Somalia & Djibouti — The Horn's Long Resistance
The Horn of Africa was divided among five colonial powers — Britain, Italy, France, Ethiopia, and (briefly) Egypt — in the late nineteenth century, and the Somali people found themselves partitioned across three colonial jurisdictions and one Ethiopian imperial province. The response to this partition shaped Somali politics for the entire twentieth century: the irredentist dream of a Greater Somalia uniting all Somali-inhabited territories, which drove the newly independent Somali Republic into conflicts with Kenya, Ethiopia, and Djibouti within years of its founding, and which produced the disastrous Ogaden War of 1977–1978 that brought the Siad Barre government into confrontation with a Soviet-backed Ethiopia. The collapse of the Somali state in 1991 and the civil war that has continued with varying intensity ever since are in many respects the culmination of the colonial partition's consequences, playing out across three generations.
Sayyid Mohammed Abdullah Hassan stands at the beginning of the modern Somali resistance tradition as one of the most remarkable figures in African colonial history. A religious scholar and poet who had made the hajj, studied in Sudan, and returned to British Somaliland in 1895 with a mission to purify Somali Islamic practice and resist the spread of Christian missionary influence, Hassan organised the Dervish movement from 1900 and launched a military campaign that simultaneously targeted British, Italian, and Ethiopian forces for twenty years. He was a tactician of genius — using the mobility of his camel-mounted cavalry across the vast open terrain of the interior to evade and ambush forces that were individually more powerful — and a poet of extraordinary skill, whose verses in Somali were simultaneously military communiqués, religious declarations, and works of literature that are still memorised and recited in Somalia today. The British called him the "Mad Mullah" — the dismissive colonial epithet applied to any Muslim leader who successfully resisted European forces. He was neither mad nor, technically, a mullah. He was a political and military leader of the first rank who was only finally defeated in 1920 by a new technology: the Royal Air Force bombed his fortress at Taleh, and Hassan died of influenza a few months later. He was sixty-three years old and had been fighting continuously for two decades.
The constitutional independence movement was built through the Somali Youth League, founded in Mogadishu in 1943, which became the dominant political organisation across both British and Italian Somaliland and provided the leadership for the unified Somali Republic that came into existence on 1 July 1960. Aden Abdullah Osman Daar, one of the SYL's founders and the first President of the Republic, earned his place in African history not through the drama of his independence politics but through a single act of democratic principle: in 1967, having served his term as president and lost the election to his prime minister Abdirashid Ali Shermarke, he handed power over peacefully. It was the first voluntary transfer of power by an elected African head of state. The democratic experiment ended in October 1969 with the military coup that brought Siad Barre to power. Osman Daar lived to the age of ninety-eight, surviving the collapse of the state he had helped build and the civil war that followed it.
Djibouti — the former French Territory of the Afars and Issas, previously French Somaliland — was the last territory in the Horn of Africa to achieve independence, doing so on 27 June 1977. Its independence politics were shaped by the tension between the Issa Somali community, which favoured unification with Somalia, and the Afar community, which preferred independence or continued French protection to absorption into a Somali state. Mahmoud Harbi was the most prominent early advocate of independence — a journalist and politician who served as Vice-President of the territorial government and campaigned vigorously for a "Yes" vote in an independence referendum; he died in a plane crash in September 1960 under circumstances that have never been fully explained, removing from Djiboutian politics the figure most likely to have bridged the Issa-Afar divide. Hassan Gouled Aptidon, who led the Issa community to independence seventeen years later, became the first president and governed for twenty-two years. Ahmed Dini Ahmed, who represented the Afar community and served briefly as Djibouti's first Prime Minister, resigned within months in protest at what he saw as Issa domination of the new state, and eventually led an armed Afar rebellion — the FRUD — in the 1990s. The Issa-Afar tension that Mahmoud Harbi might have resolved persisted as a defining feature of Djiboutian politics throughout the independence era.
