This chapter examines the history of the Ethiopian-British Somaliland border, through the lens of local society. It is clear that the territorial claims and administrative ambitions of the respective governments provided both problems and opportunities for borderland Somali subjects.
By Cedric Barnes
BOOK CHAPTER
The Ethiopian-British Somaliland Boundary
CEDRIC BARNES
From: Borders and Borderlands as Resources in the Horn of Africa, James Currey an imprint of Boydell & Brewer (2010)
Edition: NED – New edition
Borders and Borderlands as Resources in the Horn of Africa
Description
State borders are more than barriers. They structure social, economic and political spaces and as such provide opportunities as well as obstacles for the communities straddling both sides of the border. This book deals with the conduits and opportunities of state borders in the Horn of Africa and investigates how the people living there exploit state borders through various strategies. Using a micro-level perspective, the case studies, which include the Horn and Eastern Africa, particularly the borders of Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, focus on opportunities, highlight the agency of the borderlanders, and acknowledge the permeability but consequentiality of the borders. DEREJE FEYISSA, Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany; MARKUS VIRGIL HOEHNE, Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany.
Chapter 7: The Ethiopian-British Somaliland Boundary
CEDRIC BARNES
In this chapter
Introduction
This chapter examines the history of the Ethiopian-(colonial) British Somaliland border, through the lens of local society. It is clear that the territorial claims and administrative ambitions of the respective governments provided both problems and opportunities for borderland Somali subjects. In the British Colonial Office archives the local Somalis are portrayed as the victims of Ethiopian manipulation, but the colonial voice does not allow for the Somalis’ astute manipulation of the border in their individual, local, and group interests. Yet a careful reading of British Foreign Office records detailing events at the eastern Ethiopian periphery, reveals various repertoires employed by the trans-border Somali communities and the affordances of state boundaries in the first half of the twentieth century.
The background
The borderland area dividing the Somali-inhabited territory of northeast Africa has a complex administrative history. Large parts of the north-western Somali peninsula were claimed as part of the British Somaliland Protectorate. The Ethiopian victory at Adwa in 1896 and Ethiopia’s effective occupation of large tracts of Somali-inhabited areas at its eastern periphery, forced the British to relinquish their original territorial claims in 1897 (Marcus 1965). The British colonial administration in Somaliland, along with many of its Somali subjects, bitterly regretted this cession. In fact, shortly after the British government reduced its territorial claims, the administration of what became the British Somaliland Protectorate desperately sought a solution that would reintegrate the lost areas back into the Protectorate territory (Silberman 1961; Drysdale 1964). It was not until the Second World War reached the region in the 1940s that a momentary solution arose.
During the 1930s the whole of northeast Africa (Ethiopia, Eritrea, British and Italian Somaliland) was militarily annexed by Italy. Following Italy’s declaration of war in 1940, by 1941 British and Commonwealth forces, in alliance with Ethiopian patriots, had attacked and defeated the Italian East African Empire. The defeat of Italy brought the whole of the Somali-speaking lands in northeast Africa (apart from French Somaliland/ Djibouti) under British Military Administration, including the previously Ethiopian-ruled Somali territories. Therefore, with the defeat of the Italian East African Empire and the establishment of the British Military Administration (BMA), the Protectorate government temporarily achieved the recovery of its lost areas by default, though Ethiopian sovereignty of the area was never denied. Once in possession of the lost areas, the Protectorate administration was loath to relinquish the territory once more.
It had been a constantly regretted fact that the 1897 cession of some of the British Protectorate’s claims ‘lost’ some prime grazing lands to Ethiopian control. The ‘loss’ had made securing grazing rights for their subjects a priority for the British Somaliland administration. By the 1950s – fuelled by fifty years of changes to the economy of the region – the situation had become acute. Though the differing impacts of imperial Ethiopian rule on the Somaliland protectorate and the British rule of the Somaliland Protectorate on the adjacent Ethiopian-administered Somali territory have not been fully investigated, nevertheless archival records note the extent of change that the Protectorate government and economy had on the Ethiopian Somali borderlands.
