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History of Somalia. Somalia ( Somali: Soomaaliya; aṣ-Ṣūmāl ), officially the Federal Republic of Somalia (Somali: Jamhuuriyadda Federaalka Soomaaliya, Jumhūriyyat aṣ-Ṣūmāl al-Fideraaliya) and formerly known as the Somali Democratic Republic, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. The country was an important centre for ...
Somalia has the longest coastline on Africa's mainland. Somalia has an estimated population of around 17.1 million, of which over 2 million live in the capital and largest city Mogadishu. Around 85% of its residents are ethnic Somalis. The official languages of Somalia are Somali and Arabic, though the former is the primary language.
- Overview
- Early activity on the coasts
- Penetration of the interior
- Peoples of the coasts and hinterland
- The great Somali migrations
- Somali clans and foreign traders
- Competition between the European powers and Ethiopia
- Revolt in British Somaliland
history of Somalia, a survey of notable events and people in the history of Somalia. The easternmost country of Africa, Somalia lies on the Horn of Africa and extends from just south of the Equator northward to the Gulf of Aden. The Somali people make up the most of the population; the majority of them follow a mobile way of life, pursuing nomadic pastoralism or agropastoralism.
Somalia occupies an important geopolitical position between sub-Saharan Africa and the countries of Arabia and southwestern Asia. The capital, Mogadishu, is located just north of the Equator on the Indian Ocean.
Because of their connection with the Ethiopian hinterland, their proximity to Arabia, and their export of precious gums, ostrich feathers, ghee (clarified butter), and other animal products as well as enslaved people from farther inland, the northern and eastern Somali coasts have for centuries been open to the outside world. This area probably formed part of Punt, “the land of aromatics and incense,” mentioned in ancient Egyptian writings. Between the 7th and the 10th century, immigrant Muslim Arabs and Persians developed trading posts along the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean coasts. Many of the early Arab geographers mentioned these trading posts and the sultanates that grew out of them, but they rarely described the interior of the country in detail.
Intensive exploration really began only after the occupation of Aden by the British in 1839 and the ensuing scramble for Somali possessions by Britain, France, and Italy. In 1854, while Richard Burton was exploring the country to the northwest in the course of his famous journey from Berbera to Hārer, his colleague John Hanning Speke was making his way along the Makhir coast in the northeast. This region had previously been visited by Charles Guillain, captain of the brig Ducouedid, between 1846 and 1848. Guillain also sailed down the Indian Ocean coast and went ashore at Mogadishu, Marca, and Baraawe, penetrating some distance inland and collecting valuable geographic and ethnographic information. In 1865 the German explorer Karl Klaus von der Decken sailed up the Jubba River as far as Baardheere in the small steamship Welf, which foundered in rapids above the town. Decken was killed by Somalis, but much valuable information collected by his expedition survived.
In 1883 a party of Englishmen (F.L. and W.D. James, G.P.V. Aylmer, and E. Lort-Phillips) penetrated from Berbera as far as the Shabeelle River, and between 1886 and 1892 H.G.C. and E.J.E. Swayne surveyed the country between the coast and the Shabeelle and also reached farther east toward the Nugaaleed valley. During 1894–95 A. Donaldson-Smith explo...
Until recent times the history of the Horn of Africa was dominated by two great themes: the southward expansion of the Somali from the Gulf of Aden littoral and the development by Arab and Persian Muslim settlers of a ring of coastal trading towns dating from at least the 10th century ce. By this time, Islam was firmly established in the northern ports of Seylac (Zeila) and Berbera and at Marca, Baraawe, and Mogadishu on the Indian Ocean coast in the south. These centres were engaged in a lively trade, with connections as far as China. Initially the trend of expansion was from these coastal centres inland, especially in the north.
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Probably by the 10th century the country from the Gulf of Aden coast inland had been occupied first by Somali nomads and then, to their south and west, by various groups of pastoral Oromo who apparently had expanded from their traditional homelands in southwestern Ethiopia. To the south of these Cushitic-speaking Somali and Oromo—the “Berberi” of classical times and of the Arab geographers—the fertile lands between the Shabeelle and Jubba rivers were occupied, partly at least, by sedentary Bantu tribes of the Nyika confederacy, whose ancient capital was Shungwaya. Remnants of the Zanj, as these people were known to the Arab geographers, still survive in this region, but their strongest contemporary representatives are found among the coastal Bantu, of whom the Pokomo live along the Tana River in northern Kenya. Another smaller allied population consisted of the ancestors of the scattered bands of hunters of northern Kenya and southern Somalia known as the Wa-Ribi, or the Wa-Boni, a people whose appearance and mode of existence recall those of the San of other areas of Africa.
