Barack Obama, East Africa Reborn: 1950-2010 (Kisumu: Nyanza State Historical Series, 2011)
… Zanzibar soon found that its conception of an Erythraean Union comprising the Indian Ocean rim [1] was easier said than done. Its model was the Afro-Atlantic Common Market, but there, people of West African descent had formed a majority on both sides of the ocean, and the Rice Coast, the Caribbean and the American South had close ties of language and culture. The Indian Ocean was different. Indians and Arabs had settled and traded along the Swahili coast for more than a thousand years and Africans had an equally ancient presence in India and South Arabia, but the majority populations along each stretch of shore were very different, and though Swahili contained much Arabic, it incorporated little Hindi. The peoples of the old Erythraean Sea had come to appreciate each other’s cultures, but they were a long way from the sort of commonality that prevailed between Jamaica and Sierra Leone.
Without a common culture, the only bases for the Erythraean Region were trade and politics, and both worked against Zanzibar rather than for it. The Indian Union, which already had a presence in East Africa, saw itself as the shaper of the Indian Ocean rim’s future, and had no particular interest in a pan-oceanic federation in which its influence might be diluted. The East African successor states still distrusted their former ruler, and most also saw control of their own political destiny as a necessary counterweight to their dependence on foreign investment. As the twentieth century drew to a close, the successors began forming agreements among themselves so that they could present a united front
against their neighbors’ economic influence, and they were hardly willing to join a union that those very neighbors would dominate.
There were a few successes in Zanzibar’s pursuit of an Erythraean league. One of the most notable was the re-establishment of warm relations with Oman, which had once ruled Zanzibar and been ruled by it but had been formally separate for generations. The two would not unite again: conservative, tribal Oman had begun to grow apart from radical and cosmopolitan Zanzibar even before they separated, and they had only grown further apart since. Even the Arabic language spoken at Zanzibar was so laced with Bantu colloquialisms that visiting Omanis who heard it on the streets thought they were listening to Swahili. But time had softened the quarrels of the nineteenth century: Oman and Zanzibar now viewed each other as brothers who had taken different paths, and as the only two Ibadi countries in the world, they shared even now a similarity that outweighed their differences. Trade and cultural exchanges increased during the 1970s and 80s, and a four-freedoms agreement was concluded in 1994; by century’s end, a small but growing community of East African students and businessmen lived in Muscat.
Aden, too, grew closer to Zanzibar. It had been administered as part of the Raj before the Indian revolution, and after independence, it had looked both east to India and west and north to Eritrea and Ethiopian Yemen. Over time, it developed a population much like Zanzibar’s, with Ethiopian and Nilotic merchants filtering in through Yemen and Somali and Swahili merchants coming north to trade. The Arab, African and Indian elements of Aden came from different places than Zanzibar, but it was still a true blending, and the State of Aden was perhaps the one other place where the Erythraean idea seemed natural. It was thus unsurprising that the two would develop a growing commercial and then cultural relationship, with Aden becoming a major transshipment point for Ethiopian trade to East Africa and, in 1998, the site of the first Zanzibari-sponsored Erythraean Fair.
But for the most part, the Erythraean Union was an idea that failed: it was an idea that appealed to polyglot Zanzibar where Africa, India and Arabia had met for centuries, but it was too abstract to have much appeal elsewhere. The Erythraean Fair and accompanying cultural forum take place in every four years, and in the new century, there have been a few economic and educational agreements between the regional associations that ringed the Indian Ocean, but the idea that they might consolidate into one union is nearly as remote in 2010 as it was in 1950…
… In the meantime, Zanzibar – or, as it was more properly called, the Empire of East Africa – continued to evolve from empire to nation. By the 1970s, radio and television had penetrated even to remote villages, and the spread of mass media had a predictable leveling effect on culture and language. Swahili became, not only a trade language, but a language of daily communication throughout the country, and a growing number of people outside the traditionally-Swahili coastal regions spoke it as a mother tongue. In the autonomous Kikuyu and Yao regions, which had their own universities and where indigenous literature had been established for decades, local languages were more robust, but even there, everyone learned Swahili from primary school onward, and businesses as well as government offices were increasingly bilingual.
