AFIS: Two Difficult Tasks — Democratisation and Somalisation

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Following the League’s strong showing in the 1954 local election, the Administration was under increasing pressure to transfer power to the Somalis. Although after four years of mandate the process of Somalisation had reached a considerable level, democratisation was proceeding slowly. Clearly the main reason to hasten Somalisation was the result of AFIS’s limited financial resources. Therefore, at the beginning of 1956 there were more than 5,000 officials, of whom 4,380 were Somalis and only 621 Italians.1 Comparing the British protectorate of Somaliland to the AFIS, John Markakis emphasises that, by the middle of the 1950s, there were nearly 5,000 Somalis employed in all branches of the AFIS, while in British Somaliland in the North there were no more than 300 officials and just 30 of them were Somali.2 This difference between the two territories was determined by the different administrative and political context in which the British protectorate and AFIS operated. On the one hand, British officials kept the protectorate’s bureaucratic structure small and efficient. On the other, British administrators were not under pressure, as Italian administrators were, to hasten the process of democratisation.3 As a consequence of Somalisation, the distance between the Somalis and the Italian community increased markedly.KeywordsOpposition PartiMunicipal DistrictItalian ConstitutionItalian GovernmentColonial LegacyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.