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Nairobi, Kenya, December 2011:
I’m in Kenya researching my seventh John Wells novel, “The Night Ranger.” Wells pursues American missionaries taken into the bush by Somali mercenaries. It’s a change of pace for him, with lower stakes than his usual work. This will be one of my favorite novels.
I visited a large Somali refugee camp in northern Kenya and the Indian Ocean coast, where Somali captors recently captured and killed several Europeans.
Today I am back in Nairobi to talk about the Somalia problem, which Kenyans are facing closely. Kenya is mostly Christian. Somalis are Muslim – and poor even by African standards. Kenya needs western safari tourism to create jobs and money. The kidnappings didn’t help. Kenyans prefer to keep their neighbors apart. But the The United Nations and international aid groups have left them with little choice (oh, irony: poor countries hate open borders even more than rich countries).
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Anyway, I have a drink in a hotel and talk about Somalia with some (white) non-governmental aid workers – they live well, these NGO guys. And one of them said:
“Here’s what you need to know about Somalia. It’s on the ocean, right? [Somalia has the longest coastline in Africa, almost 2,000 miles.] But most Somalis don’t know how to swim, don’t know how to fish and have no interest in water. That’s how inward-looking they are, how tribal they are. »
The words stuck with me. And 14 years later, they help explain the billions of dollars Somali corruption scandal in Minnesotawhich exploded to become one of the biggest stories of 2025.
Somalis are tribal, but they are not alone.
It is impossible to comprehend the vast part of the world that stretches from Morocco 4,000 miles east to Pakistan and south across Africa without realizing the importance of the tribes. This area covers almost two billion people, mostly Muslims, but also includes hundreds of millions of Christians. It is predominantly poor, but it also includes the rich Arab Gulf countries.
What he shares more than anything is a commitment to the tribe as the center of identity. In Arab and Muslim countries, marriage between cousins helps maintain tribal identity; Cousin marriages account for about two-thirds of all marriages in Pakistan and almost as many in some countries. Arab countries.
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Rates are somewhat lower in Somalia, as marriages help bind “clans” – not just already closely related families – together.
However, as a book on marriage in Arab and African countries explains:
“Overall, during the marriage process in Somalia and Djibouti, collective interests come before the interests of the two individuals getting married.”
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I don’t think most Americans can easily understand how foreign these cultures really are to our way of thinking.
A society that does not even allow its members to choose their husband or wife has a very different structure from Western societies that focus on individual rights and the rule of law.
Yes, both in the West and in tribal societiesthe family is the central unit, which perhaps explains why Westerners have not seen this difference as clearly as they should.
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But in the West, each family is effectively independent. The most powerful groupings are political, not familial, organized by population size and geography – cities, counties, states, nations.
In tribal societies, families band together to gain power, which is why cousin marriage is so important. Me against my cousin; me and my cousin against our first neighbors; our extended family against yours – all under the leadership of a clan leader. Clans can share territory, but not political leadership.
In the West, nation-states derive their legitimacy from – at least in theory – providing equal justice under the law to all citizens.
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Tribal societies do not have a similar overall philosophical foundation. In practice, they operate as competing and cooperating tribes, sometimes in relatively calm equilibrium, sometimes under the autocratic leadership of the strongest tribe and its leaders.
And sometimes in open conflict, even going as far as civil war – as in the wars that ravaged Somalia for decades.
When individual families from tribal societies come to Western countries, they have little choice but to adopt Western mechanisms of accumulation – to accept the rule of law and the authority of independent political jurisdictions. Many Somalis have done just that.
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But when they arrive en masse, as Somali immigrants from Minnesota have done so, they can try to keep their tribal structures at least partly intact.
In November, the independent newspaper County Highway published an extraordinary article on the Somali fraud in Minnesota, explaining how easily the community had recovered according to the clans:
“Community is not the result of a voluntary movement of ambitious people seeking a new life in America, but of the mass resettlement of entire families by the U.S. government…
“Somalis brought to Minnesota the language, culture, and complex clan system of their broken homeland…the cultural forces that allowed Somalis to resume a version of their previous lives also had the effect of isolating them from other Minnesotans.”
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“Historical Somali society is a kind of Janus-faced society,” said Ahmed Samatar, a political scientist at Macalester College in Saint Paul and founding editor of Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies, speaking from his campus light-lit office.
“On the one hand, there is the intimacy of the local community, the family subgroup and the kinship group. Here, there is reciprocity, responsibility and respect… But civic culture was not part of this tradition.”
In other words, many Somalis believe they owe their tribes hard work, integrity and honesty.
Their tribes – and no one else.
So when Minnesota Democrats decided to abandon all guide rails and effectively open federally funded programs to combat mass looting — a decision that was both openly cynical and strangely naive – a staggering number of Somalis took advantage of it.
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As County Highway explains:
“The fraud spread so widely and so quickly that it seemed to have no real architect…gallop[ing] through the Somali community, which kept the secret from non-Somalis in Minnesota with ironclad discipline. The clan system served as both a path and a protection against fraud…”
In each case of fraud, the Somali community demonstrated what Professor Samatar described as “the solidarity of thieves.” Bad actors within the community would approach potential co-conspirators without any fear of betrayal.
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Honor among thieves!
No, not all Somalis in Minnesota can or should be blamed for this fraud.
But that is not to say that the decision to accept large numbers of immigrants from a tribal society en masse did not set the stage for this.
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Europe experienced a similar crisis with Syria and Afghan refugees over the past decade, even though Europe has faced more violence because it has welcomed large numbers of young, single men.
By 2025, it has become clear that the wave of immigration to the United States is now complete.
President Donald Trump proved the Democratic argument that the United States could not maintain its borders was a lie. It has proven that with reasonable and politically tolerable measures, new illegal immigration can be reduced almost to zero.
For at least a few presidential cycles, I doubt any serious decision Democratic Party The candidate will call for allowing massive waves of unskilled migrants (whether illegal or through questionable programs like those concocted by the Biden administration).
But at some point – maybe in a decade, maybe in a generation – the pendulum will swing back and the United States will be ready to accept a lot of immigrants once again.
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When it does, I hope he remembers the lessons of the last decade – and doesn’t let in large groups from tribal societies, encouraging them to recreate their clans en masse on American soil.
We cannot be certain that all of our new immigrants will accept the American ideal.
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But we can do our best to make sure they don’t arrive with fragmented allegiances.
Editor’s Note: This column first appeared on Substack by the author, “Unreported truths“.
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