ABSTRACT
Nationalists, party politicians, and traditional religious leaders alike, had for long inveighed against those aspects of kinship which perpetuated wasteful sectional rivalries, which weakened and sometimes vitiated necessary collaboration, and which led to the preferment of individuals and of policies irrespective of their intrinsic merits. Prior to independence and union, both the Protectorate and Somalia legislatures had frequently discussed the question and, over-optimistically in the light of the realities of the situation, had sought to find a means of extirpating what nationalist leaders now regarded as the supreme impediment to effective national unity. With French Somaliland the position might be thought to be more hopeful, since, theoretically at any rate, assuming that a majority of the territory's mixed population desired it, there would be no constitutional impediment to an independent ex-French possession joining the Republic in much the same way as the British Protectorate had joined Somalia.