Zanzibar itself was the cosmopolitan city it had always been, and only became more so as the days of the twentieth century dwindled. It had always drawn migration from its East African hinterland, but now, as the capital of a prosperous social democracy, it also drew from the Great Lakes, the Congo and the former Portuguese Central Africa. During the years of the Fool’s Errand [2], many citizens of Yeke and other Central African princely states made their way to Zanzibar – ironically retracing the route by which Swahili slavers and warlords had come to them in the early nineteenth century – and settled in their own neighborhoods in the expanding suburbs. The Great Lakes diaspora had already begun forming in the 1960s as educated young people looked for opportunities that their homelands couldn’t provide, and after a hiatus during the recession, it grew steadily from the mid-1980s onward. The newcomers were shaped by revolutionary Ibadi and Carlsenist traditions as the Zanzibaris were, but their insular societies had taken these ideas down very different paths: they were as much a mirror of the Zanzibaris as Oman was, and their encounter would broaden the horizons of both…
… Zanzibar and the Swahili coast in the twenty-first century remain the cultural heart of East Africa: they wear their tumultuous history well and are one of the most dynamic media centers on the continent. The capital is particularly famous for its religious music, which is a blend of Indian qawwali, classical Arab styles and the pentatonic sacred music of Somalia, often played on a mbira and a variety of drums. In keeping with Tippu Tip’s legacy, the Islamic music of Zanzibar is often used as a vehicle of social protest, with songs featuring prophetic Ibadi themes of justice between ruler and ruled or, with increasing frequency, between humanity and the earth. It is these prayers of protest that have found the greatest following in other countries, with the songs of Zanzibari labor brotherhoods sung during strikes in India or election campaigns in the Ottoman Union…
… Much of the rest of East Africa, by contrast, remained unfinished business. The Bloody Forties [3] and the postwar labor migrations had resulted in some cultural leveling there as well, especially in language: Swahili was now the lingua franca of business even among Nilotic peoples, and in Nyanza, where there were almost as many guest workers as citizens, it was a required subject from primary school onward. But the same battles and migrations had left the new East African states struggling to find a sense of themselves, and that struggle only deepened in the 1970s and 80s.
The recession of the 70s was devastating to the East African economy: as the last one in, the region was the first out. The modest pool of foreign investment that had built light industry and infrastructure in the 1950s and 60s dried up, and only a few of the East African states had built sufficient local capital to pick up the slack. Factories closed, putting many thousands out of work, and the small businesses that depended on working-class and middle-class customers also suffered. At the same time, falling commodity prices reduced the earnings from cash crops and mining, putting smallholders into jeopardy and straining social welfare systems.
In many ways, the economy reverted to what it had been in the early 1950s. Countries like Nyanza where locally-owned industries had grown up, or those like Maralal and some provinces of Tanganyika where mutual-aid structures were strong, were able to hold their gains and build on what they had, while others fell back. The gap between the nations that looked forward to a modest prosperity and those that seemed eternally condemned to poverty widened, and the consequences played out in a number of ways, few of them good.
Labor migration redoubled, and this time went not only to the neighboring countries (which themselves were full to overflowing) but overseas. By the 1980s, more than 600,000 East African immigrants lived in the Indian Union, with many settling in Madras and Mysore where East African labor conscripts had been forcibly taken during the Imperial period [4] or along the western coast where established Sidi communities existed. Others settled in Europe, the United States and Brazil, with lesser numbers moving to the Niger Valley, the Ottoman Union and as far as Nusantara. The overseas migrants, unlike those who stayed in the region, were disproportionately educated and came from families that had the resources to buy passage, and although their remittances were important to rebuilding East Africa’s economies during the later 1980s and 1990s, the resulting brain drain would be a drag on growth for decades.