One such record is a Foreign Office reply to a memorandum by the Governor of the Somaliland Protectorate pressing for the retention of lost Protectorate territory under British administration. The Foreign Office representative took the opportunity for a long and detailed rejoinder to the Protectorate’s claims:
The kernel of this thesis [the retention of Ethiopian ‘Haud’ borderland territory under British Administration] is the statement that the pasturage of the British Somaliland Protectorate is deteriorating and thus rendering the Protectorate unable to support its population. … But it is pertinent to ask what the deterioration is due to … The truth seems to be that because the country is being overgrazed by an ever-increasing population, and that the increase in population is due chiefly to the fact that the British administration has reduced infant mortality, animal mortality, and the mortality due to tribal warfare, it appears, in fact, that the pax Britannica is in the process of creating or at least helping to create a situation in which the choice lies between territorial expansion and starvation.
The document continues in ever more critical tones:
The idea is prevalent that we have some sort of moral right to demand the cession by Ethiopia of the Haud because such a cession by Ethiopia provides the only means of ‘preserving the tribal status quo’. When analyzed this convenient form of words is seen to mean that in the past we treated a certain area of Ethiopia as our own for all practical purposes, the Ethiopians being unable to prevent it, and that we wish, now that they are able to prevent it, to regularize the position by advancing our frontier to cover the area in question.
Finally the Foreign Office tears down a dearly held myth at the heart of the British Somaliland colonial administrative history:
We cannot even contend with any plausibility that the original frontier was incorrectly drawn in the light of the tribal distribution: the Haud is not a vacuum into which British tribes pour at seasonal intervals, but a region inhabited for the greater part by tribes which do not belong to us. … The fact of the matter is that by preserving the status quo we really mean preserving a situation which is constantly evolving to the detriment of the Ethiopian element in the shared area (Lascelles 1948).
This withering reply certainly underlines the fact that by the late 1940s – if not before – the British Somaliland Protectorate had outgrown itself, though the Protectorate could not very well admit this fact.
The 1954 Border Agreement
By the 1950s, with a weakened Britain in the first stages of imperial retreat in Africa, the Protectorate was finally forced to return parts of the borderland territory it had retained after the war, back to Ethiopia. However, for a time there was an attempt to preserve a dual British-Ethiopian authority in the borderland area in a 1954 agreement that recognized the ‘rights’ of British subjects in Ethiopian territory. The 1954 agreement attempted to regularize the relationship between the cross-cutting interests of Ethiopian and British Somaliland administrations of their common borderlands and transnational subjects. Yet, rather than simplifying matters, the agreement gave full vent to myriad affordances that the borderland had enjoyed and endured over the previous half-century.
The 1954 agreement foundered on the conflicting interpretations, not to say divergent governmentalities, of the British colonial and Ethiopian imperial states. The divergence of governmental practice is revealed in the minutes (Stebbing 1956) of a series of conferences between the two governments held in Harar, Ethiopia, between 1955 and 1956, to iron out problems arising from the 1954 agreement. These reveal that each territorial administration refused to admit that their policies would have an impact across the frontier, despite the constant (and contradictory) complaints of the depredations of the other’s policies on their respective administrations.
There was a great deal of suspicion between the two governments. A letter from the Chief Secretary to the Government of British Somaliland, J. R. Stebbing, listed what he saw as Ethiopia’s ‘real’ agenda:
- to reduce grazing rights by cultivation and to encourage settlement by Ethiopian tribes, or persons they claim as Ethiopians, wherever rain-fall and soil conditions are suitable;
- to claim as sedentary peoples, and therefore outside the 1954 agreement, any nomadic people who cultivate land, even in the rudimentary and temporary fashion;
- to claim as Ethiopian subjects any fully nomadic peoples who spend the greater part of the year in the territories;
- to appoint Ethiopian tribal leaders (akils and elders) over any tribes or tribal sections to which they can … lay claim, or over which they can fabricate a claim for Ethiopian jurisdiction …;
- to split the potential alliances of Somali peoples against them, by fostering the traditional antipathy between Isaaq and Darod groups of tribes and the fear of the Darod over Isaaq expansion into their country (Stebbing 1956).
