The Somali Bantu Banadiri Groups of Xamar Brave Merka

the Bandhabow, the Morshe-Iskashato, the Abdisamad, the Sadiq Gedi, the Bafadal, the Amudi, the Duruqo, the rer Shikh, the rer Manyo, the Gudmane in Hamar-Weyne section and the rer Faqi in Shangani section.10
They are mixture of Portugueses, Somalis, Bantus and Indians or Arab immigrants from Yemen, Hadramaout and Persia. Some of them fled the Abbasside caliphate in the VIIIth century. The Asharaf for instance claim to be direct descendants of the prophet Mohammed and are well known as devout muslims. Others like the Amarani, hardly a thousand in number, are supposed to come from a Southern Arabian Israeli group chased away by Islam. Their name refers to one of the oldest areas of Mogadishu, Hamar Weyn, that they founded before the arrival of the

They speak a typically urban dialect, Chimbelazi or Chimini, which is tinged with Portuguese, Swahili, Arabic and Somali.11 In 1956, there were also 40,000 Arabs, Indo-Pakistaneses, Ethiopians and Eritrians in Italian Somalia;
Brava was divided into six districts : Dayax (“ the Moon ”, which replaced al Bamba and Biruni), Wadajir (“ Unity ” instead of a swahili toponymy, Mpai), Hawlwadag (formerly Baghdad), Qaasih al-Barawi (in respect of a local piety), Oktoobar (the “ October Revolution ”) and Saqaawadii (Abdulkadir Saqawadin Sheikh Uweys, a founder of the Somali Youth League before independence and a grandson of the sheikh who established the Qadiriya brotherhood in the area). These new names denied a goord part of Brava’s original history.

The Bravani were overwhelmed by the upheaval of civil war. First with the Darod who were fleeing from Mogadishu, then in February 1991 with the Hawiye of the United Somali Congress, then the Darod again, in this case the Marehan of the Somali National Front who retook the city the following month but lost it thirteen days later to other Darods, the Ogaden of the Somali Patriotic Movement. All clans taken together, the ghir ghir "mices" finished off the plundering at the beginning of 1992. Disputed by the Dir-Bimal of Abdi Warsemeh Isar’s Southern Somali National Movement, Brava has since fallen under the sphere of influence of the Hawadle, a Hawiye clan that rivalled the Habr Gedir of General "Aidid".


immigrants of Arab origin : the Hatimy, the Bida and the Asharaf. On the other hand, there are the Somali of the Brava surroundings, “ the five ” shangamaas whose minority status is more doubtful because they are part of the Tunni lineage of the Digil (fig. 3). Here we find the “ three of the rear-guard ”, i.e. the Dafarad, numerically the largest, the Werile and the Hajuwa, as well as the “ two of the shore ”, i.e. the Daqtira and the Goygal.
14 Révoil,
A first category includes nearly one hundred thousand Swahili-speaking Gosha that are sometimes called dalgolet ("forest people" in Somali), molema (or mlima, "mountain people" in broken Swahili), watoro ("runaway slaves" in Oromo) or oji (from the Italian word oggi, "today", because these Bantus were said not to think beyond the present day). They are descendants of slaves, for the most part originating from Tanzania where they were loaded onto ships from Kilwa Kivinje or Dar es Salaam to Brava in Somalia.24 Although the British forbade the export of slaves North of Lamu in 1845 and the French stopped buying from Kilwa in 1864, Somali continued this trade from Zanzibar. Up to 300,000 East African people were sold on the Benadir coast between 1770 and 1896, that is, two-thirds of those en route for India, Persia or Arabia. In the 1870's, 10,000 Tanzanian slaves were sent to Somalia annually, be it by ship or by caravan through Lamu.25 Those who succeeded in their escape bids hid along the Juba and Shebelle rivers on land that was not used by Somali nomads because humidity and tsetse flies’ decimated livestock. They were joined by slaves liberated by the British Navy, fugitives who had escaped Italian forced labor in nearby plantations and servants freed by their indegeneous masters from coastal cities (fig. 2 & 4). Places like Jumbo, on the mouth of the Juba River, developed rather well before Kismayo became a permanent settlement in 1869.


the Zigua, the first to arrive as they claim, who sold themselves as slaves to get away from the Eastern Tanzania’s kidyakingo famine (the "cattle hide" that people were forced to eat) and then escaped from Somali Hawiye clans, the Abgal’s Matan and the Wadan. They however ended up joining together under a "sultan" of Yao origin, Nassib Bunda, who, with the help of the Tunni from Brava, negotiated free passage for an Egyptian expedition in 1875.26


"Mushunguli" of the Juba River according to their origins27

Zigua Zaramo Magindo Yao Makua Manyasa
Origin Pare & Usambara Mountains, Handeni & Pangani, Tanga Province
(Tanzania) Bagamoyo, Dar es Salaam & Kisarawe, Pwani Province (Tanzania) Lindi Province
(Tanzania) Masasi, Mtwara Province & Tunduru, Ruvuma Province (Tanzania)
Lichinga & Mandimba, Nyasa Province (Mozambi-que) Milange, Nyasa Province (Mozambi-que) Kunyanga, Lake Nyasa (Malawî)