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Besteman, Catherine. 1999. UNRAVELING SOMALIA: RACE, VIOLENCE, AND THE LEGACY OF SLAVERY. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 272 pp. $42.50 (cloth) $19.95 paper).
Catherine Besteman's new book is thematically the latest attempt to make actual as well as historical sense of the culturally diffused, chaotic, sociopolitical landscape in civil war torn, globally delinked, stateless Somalia.
Unraveling Somalia should be considered an achievement that sheds a long overdue light on the history, as well as the current problems facing Somalia's people of the Gosha who mostly reside in the riverine areas of the country.
The book is divided into four parts that each contain a number of chapters. The first part, the Introduction, covers what Besteman calls "Somalia in the Margins" and her fieldwork. Part II focuses on the historical creation of the Gosha with chapters on settlements, transmigration and domination. Part III examines the "Praxis of the Gosha Space in Somalia" with special attention to the supposedly distinct physical characteristics of the people of the Gosha and how that, Besteman seems to emphatically conclude, has primarily sustained the socio-cultural subordination of these Somalis. Part IV, subtitled "Violence and the State," deals with what the author calls the political economy of subordination. It is followed by the concluding chapter.
The temporality of the letter that arrives telling the author "that every child under the age of five in the Jubba Valley was now dead" /p. 3) is a powerful emotional appeal that should stir the consciousness of many readers. Following this, the author discusses the violent collapse of the Somali state; with that serving as a multi-directional, analytical fulcrum, she relates the multitude of the...