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Somali Refugees in London: Oral Culture

in a Western Information Environment

ANTHONY OLDEN

Centre for Information Management, Thames Valley University, Ealing, London, UK

Political upheaval and civil war led to hundreds of thous-

ands of Somalis fleeing their country in the late 1980s and

early 1990s. Some made their way to the United Kingdom.

This paper gives an overview of the experiences of these

people from an oral culture in a Western information envi-

ronment. Twenty-five Somalis were interviewed in London.

The rationale for their selection is discussed. The research

found that Somalis communicate by telephone extensively.

Adults who can receive it via satellite dish listen to the BBC

Somali Service – broadcast to the Horn of Africa – in Lon-

don. Young Somalis face problems due to their prior lack of

schooling in the rural parts of Somalia and in the refugee

camps, and because English is their third or fourth lan-

guage. Word of mouth is the main way of finding out about

study opportunities and jobs. Community associations help

single parents with little English. Somali language publica-

tions are few. Use of the Internet is common among Somali

professionals and university students. Research conducted

over a number of years would be of value in assessing adap-

tation to a new information environment. Research on the

information needs and interests of children born to Somali

parents in the UK would also be of value.

Introduction

The world may well be a global village in the

media sense, but on the ground the borders of the

village are far more rigorously policed than was

the case fifty or a hundred years ago. It is hard

for refugees to move from one country to another

and adjusting successfully to a new environment

may be harder still. War has displaced Liberians

and Sierra Leoneans in West Africa, Rwandans in

the Great Lakes region, and Somalis in the Horn

of Africa. Where people go depends on their

background, their culture, their contacts, the re-

sources at their disposal, and the options that are

open to them, which include the asylum and im-

migration policies of possible host countries.

Many take refuge in neighbouring countries. Some

refugees go to the former colonial ruler: some

Rwandans went to Belgium, while others went to

France, which takes an active interest in the

Francophone countries of Africa (Gourevitch

1998). Substantial numbers of Somalis managed

to come to the United Kingdom in the late 1980s

and early 1990s.

Somalis speak the same language and share

the same religion, thereby ruling out what causes

conflict in many other parts of the world. But the

state that came into being when the British Somali-

land Protectorate joined Italian Somalia to form

the Somali Republic in 1960 collapsed within

thirty years. One reason for this was the in-

creasingly despotic behaviour of Mohamed Siyad

Barre, the president who had seized power in a

military coup in 1969. Other reasons include as-

pects of traditional culture and their transposi-

tion from local to national level: the clan system,

the concept of group rather than individual culpa-

bility, and lineage segmentation, under which in-

dividuals, families and clans act in harmony or in

opposition to each other according to changing

circumstances (Samatar 1991).

Territorial boundaries in Africa often split peo-

ple up rather than encompassing them. The So-

mali Republic did not include the people of what

was then French Somaliland (now Djibouti) or

the Somalis of northeast Kenya and the Ogaden

region of Ethiopia. Siyad Barre went to war with

Ethiopia over the Ogaden in 1977. He lost, and

Libri, 1999, vol. 49, pp. 212–224

Printed in Germany · All rights reserved

Copyright  Saur 1999

____________________________________________

Libri

ISSN 0024-2667

Dr Anthony Olden is Senior Lecturer. Centre for Information Management, Thames Valley University, St Mary’s Road, Ealing,

London W5 5RF, UK. Email: tony.olden@tvu.ac.uk

Somali Refugees in London

213

several hundred thousand Somali refugees left

Ethiopia for Somalia (Kibreab 1993). In 1988, as

the situation in Somalia deteriorated, Siyad Barre’s

forces attacked the city of Hargeisa in the north-

west of the country. Several hundred thousand

Somalis fled to Ethiopia (United Nations 1996). A

number of these and others eventually made

their way outside Africa, some to the United King-

dom.

Somali men had served on British merchant

ships since the nineteenth century. They estab-

lished small communities in ports such as Cardiff,

Liverpool and London’s East End. More recent

arrivals have been fleeing unrest at home. By the

late 1980s many single mothers with school-age

children were coming (El-Solh 1991). Today there

are fewer immigrants, partly because stability has

been restored in northwest Somalia (the former

British Somaliland, which broke away as the Re-

public of Somaliland in 1991), partly because the

criteria for immigration into the UK have been

tightened. The exact size of the community in the

UK is not known, and there are different estimates.

One recent estimate is 60,000 (Kahin 1997). Offi-

cial data on the size and distribution of refugee

groups in the country is not publicly available

(Robinson 1998), but it is believed that the ma-

jority of Somalis live in the Greater London area.

There are a number of reports on the commu-

nity in London boroughs and other parts of the

UK. These were commissioned under local au-

thority and other auspices, and include Somali

community in Tower Hamlets (CSC 1998); Feeling

exclusion? A survey of the Somali community in

Lewisham (II Ahmed 1998); Islington Somali com-

munity survey report (1994); The Somali community

in Cardiff (1994); Educational and training needs of

the Somali community in South Glamorgan (EA Ah-

med no date); and A survey of the educational back-

grounds and needs of Somali families in Bristol

(1995). But the relative paucity of information

about the community becomes clear when one

consults the subject index of the fourth national

survey of ethnic minorities (Modood et al. 1997).

Bangladeshi women and Bangladeshis account for

three columns of the survey, while under Somalis

there is just one reference.