Without a hint of irony, given the Protectorate’s own historical designs on Ethiopian sovereign territory, Stebbing added for the record:
The Somaliland Protectorate members of the delegation were also agreed that Ethiopian policy towards Somaliland is undoubtedly expansive and imperialistic and … that at some later date the Ethiopian government will claim right under the 1954 agreement of reciprocal facilities, so that they may set up their own liaison organizations within the Protectorate, and so, very greatly expand their influence.
But this increase of Ethiopian-claimed Somali subjects was not merely Ethiopian imperialism. Indeed, of the many hundreds of specific cases that find their way into the historical record, the common theme is which jurisdiction Somali individuals or sections of clans chose to claim. More often than not they claimed both. Moreover, as John Drysdale (one of the original participants in the 1956 Harar conferences) later reflected about the period of dual administration in the borderlands: ‘[A]s a clan aligned itself with one government, and then with the other, shifting according to the expediency of the moment, each government would be provoked into action to preserve its dignity and would intensify the competitive struggle for the nationality of the clan in question’ (Drysdale 1964: 82).
It is also striking – given the benefit of historical hindsight – how many of the cases recorded in the 1955–56 Harar conferences showed continuities of local strategies towards the boundary since the outset of Ethiopian and British rule over the region in the late nineteenth century. While much of the discourse on the Somali-Ethiopian borderlands has concentrated on the ‘pastoral’ (herding) Somali sections, agro-pastoralists are also a significant presence in the borderlands. Agricultural Somalis were as astute in making use of the affordances of the borderlands as their pastoral cousins.
A Gadabuursi case study
The agricultural or agro-pastoral transformation of the north-western Somalilands is an important but little-studied process, and the trans-border dimension to it has received even less scholarly attention. The two acknowledged experts on the region, Abdi Samatar, and Ioan Lewis, have both written on the rural transformation of the British Somaliland Protectorate (Samatar 1989; Lewis 1961), but neither author has taken into account the impact of the agricultural transition across the Ethiopian border, and specifically, the fact that the transition to agriculture added further dimensions to the question of the border ‘dividing’ Somali populations.
The increase in sedentary agriculture certainly began in the late nineteenth century in the north-western Somali lands, though some Somali clans – especially those inhabiting the Harar highlands – were already well-established farmers by then. Agriculture began to increase on both sides of the border in earnest from the 1920s onwards. Work on the Somaliland Protectorate has shown that the transition to agriculture in the Protectorate, and the accompanying registration and enclosure of lands, put pressure on the wells and grazing of the Protectorate clans in the higher and well-watered areas of the Protectorate (Kakwenzire 1976).
During this period the Protectorate government followed a policy of minimizing social change after the experience of the disastrously expensive and socially disruptive rebellion led by Mohamed ‘Abdille Hassan (better known to non-Somali audiences as the ‘Mad Mullah’). Though the Protectorate government was attracted by the increased revenues that farming Somalis generated, it nevertheless found agriculture an added headache. In the Protectorate, the agricultural transition was above all an ‘administrative’ issue to be dealt with carefully for the overall good of all sections of the population.
On the other side of the border, however, the Ethiopian government positively welcomed and pushed the transformation of pastoralists to tax-paying ox-plough farmers. Grain-growing farmers were vital for Ethiopia’s agrarian-based taxation system. Therefore while the British attempted to closely regulate and circumscribe the agricultural activities within what they perceived as the ‘customary institutions of their Somalis’, the Ethiopians energetically encouraged farming by local Somali clans, and introduced highland settler-farmers for good measure.
