A Reply to Tobruk
A Reply to Tobruk: East Africa’s Unitarianism
On March 1953, a letter informed General Mohan Kumar that his colleague would be returning to Surat from Massawa immediately. The unfortunate man had been found by a court in Harer to have been engaged in “lewd and illicit acts” with several women and at least one farm animal. The letter further stated that East Africa required no additional military assistance from India. It ended with a declaration that East Africa “would humbly prefer that the esteemed and beloved Comrade Amrit Ahuya station his soldiers— even the well-behaved ones that exist somewhere in his vast army— in places where they are needed.”
The General-Overseer in Harer had expected to face some trouble, but, as General Kumar reported to his higher-ups, “the East Africans are prideful as cats.”
The Popular Union of East Africa had long been the Commonwealth’s oddest duck. The government of Chairman Dawit Gebeyehu, headquartered in the Harar Capital District, presided over a theoretically Unitarian federation of an Ethiopian monarchy and, after 1941, a Somali sultanate with its capital in Hargeisa. The comparatively united and cohesive army that defended this state trained and fought alongside the Siddi Regiment, a force of former slaves from India. Additional members to the Federation were considered— the Nilotic peoples along the White Nile were considered a soft target, and control of their lands promised rewards— but the Peace of Jeanville, signed in 1944, snatched away Addis Ababa, which returned to its prior status as Nouvelle-Lyon. In the years since, India had loomed large. East Africa could not counter its influence by playing anyone off it, because the Union had long since collapsed. Under this stress, East Africa turned to its own strengths, refusing Indian incentives and calling Indian bluffs whenever possible. Its state ideology evolved from “Unitarianism but with monarchs” to a body of thought now known as the Harar School.
“It is possible to view the Germanian government as simply being a republic with a king on top,” Gebeyehu wrote in his 1952 Treatise of Government, “like a flower in a youth’s hair. However, the German König retains still the important duty of embodying the unity of the people and making them governable by the bourgeois-democratic government. Without the people there is no king, but the reverse is also true. The bourgeois-democratic government in Vienna exists alongside this bond of monarch and nation without disrupting it, and this is why Germania defeated France in the Great War. We owe our own titanic successes— an exemplar for all Africa!— against France to the willingness of commoner and monarch alike to set aside any differences and work together toward the great goal of human unity.” Generally, adherents of the Harar School believed in a Unitarianism that could exist alongside traditional authorities, and benefit from their (passive) involvement. Gebeyehu liked to claim that East Africa generally adopted the principle of constraining the monarch’s power in the manner of a bourgeois constitutional monarchy, but “a little differently, for our Constitution is the great path which Weber’s studies opened for humanity. In this land, we bees value our queens.”
The Unitarian Republic of Oceania might have better illustrated the tendency of authoritarian Unitarians to distance themselves from the excesses of the Union, but East Africa also took copious notes on the fall of Kubilay. In a Sengupta-broadcasted speech made after the Yenilemists’ declaration of their own Turkish state, Foreign Minister Ilyas Garuun reported that Harar was “appalled by the failure of the once-promising nation which Akarsu Kubilay, the First Comrade, devoted his life to. I think that we all find it hard to believe that Unitarianism managed to be so unpopular among so many of a country’s people. All of you who listen to my voice, be assured that we East Africans can and will do better.” Practical measures on this front included granting select small towns and villages the right to manage their own resources, and negotiate the price of those resources’ sale to the government. However, small-scale changes did not counteract the general pattern of authoritarian centralization. The authorities at the port of Berbera typically bypassed the nominal Somali sultan in Hargeisa, and reported directly to Harar on most matters of significance. Most of East Africa’s economy remained directly under the purview of the state. Meanwhile, it was often said in Gondar that a bar table with four or five drunk prefectural administrators sleeping on it contained more power than the geriatric Emperor Yaqob’s entire palace.
Privately, Lucknow had serious concerns about East Africa. The revolutions in Aceh and Burma had been carefully controlled from the start, and India’s hands only clenched tighter around Banda Aceh and Mandalay with the arrival of General-Overseers in those capitals. The war with France, however, had left East Africa poor but made it strong. While its navy and air force were still rudimentary nand largely composed of increasingly outdated Turkish surplus equipment, the state commanded the second best army in the Commonwealth— second only to India itself in both quantity and professionalism. Its industry, cut off from French competition during the war for independence and bolstered by the assistance of Indians and exiled Turks after that, had given the state and people a kind of quiet prosperity and productivity that lagged behind Western European standards but easily outcompeted any regional African society except for Egypt. Such an ally, India reasoned, would be useful. It could, with its geographical proximity to France’s remaining centers of power in Africa, serve as a bridge to the West. India also recognized that East Africa had acquired quite a bit of prestige in the eyes of its neighbors-- enough, in fact, to potentially inspire newer revolutions that could be controlled by India from the early stages.