Particular attention is paid to the needs of

younger members of the community in this proj-

ect. Most will spend the rest of their lives in the

UK. Older Somalis may well do so also – includ-

ing those who believe their stay here to be tem-

porary, or wish it to be so – but are more likely to

be preoccupied with lives left behind and with

what is happening to family and friends back

home. They also find it harder to adapt. A nurse

practising in East London found that elderly So-

mali women were particularly prone to non-

specific physical complaints. In Somalia they

would be the focus of the family, to whom others

would come for advice. As refugees in a foreign

culture they no longer have status (Wiggs 1994).

Life is not easy for younger refugees either, but at

least they have better opportunities and pros-

pects. As one interviewee put it, “the younger

generations are more integrated, they ... belong

here [more] ... But the older ones, we belong to

the other side .... It’s painful to be here”.

Research methods

A survey was carried out, although those sur-

veyed were not selected scientifically. The ration-

ale was that the depth and quality of the data

collected would compensate for the limitations of

the selection (Mcharazo and Olden 1999). A pre-

cedent is the large-scale countrywide survey

(Carey-Wood et al. 1995) of how asylum-seekers

to the UK had fared in terms of settling into the

community. It found it impossible to identify an

adequate sampling frame. For reasons of con-

fidentiality, direct access to the records of the Im-

migration and Nationality Division of the Home

Office was not possible. Although the Home Of-

fice was willing to assist, Carey-Wood and her

colleagues felt that the addresses in files might

not be up-to-date and that “official” involvement

might alarm potential respondents. Most refu-

gees leave their country of origin because of

trouble from the authorities. Most go through

anxious periods awaiting decisions on their im-

migration status from the authorities in their host

country. A letter in the mail, a telephone call, or a

knock on the door from a researcher saying that

he or she had been told about them by a govern-

ment department would not be likely to evoke

the most positive response.

The Carey-Wood survey distributed leaflets to

community groups, each leaflet containing a form

that could be returned by anyone willing to be

interviewed. To identify appropriate community

groups in London this Somali project used the

Anthony Olden

214

Refugee Council’s directory Refugee resources in

the UK. It gives contact names as well as provid-

ing addresses and telephone numbers. Sixteen

Somali associations were written to, and a con-

tact telephone number provided to enable the

recipient to respond without the bother of writ-

ing a letter. But there was little response, and the

letters were followed up by telephone calls to

speed matters up. It was then that one point

about refugee associations became obvious: most

operate on a shoestring. They have very little

money (sources include local councils, the Lon-

don Boroughs Grants Unit and the Home Office),

and in the main most of those who work for

them do so on a voluntary basis. As a result, per-

sonnel changes, premises change and telephone

numbers change – or telephones get disconnected

when money is not available to pay the bill. Re-

search on Kurdish associations in London found

that new ones were continually being started

while the old ones were disappearing (Wahlbeck

1998). But some contacts were established, and

these contacts led to others. This is the snowball

effect, which has also been used in other surveys

of the Somali community (El-Solh 1991 and 1993,

Griffiths 1997). Other contacts were suggested by

some of the researcher’s students, in particular by

the Somali undergraduate who arranged and

assisted with the pilot interviews.

Ethnographic methods are often used to in-

vestigate oral cultures (Hammersley and Atkin-

son 1995), and the interview was the main tool

that gathered data for this research. The pilot

interviews were opportunities to try out different

approaches, and resulted in the original list of

questions being whittled down to the following

list of issues for discussion:

• Your personal background

• The issues and problems of most concern to younger

members of the community

• Your feelings about Somalis and education in the UK

• How Somalis find information about study opportuni-

ties

• How Somalis find information about other matters (for

example jobs)

• Additional information that would be helpful

• Any other points/advice?

The rationale for starting on a personal level

was that most interviewees would find it easier

to start talking about themselves and their back-

ground. The aim in ethnographic interviewing is

to facilitate a conversation, giving the interviewee

plenty of leeway (Hammersley and Atkinson

1995). “Ask them about their job, their work and

best of all the problems they experience when

doing it” is one recommendation (Nicholas 1997,

346). “The golden rule is not to box people in

with a rigid set of questions, but to be flexible

within an overall plan” is another (Slim and

Thompson [1994?], 76). A further point is that to

start off by asking people what information they

need may bring the puzzled response that they

do not need any, as a study of rural dwellers in

Southern Africa discovered. It was only when the

researcher went on to ask about their farms or

their businesses that they mentioned items of in-

formation that would be an asset to them

(Mchombu 1995).

Following on the pilot phase twenty-five So-

malis were interviewed in the interviewee’s

workplace, place of study, or home. The locations

were the London boroughs of Camden, Croydon,

Ealing, Greenwich, Hillingdon, Hounslow, Isling-

ton and Tower Hamlets. Although originally con-

centrated in the East End, Somalis can now be

found in all parts of Greater London. One inter-

viewee said that in spite of the civil war and

other difficulties at home, Somalis liked to settle

where other Somalis were. Availability of local

authority housing and quality of education are

other factors, as is the absence of problems such

as racism: one person mentioned moving from a

part of London where she had been spat upon

several times.