More troubling yet was the growing resentment of foreign workers on the one hand, and international finance on the other hand. Countries that hosted foreign laborers – and any country or province even slightly more prosperous than its neighbors drew migrants – erupted in riots and armed battles. Some countries expelled foreign workers – Nyanza in 1975 and 1981, Manyoni in 1977, Kivu in 1974 and 1980 and 1982 – although the repeated expulsion edicts showed that they were largely ineffective. And in the poorest countries, the resentment was directed outward against the Baganda and Ethiopian and Indian bankers and industrialists who they saw as neo-colonial exploiters. Rioting in Kenia in 1976 resulted in more than a hundred foreigners killed, and similar albeit smaller outbreaks took place in much of the region between 1972 and 1985. The presence of collective security structures prevented actual war or a recurrence of ethnic violence on the scale of the Bloody Forties, but East Africa bled all the same.
In one case, war did break out. Kivu’s annexation of the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika had never been accepted by the loose federation that bore the same name, and although the majority of the population had stayed and even welcomed the Kivu armies during the Bloody Forties, some had fled and carved out a domain on the Tanganyika side of the frontier. Border clashes, sporadic during the 1950s and 60s, became more common in the 1970s, and on the Kivu side, the local feudal lords’ enthusiastic enforcement of the decrees expelling Tanganyikan workers caused relations to deteriorate rapidly. In early 1984, a border incident spiraled out of control, and two Tanganyikan cantons invaded Kivu.
The region, the world and even the Tanganyikan and Kivu governments were caught flat-footed by the invasion. This was not a war between two countries but between feudalists and autonomous cantons, and fighting dragged on for weeks as the national governments debated whether to support their respective provinces or force them to make peace. Ultimately, after heavy pressure from within and without, including a Court of Arbitration decision as well as threats of secession by Tanganyika’s eastern cantons, both countries sent in their armies to restore peace and take control of the border. The following year, Tanganyika ratified the frontier in exchange for compensation to the refugees of the 1940s, but the more lasting effect would be the final death knell of feudalism in Kivu and the creation of a more formal constitutional structure in Tanganyika…
… East Africa was slower than most regions to recover from the recession, but by the 1990s, the regional economy had stabilized and begun to grow again. Remittances from abroad were critical to the recovery, as was the pool of capital and knowledge that the East African diasporas had built: by the later 1990s, many East Africans returned to start businesses and invest in their countries, and this trend accelerated during the 2000s. At the same time, the gap between richer and poorer nations was wider than ever, and the legacy of the 1970s and 80s, coming on top of the Bloody Forties, created a mistrust that was slow to dissipate.
Ironically, it would be this very distrust that finally induced the East African successor states to expand their customs union into a political and economic federation. The return of foreign investment beginning in the late 1980s fueled renewed fears of neo-colonialism, and by the mid-90s, legislatures throughout the region increasingly debated whether to join together to present a stronger front against international banks and corporations. This effort was led by the richer and more stable successor states – Nyanza chief among them – and, in another irony, by the anarchist cantons that saw federation as an opportunity to institutionalize mutual aid across the region. In 2004, these efforts came to fruition with the creation of an East African Association with offices in Kisumu, with a union-wide four-freedoms agreement and uniform laws on commercial matters and resource exploitation. The treaty was closely negotiated and many aspects of it, particularly the four-freedoms clause, were controversial, but distrust of neo-colonialism, and the seeds of mutual aid planted during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, overcame the successor states’ distrust of each other.
