The Water-Supply of British Somaliland

Abstract

BRITISH SOMALILAND owed its original value almost entirely to its strategic situation at the entrance to the Red Sea. Its coast has no convenient harbour, and the maritime plains are almost unhabitable for part of the year because of the trying humid air and the annual kharif. As an alternative route into Abyssinia Berbera proved very useful to the Italians when the French imposed irritating restrictions on the movement of goods along the railway from Djibouti. Much merchandise passed through Berbera after large sums had been expended on an all-weather motor road via Hargeisa and the frontier post of Tug Wajaleh to Harar. As a site for aerodromes the country now acquires a new importance. The population, largely nomadic, of about three hundred and fifty thousand is mainly pastoral, for only in a few districts is dry farming practised. Cultiva? tion is very precarious owihg to the vagaries of rainfall, to the ravages of locusts, ants, and other insect pests, wild animals and birds, and to the uncontrolled wanderings of domestic herds. Irrigation is practised only in the valleys of a few watercourses where water can be raised by hand. The sale-or barter of camels, oxen, sheep, and goats giving meat, milk, and skins, provides the people's frugal needs; Somali goat skins make high-class kid for gloves. After a season of low rainfall or the late appearance of the monsoon almost famine conditions prevail and the scenes around the few perennial water centres are extremely distressing. For miles around the wells every edible particle has been devoured and the surface has been converted into a dust -bowl by the incessant movement of thousands of animals. Reduced to skeletons by starvation, the emaciated creatures, covered with sores and moving in a cloud of dust become an easy prey to the hyenas, jackals, and even carnivorous birds, while flies in swarms perpetually worry them. Vultures and other carrion birds follow the herds to pounce on any beast that falls. The country is already overpopulated and overgrazed, and unless the destruction of trees is checked and the number and distribution of domestic animals controlled, desert conditions must eventually persist. Rainfall in British Somaliland, although monsoonal, is too inadequate and capricious to support a healthy vegetation. The wet season breaks in AprilMay with spasmodic showers or violent, but very local, thunderstorms, and in a few days the favoured districts are transformed from arid wastes with withered scrub to green, grassy plains with leafy shrubs. Rain may fall fitfully until December but usually December to April are rainless months. The gregarious thorn (acacia) sprouts some time ahead of the rains, and a single shower develops a rich foliage and blossom buds. Falls of rain are observed from afar by anxious pastoralists, and the nomadic herdsmen with their emaciated animals trek laboriously, but hopefully, towards those regions. Towards the end of the dry season, especially when the rain is delayed, practically no feed remains within range of watering centres, and the people are driven to uprooting plants with bulbous roots and mutilating or felling trees for the digestible fibre in their branches, .thereby increasing