Seven of the twenty-five interviewees were

women. It proved more difficult to find women,

but the first female interviewees helped by sug-

gesting contacts and by telephoning them in

advance, which meant that the researcher did not

have to write or “cold-call”. One male interviewee

expressed initial reservations. He suggested that

the reason for the poor response to this research-

er’s letters to community associations was the

previous experience of Somalis with projects that

never brought results. In his opinion many re-

search projects were of more importance to the

researchers than to those under research. The re-

searcher acknowledged that there was some truth

in this but pointed out that he had given advice

to a number of interviewees who had questions

Somali Refugees in London

215

about education. He had also accepted an invita-

tion from another interviewee to join SOMAID, a

new charity working towards establishing a uni-

versity in Hargeisa.

Most interviews were conducted on a one-to-

one basis. Exceptions to this included two teach-

ers who shared an office and were interviewed

jointly. Their dialogue added an additional di-

mension. Interviews were in English, and their

length depended on how much the interviewee

had to say and the time at his or her disposal.

They ranged from ten minutes to well over an

hour. They were taped with the interviewee’s

permission and the tapes were later transcribed.

Points of interest made before or after the taping

were written down. After the tape recorder had

been switched off one interviewee thought for a

moment and then summed up the situation of

many in her community as follows: “Our prob-

lem is poverty”.

Personal background of the interviewees

Many of the interviewees were teachers or social

workers. Others were journalists. There was also

a translator, a police interpreter and a minicab

driver. Some were graduates of the Somali Na-

tional University. A few had master’s degrees

from British, Canadian or American universities.

Others had studied in the Netherlands and India.

One held a doctorate from the United States; an-

other was registered for one in the UK. Some had

held senior positions before changed circum-

stances had brought them to the UK. One had

spent twelve years in the Somali diplomatic serv-

ice, serving in the Soviet Union, the United States

and the German Democratic Republic. Another

had worked for the World Bank for a period. A

third had worked for the Somali Academy of Arts

and Sciences, managing a group of thirty scholars

compiling a dictionary of the Somali language.

The youngest interviewees were students in

further education colleges. These had arrived as

children or teenagers. One eighteen-year-old ex-

plained how he had arrived at the age of sixteen

with his seven brothers and sisters and their

mother. None spoke English. They came after a

period in a refugee camp in Kenya, and the father

managed to join them later. A twenty-five-year-

old final-year engineering undergraduate told

how government forces had killed his father and

uncle as the family fled from Hargeisa in 1988.

After two years in a refugee camp in Ethiopia he

managed to leave for Europe.

Not all the interviewees had come to the UK as

refugees. For example, the BBC Somali Service

had recruited two as radio journalists, one as far

back as the 1970s. The interviewee who had most

recently arrived had been here just a year, manag-

ing to join his wife and children who had arrived

several years earlier. Since arriving his application

for refugee status had been lost by his solicitor:

So I became very devastated, and then they tried to help

me out and I re-applied again and now I’m waiting to

hear from the Home Office and I try to keep myself busy.

I don’t get even any support, I don’t have the status, I

can’t go to work, I can’t go for further studies. So I work

for the community as a volunteer, that’s my background.

An oral society

Until recent times most of Africa was very largely

an oral society (Sturges and Neill 1998), and

news by word of mouth still has an enormous

significance for refugees. In 1992 there were over

a million Mozambican refugees in Malawi and

up to another million spread between Tanzania,

Zimbabwe, Zambia, Swaziland and South Africa.

They developed their own information systems,

getting news from cross-border traders for exam-

ple. Personal contacts were considered trustwor-

thier than institutional sources such as the op-

posing political parties back home (Koser 1997).

The Somali situation is further complicated by

the fact that the language was only written down

in the early 1970s. Burton, a British traveller in

Somaliland in the 1850s, thought it strange that a

language “which has no written character should

so abound in poetry and eloquence”:

There are thousands of songs, some local, others general,

upon all conceivable subjects, such as camel loading, draw-

ing water, and elephant hunting; every man of education

knows a variety of them ... The country teems with poets

... Every man has his recognized position in literature as

accurately defined as though he had been reviewed in a

century of magazines (Burton 1987 [1856], 1: 81–82).

Referring to traditional nomadic life, one inter-

viewee explained that when “people talk to each

other, it’s in poetry, if they fight, it’s through

poetry, poetry is very, very important in the life of

the Somali”. Burton noted that children learned by

Anthony Olden

216

conversation, not books, and that Somalis picked

up both Western and Eastern languages by ear

and memory.

Historically Somalis had used the Arabic lan-

guage for correspondence. During the colonial

era English was introduced to the north and Ita-

lian to the south. In 1972 the government decided

to adopt the Roman script for the language

(Kahin 1997). According to the interviewee who

had worked on the Somali dictionary project, one

reason for this was financial: typewriters in gov-

ernment offices would not need to be replaced.

This led to certain problems:

I can read English very fluently, I can read Somali very

fluently, but though Somali is my first language I can

read English better than Somali. Every person who is

reading Somali sometimes has got some hiccups ... and

that indicates that the Latin script is not the proper script

for the language.

Another interviewee explained that word-of-

mouth is the most successful way to communi-

cate with Somalis: if you want people to pay at-

tention to leaflets containing useful information,

you need to hand these out to them in person,

not distribute them through the mail. Much in-

formation is exchanged in social contact over the

chewing of Khat (qat), the leaves of Catha edulis, a

shrub grown in parts of East Africa and Yemen

(Bali 1997). It is a narcotic stimulant, illegal in

some countries but not in the UK. Fresh leaves

are imported on a regular basis, and there are

Khat houses in various parts of London. Khat

chewing is a form of relaxation mainly indulged

in by men. One interviewee stated that visiting a

Khat house and telling the men there about your

plans or the project that you have in mind is a

much better way of disseminating information

than putting up posters. Somali language news-

papers are on sale, but the patrons of the Khat

house prefer to listen – “Read for us please

what’s in there” – than to buy and read for them-

selves.