Enough antipathy did remain that the East African federation is one of the looser regional groupings in today’s world, and its members have been adamant about maintaining political independence even while merging their economies. The economic agreements have deepened, though, and a common East African currency is scheduled to debut in 2012, making East Africa the only regional union other than India that has one. The union has also begun to coordinate efforts against climate-driven desertification and the environmental degradation that remains from the decades of unrest. But like its member states themselves, the union is very much a work in progress…
Maryam Kamayirese, The Great Lakes in Motion (Kigali: Ubushishozi, 2014)
… The Great Lakes Model [5] encountered its first serious strains during the last quarter of the twentieth century. The railroads that ended the commonwealths’ geographic isolation took many of their young people to universities and jobs in Kampala and Zanzibar, and brought most of them home again. Other young people who fought as volunteers in the Uele rebellion [6] returned to question their homelands’ place in the world, and to wonder whether their insularity was really compatible with the social mission of their religions and ideologies. And as truly effective treatments for the Congo fever finally became available, many questioned whether the strict enforcement of sexual and marital norms was really necessary any more.
The peasant-herder-religious commonwealths of the nineteenth century had taken the Great Lakes far, creating societies that were cohesive and participatory and had social indicators far above their wealth, but it could not truly maintain a consensus in a technological society where more and more people were neither peasants nor herders. As late as 1960, none of the Great Lakes republics had any cities of more than 30,000 population, and some, like Ituri, had no cities to speak of, but by 1990, there were several railroad hubs with more than 100,000 people. The people who lived in these cities skewed young, and they wanted more growth and opportunity than the Great Lakes Model had hitherto provided.
Urbanization and daily contact with the outside world worked their changes on almost every aspect of society. Some were subtle: in 1980, the median age at first marriage in the Great Lakes was 18.4 for women and 19.2 for men, three years younger than the United States or western Europe, but by 2000, it had converged with the West at 22.9 for women and 24.1 for men. Others were far less so: political parties, previously unknown in the Great Lakes, coalesced and challenged the old notion of government by general agreement.
There were only two directions the commonwealths could go: either the consensus would be broken or a new one would form. Rwanda with its quasi-anarchist theology, and Ankole with its ethic of Carlsenist mutual aid, moved quickly toward the latter, accepting the cities as a fourth leg of society and hammering out coexistence between autonomous rural and urban communities (in Rwanda’s case) or a policy compromise allowing more room for growth and international participation in exchange for commitment to the social mission (in Ankole’s). The consensus in the other states proved more brittle: in some, the challenge of the cities ripped the mask off a system that had become authoritarian and rigid, and in others, the cultural gulf between town and country had become too great. The politics of these states became increasingly volatile and competitive, and that volatility has not yet abated.
The Great Lakes Model is far from dead – if anything, the tradition of politically engaged citizens and participatory government has been revitalized – but it is unclear how it will adapt to a world where old verities are falling and where near-unanimous consent can no longer be obtained. Can the commonwealths’ egalitarian concept of the public good address the growing gaps in wealth between the countryside and the towns, and can the family, village and neighborhood structures that form their base adapt to a more individualistic generation? The answer is being shaped now, throughout the Great Lakes region…
… At the same time that the insular Great Lakes states were forging a new consensus, the eclectic culture of Buganda came into its own. Kampala had prospered during the 1950s and 60s as a regional banker and railroad hub, and both of those reinforced the tendency to look outward that the palace cult and diverse religious mix had already catalyzed. The way that Buganda rode out the 1970s – by seeking emerging financial markets and providing seed money for community credit and penny-banking structures in developing countries – made it even more a country of the world. By the 1980s, people outside Africa had heard of Buganda as more than just a home of unusual religions, and its literary and musical fusions found wider audiences.
In the 1990s, after the fall of the Hungarian regency council [7], Buganda also gained entry to Europe. For three generations, its capital had been home to a large community of Hungarian Jews descended from post-Great War refugees, and although most declined to adopt the Baganda version of their religion, they had become well integrated into the capital’s society. The regents’ demise made Hungary safe for them again, and although Buganda’s higher living standard meant that few returned permanently, many started businesses and invested in Hungarian redevelopment, and they brought Baganda partners with them. Geographic realities meant that there was little direct trade between Buganda and Hungary – some goods made it through Croatia, across the Adriatic and Mediterranean, and down the Peace Railroad from Cairo, but the shipping costs involved made most products unviable – but money traveled more easily, and at the turn of the millennium, there was a community of Baganda in Budapest to match the Hungarians in Kampala.
