alternatehistory.com
Northeast Africa 1936-39
Egypt
In 1910, the population of the Sultanate of Egypt stood at 8 million, and, due mostly to better medicine and rising prosperity, rose steadily over the next two decades. This is not to minimize the importance of immigration, which, despite not raising the raw numbers of Egypt’s population very much, changed the political and cultural history of Egypt and the world forever.
Immigration to Egypt had been quite low in the late 1910s, as the Unitarian revolutions in India and Turkey wound down and the populations of both countries figured that they could come to terms with their new rulers. Then came de-nationalization and de-Islamification. As the 1920s wound on, small boats and planes left the Hejaz and the Indus, hastily crossing the Red and Arabian Seas in hopes of making it to the safety of the Sultanate, the last true Muslim state left in the lands of the old Caliphates. The people of Cairo slowly grew used to the presence of Kurds, Syrians, Bengalis, Punjabis, and more. These people carried with them many different languages and, as if in a deliberate snub to the conservative orthodox ulema of al-Azhar University, religious traditions. Each man and women seemed to have their own way of approaching God. As storm clouds gathered over Central Asia, Persians made their way to the Nile as early as the summer of 1936. Three years later, the joint Indian-Turkish invasion of Persia and the Central Asian states would confirm their fears.
These people grew to know each other in the way all Egyptians did— sitting around tables with steaming cups of coffee in hand. The Egyptian ahwa, or coffee shop, became a center of debate and intellectual ferment, which reached a fever pitch near the end of 1936. The Sultan of Egypt, interested in what these people had to say (and hoping to get declared as the new Caliph of Islam) invited intellectuals from across Egypt to the Cairo Citadel in November, and again in December.
The Cairo Citadel.
The Citadel Conferences were the birthplace of the intellectual trend of Ummatiyyah, or Ummatism. Named in reference to the Ummah, the world community of Muslims, Ummatism disavowed sectarianism or atavism from the start. In coming together, the delegates at the Conferences came to realize that many of their sects had begun in an attempt to rediscover the “true and original” Islam of the Prophet, and had ultimately diverged not only from each other but from themselves, growing unrecognizable to their founders over time. The tirade of Ahmet Muhtar Zogolli [1], a delegate from Albania, against the inability of sectarian “purity” to stop the marauding apostate hordes of Akarsu Kubilay and Sanjay Nijasure reflected a general consensus among the delegates that the Muslims of the world, no matter how much they quibbled over matters of theory and practice, faced a common struggle and needed to put up a united front. The trouble of devising strict rules for deciding where Islam ended and heresy began would begin later; for now, the delegates— including the Sultan, who sat in as one of Egypt’s representatives— agreed that heterodoxy was inevitable within the wide embrace of the Ummah. Some delegates even grew interested in heterodox thought— the story of the Oudh Bequest [2], in which a Shia governor in Northern India organized a gradual transfer of over six million rupees to the holy Shia cities of Najaf and Karbala, is said to have captivated even the conservative Sunnis of Nejd, who found themselves so starved for stories of devotion in the modern age that the great deeds of the past seemed near-miraculous and worthy of celebration.
Some delegates were not merely interested in this embryonic philosophy. Some were inspired, inspired to fight and die.
Over the course of the Second Citadel Conference in December 1936, a group of men coalesced around two key figures. One was Faisal bin Hussein, the former Sharif of Mecca. Once a young man ready to perform the duty of his dynasty, the Hashemites, and guard the Two Holy Cities, he had been forced to flee his homeland in the wake of the Ottoman Civil War. After sinking into relative obscurity, he slowly clawed his way back into the public eye through steady attendance at the coffee shops of Cairo. The other was Selim Osmanoglu, nephew of Abdulmejid III, last sultan of the Ottoman Empire. This group became known for its willingness to extend the “united front” thesis of the Ummatists even further. The majority of the world’s Muslims, Osmanoglu would claim, languished under European rule or suffered the horrors of Unitarianism. Ultimately, curing one was as important as curing the other. The free Muslims of the world owed it to their subjugated brethren to wait for openings, strike decisively, and establish strong states that could protect the rich and diverse tapestry of Islam from the forces that would shred it to bits. This group, though still existing within the Ummatist consensus, came to be known as Fatahists (from fatah, an Arabic word that can be translated as “opening” or “conquest”).
