Somali Village

Tag: history

  • The “Novelty” of Hand-Weaving: The Industrial Juxtaposition of the Somali Village of 1904

    Orlagh McSorley

    Photograph of textiles similar to those made by the Somalis in 1904. Taken in October 2025. By: Somali community of Cardiff.

    In its first month of opening, the Yorkshire Factory Times carried a review of Bradford’s Great Exhibition of 1904, which focused upon how competently it sold the city as a global leader in industrial innovation, especially in its largest industry of textile production. As an aside, the review provided a throwaway comment on the presence of a handloom in the Somali Village, the most popular entertainment at the Exhibition:In its first month of opening, the Yorkshire Factory Times carried a review of Bradford’s Great Exhibition of 1904, which focused upon how competently it sold the city as a global leader in industrial innovation, especially in its largest industry of textile production. As an aside, the review provided a throwaway comment on the presence of a handloom in the Somali Village, the most popular entertainment at the Exhibition:

    The hand loom in the exhibition weaving cloth goods is a novelty, but is that and nothing more, as is also the spinning wheel, with its combed wool spun into weft. The loom in the Somali portion, if a correct method of weaving as carried on in the black districts, won’t cause foreign competition to teach us to put tariffs on.[1]

    Contemporaneous Somali hand-weaving was dismissed as part of the old world that Britain had left through industrial innovation, as a quaint novelty that had no relevance to the hard-nosed world of technology and business. In the rest of this blog, I shall set out to challenge this casual and racializing dismissal.

    The practice of Somali hand-weaving brings together music, art, practicality and heritage. Precisely because of this hybridity, I argue, it also posed a threat to the British Empire’s attempt to present African cultural production as static, primitive or inferior. By examining the historical treatment of hand-weaving, while also challenging its current perception as an archaic folk art, we can better understand the relationship between Somalia’s colonisation and the cultural practices that are now at risk of being lost to members of the diaspora. In this context, the juxtaposition between hand-weaving in the 1904 Somali Village and the textile machines displayed in the Industrial Hall becomes symbolic of the unequal relationship between Britain and its imperial subjects.

    To begin with, the historical significance of weaving in Somalia has been largely ignored in academic research. This neglect helps obscure the impact that the decline of Somali textile exportation had on the country’s economic and cultural identity. As Clarence-Smith states,

    the Benadir coast of Somalia had an ancient reputation as an exporter of cotton textiles. Back in the fourteenth century, Ibn Battuta noted that the “unequalled” cloth of Mogadishu was exported “to Egypt and elsewhere.”[2]

    This history shows that Somalia’s role in textile production has been systematically disregarded. Such disregard reflects a wider colonial framework in which African products are valued only when they can be extracted, appropriated or reinterpreted through European systems of knowledge and production. Britain benefited from processes perfected over centuries in Somalia while also contributing to the removal of resources and labour that could have supported Somalia’s own technological development. As factory methods came to dominate global textile production, hand-weaving was increasingly pushed aside and associated with a supposedly pre-modern past. In this way, the 1904 exhibition, which featured the Somali Village in juxtaposition to the Industrial Hall, helped justify British imperialism to white audiences through the display of technological advancement.

    This contrast was especially visible in the relationship between the Somali Village and the wider 1904 Bradford Exhibition. Hattersley’s, based in Keighley, invented, patented and manufactured the “self-shuttling” loom in 1901, before its introduction into the Industrial Hall at the 1904 Bradford Exhibition.[3] By placing Somali hand-weaving in the Village alongside such industrial advances, the exhibition encouraged visitors to read Somali labour as slow, manual and inferior. Yet this framing ignores the historical and cultural importance of hand-weaving, as well as the performers’ own skill and labour. They built the village by hand and sustained a community in a completely new environment in Bradford for six months. The contrast between the Somali Village and the Bradford Exhibition was therefore not neutral: it shaped, and was shaped by, Britain’s colonial view of Africa and its people.