Buganda today is a comfortably middle-income country, comparable to Russia, Costa Rica or the richer Ethiopian kingdoms. It has become highly urbanized – Kampala, with three million people, accounts for close to a third of its population, and other market centers have grown into large towns – and the backbone of its economy is finance, transport and information services. Its relationship with its neighbors to the east still has some residual distrust, but recent governments have tried to be a positive force in the region, and its support of the East African Association has reassured many that it doesn’t intend to become a neo-colonial power. For more than a century, Buganda has been where religions come together, and now, increasingly, it is also a cultural and economic center…
… Kivu, the Great Lakes’ other polyglot patchwork state, entered the 1970s in a state of transition between the old feudal agrarian economy and the increasingly modern culture of the cities. The Köhler family had been forced to yield much of its power, but the feudal nobility that the family had created clung tenaciously to theirs. A few yielded to demands for popular government during the 1960s, and some even embarked on the beginnings of land reform, but most refused both, and they used parliamentary and paramilitary means to keep control of the government and fight the burgeoning agricultural unions.
The recession sharpened the conflict. The feudalists, deprived of much of their traditional cash-crop income, squeezed their tenants and smallholders for revenue, and in those provinces where some land reform had taken place, the worsening economy brought it to an abrupt halt. The middle class, for its part, was more interested in protecting its own position than in supporting the peasants, and much of the tax revenue that supported urban development came from feudal rents. They sometimes sided with the feudalists and sometimes against them, but never enough against them to demand fundamental reforms in the provinces. By the end of the decade, several provinces were in a state of low-grade civil war, with the neutered monarchy and the divided legislature unable to respond effectively.
It would be an outside event – the Tanganyika crisis of 1984 – that would break the impasse. The middle class, and even some of the more moderate feudalists, were appalled that a provincial landlord had almost brought the country to war, and Thilo Köhler, more experienced and politically canny than he had been when he took the throne, seized the moment to demand a new constitutional settlement. His coalition was an odd one, combining peasants, businessmen and the nobles in the western part of the country, but he managed to keep it together through the 1986 election and to prevent their initiatives from being blocked in the house of lords.
The end result was something of a reversal of fortune from the previous constitutional coup of 1962. In exchange for remaining hereditary governors of their provinces and keeping their seats in the upper house, the feudalists were forced to cede real power to elected legislatures and to accept phased purchases of land by government-funded agricultural cooperatives. And the Köhlers got much of their power back as the third and pivotal leg of a government that pitted the peasant radicals against the Westernized urban middle class. Despite having joined in a temporary coalition, the peasants, who were strongly influenced by the ideology of Zanzibar to the east and the commonwealths to the north, had (and still have) a very different cultural outlook from the towns, and Thilo, who came from both worlds, was the one who could bridge them.
Since the 1990s, Thilo has reinvented himself as a populist monarch in the tradition of the Bonapartes, which may be ironic in light of his partial German ancestry but has been effective. Under his watch, his grandfather’s patchwork feudal kingdom has become a modern state, and his daughter, appropriately named Marianne, shows every sign of continuing the family’s adaptability…
… In Samuel’s Kingdom, non-Mormons were now fully equal under the law, eligible to receive homestead land and to be elected to the highest office. This changed society less than many conservatives had feared. The country still had a large Mormon majority and an unshakeable Book of Mormon-derived constitution, which meant that government and law continued to reflect Mormon priorities in nearly all cases. Non-Mormons were elected to judgeships and sometimes even to the quorum, and their very presence, like that of the American Mormon settlers, could sometimes sway debates or catalyze ideas, but they had neither the numbers nor the inclination to enact fundamental changes.
