including headings Between Arabia and Ethiopia, Colonial competitors, Fascism to independence, Somali conflicts, Famine and the UN, ...
Hatshepsut sends a famous trading mission to Punt (an area probably on the Red Sea coast of modern Somalia), which results in a new supply of gold, ebony and myrrh. She continues her father's building programme at Karnak...
Tiny Djibouti (its population at the time of independence is only about 350,000 people) avoids very successfully the most obvious threat to its existence - that of being dominated by one or other of its large neighbours,...
The issue of grazing rights around Wal Wal, in the Ogaden, is referred to the League of Nations. The League takes its time before coming up with a non-committal decision in September 1935. But meanwhile Italy, which has...
In Italy Mussolini is able to make much of his triumph. On May 5, the day on which Addis Ababa falls, he announces the establishment of a new Italian empire. The king of Italy, Victor Emmanuel III, is proclaimed emperor...
From 1943 Italy has been classed by the western powers as a 'co-belligerent' rather than an ally, and the postwar territorial adjustments would probably have been much the same if she had remained with Germany until the...
When Zauditu dies, in 1930, Ras Tafari is crowned emperor. He takes the title Haile Selassie, meaning 'might of the Trinity'. He immediately introduces a programme of reform, beginning with the provision of Ethiopia's fi...
When the Russians pull out of Afghanistan, in 1989, bin Laden returns to Saudi Arabia. But he soon finds a new affront on his home territory. In 1990, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the government allows US troops t...
Mussolini's dreams of imperial grandeur hark back to the days of the Roman empire, at the peak of which Rome was master of the entire Mediterranean. This modern would-be Caesar has the nostalgic habit of lapsing into Lat...
After World War II French Somaliland, like all other French colonies, is given the status of overseas territory within the French Union. And, again like all others, it has the option in 1958 to sever links with France or...