The traditional Senussi banner.
Over the course of 1937, the Fatahists would come into contact with the Senussis, a religious order with deep roots in Tripolitania. The Senussis had once been of great consequence in the province, but a string of defeats at the hands of Visegradian colonial troops, culminating in the murder of the Chief of the order earlier in the decade, had shown their inability to combat infidel infiltration. Eager to become relevant again, the Senussis officially allied with the Fatahists on the basis of common ambitions and doctrines. This alliance would slowly become union within five years— the lack of momentum and leadership among the Senussis all but guaranteed that they would become the Tripolitanian wing of a Fatahist movement with ambitions beyond North Africa.
The newly empowered Fatahists waited for their opening. In 1939, they found it.
[1] OTL: King Zog of Albania.
[2] This is basically OTL.
Visegradian Tripolitania
The Fatahists and Senussis laid the groundwork for their “opening” for over a year. Agents from Egypt had successfully contacted the remnant Senussi leaders in Tripolitania, headquartered in the border town of Jaghbub. Though the Tripolitanians were leery of foreigners at first, the dangerous trip of Selim Osmanoglu and Faisal bin Hussein to Jaghbub to personally meet their new allies showed the Tripolitanians that the old Hejazi, the upstart Turk, and their retinue of Egyptians, Persians, and Indians were serious about their willingness to defy Visegrad. That willingness dramatically increased amid the chaotic opening shots of the War of the Danube. Once Turkey officially entered the war on the CUS’s side, the Visegradian troops garrisoning Tripolitania were at a loss. These troops were, to a man, loyal to King and Country— but what was Visegrad demanding of them? Communication with the royalist government was spotty, and there was much confusion over whether to guard Tripolitania until the royalists eventually won or hop across the Mediterranean to personally bring about the CUS’s defeat.
After contentious meetings with subordinates and provincial governors in Tripoli, Miklos Horthy, the Viceroy of Tripolitania, decided that as many soldiers as possible should be sent to Rijeka to open up another front against the CUS. The remainder, it was decided, would be stretched to cover Visegrad’s bases in the colony.
Unfortunately, they were stretched too thinly.
For over a year, the Fatahists had marshalled their strength. They raided police armories in the remote hinterland of Tripolitania, and grew brazen enough to raid some of the coastal towns’ weapons. These new toys were held by recruits from natives of Tripolitania and Egypt, as well as the immigrant communities of Cairo. The sultan of Egypt had received arms and money from France for decades— Egypt was a French protectorate before the Great European War, and France continued to support Egypt to keep it (and its precious Suez Canal) from falling into Turkish hands. If the French knew about the sultan’s covert diversion of some of this aid into Fatahist hands, it’s unlikely that they would have cared. Visegrad was a dead letter anyways, and at least the Fatahists weren’t Unitarians.
The Visegradian troops of Tobruk, leaving before the break of dawn, found that the fishermen at the docks were not just angry but armed. They blocked the way to the civilian ferries that had been hastily requisitioned to carry the soldiers from Tobruk to Benghazi, and then onward to Rijeka. The troops prepared to fire back but found themselves surrounded as the “civilians” of the town showed just how many Fatahist operatives they’d been concealing. After a brief exchange of shots, the Visegradians realized the futility of fighting back and surrendered. After the former occupiers were disarmed and defanged, the real civilians, slowly waking up to the sound of gunfire and shouts of victory, stepped forward to voice some concerns. Here, though, things turned ugly. The Fatahists had underestimated the extent of Tobruk’s bitterness toward the occupiers, and the crowd of civilians, roused from their beds by the sound of gunfire, became a mob. Though the majority of the Europeans in the town were eventually allowed to board the ferries and leave Tripolitania behind forever, over 100 soldiers and settlers had been stoned or stabbed to death by noon. Despite this unsavory end, the Capture of Tobruk, pulled off in May 1939, became the first step toward Islamic revival and African liberation.