Indeed, thirty years after the transition to farming began in earnest – as the documentation of the 1955–56 Harar conferences shows – one of the main problems identified by the British was the fact that the guarantee of trans-border grazing rights for pastoralists in the original border treaties was adversely affected by the increase in cultivation on the Ethiopian side (Stebbing 1956). But it was also the case that the increase in pressure on trans-border grazing rights – that is, British clans’ grazing rights in Ethiopia – was undoubtedly increased by the Protectorate’s own enclosure of grazing land for agriculture at the heart of its territory. The complaints made in Stebbing’s list against the Ethiopian policy of settling Somalis into agriculture were doubly disingenuous since cultivation on the Ethiopian side had vastly expanded under the British Military Administration of the reserved areas in the 1940s in response to a boom in grain prices (Barnes 2004).
In the 1920s as part of the consolidation of rule in the Somali periphery, the local Ethiopian government based in the eastern garrison town of Jigjiga had attempted to reform and regularize the collection of revenues. The Ethiopian administration took advantage of the expansion of farming already undertaken by some sections of Somali clans since the late nineteenth century. In 1917 the then (sub) Governor of Jigjiga, and one of Ethiopia’s early ‘modernizers’, Takla-Hawaryat, began to formalize the previously erratic collection of agricultural revenue (grain) from the increasing numbers of farming Somalis. Inevitably, the more regular demands for tax either in cash or in-kind brought resistance from some quarters, not least the Gadabuursi clan, who had begun profitable sorghum gardens on the well-watered hills that made up the northern section of the border between Ethiopia and the Somaliland Protectorate.
In a sub-province still dominated by camel herders, cultivating clans like the Gadabuursi were especially valuable tax-payers – tax which was primarily paid in grain. Ethiopian officials pointed out that, like any civilized power, their provincial administration needed regular revenues to ensure good administration (Archer 1918; Summers 1923). In 1920 Takla-Hawaryat was replaced as Governor of Jigjiga by Qagnazmach Gadla-Giyorgis, whom the colonial officials in Somaliland saw as ‘unscrupulous, determined, and tyrannical, but clear-headed and remarkably plausible’. For the nascent modernizing regime in Ethiopia, Gadla-Giyorgis was an ideal governor, extracting the ‘last ounce of tribute’ from the district and remitting valuable revenues to Addis Ababa ‘without misappropriating much for his own use’ (Plowman 1927a). Like Takla-Hawaryat, Gadla-Giyorgis paid particular attention to the Gadabuursi cultivating on the border with the Protectorate.
The Ethiopian tax demands should also be seen within the context of British administrative withdrawal (circa 1909–13) from the Somaliland interior to a mere coastal presence as Mohamed ‘Abdille Hassan’s rebellion raged in the Protectorate. During the period of British withdrawal, the Gadabuursi clan had received ‘protection’ and wages from the Ethiopian government. When the British administration eventually returned it did not tax subjects directly for fear of prompting another revolt. But the Protectorate’s tax-breaks were directly corrosive of attempts at good ‘provincial’ governance by the Ethiopian administration. Instead, the British encouraged trade with the coast, thereby gaining indirect taxes from import and export tariffs, and established a customs post close to the Ethiopian border around which the district of Borama evolved. Many Gadabuursi clans welcomed the British presence which would counteract the advance of Ethiopian administration and their incessant demands for taxation along the yet-to-be-demarcated border (Walsh 1942).
During the 1920s harvests improved, and markets stayed healthy. The Gadabuursi enjoyed good revenues from their grain harvests which they sold in the Protectorate where tax was light and indirect. Indeed, after the British re-established themselves in the Gadabuursi areas of the Protectorate there was an abrupt decline in trade between the Ethiopian center of Somali trade in Jigjiga and the Protectorate. Customs receipts at one of the Protectorate customs posts at Gabileh fell from 27,000 Rupees in 1920 to 12,000 Rupees in 1922, with official imports of grain falling from 1,625 tons to 832 tons. The decline in revenues was partly due to increased cultivation in the Protectorate itself, but the figures hid the increasing instances of grain being smuggled from Ethiopia across the border to markets in the Protectorate avoiding Ethiopian taxes at Jigjiga (Monthly Intelligence Report 1923).
