Somali unification, ifjo-jo

ONE OF THE MANY side-effects of the Second World War was to stimulate a new conception of Somali nationalism, to foster the nationalist aim of unifying the several Somali territories, and to provide conditions under which this aim could largely have been realized. In the course of the fighting in Africa, in August 1940, the Italians captured British Somaliland and added that territory to the Somali portion of their East African empire. This, however, was a short-lived success for seven months later the Protectorate was recovered, and Somalia and the Ogaden were occupied by the Allies during the East Africa campaign and liberation of Ethiopia. With the sole exception of French Somaliland which in 1942 declared for De Gaulle, all the Somali territories were now destined to remain for almost a decade under the British flag.

The occupied enemy territories administration, which had been temporarily established in Ethiopia after the Italian defeat, was terminated by an Anglo-Ethiopian agreement and military convention of January 1942. To aid the movement of Allied troops and to counter any danger from Jibuti, then still under Vichy rule, however, this agreement provided for the continuance of British Military Administration in the Ogaden and in the Haud as part of a series of ‘Reserved Areas’ and cantonments which also included the vital Franco-Ethiopian line of rail from Dire Dawa to the French Somaliland border. The Haud was ruled from the Ethiopian administrative centre of Jigjiga by a British Senior Gvil Affairs Officer, and the parallel existence of the two authorities was a source of constant embarrassment to each. Continuing the position under the Italians, the Ogaden remained attached to Somalia and was administered with that territory from the headquarters at Mogadishu. British Somaliland, though part of the same over-all administration, had its own separate military governor.

A further Anglo-Ethiopian agreement, signed in 1945, returned the Franco-Ethiopian railway to its pre-war status along with the British military cantonments in Ethiopia, but enabled British military administration to continue in the Ogaden and Haud without prejudice to Ethiopia's ultimate sovereignty over these areas. With these arrangements completed, the Horn of Africa was now to become the scene of a new scramble for Somali territory; a conflict of interests in which for the first time the views of the Somali themselves and their aspirations for the future received some belated consideration.