Though the Fatahist rank and file expected a rift between their two greatest leaders to sour this great victory, such a rift never materialized. Selim Osmanoglu seemed to be genuinely comfortable as a second-in-command (he had, after all, seen what a curse leadership had been to his uncle Abdulmejid) and with his sanction the old Faisal bin Hussein, once the Sharif of Mecca, received a new title in a grand ceremony attended by the people of Tobruk.
Amir al-Mu’minin. Commander of the Faithful.
Flag of the Fatahist Emirate of Tripolitania (Imarat al-Tarabulus). The black stripe of the Abbasids, the green stripe of the Fatimids, and the white stripe of the Umayyads stand behind the red triangle of the Hashemites.
While Faisal and the Tripolitanian Senussis started setting up a government capable of defeating the rest of Horthy’s forces, Selim and a group of handpicked guides and followers went south along an old desert trail. One of these followers was Ibrahim Murra, a Hajji from the Wadai Empire. This state was not claimed by any of the European powers— it was so remote from areas of European influence that it didn’t even show up on many European-made maps [1]. However, Wadai was one of the last centers of native power in the Sahara, and had for many decades been receptive to Senussi teachers from Tripolitania. Selim hoped to leverage these old links for new ends. In the long term, if all went to plan, Visegrad could be driven from Tripolitania completely, Wadai’s government could be convinced to join the cause, and a new cadre of African Fatahists, headed by Selim, could head west from Wadai…
...into Bornu, on the northeastern periphery of Britannian West Africa.
[1] Certainly not on Augenis’s map
French East Africa
The French empire in Africa was a bit of a mess. In the west, centers of power in Senegal, Cote-de-Poivre [1] and Benin propped up a larger French zone of influence that coexisted uneasily with Britannia’s large domain. Heading east from Benin through several hundreds of miles of grassland and jungle, one could find the frontier town of Bangui, the linchpin of French control in the center of the continent. Proceeding even further east, one could find the mishmash of protectorates, colonies, and zones of influence that was the Horn of Africa.
In the Great European War, France needed men to fight. It recruited extensively from French West Africa, since these colonies were closest to France itself. After the war, the French were in no mood to grant concessions to anyone— but popular opinion and African agitation swayed the French government into granting the Charter of Dakar in 1921, which allowed for limited election of African deputies to the French Estates-General. However, the government was not radical enough to extend the Charter’s propositions to be extended to the East (and probably hoped that, by giving the West preferential treatment, it could encourage Eastern participation in the next war). Ironically, this was the least of France’s problems in its eastern domains.
Though Fatahism had not made the trip to French Somalia or Nubia [2] yet, these regions were still rife with discontent. However, the French authorities had no reason to be worried about either. Somalia and Nubia were riven by linguistic and tribal disunity, and had no all-regional group that might serve as a vehicle of rebellion. Divide-and-rule politics could keep both regions pacified.
No, the real threat to France was Ethiopia.
The Solomonic Kingdom had long ago recognized its inability to interrupt the Concert of Africa, and acquiesced to French suzerainty in the 1800s by signing the Treaty of Gondar. The treaty gave France full control over Ethiopian foreign policy and required it to pay a “protection” payment annually, but allowed it to retain its army and internal autonomy. The highlands of Ethiopia would be a tough nut to crack, and France wanted colonization to be as quick as possible. Gradually, Ethiopia grew integrated into the French sphere— its neighbors were all conquered by France, its major trade partner was France, and Ethiopian nobles started to send their kids to Mogadishu and Djibouti to study in newly-founded French lycées. However, the French unilaterally hiked the “protection” payments in 1932 in order to pay for French flu recovery. This incident, especially when compared with the preferential treatment gained by West Africa, was the final straw for many sectors of the Ethiopian population, including the army. A group of colonels founded the United Officers’ Movement shortly afterward. The outlook of the group was overwhelmingly Unitarian, and they found a natural ally in Turkey. Ethiopian officers made periodic trips to Sanaa and Aden to garner Turkish support for a Unitarian Revolution in Ethiopia. Though relations were initially quite warm, they had started to cool by 1936. They simply did not want to bite off more than they could chew by opening up a front with France, which despite its defeat in the Great European War was still a force to be reckoned with. After this disappointment, Colonel Dawit Gebeyehu, who supported links with India, came to the fore. The United Officers was a more nationalistic movement than the one that founded Unitarian Turkey, Gebeyehu reasoned, and wasn’t the Unified Indian State the more nationalistic of the twin Unitarian powers?
