Postby James Dahl » Tue Apr 17, 2007 3:18 pm
Kismayo was originally a Bajuni village, along with most of the coast and islands of Lower Juba. Middle Juba was largely Bantu.
Siad Barre encouraged Somalis to dispossess the land of the Bajuni and Bantu, and over a rather short period throughout the colonial era through the 1970s onward Lower and Middle Juba became mostly Somali. Initially this was actually a very mixed bag, with Somalis from lots of different clans, due to the way they came to be there, but Siad Barre favored his own Marehan settling in Lower Juba, so they became the dominant group there. The civil war brought the Marehan from Gedo south into Lower Juba in force, who took anything the Bajuni still had left, and drove out everyone else, establishing their dominance.
The Bajuni have been screwed over so thouroughly that I think they are the equivalent of the Native Americans or the Australian aboriginals. Their land got stolen, plain and simple.
The Bantu of Middle Juba also got a really raw deal, but Middle Juba isn't as rich as Lower Juba, so fewer Somali settlers moved there, and the Somali Bantu are better at defending themselves than the poor Bajuni, who are largely fishermen and so lack the knowledge of warfare that pastoralists like the Somali and Bantu know in their bones.
