The Problem With The Word Somalitown
“Vi vill inte ha Chinatown i Sverige, vi vill inte ha Somalitown eller Little Italy, vi ska bo blandat med de olika erfarenheter som vi har. Vår utgångspunkt är ett samhälle där man lever tillsammans med olika bakgrund, olika erfarenheter och olika inkomster och möts. Det är så vi blir ett sammanhållet samhälle.”
Or for those of you who don’t know the Swedish language, here is the google translation of the above paragraph.
“We don’t want Chinatown in Sweden, we don’t want Somalitown or Little Italy, we want to mix with different experiences that we have. Our starting point is a society where people with different backgrounds, different experiences and different incomes live together and meet. This is how we become a cohesive society.”
These are the words of the current Swedish prime minister, Magdalena Andersson, taken while being interviewed by press while out and about on the campaign trail for the upcoming election on September 11th.
There’s numerous things in the quote above that sound suitably grandiose and uniting for a prime minister. To mix experiences — to create a blend of different cultures and incomes together in the same society. A desire that the world is more cohesive between people.
One word spoils any together sentiment. Somalitown.
Let’s compare this word to the other two locations mentioned above. Little Italy is a term that one may immediately link to New York but neighbourhoods named Little Italy crop up across the world. I generalise here, but the term Little Italy is romantised today as the type of urban suburb that one can hit up for ‘authentic’ restaurants, wine bars and a pace of life just a touch less hectic than the hustle and bustle of the rest of the city.
I can say something similar about the world’s Chinatowns, many of which have become tourist destinations for their own food and escapism. That’s not to say that Chinatowns and Little Italy always have or had such status, with plenty of well documented yet perhaps overly-stereotyped links to drug misuse and mob culture in years gone by. A reminder that these areas that didn’t always enjoy the attraction of today.
Then let’s take Somalitown. This is a term that as far as Google searching skills can take me did not exist before Magladena Andersson uttered it into existance. You see at least at some point in the existence of Chinatown or Little Italy these places had such an immigration influx that these areas were dominated by a majority of Chinese and Italian migrants.
A 2015 UN figure estimated that 2 million Somalis living outside of their country, pushed by civil war within the country to leave. Of that 2 million, it is also estimated that around two thirds of this number live in the immediate neighbouring areas surrounding Somalia, in nations such as Kenya, Sudan and Yemen.
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In this band of nations there is a place that we could possibly call a ‘Somalitown’. Within the city of Nairobi is the neighbourhood of Eastleigh, an area dominated by both Kenyan Somalis and more recent immigrants fleeing the civil war. Tourist destination? Far from it, and it is most headline worthy as a place where racial profiling by local police proliferates. In the immediate aftermath to explosions in Nairobi in 2014 over 600 people were arrested from the suburb, including for strict punishments such as loitering. This was a policy attempt to try and find the root of the problems and those threatening the city, claiming to uproot any links to the al-Shabab militant organisation. The action was also influenced by a desire to ensure recent refugee arrivals in Somalia remained in their refugee camps, rather than living within the city.
Eastleigh doesn’t have the glamour of a Little Italy or a Chinatown. But it would be a surprise to do so. Those Little Italy’s and Chinatown’s have been around since well before my grandparents were born. Eastleigh was in the 60’s still a Kenyan Asian enclave — and its transformation and demographic change is far more recent. Here we have a population, arguably two populations of the Kenyan Somalis and more recent refugees, who are moving in and still upsetting the status quo of the area. The population, new to the area, is struggling with integration and with an unshakable preconception that their presence is linked to crime and disorder. In that sense, it mirrors perfectly the perceptions of Little Italy and Chinatown that existed when my grandparents were born.
Will Eastleigh be a destination and a desirable area for people from different communities in the future? Hard to say — but it is a place of investment from the Somali community to become a “global Somali hub”. With investment comes opportunities to attract others, but that might take generations to become a reality. In conclusion, it is too early to make that comparison to the those Little Italy and Chinatown locations scattered worldwide.
However I doubt that Magdalena Andersson had heard of Eastleigh when she made the Somalitown comment. Nor do I suspect she had heard of the crop of “Little Mogadishu’’ places that are in areas of Minneapolis or Toronto. If she had heard of them no doubt she would have used that term rather than make one up of her own.
This is where the problem lies. The blending of two accepted and nowadays rather celebrated immigrant hubs with one fictional one comes across as isolationist.
Somali immigrant communities, to quote the pathways that Google searching takes me down, are heavily impacted in troubles from crime and disorder and low employment. I will let you as the reader decide what that is due to. AI bias? Truly shocking crime rates compared to equivalent communities? Or the biases of the Western world that mean immigrant communities, especially those from places such as Somalia, are likely to be outcast from mainstream society by racism, language barriers and more, meaning they are thereafter closer to alternative societies and as such crime?
But a true Somalitown doesn’t exist in any Somali community in the western world anyway, as there is no town with a population from Somalia so high to be in the majority. Sweden has the highest number of Somali diaspora of any nation in Europe. But even here areas like Börlange and Rinkeby are hotspots of multiculturalism, with people from many different nations finding somewhere to call home. A significant minority may be Somali, but the concept that their culture dominates these areas is ludicrous.
That immigrants all settle in one place is partly to do with connections and finding other people similar to yourself, but in Sweden that is also due to housing. Many rental apartments are strictly controlled and those in ‘worse’ locations (i.e. suburbs that soon become such immigrant areas) often have less waiting times and those immigrants have less options to wait around forever. It is incredibly cyclic how segregation easily exacerbates, white flight effects exacerbate and means areas walking distance apart can have wildly different demographics.
Let’s pause to reflect a little on the other part of Magdalena Andersson’s comment. One expressing that we don’t want to have people of the same demographics to stay together. Understandable. Commendable perhaps. Desirable many of her supporters will say. The issue here isn’t that one isn’t dealing with mixing a bunch of Smarties together from a tube, one is dealing with human beings. Human beings like to be with people like them. That like the same sports, that talk the same language, that have kids the same age and so forth.
These Swedes, famously cold-hearted and stoic in their stereotype, and noted for living in the country where it is hardest to make friends in the world, are not immune from this clustering. Think to this matter the Swedish communities that came to be in North America from the waves of 19th century migration. Or, more recently, the numbers of Swedes living in places like Spain or Thailand that have sufficient mass to have their own schools and fika spots without the winter freeze. Governments might not want communities like this to develop and form such bubbles but for all humans the desire to be with people more similar to yourself than different is a part of our natural instincts. Little Sweden isn’t going to stop being Little Sweden now.
And while there are places around the world that cling to that Little Sweden tag line, there are no places that shout about being a Somalitown. I will let you as the reader speculate as to why our prime minister chose to use that term in the run up to an election. The truth though is that there is no Somalitown in the same way there have been and are Little Italy’s and Chinatown’s around the world. To even suggest they could be shows the gulf between Sweden’s understanding of their 1.4 million strong population of foreign born individuals and the world’s they live in.