Dawit Gebeyehu, Chairman of the United Officers’ Movement
Envoys sent to Delhi returned with news of Nijasure’s interest. Upon catching wind of this, Turkey, not wanting to lose influence in a region that could become its backyard, promised unconditional support in the event of a revolution by the United Officers.
Gebeyehu was ready to move. The question was: when?
[1] OTL Liberia. Before American colonization, It used to be called the Pepper Coast.
[2] TTL name for OTL Sudan. I’d like the name “Sudan” to be used elsewhere.
TL;DR: The Ummatists are a new movement of pluralist Islam that's risen as a reaction to colonialism and Unitarianism. The Fatahists are their more militant wing, and have as their explicit goal the foundation of new states that can safeguard Islam from the Europeans. Their ideal form of government is a large empire that fairly and justly rules over a heterodox population without overstepping its boundaries and oppressing anyone too much. Idealized visions of the Ottoman and Mughal empires have influenced these goals. Selim Osmanoglu is a Fatahist Che Guevara, I guess, and he plans to raise hell in the northern, more solidly Muslim part of Britannian West Africa.
Meanwhile, Ethiopia gets ready to spread Unitarianism to a third continent, all while playing the Indians and Turks off each other. I imagine Dawit Gebeyehu as a mix of Gamal Abdel Nasser and Daoud Khan-- leading a revolution from above by some disgruntled officers against a ruler seen as too willing to deal with the West, but only with extensive foreign support.
Next Africa chapter will center on Western Africa.
Northeast Africa (1936-1939)
Egypt
In 1910, the population of the Sultanate of Egypt stood at 8 million, and, due mostly to better medicine and rising prosperity, rose steadily over the next two decades. This is not to minimize the importance of immigration, which, despite not raising the raw numbers of Egypt’s population very much, changed the political and cultural history of Egypt and the world forever.
Immigration to Egypt had been quite low in the late 1910s, as the Unitarian revolutions in India and Turkey wound down and the populations of both countries figured that they could come to terms with their new rulers. Then came de-nationalization and de-Islamification. As the 1920s wound on, small boats and planes left the Hejaz and the Indus, hastily crossing the Red and Arabian Seas in hopes of making it to the safety of the Sultanate, the last true Muslim state left in the lands of the old Caliphates. The people of Cairo slowly grew used to the presence of Kurds, Syrians, Bengalis, Punjabis, and more. These people carried with them many different languages and, as if in a deliberate snub to the conservative orthodox ulema of al-Azhar University, religious traditions. Each man and women seemed to have their own way of approaching God. As storm clouds gathered over Central Asia, Persians made their way to the Nile as early as the summer of 1936. Three years later, the joint Indian-Turkish invasion of Persia and the Central Asian states would confirm their fears.
These people grew to know each other in the way all Egyptians did— sitting around tables with steaming cups of coffee in hand. The Egyptian ahwa, or coffee shop, became a center of debate and intellectual ferment, which reached a fever pitch near the end of 1936. The Sultan of Egypt, interested in what these people had to say (and hoping to get declared as the new Caliph of Islam) invited intellectuals from across Egypt to the Cairo Citadel in November, and again in December.
The Cairo Citadel.
