushitic languages were probably spoken over a much larger area until they were replaced by the Semitic languages introduced by colonists from South Arabia in the first Millennium B.C.

Western cushitic languages are spoken by some of the Sidama peoples of South western Ethiopia.

Eastern Cushitic by other Sidama groups and by the Danakil (Afar), Galla, and Somali of the Horn of Africa.

Finally, there is a small isolated group of Southern Cushitic speakers represented by the Iraqu of northern Tanzania."7

He further states that:

 

"archeological evidence suggests that movement of peoples of Caucasoid stock from Western Asia into North-east Africa began at a very remove date, at least ten thousand years ago. The first Caucasoid were hunter-gatherers, who must have kept to the drier lands and avoided the cool Ethiopian highland and the savings of Southern Sudan. Some of these early Caucasoid groups probably remained on the Red Sea Coast, others moved Westward along the North-Africa littoral, yet others followed the line of the Rift valley that divides the Ethiopian highlands onto the highlands of East Africa. The Caucasoids introduced the different Cushitic languages. But about the relations between the speakers of the different branches of Cushitic nothing definite is known."8

 

5. Agathachides

 

In the second century B.C., a Greek scholar Agathachides, first tried to classify the people of North-east Africa. He divided the peoples living south of Egypt into four types:

 

river rain agriculturists,

marsh dwellers,

nomadic pastoralists, and

fishers on the shore.

The first three groups accord well with the present division (represented by such groups as the Nile Nubians, the Nuer, and the Beja, in that large part of the population of the modern Sudan that is not of Arab origin."9

 

6. Keeping Cattle

 

Historians inform us that cattle-rearing started in Sahara about 5000 years ago, i.e. about 3,000 B.C.10 Thus the Galla and other Somali tribes who, as we have seen above, were the original inhabitants of Somalia, might have become pastoral nomads around 1,000 B.C. Before that time, they might have been hunters, catchers and food gatherers.

 

7. Sir Richard Burton on the Origin of the Gallas

 

Regarding the origin of the Gallas, Sir Richard Burton, the British explorer who travelled in northern Somalia about 137 years back (in 1856-58), wrote as under in his famous book: "First Foot Steps in East Africa":

 

"The half-castes in Eastern Africa are represented principally by the Abyssinians, Gallas, Somal, Sawhili, Hamitic, and Kafirs. The first-named people derive their descent from Menelak, son of Solomon by the Queen of Sheba...

 

About the origin of the Gallas there is a diversity of opinion. Some declare them to be Meccan Arabs, who settled in the Western Coast of the Red Sea in a remote epoch: according to the Abyssinians, however, and there is little to find fault within their theory, the Gallas are descended from a princess of their nation, who was given in marriage to a slave from the country south of Gurague. She bore seven sons, who became mighty robbers and founders of tribes; their progenitors obtained the name of Gallas, after the river Gala, in Gurague, where they gained a decisive victory over their kinsmen the Abyssin"11

 

8. Somaal as the Ancestor of the Somalis

 

Today all the Somalis consider that their common ancestor in the remote past was "Somaal" and that the country has been called Somalia after the name of that ancestor Somaal.

 

9. Physical Anthropology

 

Not very extensive physical anthropological studies of the Somali tribes have been done as yet. But even then, whatever work has been done is very important, for it reveals very clearly that the Somalis living in the Horn were a very ancient people of far more than 10,000 years B.C., much before the oldest civilization of Egypt which developed only about 5,000 years B.C.

 

Physical anthropological research studies conducted by Professor Jean Hierneaux and reported by him in his famous book "The People of Africa" (1974) throw valuable light on the Somali people:

 

" ... the fossils record tells of tall people with long and narrow heads, faces and noses who lived a few thousand years B.C. in East Africa at such place in Gamble's cave in the Kenya Rift Valley and at Olduval in northern Tanzania. There is every reason to believe that they are ancestral to the living 'Elongated East Africans'.

 

... It (this element of 'Elongated Africans') was first concentrated in the cattle breeders of the neolithic Sahara, whose inhabitants dispersed because of progressive desiccation, giving rise to the herdsmen of east Africa (the Tutsi, Hima, Masai, Galla and Somali are all pastoralists).12

 

... The Galla of Southern Ethiopia are intermediate between Tutsi and the Somali. In northern Ethiopia and Eastern Sudan, biological affinities with Somali and Galla fade away as one moves north within the Beja ethnic group. The most southern Beja subgroups, the Beni Amer and Hadenda, differ only moderately from a northern community of Somali, the Warsingali.

 

... The Somali and Galla speak Eastern Cushitic languages, the Beja, a Northern Cushitic one.

 

... Besides having similar physical characteristics, the Elongated Africans share a major cultural trait: they are essentially pastoral, except for a few communities who abandoned this way of life recently.12

 

... According to Murdoch, independent pastoralism did not appear among the Somali and Galla until near the end of the first millennium (thousand) A.D., whereas apparently it was already practised by the Beja when they first appear in Egyptian history around 2700 B.C."13

 

... The archaeological existence suggests that pastoralism together with grain cultivation, may have diffused to the Ethiopian highlands and the Horn of Africa in the second, if not the third millennium B.C. and it was established in the highland and Rift Valley region of Kenya and northern Tanzania in the last millennium B.C. or earlier.

 

However, the Kenyan and Tanzanian populations who practised pastoralism long before the coming of iron were themselves akin to the ancestors of the present Cushitic speaking Galla and Somali, whose nucleus of expansion lies in Southern Ethiopia. The skeletons of hunter-fisher-gatherers of the stone age all belong to populations characterized by tall stature generally with a long and narrow head, high and narrow face and nose, and frequently showing sub-nasal prognathism -- features which are all displayed by the living Elongated Africans.14

 

... However, the earliest movement from east Africa, if correctly dated, shows that the modern Elongated Africans there differentiated at a time when the peoples of the Sahara were still relatively archaic. According to archaeology, the centre of this differentiation might be the Horn. The extremely hot and dry climate of this area might be expected to cause, through climatic selection, the most rigid evolution towards the Elongated African morphology from a still little differentiated stock."15

 

Thus the Somalis can feel proud that archeological and physical anthropological researches have conclusively established that the Somalis have been a very ancient people who have been living in their present land for about 40 or 50 thousand years.

[Liqaye]

Yup i read the book although i can categorically say that it was ghost written by a ghost writer.

May be the son-of-a BIIJ should have written about the somali present that he pissed on, and the future for somalis that he has made so much harder.

 

Just a thought.