In spite of Ethiopian efforts to collect taxes and establish effective administration on their side of the border, the British rather churlishly accused Gadla-Giyorgis of ‘maladministration’, reporting that he had reduced the once-prosperous town of Jigjiga ‘to a half-deserted weed-grown ruin’ (Monthly Intelligence Report 1924). They appeared to be blind to the effects that their timid indirect taxation was having in the Jigjiga region. Nevertheless, the Ethiopian government continued to bolster its claim to the Gadabuursi through the recognition of individual ambitions to the ‘chieftaincy’ (known as the Ugaas) of the Gadabuursi.
Early on in the Protectorate’s history, the government recognized a certain Ugaas Robleh as hereditary chief of the Gadabuursi, before their temporary withdrawal from the Protectorate in 1909. On their reoccupation, the Protectorate government discovered that Robleh had taken money from the Ethiopian administration in their absence (not unreasonably, it would seem, given the abandonment of the interior by the protecting government). The Protectorate replaced him with another man who failed to gain clan-wide recognition among the Gadabuursi, so the British appointed Ugaas Robleh’s son, Daudi, supported by other important Gadabuursi personalities. These adjuncts to Daudi were revealingly called ‘trade agents’ by the British, and their appointed task was to attract Gadabuursi goods and grain away from Ethiopian jurisdiction into the Protectorate.
Meanwhile, Daudi’s father, Ugaas Robleh, continued to work for the Ethiopian government who maintained their claim to the Gadabuursi as an ‘Ethiopian’ clan. However, under the more stringent conditions of Gadla-Giyorgis’s rule and the evident economic and agricultural success among the Gadabuursi of the Protectorate, Ugaas Robleh became disgruntled and returned to British territory. In the meantime his son Daudi went over to the Ethiopians and Governor Gadla-Giyorgis, helping to collect tax and registering sections of Gadabuursi as ‘Ethiopians’. Daudi eventually earned himself the Ethiopian title of Grazmach (Kittermaster 1926a; Plowman 1926).
The struggle to claim Gadabuursi became intense. In November 1923 a British Gadabuursi was killed by an Ethiopian party trying to collect taxes from a village at the frontier (Kittermaster 1925). In another instance, the Ethiopian police arrested a trading caravan for smuggling grain to the Protectorate, but local (presumably Gadabuursi) Somalis killed the police and the caravan escaped to the Protectorate (Plowman 1925). When Gadla-Giyorgis proceeded to levy a camel tax on all caravans of grain going out of Jigjiga district, many Somalis were roused, and by 1925 five Ethiopian tax collectors had been murdered (Summary of Intelligence Reports 1925).
In an attempt to stop the leakage of grain and revenue from trade from Jigjiga to the Protectorate, Gadla-Giyorgis resorted to more forceful measures. He put Daudi Robleh in charge of armed bodies of irregular Somali police whose role was to collect customs dues at the border and grain taxes, and to register sections of the Gadabuursi as Ethiopian. The methods the Somali irregulars used were often violent, and levies of customs dues quickly escalated into the plunder of entire caravans, with some of these gains being sent back to Gadla-Giyorgis and some being kept for themselves (Kittermaster 1926b).
The Ethiopian border administration under Gadla-Giyorgis was exposed to continued British criticism throughout the 1920s. Many of the incidents came about through Gadla-Giyorgis’ vigilance in the collection of revenue which the British saw as ‘maladministration’. Finally in June 1927, the British were given real cause for complaint when the zealous Gadla-Giyorgis attacked a Somali caravan for ‘taxes’, not realizing, however, that the caravan was carrying the property of the ex-Governor of Somaliland, Archer, who was accompanying the Maharajah of Kutch on a shooting expedition in southern Ethiopia (Plowman 1927b). On account of this unfortunate incident, the Ethiopian government was obliged to remove Gadla-Giyorgis, much to the satisfaction of the British (Archer 1927).
