Nowhere has African adjustment to the postcolonial period entailed more destructive
consequences than in the Horn. The conflict over Ethiopian claims to the Somali-inhabited
Ogaden, an extensive inland area between the Ethiopian mountains and the Somali rangelands, is
rooted in the specific conditions of a region where an African empire and an African nation pursue
irreconcilable objectives. Ethiopian rulers vow to maintain the territorial integrity of their
empire-state and repudiate the notion that Somali-speaking people, regardless of their current
jurisdiction, should be allowed the right of self-determination. Somalis insist that empirical
criteria, not the juridical ones preferred by Ethiopia, objectively establish the socio-economic and
cultural orientation of the Ogaden Somalis that forms the basis for their nationalist identification
with Somalia.
With historical antecedents derived from events of the past century, Somali-Ethiopian confrontations over the Ogaden have invited intervention from abroad by major powers, encouraged the introduction of sophisticated weapons to the region, and in recent years have torn asunder domestic economies to spawn the "wretched of the Horn" - a refugee population in excess of one million. a e Somali-Ethiopian conflict is, of course, much more than a "boundary dispute." Somalis believe that unification of Somali-inhabited lands is essential for sustaining the connections between territoriality and their ability to survive as a people without which regional peace and political stability remain unattainable. The Somalis cannot realize their objective of territorial restoration without fundamental alterations to Ethiopia, changes which twentieth-century Ethiopian regimes have consistently regarded as a dangerous threat to their own survival. An Ethiopian state whose rulers permitted Somali self-determination would implicitly consent to its own territorial disintegration, an improbable policy for any Ethiopian government, whether feudalist or revolutionary socialist, to adopt in the foreseeable future (l).
This article attempts to explain why Somalis persistently refuse to accept Ethiopian claims to the Ogaden. While a comprehensive periodization of Somali nationalist development from the 1880s to the 1980s awaits investigation in terms of breaks, transitions, and continuities, my research on the British Somaliland Protectorate (now northern Somalia) and the adjacent Ogaden before 1950 suggests ecological, commercial, and cultural reasons why Somalis came to consider both political independence and territorial reunification essential for their social and economic improvement. The anticolonial dimension of Somali nationalism reflected intense dissatisfaction over the partition of Somali rangelands by multiple colonizing powers who tried to intimidate, coerce, and conquer its primarily nomadic inhabitants. During the first half of the twentieth century, the tactics, methods, and organization of Somali resistance shifted from a religious-military basis to secular political forms. The article also highlights salient economic and commercial conditions in the eastern Horn, drawing attention to Somali entrepreneurship exemplified by a petit-bourgeoisie of trade truck drivers, coffee shop owners, livestock dealers, colonial clerks, teachers, and interpreters. This embryonic class did not control the means of production, but it did play a key role in helping to establish political organizations that appealed to the concerns of urban and rural Somalis by the late 1940s, notably a broad Somali opposition to the continued presence of Ethiopian state forces in the Ogaden. There have been few efforts made to study Somali class structure and explaining class formation in a pastoralist economy presents special challenges (2). Since documentary sources are either inadequate or cover a variety of unrelated issues, the latter sections of the article draw heavily from orally transmitted materials for historical reconstruction.
The advent, spread, and triumph of nationalist organizations across twentieth-century Africa hastened the liquidation of European colonial regimes. Africans articulated demands for decolonization within the boundaries of individual colonial units where nationalists opposed self-determination for ethnic groups within an existing state, but militantly demanded its broader application to eliminate European colonial rule (3). The retention of the colonial territorial legacy in postcolonial Africa legitimized inherited frontiers as a critical way to define and distinguish one national state from another. Territorial integrity and present boundaries form a symmetrical linkage which accords international juridical recognition - a critical measure of stability and continuity - to empirically weak postcolonial states (4).
Throughout the eastern Horn the empirical properties of states are especially variable with boundaries as rigid as they are artificial. Rather than promoting stability, "frontier fetishism (5) in this region has only provoked constant Somali opposition, particularly over the Ogaden where the correlation of ethnicity and class sustains one of the oldest irredentist movements in Africa. African states are reluctant to consider postcolonial boundary adjustments anywhere, fearing the dire consequences from a multiplicity of claims stimulated by such a precedent. Such changes in the Horn, however, (their implicit "demonstration effect" aside) would fundamentally alter - some would say "dismember" - the empire-state of Ethiopia, the polity at the heart of this volatile region and yet one which enjoys a mystique unique among African states.