When receiving travel directions over the tele-

phone before appointments the researcher noticed

that not once did anyone suggest looking at the

widely available street guide, the London A to Z.

Obviously such printed sources are rarely con-

sulted. An interviewee pointed out that, when

necessary and possible, one Somali takes another

to a destination in person:

What the Somalis are good at is – if someone comes to the

office and he himself has an errand and when that’s fin-

ished he sees a Somali there who can’t speak English well

and if you ask him, “Please, can you take this lady to the

DSS [Department of Social Security]? ... Can you show

her that place?” ... There’s no problem, they just go along

and help. Even if it’s someone she meets in the street –

just meets in the street and says, “Please can you help

me? I need that place” – no problem there.

Another interviewee remembered how, as a

child in Somalia, a walk down a street with her

grandmother could take a long time because of

all the stopping to ask neighbours and friends

how they were and to exchange news. Too much

talk now makes her impatient, because she sees it

as a hindrance in the modern world, but in a pas-

toral society it was different: “If two strangers

meet ... in the middle of nowhere they would stop

and talk and ask each other what is happening,

and that was the way of exchanging informa-

tion”. “Is it peace?”, traditionally called out when

approaching someone, has been described as,

literally, a request for information (Lewis 1993).

Oral culture and modern telecommunications

The Somali have adopted modern telecommunica-

tions with enthusiasm. There may be no postal

communication between Somalia and the outside

world, but the telephone provides an instant link.

Barakaat, a company based in Mogadishu, the

capital of Somalia, had 5,700 mobile telephone

customers in early 1999 (Hannan 1999). Such So-

malis are an elite, but privately run centres are

available for the public in the major centres of

population and in the refugee camps in Ethiopia

and Kenya. Many Somalis in London have mo-

bile telephones, and telephone centres have been

springing up here also.

One can telephone the camps from Europe.

The local operator will arrange for the person one

wants to contact to be present to take the call at a

certain time on the following day. There is a

charge for this service, but it works well. No ad-

dress is necessary, just the person’s name (made

up of first name, father’s name and grandfather’s

name) and clan details. Somali clans have sub-

clans, and these sub-clans have sub-clans again.

These details perform the same function as a

street address in the West. If necessary someone

well known from the same clan background will

Somali Refugees in London

217

be contacted to assist. Several interviewees at-

tested to the success of these arrangements for

tracking people down.

Money is transferred without reference to

banks. One hands over Western currency to an

agency here, a fax is sent to the office there, and

the money is passed to the recipient. There is a

charge for the service (5% was the figure men-

tioned), but the money gets into the hands of the

recipient very fast, “faster than the Western Union,

faster than the banks, faster than the world’s

fastest money transfer”. “People can live without

governments”, one interviewee remarked of So-

maliland:

There’s no bank, there’s no post, there’s no social serv-

ices, there’s nothing working and everything’s booming

again! The business is booming, they’re dealing with dif-

ferent countries, and there’s money – wire transfers – by

fax, by fax – because the telephone’s working and the fax

is working.

One drawback is the pressure that telephone

calls for assistance can place on Somalis overseas.

Extended families are the norm in Africa, and it

is difficult to turn down a request for help. In a

life or death situation it is impossible. A former

teacher now working with a voluntary agency

explained why a student might fail to succeed:

He is on a full-time course and then he gets a call one

evening – his mother or his brother or his sister – “I’m

desperately needing money, we haven’t eaten for three

days” ... And then the boy ... gets confused and says

“What can I do? I can’t stay here, I have to be looking for

work”. And then he leaves the college, tries to look for a

job for three or four months, probably can’t get any ...

and then his study has gone. He keeps on being in that

cycle for many, many years.

The BBC Somali Service

The BBC was mentioned by many interviewees

as the most important source of unbiased infor-

mation for Somalis in the Horn of Africa and

elsewhere. By way of contrast, in the build-up to

the Rwandan massacres of 1994 Radio Rwanda

spread misinformation and Radio Television Li-

bres des Milles Collines spread propaganda,

encouraging its Hutu listeners to kill their Tutsi

compatriots (Gourevitch 1998).

BBC Broadcasts in Somali started in 1957,

around the same time as broadcasts in Kiswahili

and Hausa. Backing came from the Colonial

Office and later the Foreign and Commonwealth

Office. There are short broadcasts three times a

day, totalling ten hours a week. The emphasis is

on news and current affairs, but there is also a

“missing persons” slot co-funded by the British

Red Cross, Oxfam and Concern (Forty years of the

Somali Service 1997).

An attempt by the BBC to conduct audience re-

search based on random sampling in a rural part

of Somalia was unsuccessful. The researchers were

mistaken for aid personnel and asked to help

with water supplies (Kennedy 1997). But there is

no doubt about the overwhelming popularity of

the service in the Horn of Africa. The flagship

transmission is at 1530 Greenwich Mean Time,

and interviewees pointed out that all Somalis

who possess transistor radios listen. Others will

congregate around a radio in a teashop or else-

where. On contacting the BBC Somali Service in

London for more details, the researcher was told

by one of its staff that “a man will tolerate no

interruption from his wife or his children when

listening to a broadcast”. For him Somalis are the

most information-oriented people in the world.