If anything, the incorporation of non-Mormons as full equals accelerated their assimilation into the majority culture. Although they didn’t adopt Samuel the Lamanite’s Muslim-inflected Afro-Mormon faith, they did increasingly take on Mormon values and secular culture, including the Americanisms that had spread through the kingdom between the 1950s and 70s. By the turn of the millennium, even the most remote village was part Congo, part Zanzibar, part Middle America and part Zarahemla, and while the combination was undeniably effective, tourists were still arrested by the sight of Afro-modern diners standing next to Mormon temples that looked very much like mosques…
Abebe Woldemariam, The Trials of the Seven Kingdoms (Gondar: Solomon, 2013)
… Where the 1950s and 60s were a time of growth and triumph for Ethiopia, the following two decades would be a time of troubles. In Sanaag, inter-clan fighting over grazing land intensified as the population grew and the climate became drier, and as it had begun doing in the 1960s [8], the fighting spilled over into neighboring countries with Somali populations. Attempts to contain the battles often failed – the Ethiopian army couldn’t be everywhere at once, and the government of Sanaag itself was weak and riddled by clan rivalries.
The Sanaag parliament, constituting itself as a tribunal under the customary Xeer justice system, made several attempts to resolve the disputes over right-of-way and grazing land, and the Ethiopian government offered to help fund a compensation scheme, but shifting alliances between clans and their representatives doomed these attempts to failure. In the meantime, as an increasing number of Somalis from Sanaag sought work in Geledi, Kismayo and Zanzibar, they brought their clan rivalries with them, sometimes causing neighborhoods to erupt in mini-wars for which the neighboring countries held Ethiopia partly responsible. [9]
Ethiopian Yemen was also a source of increasing unrest. Like Sanaag, the Kingdom of Yemen was really a collection of petty states, some of which still had only nominal allegiance to Gondar. The chiefs in the deep mountain regions accepted the Ethiopian and Yemeni governments as overlords and settled their disputes in the courts rather than the battlefield, but it was hard to make them do anything they didn’t want to do, and they had lost neither their bone-deep conservatism nor their tendency to quarrel.
In the towns, a different Yemen was emerging: educated young people gravitated there, and their encounters (and sometimes marriages) with Hadhramis and citizens of Ethiopia’s more metropolitan kingdoms led to broadened horizons. The generation growing up in the Yemeni cities in the 1970s and 80s was the first to take for granted that women should be educated, and they increasingly rejected clan society and adopted the reformist branches of Islam that were practiced among the Hadhramis and Oromo. Many went to study in Amhara or Eritrea and maintained ties with the Yemeni communities there, and brought back with them the attitudes of urban Ethiopia.
Therein lay the problem, because with the exception of Sana’a, Ta’izz and the port of Al Hudaydah, the towns were all under the rule of one or another of the feudalists. They chafed under that rule, wanting to be city-states within the kingdom and empire, and the hill-chiefs and provincial emirs were unwilling to give up the tax revenue and trade that came with controlling the cities. There were some efforts at buying out the feudalists, and a few did consent to grant independence in exchange for annual compensation, but the majority refused. By the end of the 1970s there were armed clashes between town militias and troops from the hills, requiring the Ethiopian army to move in and impose peace on large parts of the country, and in 1981, a rebellion in the market town of Ibb raged for six weeks and drove the emir’s forces out of the city before the army could restore order…
… All this, coming on top of the economic troubles of the 1970s, strained the Ethiopian government to the limit and damaged relations with neighboring countries. The army redoubled its effort to stop the clan fighting in Sanaag and to control the border with Geledi, Obock and Italian Eritrea, but had only limited success. In some cases the army’s measures backfired, as when it clashed with Afar and southern Somali herders that it mistook for clans from Sanaag, and the very fact that the region’s governments were trying to impose order on clans that weren’t accustomed to recognizing higher authority made many clansmen think of those governments as common enemies.