    A further dimension of this erasure is the role of women in hand-weaving. The hand-weaving exhibited in the Somali Village would likely have been undervalued and treated as folk art to be viewed with patronising wonder. This dismissal was intensified by the fact that, in Somalia, most hand-weaving is traditionally done by women. When positioned against the industrial, scientific and technological – and therefore, by extension, male – achievements displayed in the 1904 Exhibition, Somali hand-weaving could be reduced to a women’s pastime rather than recognised as skilled cultural production:

    In a jointly sponsored UNESCO and UNICEF report on a seminar held in April 1978 in Mogadishu on Basic Education for Nomads, “[..] Arts and Crafts among the Somali nomads centre on wood carving; camel bells, wooden spoons, forks, dishes, walking sticks etc.” It is interesting that the arts and crafts of which the author Abdi Arte speaks are woodcarving, the one and only craft executed by men.[4]

    The failure to recognise objects made by women therefore reproduces two forms of hierarchy at once. It privileges Western technology over Somali craft, and it privileges male-made objects within Somali cultural history over the work of women. As a result, the strength, knowledge and skill of women weavers are pushed out of view, allowing hand-weaving to be framed as a historical craft left behind by Western progress rather than as a living and complex cultural practice in its own right.

    At the same time, hand-weaving in the Somali Village may also have helped connect the performers to the homes they had left behind. However, this cultural connection was complicated by the commercial setting of the exhibition, where the troupe sold their handmade items to visitors. This created a tension between hand-weaving as a practical and cultural practice and hand-weaving as a performance for a white audience looking on from a position of power. Demonstrating a cultural activity for the coloniser intensified the white gaze and turned Somali labour into entertainment for the crowd. As bell hooks argues,

    Often in contemporary capitalist society, where “folk art” is an expensive commodity in the marketplace, many art historians, curators, and collectors still assume that the folk who created this work did not fully understand and appreciate its “aesthetic value”.[5]

    This is significant because hand-weaving was not simply a visual or material practice. Songs would have been sung while weaving in the aqal, a nomadic home traditional to the Somali people. These intertextual qualities show that hand-weaving brought together sound, movement, labour and memory. They also highlight the cultural richness of a practice that has been almost lost for many living members of the diaspora.

    To conclude, restoring hand-weaving both as a practical technological process and a form of cultural history cannot undo Britain’s role in helping to erode this traditional Somali practice. However, it can offer a starting point for recovering its significance. Current projects that centre Somali voices and diasporic experiences are now exploring how this history can be expressed through the multifaceted process of hand-weaving. For the Somali people in Bradford’s staged village, hand-weaving may have been an essential expression of culture: a way of sustaining material, spiritual and communal connections while living for six months in a hostile environment. Fozia Ismai’s projects have been invaluable in developing artistic approaches to the historical significance of hand-weaving:

    Our latest project Audible Tapestries has allowed us to research Somali nomadic weaving techniques and tactile technologies that can be incorporated into. Conventionally, all weaving is done by women in Somali nomadic life, from the creation of the Aqal (a portable house) to almost all of the household objects within it.[…][6]

    The Somali Village charity also contributes to this process of recovery by preserving and curating evidence of hand-weaving. Its exhibition at Cartwright Hall aims “to commemorate the history and heritage of the Somali diaspora in the physical landscape.”[7] Together, these projects suggest that hand-weaving should not be understood as a relic of the past, but as a continuing practice through which Somali history, gendered labour and diasporic memory can be made visible again.

    Orlagh McSorley produced this blog post as an output of her module FOAH2002 Student Research Partnerships, part of the BA in Liberal Arts at the University of Leeds, during a placement with the Somali Village in Colonial Bradford project in the academic year 2025–26.

    Endnotes

    [1] Yorkshire Factory Times, 27 May 1904, p.1

    [2] William Gervase Clarence-Smith, ‘Locally produced textiles on the Indian Ocean periphery 1500‒1850: East Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia’, Global Economic History Network, (2006), p. 20.

    [3] Eugene Joseph Nykolyszyn, ‘Innovation, diffusion and technology change. A study of the Yorkshire worsted industry (1890-1939)’, PhD thesis, University of Leeds, (2022), p. 93.

    [4] Arlene Fullerton and Amina Ada, Handicrafts of the Nomadic Women of Somalia. (Smithsonian Libraries African Art Index Project, 1995), p. 2.

    [5] bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. (Boston: South End Press, 1990).

    [6] Fozia Ismai, Weaving with fragments and fractures <https://archive-stories.com/Weaving-with-fragments-and-fractures&gt; [Accessed 26 February 2026].

    [7] A Somali Village in Colonial Bradford <https://somalivillage.org.uk/about/&gt; [Accessed 1 March 2026].

