Somali

Somali, people historically of the Horn of Africa occupying all of Somalia, a strip of Djibouti, the southern Ethiopian region of Ogaden, and part of northwestern Kenya. Except for the arid coastal area in the north, the region that Somalis traditionally inhabit consists of plains, coarse grass, and streams. They speak a language of the Cushitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic (formerly Hamito-Semitic) family.

Traditional culture in Somaliland

In the 14th century many Somalis, converted to Islam by Arabs from across the Red Sea, began their expansion southward from the arid steppes to their present borders, which overflow what was traditionally known as Somaliland. Although three great divisions of Somalis exist, roughly corresponding to the northern, central, and southern parts of the region, the Somalis demonstrate considerable cultural unity.

The basis of traditional Somali society is the rēr, or large, self-contained kinship group or clan, consisting of a number of families claiming common descent from a male ancestor. A Somali individual has obligations both to the rēr and to the loosely defined social unit of which the rēr is a part. Government of the rēr is markedly patriarchal, although the chief is chosen by a group of elders who counsel him.

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eastern Africa: The Somali

In Somalia Somalis are primarily nomadic pastoralists. The intense competition for scarce resources in the region has encouraged individualism and led to regular blood feuds or wars with neighboring groups. The vast majority of Somali individuals belong to the Shāfiʿī rite of the Sunni Islam and various Sufi orders are popular. Religious practices among the Somalis also include the worship of ancestral saints.

A second category of Somalis are the townspeople and agriculturists living in urban centers, especially along the coast of the Horn of Africa, where intense and prolonged intimacy with the Islamic tradition has rendered the culture highly organized and religiously orthodox and where geographic position has turned the townspeople into commercial middlemen between the Arab world and the nomadic peoples of the interior.

The diaspora

Some Somalis fled to the United States, the largest group of them settling in Minnesota. More than 78 percent of the nearly 80,000 Somalis who lived in Minnesota in the early 2020s lived in and around Minneapolis and St. Paul.