With its ancient written languages, Solomon and Sheba mythology, early state systems beginning with Aksum (250 B.C.), court conversion to Christianity after 350 A.D., victory over Italian imperialists in 1896, invasion by fascist forces in 1935, the triumphant restoration of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1941 as "the first to be freed from fascism," and headquarters for the Organization of African Unity since 1963 making Addis Ababa the unofficial "capital of Africa," Ethiopia was long considered a progressive symbol of African independence, "a prestige and recognition which gives [it] a special place in the contemporary African scene (6). Recent scholarship, however, has delineated a dialectic of modern Ethiopian history to explain how the state's expansive policies and colonial practices towards various nationalities (including the Ogaden Somalis) have provoked furious internal struggles throughout the country. Indeed, the central paradox of contemporary Ethiopia is the simultaneous search for self-determination by both the Ogaden (its most underdeveloped, unintegrated, and unincorporated territorial sector) and Eritrea, its most politically advantaged and economically integrated province (7).
Until the 1950s, at least according to the writings of many politically conscious Caribbeans, black Americans and Africans living far from the Horn, Ethiopia enjoyed symbolic significance as "a solid island of freedom in the stormy waters of colonial aggression (8). The novelist Daniel Thwaite rhapsodized that Ethiopia was the "shrine enclosing the last sacred spark of African political freedom, the impregnable rock of black resistance against white invasion, a living symbol, and incarnation of African independence (9). West Indians saw its invasion by Italian fascists and their eventual expulsion in apocalyptic terms, another indication that the world was divided into good and bad, black and white, in which a black state had survived the onslaught of evil. Isaac Wallace-Johnson, the Sierra Leonean nationalist who led the West African Youth League, acknowledged that "the long resistance of the Ethiopians to Italian imperialists [was] a source of inspiration and hope for a West African struggle for emancipation (10). Edward Roux cited a similar impact which the Italian-Ethiopian war had in South Africa when Africans "realized for the first time that there existed still in Africa, an independent country where the black man was master and had his own king. They were inspired by the idea of black men defending their own country against white aggressors (ll). Traditional Ethiopian chroniclers also depicted wars of attempted conquest as struggles between good and evil, light and darkness, attributing their victories to the might of God and describing Ethiopia's enemies as guided by Satan.
Although the image of Ethiopia as "the only oasis in a desert of rank subjugation from the avaricious hands of foreign domination" contributed to anticolonialist, nationalist, and Pan-Africanist sentiments, there is little indication that Africans on the continent or throughout the diaspora actually knew (or perhaps even cared) much about the inner workings of the Ethiopian state (l2). Yet an analysis of Somali nationalism and its anti-colonialist component is incomplete without an examination of the manner whereby Somalis experienced Ethiopian state institutions since the late nineteenth century. Somalis in the Ogaden and neighboring British Somaliland had no illusions about a symbolic or abstract Ethiopia. As will be shown, to them identification of Ethiopia as a "bastion of prestige and hope to thousands of Africans" was appallingly absurd, contradicted by their adversarial relations with "real" Ethiopians.
The historiography of northeast Africa has long reflected a "kings and things" orientation which emphasized the development of centralized polities in the Ethiopian Highlands but ignored the political economies of transhumant pastoralists to the southeast. Recent historical research has modified this imbalance somewhat but the taxonomy of pre-colonial states in the Horn still rests on elusive, often vague, definitions making it difficult to give precise historical answers to the questions, what exactly was "Ethiopia" before 1900, and what was ''Abyssinia? (l3).
"Abyssinia" refers to a physical entity in the normally well watered northern and central highlands, dominated culturally and politically by the Orthodox Christian, Semitic-speaking Amhara and Tigre and ruled nominally by an aristocratic and ecclesiastical hierarchy based at Gondar after the seventeenth century. Whatever analytical term one uses to characterize Abyssinia - a spatial jigsaw of land holdings, an association of semi-autonomous principalities connected to a political center through sporadic payment of tribute and the reciprocal provision of occasional defenses, or a "class-divided" society presenting the classic trinity of peasant, warrior-ruler, and priest - it was not a compact political unit (l4).