  • Somali Village Organisation Launched in Bradford

    Left to right: Yahya Birt, Fozia Bora, Mussa Awaleh, Beka Edington, Razwan-ul-Haq, Freya Duncan, Haiyi xie, Chris Gaffney, Sofia Fallon, and Zainab Nur.

    The Somali Village, a new national organisation to promote Somali history, culture and heritage in the Somali diaspora and for the general public, was launched in Bradford on Sunday 27 April 2025 at the historic Cartwright Hall during the City’s Year of Culture, at its main art gallery in Lister Park. A new website for Somali Village was launched <<somalivillage.org.uk>>, which introduced our first project, “A Somali Village in Colonial Bradford”. This project is a collaboration between Somali Village, the Universities of Leeds and Bradford, Bradford District Museums and Art Galleries, and Bradford2025.

    The location may seem unusual from a Somali perspective, as today there isn’t a large Somali community in Bradford, but it is historically significant. One of the Somali Carwo (an ethnographic troupe), consisting of 57 men, women and children, was housed for six months in a ‘model village’ built in Lister Park during the great Bradford Exhibition of 1904. 2.4 million people came to the Exhibition, and over 350,000 paid extra to see the Somalis, a daily average of 2000. Profits from the Village were passed on to Cartwright Hall to help pay for its founding art collection. In the words of one participant at the launch, it is this “complex, difficult and lost history” that the project addresses through research and education. One member of the Village, Halima Abdi Bedel, succumbed to a long-standing illness and is buried in the city’s Scholemoor Cemetery, marking Bradford’s first-known Muslim burial.

    The Somali Village Chair, Zainab Nur, talked about the importance of Somali history in the UK, which stretches back 150 years, and how the new organisation will promote it further. Community historian Yahya Birt talked about how the website is a portal not just for research but to call for people to share their memories and interpretations. Dr Fozia Bora and Professor Chris Gaffney talked about how they teach on the history Somali Village to undergraduates in Leeds and Bradford universities through history/archives and archaeology respectively.

    Following lunch, a tour was conducted around Lister Park to show the original location of the Village. The day concluded with a collective reflection on how to share this history in Bradford’s schools and cultural institutions, how to mark the Village in Lister Park and how this research will impact the city’s narrative, in the context of the city’s colonial and postcolonial past and present, and delving in particular on the Somalis as Bradford’s earliest Muslim community, a point that resonates deeply with the local population in Manningham. Feedback on the event was positive and encouraging, with participants finding it highly informative, inspirational and marking a new chapter in Bradford’s self-understanding as a city of many cultures and many waves of diverse forms of migration.

    For the Somali community, the launch of the new organisation is similarly an important moment, as a collaborative group of researchers, educators, curators and artists come together to piece together the different strands of Somali history across the UK.

  • Yorkshire’s Role in Overseas Christian Missions

    Ellie Boyce

    Imperial Federation, Map of the British Empire in 1886. Source: Picryl, under a Creative Commons licence.

    Missionary work has long functioned as a means through which influence, recognition, and authority could be projected beyond local and national boundaries. Although this is often understood in relation to large denominations or imperial states, it was also significant at a regional level, enabling local communities to participate in, and derive status from, global missionary networks.

    In the early stages of researching this blog post, I was struck by the kinds of material that dominated both academic research and online search results. Yorkshire’s missionary “successes”, including influential individuals and prominent organisations, were relatively easy to locate. By contrast, the more uncomfortable dimensions of Christian missions, colonial legacies, and imperial exhibitions proved far less visible. As with many aspects of historical memory, difficult subjects are often obscured, allowing societies to forget and move on rather than confront and process them fully. As Zeger Verleye argues, colonial shame or guilt can threaten the security of a nation’s self-identity (2021, p. 5). Given the historical and continuing significance of Christianity within Britain, it is unsurprising that a topic capable of destabilising so central an element of British identity has often been marginalised.

    This tension between colonial guilt and Yorkshire’s involvement in Christian missions has led me to frame my research through the connected concepts of pride and shame. In her study of Christianity and colonialism, Hilary Carey identifies competition as one of the key reasons why ordinary people supported colonial missions (2011, pp. 17, 83, 379). She argues that denominations and nations sought to present themselves as especially powerful or influential, and this framework can also be applied to regions such as Yorkshire. As attitudes have shifted in the present, it is no longer possible to place uncritical pride in colonial missions. Instead, I argue that new forms of local pride have emerged through missionary work, centred on ethical practice, innovative thinking, and local origins. Yet, while these positive outcomes matter, they must be understood alongside the colonial legacies that helped to produce them.