Fragments of a larger map which, owing to the changes in West Africa, has become outdated. I’ll post the full map eventually.
In the meantime, East Africa spent its spare change on linguistic research. French was still the official federal language and a compulsory subject in the education system, but efforts were taken to ensure that the Ethiopian education system left children with a solid footing in their mother tongue (be it Amharic, Tigray, Oromo, or something else entirely). Drawing on the talents of Ethiopia’s old translator corps and visiting academics from the wider Commonwealth or from non-Unitarian countries, Harar oversaw the construction of a Latin-based alphabet for the Somali alphabet which Hargeisa promptly adopted for the educational and cultural materials it produced for the Sultanate of Somalia. Other products of this period included compilations of existing research on the Nilotic languages spoken in France’s three inland protectorates. The effect of this charm offensive was to capitalize on existing sympathy for the East African cause.
During the East African war for independence, France had grown desperate. Presented with repeated failures by the Africa Corps, the exiled French colonial administrators in Spanish Mombasa ordered the Corps to establish contact with the inland empire of Wadai. This native state, which began modernizing its administration and army on the model of Fatahist Tripolitania to the north over the late 1930s and early 1940s, was the most powerful entity in the great unclaimed zone which covered the Sahara. Gritting their teeth, the French agreed to recognize Wadai’s control over Darfur and establish the border between Wadai and French Africa along the limits of the French zone of influence. In exchange, Wadai sent its mixed-bag army of camel-riders and modern infantrymen to help the French keep order in their empire. This move was certainly successful in deterring the Unitarians from any westward advances, and instrumental to the relatively simple resolution of the war as a whole. However, the people of the White Nile, Rift Valley, and Shilluk Protectorates remembered the terror that Wadai’s riders and the victory-starved Africa Corps had brought upon them. The wantonness, arrogance, and shocking cruelty of the French and their desert allies became a seed of bitterness. The close proximity of Wadai, whose new borders now included a section of the White Nile, watered this seed. The grievances of the Nilotic peoples did not immediately lead to the development of an indigenous nationalism-- this region had never, with the exception of the Shilluk lands, been ruled by any form of governance resembling a state before the arrival of the French. Instead of mobilizing for the sake of a new nation, the small but growing political class of the inland Protectorates looked toward Harar.
The Somalis of French Africa, much like the Nubians, were rather ambivalent about East Africa. The Nubians remembered the professionalism of Egypt’s troops, which had arrived in Jeanville on behalf of their old allies in France, and generally felt that their country could, with Cairo’s help, carve out its own path in the event of wholesale French imperial collapse. The Somalis, whether living in the French colony of Mogadishu or in the inland sultanates and chiefdoms under French influence, had not been ruled by East Africa but by the Union. The brutality of the Turks left deep scars, and unlike their compatriots under East African rule the intelligentsia of Mogadishu had grown to strongly distrust anything that smelled of blue-wing ideology. Protectionism, always a hit with the folk of rural areas and the recent migrants to the cities, gained greater support among urban professionals who owed their lives and livelihoods to the return to French rule.
In Nouvelle-Lyon, memories of the war for independence were strong. The older citizens remembered when the port was busy with ships from all over the Commonwealth. There was work for all who wanted it, and that work was the work of free men, not of colonial subjects. The younger citizens born since 1944 could not remember this heady time, but nonetheless inherited a dim sense that in Addis Ababa, Africans could be Africans again, and not Frenchmen-in-training. Nouvelle-Lyon’s view of the East African federation was not solely fleshed out by legend. Much of Nouvelle-Lyon’s Somali and Amhara population had left for Berbera after the Peace of Jeanville, and maintained ties of family, clan, and— after the normalization of French-East African relations in 1953— business with the population of Nouvelle-Lyon. When faced with demonstrations for the freedom of Nouvelle-Lyon and its possible union with East Africa as a third member of the federation, the French displayed restraint. They were understandably reluctant to mint any martyrs, but did not know how long that resolve would deliver results.
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If Nijasure was Stalin, Gebeyehu is Tito. Here’s hoping East Africa has a longer lifespan than Yugoslavia.
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