Nevertheless, the Gadabuursi continued to exploit their ambiguous status and the affordances of boundary administration, a situation that had suited the British up to a point. However, by 1930 the situation had changed. The then Governor of the Protectorate, Harold Kittermaster, wrote:
The question of the border tribes is becoming increasingly urgent. His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie is apparently making genuine attempts to improve the administration of the border districts and naturally, the indefinite procedure of the past must be improved. Cases are being constantly filed in the Buramo [Borama] court against Gadabursi who have always been regarded as British but who are now living in Abyssinia and if application is made to the Abyssinian authorities for the execution of the judgments they challenge the validity of the British courts to try the case at all. … In view of the closer administration of the district by the Abyssinians, I now withdraw the opinion I expressed two years ago that the demarcation of the border should be postponed as long as possible. I think it should be undertaken at once. (Kittermaster 1930)
Later that year there was an ugly incident during a dispute over the Ethiopian right to tax certain sections of the Gadabuursi clan. During a meeting at the border between the new Governor of Jigjiga, Fitawrari Taffassa, and his British counterpart in Borama, District Officer Walsh, to resolve taxation rights and dues, tensions escalated and shots were fired. A number of Ethiopians were killed (Walsh 1942).
Problems continued to bedevil Gadabuursi country near the border with the British Protectorate’s Borama district since Ethiopian soldiers regularly prevented grain and other produce from being taken across the border for sale (Addis Ababa Intelligence Report 1931). Later in 1934 when the Ethiopian government introduced a ‘poll tax’ to their side of the border, it immediately provoked the old problem of the dual nationality of Gadabuursi when, as in the past, the local officials at Jigjiga taxed all the Gadabuursi present in Ethiopia regardless of their ‘nationality’ (Somali-land Protectorate Intelligence Report1934).
The intervention of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and British Somali-land, the Italian defeat and the subsequent administration of the eastern Ethiopian periphery by the British Military Administration ‘solved’ the borderland problems for a time. However, in the post-war period the division of the Gadabuursi clan on either side of the border was the most perennial of the ‘borderland’ problems, and many Gadabursi cases were included in the deliberations of the Harar conferences in the 1950s.
Conclusion
Though it is not always explicit in the written records, it is evident that Gadabuursi ‘agricultural’ clans were actively engaged in using the affordances of the border to full effect. For some, the less stringent fiscal demands of the early British colonial regime made an Ethiopian nationality less attractive. However, it is also clear that some elements preferred being Ethiopian for various reasons, for example, to evade court cases in the Protectorate. The divide in the Gadabuursi ruling family hints at a wider Gadabuursi agency in the exploitation of borderland affordances. The choice between territorial administrations was a complex calculation of short-term ‘household’ interests – rational economic decisions – as well as wider questions of the relative strengths of other Somali clans, past experience, and future ambitions.
About the Author
Cedric Barnes studied for his BA and MA in African (Area) Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He undertook research in the Faculty of History at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, for a PhD entitled ‘The Ethiopian State and its Somali Periphery, 1888-1948’ (awarded in 2000). From 2001 to 2007 he researched and taught at SOAS in the Departments of Africa and History.
He is the author of several articles in the Journal of East African Studies, Social Identities, and the Journal of African Cultural Studies, and of professionally commissioned analytical reports on the North-East Africa region. He joined the Africa Research Group in the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office in September 2007, covering the Horn of Africa and Kenya.
References
(Abbreviations: PRO – Public Records Office, Kew, UK; FO – Foreign Office, BSP – British Somaliland Protectorate)
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—— 1926a (Kittermaster to Bentinck, Sheikh [BSP], 20 February 1926, PRO: FO 371/11559/J805/8/1).
—— 1926b (Kittermaster to Bentinck, Sheikh [BSP], 18 February 1926, PRO: FO 371/11559/J827/8/1).
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—— 1926 (Plowman to Bentinck, Harar, 30 December 1926, PRO: FO 371/12344/J229/54/1).
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