Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

his blood wealth (100) will betaken by his next of kin and the remaining eighty camels shared amongst all the Hassan Ugaas.
    2. If a man of the Hassan Ugaas is wounded by an outsider and his injuries are valued at thirty-three-and-a-third camels, ten camels must be given to him and the remained to his jiffo-group (a sub-group of the
diya
group).
    3. Homicide amongst members of the Hassan Ugaas is subject to compensation at the rate of thirty-three-and-a-third camels, payable only to the deceased’s next of kin. If the culprit is unable to pay all or part, he will be assisted by his lineage.
    The heavy focus of the
heer
on killing and wounding reflects the almost constant state of warfare between diya-paying groups and clans. Central to this was blood wealth and blood feuding. A crime against a particular person was a crime against the whole diya-paying group, and necessitated collective compensation, blood wealth. If such blood wealth was not paid, the
diya
-paying group of the person who had committed the crime faced the collective retribution of the victim. When modern transportation reached Somalia, blood wealth was extended to people who were killed or injured in motor accidents. The Hassan Ugaas’s
heer
didn’t refer only to murder; clause 6 was “If one man of the Hassan Ugaas insults another at a Hassan Ugaas council he shall pay 150 shillings to the offended party.”
    In early 1955, the flocks of two clans, the Habar Tol Ja’lo and the Habar Yuunis, were grazing close to each other in the region of Domberelly. A man from the Yuunis was wounded after a dispute with a member of the Tol Ja’lo over camel herding. The Yuunis clan immediately retaliated, attacking the Tol Ja’lo clan and killing a man. This death led, following the code of blood wealth, to the Yuunis clan offering compensation to the Tol Ja’lo clan, which was accepted. The blood wealth was to be handed over in person, as usual in the form of camels. At the handing-over ceremony, one of the Tol Ja’lo killed a member of the Yuunis, mistaking him for a member of the
diya-
payinggroup of the murderer. This led to all-out warfare, and within the next forty-eight hours thirteen Yuunis and twenty-six Tol Ja’lo had been killed. Warfare continued for another year before elders from both clans, brought together by the English colonial administration, managed to broker a deal (the exchange of blood wealth) that satisfied both sides and was paid over the next three years.
    The paying of blood wealth took place in the shadow of the threat of force and feuding, and even when it was paid, it did not necessarily stop conflict. Usually conflict died down and then flared up again.
    Political power was thus widely dispersed in Somali society, almost pluralistically. But without the authority of a centralized state to enforce order, let alone property rights, this led not to inclusive institutions. Nobody respected the authority of another, and nobody, including the British colonial state when it eventually arrived, was able to impose order. The lack of political centralization made it impossible for Somalia to benefit from the Industrial Revolution. In such a climate it would have been unimaginable to invest in or adopt the new technologies emanating from Britain, or indeed to create the types of organizations necessary to do so.
    The complex politics of Somalia had even more subtle implications for economic progress. We mentioned earlier some of the great technological puzzles of African history. Prior to the expansion of colonial rule in the late nineteenth century, African societies did not use wheeled transportation or plow agriculture and few had writing. Ethiopia did, as we have seen. The Somalis also had a written script, but unlike the Ethiopians, they did not use it. We have already seen instances of this in African history. African societies may not have used wheels or plows, but they certainly knew about them. In the case of the Kingdom of Kongo, as we have seen, this was fundamentally due to the fact that the economic institutions created no incentives for people to adopt these technologies. Could the same issues arise with the adoption of writing?
    We can get some sense of this from the Kingdom of Taqali, situated to the northwest of Somalia, in the Nuba Hills of southern Sudan. The Kingdom of Taqali was formed in the late eighteenth century by a band of warriors led by a man called Isma’il, and it stayed independentuntil amalgamated