By Adan Makina
Editor’s Note: WardheerNews proudly presents to its readers the historical struggles of the former leader of the now defunct Northern Frontier Districts Liberation Front (NFDLF) that fought for separation from the Republic of Kenya. Septuagenarian Sultan Deghow Muhumed Sambul threw in the towel in the early nineties after the collapse of Somalia’s central government, and accepted defeat after combined fifty-years of struggle against British colonialism and against independent Kenya. In a long and ongoing exclusive research on Sultan Deghow Muhumed Sambul’s historical struggles that touch on the political, social, and historical past of the former Northern Frontier Districts (NFD), WardheerNews editor, Adan Makina, shares with our readers, Part II of the upcoming historical text.
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As the Sultan reminisces, education in the former NFD collectively started in 1946 in all the six districts that included Garissa, Wajir, Mandera, Moyale, Marsabit, and Isiolo. However, according to Turton, Wajir, which falls to the north of Garissa where the Sultan was born, had its first primary school in 1948. The year 1946 corresponds to an era when Somalis in Kenya were marginalized by the British colonial administration–a year after the end of the Second World War–a period of pan-Somali upheaval that was rejuvenated after the recommendations of the British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, who proposed the creation of a ‘Greater Somalia’ state to seal undeterred Somali pastoralists’ movement across unguarded colonial borders.
Deghow recalls starting his formal education at an intermediate colonial government school that same year. After eight years of hard work and dedication to his secular education, Deghow successfully completed his primary education. On the other hand, while pursuing his primary or intermediate education—a trend common among modern Somali school-goers, young Deghow attended an Islamic school that was run by his father who was a Maalim–a term originating in Arabic that translates to a ‘teacher’. Besides specializing as a teacher, Deghow’s father was a man of scholarly repute and as well one who memorized the entire Qur’an at a tender age—a uniform tendency that was unique to Somalis practicing sedentarization—a term interchangeably used in this book to connote pastoralism, nomadism or mobility that is mainly practiced by people whose lives were dictated by changing weather patterns, rivalry, cattle rustling, territorial competition and transhumance.
Such living conditions consequently lead to the search for water and pasturage for the herds of livestock that sustained people falling under such social category. Even at this time and age, Deghow, who is a few years short of attaining the feeble octogenarian age, quotes specific Qur’anic verses when explaining major subjects under discussion—an indication he has a good grasp of Qur’anic exegesis, Islamic jurisprudence, empyreal or stratospheric knowledge and other divine thoughts and principles.
Life father like son, it is the ingrained spiritual limpidity inherited from his spiritual father that gave him unfathomable outspokenness and adeptness of vulnerary remediation between pastoral conflicting parties. His tenderness of heart and compassion for innocent humans besieged by the inflicting horrors of European colonialism gave him the human resolve to embark on a political path of self-determination through armed struggle that lasted almost half a century in later years.
Since the colonial administration practiced divide-and-rule tactics, majority of the teachers who taught in secular and religious schools in Garissa District were primarily Muslim teachers brought from as far as Zanzibar. Zanzibari pedagogues managed and operated the few Madrassas in the district using Arabic as the medium of instruction.
People of Bantu extraction—whether pedagogues or others espousing distinctive educational backgrounds—regardless of whether they were males or females, were not allowed in the former NFD. On the other hand, Somalis and the Oromo were restricted from crossing the Tana River to other parts of Kenya for fear of exporting hostilities to peaceful southern regions that were haven for European settlers.
Ironically, rather than instituting novel administrative measures and injecting visionary leadership styles, the same stringent restrictive measures that were borrowed from the departing colonial master continued unabated even after Kenya’s attainment of independence in 1963 up to the Jomo Kenyatta and Arap Moi eras. Prior to taking office in the volatile, segregated NFD, British colonial administrative designates sent to the region to take over from their counterparts would exclusively be provided with Somali or Oromo cooks, drivers, and security guards, as the Sultan recalls.
Thus, the exclusive transfer of Zanzibari Muslim teachers to NFD was a way of enticing people belonging to the Hamito-Cushtic race to embrace British Colonial system of education while allowing Islamic education and Christian missionary activities to run side by side unrestrained.
While Christian education and missionary activities were inessential in areas heavily populated by people of Somali ethnic origin in the former NFD, traces of Christian evangelical activities remained visible among people practicing paganism and other African religious beliefs. The Somali disdain for other religious beliefs and their ardent desire to hold on to their Islamic beliefs, rendered Christian missionary proselytization efforts an impossible task.
After wrapping up his intermediate education, the youthful Deghow enrolled for secondary and university education through correspondence in Nairobi as it was the only way to enlighten his quest for higher education. While the Portuguese missionary activities were the first to inject formal schooling in Africa in the middle of the sixteenth century, the British and the French and later on the Americans, laid down the foundations for some form of authoritative European system of education in the nineteenth century.
READ MORE:A LOOK AT SULTAN DEGHOW MUHUMED SAMBUL’S POLITICAL STRUGGLES
Adan Makina
WardheerNews
Email: [email protected]
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Read also
Part I:A LOOK AT SULTAN DEGHOW MUHUMED SAMBUL’S POLITICAL STRUGGLES
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