The Horn of Africa

Abstract

T tHE name 'Horn of Africa', is usually applied to the old 'Land of Punt' or Terra Aromatica on the shores of the Gulf of Aden whence came the frankincense and myrrh. I am now using it loosely to apply to all the desert country inhabited by Somalis which lies between the Highlands of Ethiopia and the Highlands of Kenya and the sea. It is a big area extending from north to south for about I,000 miles and from east to west in some places for 400 or 500 miles, but it is very sparsely inhabited and it is thought to contain not more than two million Somalis. Very little indeed is known about the early history of this territory, but it is quite likely that what happened was this. Some thousand years before the beginning of our era, people who possibly came from Palestine or Syria and who have since been called Galla, worked their way up the Nile Valley and into the foothills of the Ethiopian Plateau. They then spread to the south and south-east and by the tenth century they had covered a large part of the Horn of Africa. These Hamitic invaders were followed from about 8oo B.C. onwards by waves of Semitic immigrants who crossed the Red Sea from Southern Arabia, bringing with them their special arts and skills, and settled on the eastern fringe of what is now Ethiopia. It was the mixture of the Semite with the indigenous negroid people which produced (over a period of 500 years) the collection of petty highland kingdoms which became known as Ethiopia. The years between 900 and I400 saw the rise and fall of a group of Muslim States which at one time ringed the Ethiopian Plateau and under whose influence many of the pagan nomads turned to Islam. In this period too there came from Arabia the first big wave of Islamic missionaries which was to hasten and intensify the conversion of the Galla of the coastal plains. It is to two parties of such missionaries that the Isahaak and Darod Somalis attribute their beginnings, basing their claims to noble blood partly on direct Arab ancestry. By the end of the fourteenth century the Muslim States were in decline and the stage was then set for the first of the great migrations to the south which for six centuries have been the dominant characteristic of life in the Horn of Africa. Subsequently in the north the initiative was recovered by the Muslims and the old kingdom of Ifat was re-established under the Amirs of Adal who, using Danakil and Somali tribesmen, carried on an intermittent war against the Ethiopians. The issue remained in doubt until I529 when Ahamed Gran, the famous left-handed Imam of Harar, having raised and