An online IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Emma Hill (RACE.ED Archival Research Fellow, 2023-24)
Unpacking the Archives of Scottish-Somali Action
The Archiving Somali Scots Histories (ASSH) Project is undertaking a programme of research centred upon an unsorted collection of documents held by the University of Edinburgh’s Special Collections pertaining to the activities of the Scottish-Somali Action group in the 1990s. The archive consists of 30 boxes of unsorted material, and my IASH Fellowship focuses on auditing the material to build a sense of the group’s history and contextualise this within the (post)colonial context of 1990s Scotland.
Operating in Edinburgh throughout the 1990s, the Somali-Scottish Action Group was a unique advocacy and lobbying group which sought to improve the lot of Somali individuals living in the UK, and influence British foreign policy on Somalia. Based at the University of Edinburgh Settlement, the group was formed by academics, ESOL tutors and UoE students in the wake of the murder of Somali student, Ahmed Abukaar Sheekh in Edinburgh in the late 1980s, and came on the heels of a social justice campaign which protested the failure to convict his killers. Up against structural barriers to challenging institutional racism in Scotland, the group instead turned their attention to challenging what they perceived as a lack-lustre government policy on intervention into the (then) deteriorating situation in Somalia. From the early 1990s onwards, it organised a series of events directed at intervening in prevailing British policy on Somalia, resulting in high level engagement with Scottish MPs and UK Government Ministers.
The activities of the Scottish-Somali Action Group are remarkable not in the least because its impact quickly accelerated beyond its fairly local origins, but also for the very pointed interest taken by a philanthropic group in Scotland in Somalia. In previous research, I have mapped how economic and social relations between Somalia and Scotland, forged during the colonial era and shaped by colonial power, have been routinely erased from public imaginaries about Scotland, and the potential for Somali claims-making in a Scottish context disavowed. By the 1990s, Somali people existed in the Scottish imaginary as a ‘forgotten’ part of Scottish society, as refugees at the mercy of circumstances beyond their control. In this context, the connection on which the SSA persistently insists between Scotland and Somalia in the so-called ‘post/colonial’ era of the 1990s warrants further investigation and analysis.
In this session, I give an overview of the development of the SSA, and identify some potential lines of enquiry and critique. Specifically, how might we unpack the complex, multidirectional and multiscalar dynamics of power and violence when the racist murder of a Somali man in Edinburgh prompts Scottish-led intervention in Britain foreign policy on the Somali civil war? And what might the historiography of the group tell us about the ongoing operation of colonial power in the (post)colonial context of 1990s Scotland?
Please note that this seminar is online-only - click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/83178441780
Passcode: Kj7gnpP4