Is it Ethical to Study Somalia?

I tell my students, ‘When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.’ This is not just a grab-bag candy game.

—Toni Morrison

During my master’s in African Studies at the University of Oxford in 2018, the first text I read was Professor Amina Mama’s Is It Ethical to Study Africa? Preliminary Thoughts on Scholarship and Freedom which explores identity, location, and the ethical challenges of being an African scholar studying Africa, with all the ‘allegiances and tensions of working in one’s own backyard.’ In this seminal piece, Professor Mama affirms that Africa’s radical intellectuals have effectively pursued anti-imperialist ethics and cultivated regional and national communities of scholars working for freedom. However, she argues that the ‘liberatory promise of the anti-colonial nationalist eras has not been fulfilled.’ In order to do so, she suggests that scholars address the ‘intellectual challenges of Africa’s complicated and contradictory location in the world’ and ‘ensure that our unique viewpoints inform methodological and pedagogical strategies that pursue freedom.’ If ethical considerations are indeed ‘framed around identity, epistemology and methodology’, as Professor Mama asserts, I frequently wondered what responsibility my diasporic identity placed on me as I endeavoured a decolonial liberatory approach to my study of Africa. This question stayed with me whilst researching and writing my dissertation, The Politics of Famine Relief: Diaspora & Local Humanitarian Work in Somalia, and my questions have evolved into reflections every year, since graduating.

POSITIONALITY

Reflections on diasporic and continental asymmetries of power are an intra-community discourse. For me, it is also the attempts to epistemologically reconnect the corporeal and spatial gap caused by being one generation removed from the continent. I approach research as one tool of many to seek to ‘know’ Somalia and further transformative justice, and yet intention does not alone mitigate the challenges of studying Somalia from a distance. When Professor Mama asked ‘What does having an African identity demand of our scholarly ethics?’, I reckoned with a diasporic African identity and being educated in the imperial core. There is legitimacy in my choice to study Somalia, but also a deep responsibility.

My reflections, surprisingly, did not contain the conflict of ‘being neither from here nor there’. The diasporic experience of feeling ‘out of place’ is one which many writers have explored, thoroughly and eloquently, but truthfully it is an experience I have largely come to peace with, with multiplicities I enjoy. Yet, unpacking identity is an essential component of acting ethically and morally. Identity requires us to render with positionality, privilege and power. A complete rejection of considering identity or lived experience, in fear of advocating for ‘identity politics’, often leads to epistemic violence—people speaking on behalf of others, taking space, and silencing or tokenizing people already rendered marginal.

This has not yet permeated the most stark inequalities in African Studies, namely the continued dominance of white scholars claiming ‘expert’ knowledge of Africa. Followers of Somali studies may remember the Cadaan Studies hashtag and the essential piece Can the Somali Speak? Despite this open and well-known disparity, many white academics continue to simply pick a country in Africa. This country becomes their niche and career, and it is a cause and consequence of the marginalization of Black scholars. These ‘experts’ often make reference to the ‘variation’ of their departments when they finally do get a Black (male) colleague and may vocalise doubts about the ability of African scholars to conduct ‘objective’ research.

DISTANCE AS OBJECTIVITY, OBJECTIVITY AS ETHICS

Objectivity as ethics is itself a white fallacy. Objectivity is a performance of respectability politics and the preservation of the intimate connection between academic pseudo-science and European imperialism and colonialism. A lot of ‘objective’ and ‘scientific’ historical research on Africa, despite being debunked, still has social, economic and political consequences for Africa and the African diaspora. For example, the origins of the Rwanda genocide can be traced to racializations which were imposed by Belgian colonial rule.

Racialized people are rarely considered objective. In this sense, objectivity for racialized people is still measured in degrees of proximity and distance. The diaspora, distanced from the continent is considered more objective and thus more respected and more privileged than scholars on the continent. During and after conducting my research, I spoke to many people who highlighted the benefits that a Western education, fluency in English and a British passport, would give someone working in the international humanitarian sector in Somalia. But I could think only of the students in Somalia who speak fluent Somali, and how the last mile of humanitarian aid in the most unsafe areas is delivered by them. The politics of knowledge production still refuses to recognise lived experience as expert knowledge.

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Is it Ethical to Study Somalia?

POSITIONALITY

DISTANCE AS OBJECTIVITY, OBJECTIVITY AS ETHICS

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