Burton made a similar point in the nineteenth

century:

The Somal Badawin have a passion for knowing how the

world wags ... . No traveller ever passes a kraal without

planting spear in the ground, and demanding answers to

a lengthened string of queries ... Thus it is that news flies

through the country. Among the wild Gudabirsi the Rus-

sian war was a topic of interest, and at Harar I heard of a

violent storm which had damaged the shipping in Bom-

bay Harbour, but a few weeks after the event (Burton

1987 [1856] 1:131)

The broadcaster believes that 99% of Somali

women in the UK listen to the service, but an-

other interviewee maintained that men listen

more than women, because women are less politi-

cal and because household chores prevent them

from spending as much time listening to the

radio. Although directed at the Horn of Africa,

broadcasts can now be picked up via satellite

dish in Europe. Someone else said that people

take basic jobs such as cleaning in order to buy

the dish. At one time men listened to the broad-

casts in khat houses, but now many homes have

the connection. Another interviewee – a former

radio journalist herself – felt that listening to

Somali political news could have a negative ef-

fect. Yet another pointed out that in the UK only

Anthony Olden

218

the adults listen. Her children say “Oh mum,

you’re getting Somali news hour”. Then they

turn their attention to other things.

Education and literacy

Background before arrival in the UK

Literacy has been described as the most impor-

tant single innovation of foreign rule for the non-

Muslim parts of Africa (Afigbo 1985). But for

some Muslim and non-Muslim Africans Western

education was suspect in the early days of colo-

nialism. When the French established a school for

the sons of chiefs the Tuareg of the Sahara

handed over the children of their slaves instead.

They feared that if their own sons were taken

they might never see them again (Shortland

1999). One Somali interviewee mentioned the

fear that the colonial authorities would turn their

children into Christians. Her father and a friend

countered this when they founded the first ele-

mentary school in the British Somaliland Protec-

torate in the 1920s. For Somali nomads, however,

a knowledge of the traditional skills necessary for

survival obviously came first, together with

Qur’anic education.

The adoption of the Roman script for the So-

mali language in 1972 was followed by a literacy

campaign. After progress had been made in ur-

ban areas the government turned its attention to

the rest of the country. The slogan was: “If you

know, teach. If you don’t, learn” (Kahin 1997).

Schools were closed, and older children and their

teachers were sent to the rural areas to teach. The

country’s literacy statistics showed much im-

provement, and Unesco and other organisations

were appreciative. But the advances in literacy

outside the urban areas were not sustained: “It

was deceit! How could it be good? Taught by

children for one year only! ... We got awards, but

it was chaos, it was crazy.” Another interviewee

pointed out that the idea was a good one, but

what was lacking was a strategy to sustain the

development.

The women interviewed in this research were

either highly educated already or in the process

of advancing their level of education. But they

and the male interviewees pointed out that this

does not hold for many of the Somali women in

this country, or for many men either. According

to estimates from the early 1990s, 96 per cent of

women in Somalia cannot read. Early marriage is

the norm for settled rural women (nomadic wom-

en marry later), usually between the ages of fifteen

and eighteen. Children follow, making moving

elsewhere for further education unlikely (Women

in Somalia 1994). There are numerous single-

parent Somali families in the UK, and in most

cases the single parent is the mother. If she lacks

education she is unable to give the children the

support they need at home. One interviewee said

that children sometimes arrive in the UK with

relatives who have no schooling at all, and are

thus unable to advise them. Another summed up

the problem as follows: “Most of the fathers, the

mums, the women are not educated. They cannot

help them with their homework, with the system,

with the school. They don’t even understand,

they can’t read their work.” A third pointed out

that when a child fails to attend school and the

school writes to the parents, the parents may be

unable to read the letter so that they do not know

whether their child goes to school of not.

Somali children come from a wide range of

educational backgrounds. In some cases the father

will have worked in Saudi Arabia or the Gulf

States, and the children will have attended school

there. These will have written and spoken Ara-

bic, but not necessarily written Somali. Children

coming direct from Somalia or from refugee

camps in the neighbouring countries will have

little education. This is due to the disruption

caused by war and the limitations of life in rural

areas and in refugee camps. One interviewee

stated that a child coming to the UK from a rural

area is unlikely ever to have been to school in his

life. Another said that people were “just running

around the camp all day long either looking for

the dry food or looking for the water and all that.

Kids are playing – there’s no proper education

there.” A third comment was that people saw

that education was not always necessary to get

ahead in life. Some had amassed money and

done well without going to school, and others

thought “OK, maybe corruption and stealing was

the better way”.

Experience in the UK

One interviewee said he realised that “this country

if you stay no way you can live without informa-

Somali Refugees in London

219

tion”. But there are obstacles, in particular lan-

guage. English is not a first or a second language

but a third or even a fourth after Somali, Arabic

and in some instances Italian. Children are slot-

ted into classes on the basis of their age, and this

can cause serious problems for those with little

English and little experience of attending school:

Some child from a rural area, who knows only how to

look after livestock – ruminants, small livestock – doesn’t

know anything else and you put him in school, what do

you expect of that?

