Somali clans are based on male bonding, reaffirming the power of men over women. This explains why women interpret the current community-based mutinies that characterize current Somali politics in ways antithetically to the view held by men. Where men mystify politics, glorifying their role in it, women are distrustful of the warring and peacemaking processes. Women are aware of the importance of the multiplicity of connections the warring communities have, seeing themselves now as mothers to children of one family, now as daughters of another, and on remarriage, as mothers to offspring from yet another lineage. The men remain true to their father's ancestral identity, the women do not.
Women know that their clan identities are an artifice.
They know the men who stage the mutinies, know the women victims, the women turned into spoils of war - or into gifts of peace given away in marriage to settle a dispute between men. By baring their breasts and putting their honour on the line, the women of Kismayo revealed the extent to which men think of them as secret enemies, untrustworthy, labouring in the service of some alien interest. Proverbial lore compares them, in fact, to shadows, adjusting their shapes to the external circumstances. Somali men think a woman's one identity is incomplete without reference to a man, husband, a father, a brother, or some other male relation. So when the women bared their breasts, the men in Kismayo asked one another, not who the women were, but whose women they were.