With this distribution of peoples in the 10th century, the stage was set for the great movements of expansion of the Somali toward the south and of the Oromo to the south and west. The first known major impetus to Somali migration was that of Sheikh Ismāʿīl Jabartī, ancestor of the Daarood Somali, who apparently traveled from Arabia to settle in the northeastern corner of the Somali peninsula in the 11th century. This was followed, perhaps two centuries later, by the settlement of Sheikh Isaq, founder of the Isaaq Somali. As the Daarood and Isaaq clans grew in numbers and territory in the northeast, they began to vie with their Oromo neighbours, thus creating a general thrust toward the southwest. By the 16th century the movements that followed seem to have established much of the present distribution of Somali clans in northern Somalia. Other Somali pressed farther south, and some, according to the Arab geographer Ibn Saʿīd, had already reached the region of Marca by as early as the 13th century.
In the meantime, farther to the west a ring of militant Muslim sultanates had grown up around the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, and the two sides were engaged in a protracted struggle for supremacy. Somali clansmen regularly formed part of the Muslim armies: the name Somali first occurs in an Ethiopian song of victory early in the 15th century. In the 16th century the Muslim state of Adal, whose port was Seylac, assumed the lead in the holy wars against the Christian Amhara. The turning point in the struggle between Christians and Muslims was reached with the Ethiopian victory in 1542, with Portuguese support, over the remarkable Muslim leader Aḥmad ibn Ibrāhīm al-Ghāzī (known to the Ethiopians as Aḥmad Grāñ). With his Somali armies, Aḥmad had harried Ethiopia almost to the point of collapse. This victory, which saved Ethiopia, also closed the door to Somali expansion westward and increased the pressure of the Somali and Oromo thrust southward. With this stimulus the main mass of the Oromo swept into Ethiopia from the south and southwest and streamed in conquering hordes as far north as the ancient city of Hārer.
Thus, by the latter part of the 19th century, the coastal and hinterland traditions had merged, and the centre of pressure had swung from the coast to the interior. In the north the ancient ports of Berbera and Seylac, much reduced in prosperity and importance, were now controlled by Somali nomads, and the position of the old ports of Marca, Baraaw...
About the middle of the 19th century, the Somali peninsula became a theatre of competition between Great Britain, Italy, and France. On the African continent itself Egypt also was involved, and later Ethiopia, expanding and consolidating its realm under the guiding leadership of the emperors Tewodros II, Yohannes IV, and Menilek II. Britain’s interest in the northern Somali coast followed the establishment in 1839 of the British coaling station at Aden on the short route to India. The Aden garrison relied upon the importation of meat from the adjacent Somali coast. France sought its own coaling station and obtained Obock on the Afar coast in 1862, later thrusting eastward and developing the Somali port of Djibouti. Farther north, Italy opened a station in 1869 at Aseb, which, with later acquisitions, became the colony of Eritrea. Stimulated by these European maneuvers, Egypt revived Turkey’s ancient claims to the Red Sea coast. In 1870 the Egyptian flag was raised at Bullaxaar (Bulhar) and at Berbera.
Britain at first protested these Egyptian moves but by 1877 had come to regard the Egyptian occupation as a convenient bulwark against the encroachments of European rivals. With the disorganization caused by the revolt in the Sudan during this period, however, Egypt was obliged to curtail its colonial responsibilities, evacuating Hārer and its Somali possessions in 1885. In these circumstances the British government reluctantly decided to fill the gap left by Egypt. Between 1884 and 1886, accordingly, treaties of protection were drawn up with the main northern Somali clans guaranteeing them their “independence.” Somali territory was not fully ceded to Britain, but a British protectorate was proclaimed and vice-consuls appointed to maintain order and control trade at Seylac, Berbera, and Bullaxaar. The interior of the country was left undisturbed, only the coast being affected.
Meanwhile, France had been assiduously extending its colony from Obock, and a clash with Britain was only narrowly averted when an Anglo-French agreement on the boundaries of the two powers’ Somali possessions was signed in 1888. In the same period, the Italians were also actively extending their Eritrean colony and encroaching upon Ethiopian territory. Not to be outdone, the king of Shewa (and soon to be emperor of Ethiopia), Menilek II, took the opportunity of seizing the Muslim city of Hārer, left independent after the Egyptian withdrawal. In 1889 Ethiopia and Italy concluded the Treaty of Wichale, which in the Italian view established an Italian protectorate over Ethiopia. Arms and capital were poured into the country, and Menilek was able to apply these new resources to bring pressure to bear on the Somali clans around Hārer. In 1889 Italy also acquired two protectorates in the northeastern corner of Somalia, and by the end of the year the southern part of the Somali coast leased by the British East Africa Company from the sultan of Zanzibar was sublet to an Italian company.
