The first thing I will say is that, historically, Somalia has had a profound sense of identity. I tell my students that the Somali flag is a five-pointed star. It has five points for Somalis in all the regions of the Horn of Africa: the two colonial states that now make up Somalia, Djibouti, Ethiopia, and the Northern Frontier District of Kenya.
Beyond that, as a skeptic, I would say there is nothing national that persists. In fact, I would say this extends even to the clans. Getting clans within a clan family to cooperate can be difficult. The two warlords who were fighting over Mogadishu in the early 1990s were both from the same clan family. To say that something is national, it would probably only exist because there is funding on the national level.
I think Professor Menkhaus—