From 1876 to 1916, a conjunction of political, diplomatic, military, and strategic circumstances enabled Abyssinia to remain independent throughout the imperialist partition of Africa. During his reign as Emperor (1889-1913), Menelik II vastly expanded the frontiers of Abyssinia and laid the basis for the modern "Ethiopian" state through a combination of local conquests and international diplomatic maneuvers with European powers. The military success and socio-political dominance of this expansive state by the Amhara feudal class depended significantly on their unrestricted access to modern weaponry guaranteed by Abyssinia's exemption from the Brussels General Act of 1890, which otherwise prohibited the sale of firearms to Africans (l5). By 1916, with its nucleus located in the feudal ruling houses of Gojjam, Tigre, and Shoa (Amhara), "Ethiopia" consisted of a number of loosely federated ethnic groups in the highlands ruled by the Abyssinian landed aristocracy through a shifting web of connections, tacit alliances, and collaborative mechanisms. This core was surrounded by subject nationalities on its southern, southwestern, and southeastern peripheries. As an internationally recognized polity, twentieth-century Ethiopia represented the consolidation, expansion, and transformation of a feudal-military principality (Abyssinia) into a veritable multi-ethnic African empire-state, "the only African state below the Sahara whose boundaries have been determined by an internally induced process of expansion (l6).
The survival of Ethiopian independence remains an important theme in African historiography, but "Ethiopia's existence as a 'modern state' does not ... extend beyond the early 1900s into a limitless and ever-remote millennium (l7). In essence, "Abyssinia" survived the imperialist partition of Africa by transforming itself into one of its participants - as "Ethiopia" - for as Menelik warned in his 1891 circular letter to the European powers, "Ethiopia [sic] has been for fourteen centuries a Christian island in a sea of pagans. If the Powers at a distance come forward to partition Africa between them, I do not intend to remain an indifferent spectator (18).
Living on the southeastern frontiers of the Ethiopian empire state, the Somalis were a national community within culturally and ecologically constructed boundaries. Although they lacked a centralized, hierarchically organized political structure, the unifying factors of a common language and ethnic origins, Islam, egalitarian legal and political institutions to resolve disputes, and nomadic husbandry as their dominant pattern of existence distinguished the Somali way of life and ethos from that of the feudal Christian states of the Ethiopian highlands. The Somali pastoral system alone did not provide an adequate economic base for large-scale political organizations that could, for example, impose stringent land use discipline on its members. The political entities of the agrarian highlands were larger and stronger than any political structure produced by the Somalis before 1900. Nonetheless, the Somalis were a distinct social category, an ethnic nationality. From the late nineteenth century onwards, the intrusive Ethiopian state and several European administrations provided a colonial framework, historical agents, and political styles which Somali culture never accommodated to and against which they reacted increasingly in organized and unified ways.
Gradually, enclosed within Ethiopia as a result of the colonial "shareout" of the 1890s, the Ogaden was encroached upon by armed Ethiopian soldiers before the turn of the century. In 1892, the British Consul for the Somali Coast Protectorate reported that:
In 1901, Captain R.B. Cobbold accompanied an Abyssinian expeditionary force across the Ogaden. The following selections from Cobbold's diary suggest what he witnessed throughout his three month sojourn:
June 5th. (Warandad) The soil of the country we passed through today seemed of unusual richness, being of the ruddy colour so prevalent in Harar and the Ogaden. There was much cultivation of dhourra and traces of a large population but now not a village or a sign of humanity was to be seen. All had fled at the approach of the army, knowing from bitter experience that to stay behind was to be robbed and possibly killed, certainly ill-treated.
June 22nd (Gerlogubi) Singing their hateful songs of murder and rapine and bearing aloft the trophies taken from the bodies of the unfortunate Somalis they had killed. How hateful and disgusting it is to think of these brutes with their rifles, shooting down these poor villagers who cannot defend themselves.... We cannot help thinking that H.M. Government will hardly wish us to continue passive spectators of this horrible carnage going on before our eyes.
June 24th (Gerlogubi) Halted. The camp here now resembles a gigantic farmyard after the late raiding expedition. Dotted about are small herds of camels in zaribas ... numberless cows and sheep and goats.... Strings of raw meat hanging on lines, stretched between the tents and handy trees show that the men have now got plenty of food.
Cobbold's sense of outrage rose markedly day by day until on 11 July 1901, while at Hanemleh in the central Ogaden, he made the following entry in his diary:
All this cruel and barbarous treatment which the Somalis undergo at the hands of the Abyssinians
and which, being unarmed (thanks to the British Government) they have to endure without a
murmur, will some day react on the heads of the Abyssinians. Some day a reckoning up will
come, and with the Somalis armed the possibility of the downfall of Abyssinia would be within the
range of practical politics. For the Moslems who would rush eagerly to arms to exterminate their
hated enemies would run into huge figures. And if ever a war was popular, this one would be so; I
think even women and children would, if permitted, gladly risk their lives in so righteous a
struggle (20).