    This blog post therefore examines some of the key positive outcomes that Christian missions brought to Yorkshire, considering how they have been presented in ways that continue to reinforce local pride. It also addresses the less visible dimensions of missionary activity, arguing that these have received less public attention because they are bound up with colonial shame.

    Individuals were central to Yorkshire’s role in Christian missions because they enabled the region to establish a presence within wider missionary networks. In doing so, they generated local recognition and pride for the communities from which they came. Their achievements were often reported in local newspapers, where they were presented as causes for communal celebration. William Dawson (1771‒1841), born in Garforth near Leeds, was a Yorkshire farmer and colliery steward who became a prominent lay preacher. Funds were raised to allow him to become a full-time preacher in 1837, with much of his work directed towards the support of foreign missions (Lowther, 1900, p. 229). This was undertaken with the hope that ‘his usefulness [would] be increased, and extended to every part of the land’ (Christian Retrospect, 1836, p. 311). For a small town, the ability to claim a connection to the London missionary scene and to participate indirectly in global mission would have been highly significant.

    Individuals could also create enduring local legacies. James Hudson Taylor (1832‒1905), for instance, is regarded as a pioneering figure in the history of missionary work. Originally from Barnsley, Taylor founded the China Inland Mission in 1865, which Lam argues established a model for later missionary practice (2016, p. 1). He has since become a major source of local pride, appearing in newspaper articles and commemorated through cultural landmarks such as walking tours and blue plaques (Barnsley Chronicle, 2018; James Hudson Taylor, 2018; BBC South Yorkshire, 2012).

    Missionary organisations similarly enabled local communities to establish enduring global connections and expand their influence. For example, the Starbeck Mission, founded in Harrogate in 1886, began as a local mission and today undertakes missionary work across Africa and Asia (Starbeck Mission). Such organisations often developed from local initiatives into globally active institutions. Their capacity to gain support within a community and use that support to pursue wider aims demonstrates how local areas could cultivate a shared sense of pride and purpose through global engagement. This phenomenon has continued beyond the formal decolonisation of the British Empire in the mid-twentieth century. Consequently, when these missions are understood as sources of local pride today, it is essential to acknowledge and critically reflect upon their colonial origins rather than allowing them to remain obscured.

    In the Victorian period in particular, missions generated local pride not only through the work of missionaries themselves but also through their significance within community life. Missionary ideals were embedded in popular and educational culture across age groups. For example, Sabine Baring-Gould (1834‒1924) wrote hymns and songs such as “Now the Day is Over” and “Onward Christian Soldiers” for children at a missionary school in Yorkshire, both of which emphasised themes of duty and purpose (Hahn, 2015). Mission was therefore woven into everyday life, including education, and helped to foster a shared sense of communal purpose.

    A less publicised aspect of this popular culture, however, was the public promotion and display of missionary activity. Missionary exhibitions became part of popular culture by presenting missions in ways that justified their aims and fostered positive public attitudes towards them. Although the evidence is somewhat limited, exhibitions displayed artefacts from countries visited by missionaries, including The Great Missionary Exhibition in Sheffield (1901) and Africa and the East in Bradford (1925) (National Trust, n.d.; Anon, 1925). Groten (2019) argues that such exhibitions formed part of a wider culture of imperial propaganda that represented those encountered by missionaries as uncivilised. Despite this, Meyer and Pels (2025) note that missionary collections and exhibitions have received comparatively little attention within scholarship on the displacement of objects during colonialism.

    This context is significant for understanding the Somali Village. This blog post has sought to provide further background to the colonial setting of Yorkshire in which the Somali Village took place. Religion was an important tool for legitimising Britain’s imperial role, often framing it as a “civilising” mission. For example, Muhammad ibn Abdullah Hassan (1856‒1920), the anti-colonial leader and religious scholar, was represented as uncivilised and threatening to British imperial interests; by contrast, the Somali Villagers in Lister Park were depicted as loyal colonial subjects.