Italy had thus acquired a Somali colony. From 1892 the lease was held directly from Zanzibar for an annual rent of 160,000 rupees, and, after the failure of two Italian companies by 1905, the Italian government assumed direct responsibility for its colony of Italian Somaliland. To the south of the Jubba River the British East Africa Company held Jubaland until 1895, when this became part of Britain’s East Africa protectorate. Britain and Italy had reached agreement in 1884 on the extent of their respective Somali territories, but the Battle of Adwa (1896), at which the infiltrating Italian armies were crushed by Ethiopian forces, radically changed the position. Ethiopia, then independent of Italy, was plainly master of the hinterland, and in 1896–97 Italy, France, and Britain all signed treaties with Emperor Menilek, curtailing their Somali possessions. Italy gave up the Somali Ogaden, and Britain excised much of the western Hawd from its protectorate. Although the land and the Somali clans (who were not consulted), so abandoned, were not recognized as belonging to Ethiopia, there was nothing then to stop their gradual acquisition by Ethiopia.
These arrangements had scarcely been completed when the British Somaliland protectorate administration found its modest rule threatened by a religious rebellion led by Maxamed Cabdulle Xasan. This Somali sheikh (known to the British as the Mad Mullah) of the Ogaadeen clan, living with his mother’s people in the east of the protectorate, was an adherent of the Ṣaliḥiyyah religious order, whose reformist message he preached with messianic zeal. He quickly achieved wide recognition for his learning, piety, and skill as a mediator and initially cooperated with the authorities. In 1899, however, Sheikh Maxamed came into conflict with the recently established Christian mission and also was involved in a petty dispute with the administration. With the current European and Ethiopian encroachment and with the example of the Sudanese mahdi (in Islamic eschatology, a messianic deliverer), these two incidents provided the seeds that rapidly developed into a major Somali insurrection.
Maxamed did not appropriate the title of mahdi but assumed the title of sayyid (a descendant of the Prophet), and his followers were known as the dervishes. He displayed great skill in employing all the traditional tactics of Somali clan politics in building up his following, strengthening these with the call to national Muslim solidarity against the infidel colonizers. Arms and ammunition, denied to Somali in the past, became easily available through the ports of Djibouti and the northeastern coast, and the dervishes, although opposed by many Somali, who were branded as traitors to Islam, successfully weathered four major British, Italian, and Ethiopian campaigns between 1900 and 1904. The cumbersome British armies, hampered by their supply and water requirements, found the dervish guerrilla tactics hard to combat effectively, and, when in 1910 the British government decided to abandon its inconclusive, extremely expensive operations and withdrew to the coast, leaving chaos in the interior, Sayyid Maxamed seemed to have emerged victorious. A new policy was subsequently adopted, however, and, with the aid of an increasingly effective camel constabulary (whose founder, Richard Corfield, was killed at the Battle of Dulmadoobe in 1913), the dervishes were kept at bay until 1920, when a combined air, sea, and land operation finally routed them. The formidable dervish stronghold at Taleex, or Taleh, was bombed, but the sayyid escaped, as so often before, only to die of influenza a few months later while desperately seeking to rally his scattered followers.
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Jun 21, 2020 · The people of Somalia have been through a lot since 1960 when the first Somali Republic was formed, with the country struggling to maintain stability over a significant period of time.
Jan 4, 2018 · 1974 - Somalia joins the Arab League. 1974 - 75 - Severe drought causes widespread starvation. 1977 - Somalia invades the Somali-inhabited Ogaden region of Ethiopia. 1978 - Somali forces pushed ...
3 days ago · The Republic of Somalia experienced fragmentation in the 1990s: the self-proclaimed Republic of Somaliland asserted its independence from Somalia in 1991, and the Puntland State of Somalia declared itself an autonomous region of Somalia in 1998. Neither is internationally recognized. (more)
3 days ago · the Somali National Army (SNA) and supporting security and militia forces are actively conducting operations against the al-Shabaab terrorist group (see Appendix T); al-Shabaab controls large parts of southern and central Somalia of the SNA’s approximately 13 brigades, the most effective are assessed to be the US-trained Danab ("Lightning ...
