The Somali community in the UK: What we know and how we ... - ICAR

These men tended to form a separate community.
This was partly because of their long absences
at sea, whilst racism played its part. But it was
also related to their ultimate goals. Despite their
long sojourn in the UK, their sights were still set
on Somalia, with dreams of home - hopes still
cherished by the older generation in the UK. 23
Some would periodically travel back to visit
their families, and also started the tradition of
remittances, sending back money to support their
extended family and to build houses for their
return. 24 But then, as now, hope of return and
reality are different matters. As one woman, who
arrived in the late 1980s, commented:
There was a time when most Somalis would go
elsewhere in the world, not England. People who
came here never returned and their families
back home used to talk about them as if they
were dead. In some cases, the wives left behind
remarried. 25
The second stage of this early settlement began
at the end of the 1950s. The demand for seamen
was falling, but the economic boom was creating
opportunities for employment in industry. Somali
communities began to emerge in Sheffield and
Manchester, and this less transitory way of life
encouraged men to bring their wives to the UK.
It was during this time that the present Somali
community, chiefly from the Isaaq clan family
and Darood subclans from the north, became
established in what is now Tower Hamlets,
especially in Bow, Wapping, and Poplar 26 In this
period numbers were still small - estimates by
old seamen range from a few hundred to over a
thousand. But the fortunes of seafaring settlements
were to wane. The merchant navy was declining
during the 1970s, and when it regained strength
in the next decade, Somalis were excluded. The
economic recession threw more unskilled or semiskilled
Somalis out of work, setting the pattern
for unemployment and dependence on state
benefits that still characterise the older Somali
communities.
The next phase in Somali settlement was not of
dependents or labour migrants, but of refugees.
This exodus gathered pace during the 1980s,
with the degeneration of the Barre regime and
escalating violence, culminating in the 1988
decimation of the north. Northerners fled. Some
went close to home - Kenya, Saudi Arabia, and
the Gulf Emirates. There they could join Somalis
already settled in the Gulf 27 - Somali women’s
life stories often mention living and working in
Aden whilst their husbands or fathers were at sea.
Others sought asylum in the United States and
Europe - Germany, Norway, Sweden, and also the
UK, where they made for the areas where their
families or co-clan members were living. This wave
of Somali asylum seekers laid the foundations of
the present pattern of settlement. After Barre’s fall
in 1991, the continued violence in the south drove
many more out of Somalia in a second wave of the
contemporary migration.
Some of those who fled to the UK during the
post civil war period of the late 1980s and 1990s
were men, but the great increase in the Somali
population in the UK was made up of women and
children. Some came to join their husbands, but
a great many were single women with children
- their men had either been killed or had stayed in
Somalia to fight. This exodus from Somalia meant
that the overall character of Somali settlement
in the UK changed from one of single seamen to
that of refugee communities, with at least as many
women as men and a high proportion of children
and young people.
In more recent years, a large proportion of Somalis
seeking entry to the UK have come from countries
other than Somalia. The diaspora now extends
19. See Little (1948); Banton (1955); Collins (1957).
20. Adan, Sulaika et al, 1987/8: 30.
21. Green, Marianne, 2001: 17.
22. Bullivant, M. et al (1995).
23. Summerfield, 1996: 86.
24. Remittances form an increasingly significant aspect of the diaspora
process. See Omer, A. (2003), A report on supporting systems and
procedures for the effective regulation and monitoring of Somali
remittance companies (hawala), UNDP; Gundel, J. (2002), The
migration-development nexus: Somalia case study, Copenhagen:
Centre for Development Research; Sorensen et al (2002), The migrationdevelopment
nexus: Evidence and policy options, Copenhagen:
Centre for Development Research.
25. Hassan, L., 2000: 81.
26. El Solh, 1991: 540-41.
27. E.g. Adan, S. et al, 1997/8: 9-11, 16.
The Somali community in the UK
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