After several years in Ohio, I moved to a city in Southern California, not far from Los Angeles, for graduate studies. Southern California was different because it had two dozen Somali families who were brought as Ethiopian refugees. The community, though small, was a closely-knit group and we visited each other in the Weekends, ate together, and helped the new arrivals. But in early 1990s and due to the gestation of the Somali Civil War, a new wave of refugees poured in our city that had witnessed the disintegration of Somalia on first-hand and had seen gruesome killings and displacement. The small Somali community that coexisted peacefully and in harmony for years all of sudden became infused with a new blood that saw the world, perhaps, in the prism of clan warfare.
Many of the newcomers seemed to be hauling around some legitimate grievances about what was done to them. It did not take long that the early pioneers of the community-some highly educated- to start mangling their roles by gradually gravitating to their clans and then becoming stooges doing their tribe’s bidding. It was a needling reminder, or perhaps a repudiation of conventional wisdom, that the educated class is bereft of the vagaries of clannism. It was like the x-ray-not beautified but stripped down- and beyond the veneer of civility laid individuals with extreme clannish views. I remember two educated good friends, one Awrtable and the other Ogaden, who used to go out every day and drink coffee together all of sudden ceasing to socialize. When I inquired about the reason of their falling out, the Awrtable man said, “Don’t you know what happened in Kismayo? The Ogadens are now claiming Kismayo as their territory”.
One Issak fellow used to stand in a major intersection of the city cursing what he called “Dulmiga Daaroodka” (Darod Wrongdoing). A Marehan man mused if his daily prayers, behind a Habar Gidir Sheikh, would ever be accepted.
Coming from a non-Hawiye, non-Issak, and non-Darod clan, I was somehow spared from this dysfunctional and acrimonious environment. There were numerous times that I was called to interpret in court cases because the defendants and the victims found a Geledi man either “neutral” or “harmless”. But my short honeymoon was rudely interrupted when one day I walked into a court and an attorney asked me a relevant (ok, dumb) question; “What is your clan?” In a normal conversation, I would have told that lawyer about my clan and, perhaps, would have basked in informing him that the Geledi Sultanate onetime ruled what is now called “Benadir” region but this was a court of law. I refused to state my clan in the pretext that I was a professional, and hence an impartial, interpreter. The attorney pondered for seconds and posed another question that almost made me yell with a hideous laughter. “Okay, do you speak ‘Darod Dialect’? “Who told you that the Darod have their own dialect?”
I asked him. The attorney showed me a young woman-who was born and raised in Kenya- and who was a Case Worker for a local clan-based organization as the source of his information. 
The issues many of the Somali refugees faced in the 1990s were the same many refugees face when placed in a new country; language barrier, lack of employment, and growing youth delinquencies. More Somalis kept coming to the States under the Family Unification Act until the American government amended the law in late 1990s. Then there was the tragedy of 9/11 in 2001 which almost put future Somali emigration to America to a complete halt. It was sometime after 2002, when a new wave of Somali refugees came but this time they were overwhelmingly Bantu. The Bantu encountered major difficulties in their resettlement in America because many of them came from small farming towns. Moreover, the Bantu refugees were a protected group because of the legacy of slavery and discrimination in Somalia.
By Hassan M. Abukar