The Citadel Conferences were the birthplace of the intellectual trend of Ummatiyyah, or Ummatism. Named in reference to the Ummah, the world community of Muslims, Ummatism disavowed sectarianism or atavism from the start. In coming together, the delegates at the Conferences came to realize that many of their sects had begun in an attempt to rediscover the “true and original” Islam of the Prophet, and had ultimately diverged not only from each other but from themselves, growing unrecognizable to their founders over time. The tirade of Ahmet Muhtar Zogolli [1], a delegate from Albania, against the inability of sectarian “purity” to stop the marauding apostate hordes of Akarsu Kubilay and Sanjay Nijasure reflected a general consensus among the delegates that the Muslims of the world, no matter how much they quibbled over matters of theory and practice, faced a common struggle and needed to put up a united front. The trouble of devising strict rules for deciding where Islam ended and heresy began would begin later; for now, the delegates— including the Sultan, who sat in as one of Egypt’s representatives— agreed that heterodoxy was inevitable within the wide embrace of the Ummah. Some delegates even grew interested in heterodox thought— the story of the Oudh Bequest [2], in which a Shia governor in Northern India organized a gradual transfer of over six million rupees to the holy Shia cities of Najaf and Karbala, is said to have captivated even the conservative Sunnis of Nejd, who found themselves so starved for stories of devotion in the modern age that the great deeds of the past seemed near-miraculous and worthy of celebration.
Some delegates were not merely interested in this embryonic philosophy. Some were inspired, inspired to fight and die.
Over the course of the Second Citadel Conference in December 1936, a group of men coalesced around two key figures. One was Faisal bin Hussein, the former Sharif of Mecca. Once a young man ready to perform the duty of his dynasty, the Hashemites, and guard the Two Holy Cities, he had been forced to flee his homeland in the wake of the Ottoman Civil War. After sinking into relative obscurity, he slowly clawed his way back into the public eye through steady attendance at the coffee shops of Cairo. The other was Selim Osmanoglu, nephew of Abdulmejid III, last sultan of the Ottoman Empire. This group became known for its willingness to extend the “united front” thesis of the Ummatists even further. The majority of the world’s Muslims, Osmanoglu would claim, languished under European rule or suffered the horrors of Unitarianism. Ultimately, curing one was as important as curing the other. The free Muslims of the world owed it to their subjugated brethren to wait for openings, strike decisively, and establish strong states that could protect the rich and diverse tapestry of Islam from the forces that would shred it to bits. This group, though still existing within the Ummatist consensus, came to be known as Fatahists (from fatah, an Arabic word that can be translated as “opening” or “conquest”).
The traditional Senussi banner.
Over the course of 1937, the Fatahists would come into contact with the Senussis, a religious order with deep roots in Tripolitania. The Senussis had once been of great consequence in the province, but a string of defeats at the hands of Visegradian colonial troops, culminating in the murder of the Chief of the order earlier in the decade, had shown their inability to combat infidel infiltration. Eager to become relevant again, the Senussis officially allied with the Fatahists on the basis of common ambitions and doctrines. This alliance would slowly become union within five years— the lack of momentum and leadership among the Senussis all but guaranteed that they would become the Tripolitanian wing of a Fatahist movement with ambitions beyond North Africa.
The newly empowered Fatahists waited for their opening. In 1939, they found it.
[1] OTL: King Zog of Albania.
[2] This is basically OTL.
Visegradian Tripolitania
The Fatahists and Senussis laid the groundwork for their “opening” for over a year. Agents from Egypt had successfully contacted the remnant Senussi leaders in Tripolitania, headquartered in the border town of Jaghbub. Though the Tripolitanians were leery of foreigners at first, the dangerous trip of Selim Osmanoglu and Faisal bin Hussein to Jaghbub to personally meet their new allies showed the Tripolitanians that the old Hejazi, the upstart Turk, and their retinue of Egyptians, Persians, and Indians were serious about their willingness to defy Visegrad. That willingness dramatically increased amid the chaotic opening shots of the War of the Danube. Once Turkey officially entered the war on the CUS’s side, the Visegradian troops garrisoning Tripolitania were at a loss. These troops were, to a man, loyal to King and Country— but what was Visegrad demanding of them? Communication with the royalist government was spotty, and there was much confusion over whether to guard Tripolitania until the royalists eventually won or hop across the Mediterranean to personally bring about the CUS’s defeat.
