For most outsiders, a principal and immediately apparent characteristic of Somalis, often strongly at variance with external circumstance, was their ‘inordinate pride and contempt for other nations.’ In their own minds, Somalis were always aristocrats among savages: Arabs in a continent of inferior Blacks; Muslims in a continent of unbelief and confusion; herdsmen encompassed by diggers of mud; sometimes conquerors but never conquered.

Consider the opinion of one British soldier, a Commanding Officer of the Somaliland Camel Corps (SCC), with many years of experience, writing in 1944:

"The Somali is convinced that he is entirely different from and vastly superior to any East African."