For despite such favourable factors as the irritant of Christian mission activity and the hostile and zenophobic reaction of Somali to multiple colonization, the obstacles inherent in the very fabric of Somali society which he had to seek to surmount were formidable. Since Ahmad Gran's wars against Abyssinia in the sixteenth century there had been no tradition of political unity on anything approaching a national basis such as the Sayyid sought to inspire. Particularistic clan rivalries and jealousies rooted in the exigencies of the eternal struggle for access to pasture and water were too strongly entrenched to admit of the possibility of widespread co-operation. Indeed, even in Swayne's well-informed and usually shrewd judgement, in the last decade of the nineteenth century these mutually contradictory forces seemed so overwhelming that the possibility of an organized rising against the British could be discounted. Events proved otherwise, for Swayne had not calculated on the appearance of so uniquely charismatic a figure as Sayyid Muhammad.

I.M. Lewis, I. M. Lewis, A Modern History of the Som…, loc. 240