After contentious meetings with subordinates and provincial governors in Tripoli, Miklos Horthy, the Viceroy of Tripolitania, decided that as many soldiers as possible should be sent to Rijeka to open up another front against the CUS. The remainder, it was decided, would be stretched to cover Visegrad’s bases in the colony.
Unfortunately, they were stretched too thinly.
For over a year, the Fatahists had marshalled their strength. They raided police armories in the remote hinterland of Tripolitania, and grew brazen enough to raid some of the coastal towns’ weapons. These new toys were held by recruits from natives of Tripolitania and Egypt, as well as the immigrant communities of Cairo. The sultan of Egypt had received arms and money from France for decades— Egypt was a French protectorate before the Great European War, and France continued to support Egypt to keep it (and its precious Suez Canal) from falling into Turkish hands. If the French knew about the sultan’s covert diversion of some of this aid into Fatahist hands, it’s unlikely that they would have cared. Visegrad was a dead letter anyways, and at least the Fatahists weren’t Unitarians.
The Visegradian troops of Tobruk, leaving before the break of dawn, found that the fishermen at the docks were not just angry but armed. They blocked the way to the civilian ferries that had been hastily requisitioned to carry the soldiers from Tobruk to Benghazi, and then onward to Rijeka. The troops prepared to fire back but found themselves surrounded as the “civilians” of the town showed just how many Fatahist operatives they’d been concealing. After a brief exchange of shots, the Visegradians realized the futility of fighting back and surrendered. After the former occupiers were disarmed and defanged, the real civilians, slowly waking up to the sound of gunfire and shouts of victory, stepped forward to voice some concerns. Here, though, things turned ugly. The Fatahists had underestimated the extent of Tobruk’s bitterness toward the occupiers, and the crowd of civilians, roused from their beds by the sound of gunfire, became a mob. Though the majority of the Europeans in the town were eventually allowed to board the ferries and leave Tripolitania behind forever, over 100 soldiers and settlers had been stoned or stabbed to death by noon. Despite this unsavory end, the Capture of Tobruk, pulled off in May 1939, became the first step toward Islamic revival and African liberation.
Though the Fatahist rank and file expected a rift between their two greatest leaders to sour this great victory, such a rift never materialized. Selim Osmanoglu seemed to be genuinely comfortable as a second-in-command (he had, after all, seen what a curse leadership had been to his uncle Abdulmejid) and with his sanction the old Faisal bin Hussein, once the Sharif of Mecca, received a new title in a grand ceremony attended by the people of Tobruk.
Amir al-Mu’minin. Commander of the Faithful.
Flag of the Fatahist Emirate of Tripolitania (Imarat al-Tarabulus). The black stripe of the Abbasids, the green stripe of the Fatimids, and the white stripe of the Umayyads stand behind the red triangle of the Hashemites.
While Faisal and the Tripolitanian Senussis started setting up a government capable of defeating the rest of Horthy’s forces, Selim and a group of handpicked guides and followers went south along an old desert trail. One of these followers was Ibrahim Murra, a Hajji from the Wadai Empire. This state was not claimed by any of the European powers— it was so remote from areas of European influence that it didn’t even show up on many European-made maps [1]. However, Wadai was one of the last centers of native power in the Sahara, and had for many decades been receptive to Senussi teachers from Tripolitania. Selim hoped to leverage these old links for new ends. In the long term, if all went to plan, Visegrad could be driven from Tripolitania completely, Wadai’s government could be convinced to join the cause, and a new cadre of African Fatahists, headed by Selim, could head west from Wadai…
...into Bornu, on the northeastern periphery of Britannian West Africa.
[1] Certainly not on Augenis’s map
French East Africa
The French empire in Africa was a bit of a mess. In the west, centers of power in Senegal, Cote-de-Poivre [1] and Benin propped up a larger French zone of influence that coexisted uneasily with Britannia’s large domain. Heading east from Benin through several hundreds of miles of grassland and jungle, one could find the frontier town of Bangui, the linchpin of French control in the center of the continent. Proceeding even further east, one could find the mishmash of protectorates, colonies, and zones of influence that was the Horn of Africa.