[When] a child of that age [fifteen] is taken to the class

which suits his age he finds it difficult to adjust because

he was either illiterate or unable to speak English ... and

when he’s asked a question the children laugh at him and

therefore he becomes violent or disorderly in his be-

haviour and soon he’s excluded from school. So we find

that many young people are facing this problem – ex-

clusion from schools, or they start being truant.

A study of immigrants from Russia and the

other states of the former Soviet Union attending

an Israeli high school showed the majority felt

that other pupils laughed at them. Most of their

friendships were with their fellow immigrants.

But there the similarities end, because their aver-

age educational level was high relative to that of

the rest of the Israeli population. Also school-age

immigrants to Israel receive intense grounding in

Hebrew for a number of months before being

slotted into classes according to their age and level

(Shainer 1998). Section 11 of the UK Local Govern-

ment Act 1966 made available grants to local au-

thorities to provide services to immigrants from

Commonwealth countries whose language or

customs differed from those of the community.

Most of the money was devoted to education, but

libraries were supported also. In 1993 the scope

of Section 11 was widened to benefit refugee stu-

dents from non-Commonwealth countries (Jones

and Rutter 1998). Money is spent on assistance

with English and on the employment of refugee

support teachers. The importance of both is ob-

vious: as one interviewee said, “all the people in

that younger age they trying to learn and educate

themselves but the very difficult hurdle for them

is the language barrier”. Support teachers can be

liaisons between school and home. They also

serve as role models, professionals drawn from

their own community to whom young Somalis

can look up. But the feeling in the community is

that not enough language help and support teach-

ers are provided.

Educational methods in Africa are traditional,

and different approaches such as group work in

class may puzzle some students. They believe the

teacher’s job is to instruct them (Suleiman 1991).

Library development in Somalia was virtually

non-existent outside the capital (Abdulla 1996

and 1998), which means that experience of work-

ing with learning resources is very limited. One

interviewee said that children never use the li-

brary because they are not trained to make use of

the resources: “they’re from a system where

they’re spoon-fed”. A former teacher explained

why worksheets handed out to children are not

always taken seriously. Somalis are used to learn-

ing from the Qu’ran,

the Holy Book, and they treat that with respect. And once

you give them a book which contains all the information

... including the exercises and the drilling and everything

that you want them to learn then it becomes easier for

them and that’s something that they take away with them

and bring it with them ... on day to day basis.

Mathematics was mentioned as a strength by

one interviewee, who said that it was better taught

in Somalia than in the UK. Reservations about

the level of mathematics teaching can be found in

the literature (McDonald 1998).

Finding out about further and higher education

The large-scale countrywide survey of refugees

by Carey-Wood and others includes the follow-

ing quotation from a Kurdish man:

English was my problem, trying to study language, and

to find out the best place to study – college or language

centre. It was very difficult in the beginning with me. It

would have been better if someone advised me the best

place to study language ... . After one year I found the

best place... . I couldn’t get good information (Carey-Wood

and others 1995, 27).

Information about further and higher educa-

tion is obtained by visiting colleges, but one

interviewee complained that “if I go to colleges I

don’t find people whom I can understand”. Other

sources of information are local newspapers, leaf-

lets, prospectuses, careers advisors, and – more

than anything else – other Somalis. In the words

of one interviewee “Somalis are basically copy-

Anthony Olden

220

cats and they talk quite a lot and the word gets

around very quickly”. If someone is succeeding

on a particular programme of study, others will

follow suit. One Somali community centre organ-

ised a gathering of around a hundred young men

and women, and got Somali university students

and graduates earning good salaries to talk to

them and tell them about their experiences.

An engineer who has since switched to social

work explained that he found out about degree

programmes in engineering through going

through as many brochures as possible. Already

qualified and experienced when he arrived in the

UK as a refugee, he found an institution that

admitted him with advanced standing, so that he

was able to get a British qualification in less than

the standard time. An engineering undergraduate

mentioned that he obtained a lot of information

through searching the Internet. His friends con-

tact him to search out appropriate programmes of

study for them. But a social worker pointed out

that those who drop out of school do not know

where to go for advice or information.

The Africa Education Trust and the Refugee

Education Training and Advisory Service of the

World University Service (UK) were mentioned

by one interviewee. Both are based in London.

The former has been providing free educational

advice since 1958. The latter assists in helping

professionally qualified refugees to practice their

professions in the UK. Another interviewee

teaches Information Technology at the Refugee

Training and Employment Centre, which is part

of the Refugee Council, an organisation that looks

after the interests of refugees and provides a

range of services for them at the start of their stay

in the UK. The Centre runs free training courses.

Cultural changes

Children exchange information with each other,

and one thing they quickly learn from classmates

and friends is that there are limits to the amount

of chastisement that parents can inflict in the UK.

One eighteen-year-old said that when he and his

family arrived “a lot of children said your father

can’t shout at you ... and if your father shouts at

you, you could go away to Council to complain

and then your father will get locked up”. An-

other interviewee recalled that the police had

asked him for his opinion about an instance in

which a recently arrived father was taken in for

questioning after beating his son. The man was

puzzled, saying “this is my child, and I need to

give him anything that would make him a proper

child, and what is the fuss all about?” He was let

go with a caution. Someone else said that “every

Somali parent is now trying to concentrate to

make sure that his child is brought up in a proper

way so that he can lead a better life”. But the

proper way must not infringe the laws of the host

country. Female circumcision (female genital mu-

tilation), prohibited in the UK, is a health issue

discussed in the literature (El-Sohl 1993, Rutter

1994, Kahin 1997). A topic of such sensitivity is

unlikely to be raised in a single interview with

someone from outside the community, especially

when the researcher is male.