From the 1890s until the late 1940s, Ethiopian troops seldom ventured far from their
Ogaden garrisons except to conduct haphazard raids to capture Somali livestock as tribute. "The
sovereignty of the Ethiopians over the Somalis was expressed chiefly by means of intermittent
expeditions, not far removed from raids," wrote Margery Perham. "Stock was taken as tribute
from the more accessible groups, who thereupon raided their nearest Somali enemies in order to
recoup their losses. Only in 1934, when the Ethiopians took the neighboring Gerlogubi water
holes ... could the Ethiopian government be said to have occupied the Ogaden, though hardly to
be administering it (21).
In the early 1930s, Colonel (then Major) A.T. Curle served alternately as a British consular official and a political officer with the Somaliland Camel Corps. "The Ethiopians have always had an acute inferiority complex regarding the Ogaden," he recalled in an interview shortly before his death in 1981. "They didn't tax the Ogaden normally; the Governor-General of Harar would go down with a large force every three or four years and collect tribute, which meant seizing camels and cattle. But they've always suffered losses because the Somalis would lead them on to lousy water and then let them die in the desert. So they always went down there with a very strong escort (22).
Curle's private correspondence makes it clear that Ethiopian authorities were unwilling even to discuss with him Somali grievances about animal seizures in the Ogaden and within British Somaliland. "Last week, the Abyssinian Government sent a punitive patrol against some people over the west end of our Somaliland border they killed and burnt everything, 111 men, women, and children were shot regardless of who or what they were (23). After a similar incident nine months later (in September 1930), the Ethiopian commander denied any wrongdoing and disavowed responsibility for the death of eighteen more Somalis. Curle expressed his anger and frustrations in a letter to his father:
Twentieth century Ethiopian attempts to establish superior subordinate social relations with Somalis ranged widely from "indifference to bursts of violence," sometimes difficult to distinguish from "official terror (25). The following incident took place in the northwestern Ogaden in mid-1954, witnessed by a Somali psychologist who was a youngster at the time:
Like European colonial systems elsewhere in Africa, the Ethiopian state had to legitimize its presence in the Ogaden. Its attempts at non-coercive control over a "subject population" were preceded by a long period of sheer intimidation as Ethiopian rulers hardly bothered to fashion an ideological defense of their claims to the Ogaden. Ethiopian efforts to dominate the Somali-inhabited rangelands never sought the conversion or assimilation of Somalis, only their segregation, and not until the mid-1950s did Ethiopian hegemony become bound up with ideas about assimilating Somalis into the Ethiopian empire-state. Emperor Haile Selassie, afterAs dott. Osmanne wrote his letter that is a great blunder to forget Somalia. I think the saga which has been going on partly has been contributed by Ogaden province of Ethiopia.
Needless to say the Ogaden province of Ethiopia has quite recently expanded the theatre of the clannish war in Somalia. The poor country has never found peace and political stability since it's independence on June 26th 1990.
The province infact, part and parcel of Somalia land before it was given out to king Menelik II of Ethiopia in 1887 by Britain, Italy and France. The three who had signed treaties with Ethiopia separately during 1884-1886 gave the Ogaden out as a token of gratitude while seeking territorial concessions in the horn of Africa after the forces of Khedive of Egypt were forced to withdraw.
British somaliland was created in the northern arid region of the horn of Africa, which still enjoys the reputation of having the best breed of camels, who need water only once in three weeks. The area around Djibouti was occupied by France, Italy purchased one eighty mile wide coastal strip along the Indian Ocean, lying between british somaliland and the Jubaland province from the emperor of Ethiopia at a price of three million lire, and area measured about 50.000 square Km.
In 1995, the population of Somalia was extimated at 9.3 million. 80% of them are nomadic pastoralists. Indeed well developed farms can be found only in the area lying between the river Shibeli and the river Juba were maize, sugarcane and banana plantation are grown.
The nomadic somalis subsist on camel's milk and sometimes on meat . The rear goats and sheep and are also fond of tea and dates. Somalis problem at present centers on one issue: How to mellow the violence and bridge alienation of warning clansmen.
The European didn't care to know the Somalis had already evolved their own strict social code and pluralistic form of government, consistent with their principles and interests, before the colonised by Britain, Italy and France by the end of 19th century. During the pre-colonial era there were no clannish war. When any imporatnt issue was brought before them, every adult male was given the right to attend and express his views fearlessly. But no member of the clan had the courage to overrule the elders judgment.
In 1962 the Somalia president Adan Abdulla Osman said "Our ancestors developed a society which was respected every man's right to play his part in the affairs of his country.
Somalis greatest fear at the moment is that they are being re-colonised by the west, for they are told to form a government of the westerns choice. So in short I think the western community is not the gateway to peace in Somalia or any other victim within African continent, by saying this it doesn't mean that Europe as a whole is a virus toward the African problems.
Humphrey Kariuki.