The ‘District’ in fact comprised six separate administrative Districts with headquarters at Mandera, Wajir, Garissa, Isiolo, Marsabit, and Moyale. Widely dispersed and thinly concentrated on the ground, the Somali pastoral nomads occupied almost the whole of the eastern part of the region (Garissa, Wajir, and Mandera Districts), being cordoned off from their neighbours and ethnic kinsmen the Orma and Boran Galla by the ‘Somali line’, which ran southwards from east of Moyale to the Tana River. The Pokomo cultivators, numbering some 6,500 and straddled along the banks of the Tana, provided another ethnic element in the composition of the District. And the fairly clear-cut division between Galla and Somali, although complicated by the fact that many Oromo had adopted Islam and were in process of assimilation to Somali, was offset by the presence in Marsabit District, in the extreme west, of the part-Somali Rendille tribe who formed a distinct wedge between pagan and Muslim Galla and numbered some 10,000 persons.

I.M. Lewis, I. M. Lewis, A Modern History of the Som…, loc. 459