Women may find that they now control the

family finances because social welfare payments

and so on will be channelled through them. This

alters the relationship between them and their

partners, particularly if the man is out of work.

But other relationships are altered also. One in-

terviewee referred to the old days when boys got

the Islamic education and travelled in search of

knowledge. Girls on the other hand “were just

told they were here on this earth to get married

and have children and then perish.” This has

long gone, but women with little English will

find themselves dependent on their children for

routine things such as consulting a doctor. The

child has to leave school to accompany its mother

and interpret. At least one London clinic, how-

ever, employs a Somali interpreter (Wiggs 1994).

This problem is by no means confined to the

Somali community. A survey of 1000 non-white

patients attending Bradford hospitals revealed

that 58.8 per cent were illiterate with regard to

their first or any language. The hospitals’ solu-

tion is to employ interpreters and produce audio

and videotapes in appropriate languages (Tufnell

et al. 1994).

Pressures that all teenagers face are exacerbated

by conflicting cultures. At school someone may

ask a girl “Do you have a boyfriend? ... What’s

wrong with you? You’re not normal!” At home

the mother will say: “What are you doing? You’re

putting on lipstick! Are you going crazy! You’re

not religious any more.” Boys may find them-

selves under pressure to join gangs and get in-

volved in drugs.

Somali Refugees in London

221

Employment

In most countries, immigrants, if they manage to

find employment, tend to get the jobs that others

do not want. Unemployment levels are very high

among Somali men in London, and those who

are employed may find themselves working as

casual labourers, night watchmen or minicab

drivers. This is particularly painful for those with

good qualifications. One interviewee mentioned

people with Ph.D.s who worked in warehouses.

They knew Somali, Arabic and Italian but their

limited knowledge of English blocked their path.

Another explained that, although he had a British

qualification in engineering, his accent might

have posed a problem if he had technicians who

spoke English colloquially working under him.

He turned to social work instead. Someone else

said that “it’s not easy to get jobs in this country

... whether you have ten Ph.D.s or not, it’s not

easy for refugees.” She mentioned Somali medi-

cal doctors who were out of work, and how use-

ful they could be at interpreting for patients who

lacked English if only provision could be made

for this. A study of Latin American women work-

ing illegally in Brussels said they often remarked

that they “came there to get a Ph.D. in cleaning”

(Leman 1997).

Information about employment is obtained

from the Department for Education and Employ-

ment’s Job Centres. But an interviewee pointed

out that language barriers and the strangeness of

the British system – “this is not the way we work

back home” – limits access to such mainstream

services. Somali community associations provide

some information about jobs, and he believed it

would be useful if they had career advisors. As

usual, much information is communicated orally:

Normally when one Somali gets a job ... a friend will

come to him and ask him, “Oh, is there a vacancy there?

OK, I’m going to talk to the manager, and I’ll ask him

when there will be a vacancy.” That’s how they get there.

So you find a lot of Somalis working in one place and no

Somalis working in the other place.

Not recognising qualifications from elsewhere,

or not making special provision to enable those

who hold them to acquire equivalent local quali-

fications in the shortest time possible, is a waste

of resources for the host country as well as a

frustration for the immigrant (Stalker 1994). As-

sistance in preparing for employment goes some

way towards ameliorating this. For example, Refu-

gee Employment Advice in the London Borough

of Hounslow and Ealing Tertiary College in the

London Borough of Ealing provide advice on job

applications, interview techniques and so on.

Community advice

A study of the information needs of refugee

groups found little evidence that statutory serv-

ices in the UK felt this area important enough to

involve specialist staff or services (Raddon and

Smith 1998). Research into public libraries, ethnic

diversity and citizenship concluded that the main

information provider for many people from black

and ethnic minority backgrounds is the commu-

nity organisation or the religious group, not the

library (Roach and Morrison 1998). There are So-

mali community associations in many parts of

London. Staffing is mainly on a voluntary basis.

One interviewee said she was a single parent

with four children, some of them teenagers, so

she had problems of her own. But as she was

educated and spoke English she felt it was im-

portant to spend time helping women who had

neither of these advantages. Some of the women

who came to her could not read the letters they

received from the local authority or deal with

their gas or telephone bills. Another interviewee

said that his and similar associations were in

between the service providers and the community.

They provide a service for those with limited

English in particular. Criticisms of community as-

sociations were that some became too involved in

administration or caught up in internal struggles.

Advice is provided on a full-time professional

basis also. One location is Oxford House, a multi-

purpose community centre in Bethnal Green,

East London, originally established in 1884 by

Oxford University staff and students “to provide

a centre for social, educational and religious work

amongst the poor of East London”. It employs six

Somali staff, with others working as volunteers,

and is visited by up to one hundred Somalis a

day. Its two full-time immigration workers pro-

vide free advice and representation for asylum

seekers from Somalia and other parts of the Horn

of Africa (Oxford House 1999). The backlog of

applicants is such that years can elapse between

an original application for refugee status and a

Anthony Olden

222

final decision by the Home Office. Uncertainty as

to what will happen casts a shadow over every-

thing else, and sympathetic and informed profes-

sional legal advice is essential. One immigration

advisor said that solicitors know the law but not

necessarily the background of their clients. This

limits their effectiveness. As an example of back-

ground knowledge he instanced a short report he

had compiled on the Midgan, Yibir and Tumaal

clans, a small minority who had faced discrimina-

tion in Somalia and would do so again if forced

to return.