    Religion also played a significant role in the Somali Village, with religious practice heavily emphasised in both the exhibition and press coverage. This emphasis was likely shaped by the perception of Somali religious practice as a subject of curiosity or spectacle within a predominantly Christian national context. As Freya Duncan (2025) argues, media representations of religion were carefully constructed to create distance between observers and the Somali people, while also identifying selected points of similarity. This dynamic was also reflected in the emphasis that the Somalis themselves placed on similarities between Islam and Christianity during press coverage of a Friday prayer service at the Village on 21 May 1904. The carefully curated lens through which the Somali people, and particularly their religion, were presented as inferior was integrally connected to how colonial Christianity was justified, viewed, and represented as a civilizing mission.

    Religion and mission therefore also functioned as mechanisms of legitimacy and justification. Mwombeki argues that “colonialism and Christian mission had a symbiotic relationship”, in which each served the interests of the other, with missions supporting colonialism and colonialism facilitating the expansion of missions (2025, p. 390). Mwombeki’s argument can be extended to the Somali Village, where colonialism and ethnographic display in the context of religious differences may also be understood as operating in a similarly symbiotic relationship.

    Primary Sources

    Anon 2008. Life in Edwardian Tickhill: based on extracts from The Parish Magazines, Tickhill and District Local History Society, 5, pp. 1‒23.

    Anon 1925. ’Africa and the East’ : C.M.S. Missionary Exhibition, Drill Hall, Manningham, Bradford, October 7th to 21st, 1925. Bradford: H.H. Tetley.

    Anon 2018. Barnsley missionary’s work lives on in China, The Barnsley Chronicle [Online]. 6 April. [Accessed 2 February 2026]. Available from: https://www.barnsleychronicle.com/article/13421/barnsley-missionarys-work-lives-on-in-china

    James Hudson Taylor. 2018. Hudson Taylor Sites in Barnsley. [Online]. [Accessed 2 February 2026]. Available from: http://www.jameshudsontaylor.org.uk/trail.html

    Anon 2012. Twin Plaques for Barnsley’s China Missionary. BBC News South Yorkshire [Online]. 21 May. [Accessed 2 February 2026]. Available from: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-18139123

    Anon 1836. Christian Retrospect. The Wesleyan-Methodist magazine. 15, pp. 311–313.

    National Trust. Religious Card. [Online]. [Accessed 20 March 2026]. Available from: https://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/749468

    Secondary Sources

    Carey, H. 2011. God’s Empire: Religion and Colonialism in the British World, c.1801‒1908. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Duncan, F. 2025. The Representation of the Somali Villagers’ Islamic Identity in the Bradford Weekly Telegraph. Somali Village. [Online]. 26 April 2025. [Accessed 20 March 2026]. Available from: https://somalivillage.org.uk/2025/04/26/the-representation-of-the-somali-villagers-islamic-identity/

    Hahn, D. 2015. BARING-GOULD, Sabine (1834-1924). The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature. [Online].

    Groten, M. 2019. Difference Between the Self and the Heathen. European Imperial Culture in Dutch Missionary Exhibitions, 1909–1957. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. [Online]. 47(3), pp. 490‒513. [Accessed 20 March 2026]. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2018.1539725

    Lam, J. 2016. From Holy Striving to Wholly Abiding: Mystical Transformation in James Hudson Taylor (1832-1905). HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies. [Online]. 72(4), pp. 1–7. [Accessed 20 March 2026]. Available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/v72i4.3483

    Lowther, W.M. William Dawson. Dictionary of National Biography. 1885-1900, 14, p. 229

    Meyer, B & Pels, P. 2025. Unpacking Missionary Collections. Material Religion. [Online]. 21(3), pp. 231‒243. [Accessed 20 March 2026]. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1080/17432200.2025.2505307

    Mwombeki, F. 2024. The Berlin Conference: A Landmark in the Relationship between Colonialism and Mission in Africa. International Review of Mission. [Online]. 113(2), pp. 390‒404. [Accessed 11 March 2026]. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111%2Firom.12516

    Starbeck Mission. c.2035. Available from: https://www.starbeckmission.com/missionary-work

    Verleye, Z. 2021. The Lumumba Commission (1999-2002): Shame, Guilt, and the Post-Imperial Self. Journal of International Studies. [Online]. 50(1), pp. 3‒28 [Accessed 11 March 2026]. Available from: /doi.org/10.1177/0305829821105

    Ellie Boyce produced this blog post as an output of her module FOAH2002 Student Research Partnerships, part of the BA in Liberal Arts at the University of Leeds, during a placement with the Somali Village in Colonial Bradford project in the academic year 2025–26.