In the Great European War, France needed men to fight. It recruited extensively from French West Africa, since these colonies were closest to France itself. After the war, the French were in no mood to grant concessions to anyone— but popular opinion and African agitation swayed the French government into granting the Charter of Dakar in 1921, which allowed for limited election of African deputies to the French Estates-General. However, the government was not radical enough to extend the Charter’s propositions to be extended to the East (and probably hoped that, by giving the West preferential treatment, it could encourage Eastern participation in the next war). Ironically, this was the least of France’s problems in its eastern domains.
Though Fatahism had not made the trip to French Somalia or Nubia [2] yet, these regions were still rife with discontent. However, the French authorities had no reason to be worried about either. Somalia and Nubia were riven by linguistic and tribal disunity, and had no all-regional group that might serve as a vehicle of rebellion. Divide-and-rule politics could keep both regions pacified.
No, the real threat to France was Ethiopia.
The Solomonic Kingdom had long ago recognized its inability to interrupt the Concert of Africa, and acquiesced to French suzerainty in the 1800s by signing the Treaty of Gondar. The treaty gave France full control over Ethiopian foreign policy and required it to pay a “protection” payment annually, but allowed it to retain its army and internal autonomy. The highlands of Ethiopia would be a tough nut to crack, and France wanted colonization to be as quick as possible. Gradually, Ethiopia grew integrated into the French sphere— its neighbors were all conquered by France, its major trade partner was France, and Ethiopian nobles started to send their kids to Mogadishu and Djibouti to study in newly-founded French lycées. However, the French unilaterally hiked the “protection” payments in 1932 in order to pay for French flu recovery. This incident, especially when compared with the preferential treatment gained by West Africa, was the final straw for many sectors of the Ethiopian population, including the army. A group of colonels founded the United Officers’ Movement shortly afterward. The outlook of the group was overwhelmingly Unitarian, and they found a natural ally in Turkey. Ethiopian officers made periodic trips to Sanaa and Aden to garner Turkish support for a Unitarian Revolution in Ethiopia. Though relations were initially quite warm, they had started to cool by 1936. They simply did not want to bite off more than they could chew by opening up a front with France, which despite its defeat in the Great European War was still a force to be reckoned with. After this disappointment, Colonel Dawit Gebeyehu, who supported links with India, came to the fore. The United Officers was a more nationalistic movement than the one that founded Unitarian Turkey, Gebeyehu reasoned, and wasn’t the Unified Indian State the more nationalistic of the twin Unitarian powers?
Dawit Gebeyehu, Chairman of the United Officers’ Movement
Envoys sent to Delhi returned with news of Nijasure’s interest. Upon catching wind of this, Turkey, not wanting to lose influence in a region that could become its backyard, promised unconditional support in the event of a revolution by the United Officers.
Gebeyehu was ready to move. The question was: when?
[1] OTL Liberia. Before American colonization, It used to be called the Pepper Coast.
[2] TTL name for OTL Sudan. I’d like the name “Sudan” to be used elsewhere.
TL;DR: The Ummatists are a new movement of pluralist Islam that's risen as a reaction to colonialism and Unitarianism. The Fatahists are their more militant wing, and have as their explicit goal the foundation of new states that can safeguard Islam from the Europeans. Their ideal form of government is a large empire that fairly and justly rules over a heterodox population without overstepping its boundaries and oppressing anyone too much. Idealized visions of the Ottoman and Mughal empires have influenced these goals. Selim Osmanoglu is a Fatahist Che Guevara, I guess, and he plans to raise hell in the northern, more solidly Muslim part of Britannian West Africa.
Meanwhile, Ethiopia gets ready to spread Unitarianism to a third continent, all while playing the Indians and Turks off each other. I imagine Dawit Gebeyehu as a mix of Gamal Abdel Nasser and Daoud Khan-- leading a revolution from above by some disgruntled officers against a ruler seen as too willing to deal with the West, but only with extensive foreign support.
Next Africa chapter will center on Western Africa.
- LostInNewDelhi
- Word Count: 2.8k