They have also moved back to Mozambique through a resettlement program between UNHCR & the Mozambiquan government.HalfDzed wrote:Monk
The Jareer are not Cushitic, that much is obvious. Not sure if you're familiar with how the whole Bantu phrase was recently conjured up a few years ago, but from what I can remember - there was a division along regional lines. The Gosha people took the name Bantu while the Shiidle rejected it. That's why a large majority of Bantus that were settled in the U.S. between 2003-2010 are from Gosha and never from Jowhar or even Janaale. The camps these people are being brought from are full of Reer Gosha. Many of them, specially Mushunguli do not even speak Somali, they speak a dialect of Swahili (can't remember its name). Some of them returned to Tanzania through a resettlement program between UNHCR & the Tanzanian government.
The Shabelle people are Bantu (anthropologically), but going by their own self classifucation - they prefer to call themselves Reer Shabelle. The Jareer in Banadir are also different. At some point, they might have been the same people, but split up. Or it could be that they are different people all together, and the only similarity is their non-cushitic features. Jareer in general look like they've mixed in with the Somalis, whereas the Gosha Bantus had limited contacted in general. Even as late as the 70s, some of them were non-Muslim.
There were Christian missionaries who were trying to proselytize the Gosha and Jareer Weyne communities in the 1950s and that effort has resumed in the 1990s during the civil war. For now, that effort has been brought to an end thanks to the Somali Islamists.
