BANDITS ON THE BORDER: The Last Frontier In the Search For Somali Unity

Bandits on the Border: The Last Frontier in the Search for Somali Unity - By Nene Mburu. In the early 1990s, Somalia was in the spotlight for factionalism as Warlords, clans, and sub-clans doggedly wrenched their fiefdoms from the Polyglot State through bloody civil wars. In contrast, thirty years earlier the Somali were pre-occupied with the struggle for stitching together the five Somali-inhabited enclaves of the Horn of Africa into one ‘Greater Somalia’. Bandits on the Border revisits pan-Somalia nationalism of the 1960s when Kenyan Somalis attempted to secede and join the Somalia State which had been created after the merger of the former British Somaliland with the Italian Trusteeship. This book is the first insider’s analysis of the so-called Shifta secessionist war of the early 1960s and its degeneration into apolitical banditry that continues in the former Northern Frontier Districts of Kenya (NFD). The author argues that in the late 1950’s Britain’s crumbling colonial empire w