By the early 1980s, the Ethiopian government had begun to take seriously the proposal that Empress Anastasia had made during her retirement: a conference of all the nomadic peoples of the Horn of Africa, together with their respective governments, to reach not only a global settlement not only of the grazing disputes but a master plan for preserving and developing the land. One of its key allies in laying the groundwork was the Somali merchant diaspora, most of whom were from Kismayo or Geledi and who had progressed much further away from clan society but were still connected enough to customary law to know what approaches to make. The Somalis in Gondar and the growing Sanaag port towns, who were as impatient with the incessant clan fighting as Gondar was, also acted as advance men for the government, and in 1985, a majority clan leaders – many of them kicking and screaming – were finally threatened and cajoled into meeting.
The first conference had very limited success. Despite the incentives offered by Ethiopia, Italy, France and India, several key subclans refused to attend, and the others were reluctant to make deals without them. Many also considered the proposed long-term development plans unfeasible without adequate provision for climate change. But with the ice broken, negotiations continued, and by the time a second meeting convened in 1989, the society of Sanaag was changing. More and more young Somalis were moving to the cities, relieving some of the pressure on grazing lands, and the more modern views of the diaspora and the urban communities were filtering to the countryside. In early 1990, a Xeer-based settlement of the land disputes was hammered out, with the clans conceding certain customary rights and agreeing to time-shares of grazing grounds in exchange for compensation, and the regional governments agreed to an ambitious joint plan of infrastructure development and environmental conservation.
The Yemeni crisis was brought to a similar close. Using the stick of the army and the carrot of subsidies, the Ethiopian government persuaded the Yemeni feudal legislature to call a constitutional convention, and through a combination of negotiation and bribery, ensured that the kingdom’s new basic law made the market towns and cities into separate cantons and that one house of the legislature would be elected by popular vote. The price was high, but not as high as keeping a third of Yemen under semi-permanent military occupation, and liberation from feudalism was welcomed by the young, creative and entrepreneurial among the Yemenis…
… With the disputes of the 1970s and 80s settled, Ethiopia was able to reduce its military spending considerably, and combined with the economic recovery, this made the 1990s a boom time. Living standards in Kush and Oromo, now highly educated and increasingly industrialized, converged on Amhara and Eritrea, and the latter two kingdoms caught up with, and by 2005 passed, the per capita wealth of their former patron Russia. The high-yield highland crops developed during the 1960s and 70s made Ethiopia a major food exporter. Its unique blend of African, Arab and Russian culture contributed to a vibrant cinema and musical revival, and tourism grew into a major part of the economy. By now, the passage of time and the shared experience of administering the Nile Authority had also made old enemies into friends: relations with Egypt had been peaceful since the end of the Nile War, but in the 1990s they became increasingly cordial. India, too, built on its participation in the Somali accords to become a close economic partner.
But not all the troubles were over. As the anti-modernist Deobandis expanded their activities in India and Central Asia [10], some found their way to the Indian communities in Kismayo and Aden, and from there, to Sanaag and Yemen. The most reactionary of the clansmen were embittered by the settlements of the 1980s and found Deobandi militancy attractive: in 1993, the first attack took place in Sana’a, and the following year, the port of Berbera was bombed. Sporadic attacks have taken place since then, not only in the Yemeni and Somali cities but twice in Asmara and several times in Gondar.
The Ethiopian government has responded to the attacks in much the same way as India and Turkestan: through a combination of military force, intelligence-gathering and negotiating with the conservative clans that form the terrorists’ base of support. At times – again as in India – the military and political strategies have worked at cross purposes. The militant cells in Ethiopia are small, and many conservatives who might otherwise be their allies distrust their ideology as a Central Asian import, so the Ethiopian government hopes that the issue will fade away as society changes. But for the time being, and with all it has achieved, the Seven Kingdoms of Ethiopia are still not entirely free of their past…
_______
[1] See post 6164.
[2] See post 6368.
[3] See post 5186.
[4] See posts 4177 and 4327.
[5] See post 6164.
[6] See post 6393.
[7] See posts 6544 and 6563.
[8] See post 6164.
[9] See post 6357.
[10] See post 6594.