Mainstream help can be obtained from the Citi-

zens’ Advice Bureaux. The immigration advisor

described these as good organisations that sup-

port people. Another interviewee recalled that

when he worked as a volunteer with a Citizens’

Advice Bureau in a particular part of London

people came from a wide area to consult him:

They believe that if there’s no Somali person there then

they are not represented... . Normally when you’re going

to somebody at least you will want him to know of your

background and where you come from and if somebody

just says “Where’s Somalia?” it just shows that he knows

nothing.

Somali language publications and local radio

Little is published in Somalia itself because of the

unsettled situation there. In London there is

Haan Books, a small firm that publishes books in

Somali and books about Somalia written in Eng-

lish. Occasionally a Somali newspaper or maga-

zine “pops up, but again it disappears”. Sales are

poor. One interviewee said that there was a lack

of trained personnel to produce such material.

Another felt that the content of these newspapers

was not sufficiently interesting, and went on to

add “generally Somalis are not good readers”. A

third mentioned that his young daughter enjoyed

looking at the pictures and being told the story in

Somali books, but was not keen on reading the

text. Experience shows that young immigrants

often lose some of their facility in reading in their

mother tongue, while children born to immigrant

parents may never learn to read in it in the first

place, or at any rate to read well. Mother tongue

classes are arranged to try to keep children in

touch with their language and culture.

A number of interviewees mentioned the local

radio station broadcasting in Somali in Sheffield.

The feeling was that a similar service for the com-

munity in London would be appreciated. A radio

journalist said that such a service would have to

be a professional operation, because “the Somali

community in London is highly politicised”.

Conclusion

Over the last fifty years the UK has provided a

home for both economic migrants and political

refugees. Hostility is sometimes expressed, for ex-

ample in tabloid newspaper headings: “Scroung-

ers now pouring in on the Eurostar train have

come from Somalia” (Troup and Bentham 1997).

Economic migrants are frowned upon nowadays,

although the British who emigrated to the United

States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South

Africa in the nineteenth century are praised in

retrospect for their initiative (except perhaps by

the descendants of the indigenous people whose

lands they acquired). Chinese economic migrants

to the UK in the 1950s and early 1960s also

showed initiative and did well. East African

Asians who were thrown out of Uganda and took

refuge in the UK in the early 1970s have pros-

pered also. Many minority groups are now better

represented than whites in higher education (Mo-

dood et al. 1997). But because most of the Somali

immigrants have come here relatively recently,

and earlier arrivals were few and did not see

themselves as being here permanently, they have

no representation in government. This is in con-

trast to the Asian community. Also, as one inter-

viewee pointed out, Somalis are outside the

mainstream of society because “they don’t social-

ise with them, they don’t go to church, they don’t

go to parties”.

A Western information environment is a new

experience for the majority of Somalis. Apart from

those attending college they do not make use of

libraries: “they are not reading a lot – but they’re

talking a lot”. One drawback to oral communica-

tion is that the person passing on information

might not be sufficiently well informed and might

mislead without intending to do so. One Somali

may advise another to go to a particular college

to learn English, when another college might be

more appropriate. In the words of one inter-

viewee, “what you might call adaptation to the so-

ciety is controlled by a few facts or non-facts

which they get from their relatives or friends – So-

Somali Refugees in London

223

mali friends”. Statutory providers of information

such as public libraries need to do more to link

with the community and find out how to help.

Generalisation has its limitations. One inter-

viewee pointed out that, as a member of the

Internet network Somaliland Forum, he receives

ten to twenty messages a day. There is always a

debate going on. Most Somali professionals and

students are likely to have email addresses, and if

one groups Somalis according to their educa-

tional background and compares them with

similar groups from other communities “you will

find them just as eager to use written forms of

communication”.

There is plenty of scope for research. One com-

mentator has stressed the importance of longitu-

dinal studies of refugee settlement (Robinson

1993 and 1998). These would provide a picture of

how panels of immigrants adapt to a new society

over ten or twenty years. A study of how a panel

with an oral culture adapts to a new information

environment over a period of time would be of

much interest. Research on what the second

generation in particular wants and needs was

recommended in a review of the literature on

black and ethnic minority/multicultural provi-

sion by public libraries (Olden et al. 1996). Chil-

dren born to Somali parents in Britain will grow

up in this country with their own information

needs and interests. These will require attention.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all the interviewees for

their time, helpfulness, and hospitality; Farah

Abdullahi Mohamud for setting up the pilot in-

terviews and clarifying a number of points about

Somali culture and society in the early stages of

the research; Fawzia Y.H. Adam, Mohamoud

Aden, Sadia Ahmed, Joyce Amirahmadi, Ita Dris-

coll, Theba Islam, Philippa Joy, Alli A.S. Mcharazo,

Farah Ali Mohamoud, Alison Shuttle, Megan Met-

calfe Thornton and Sue Thurston for suggestions,

advice or contacts; and Thames Valley University

for assistance. I would also like to thank Dr Saad

A. Shire for his comments on a draft of the paper.

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