and maintained, however irregularly, over long periods of time. It is now necessary to revert to this theme and to examine the final fortunes of the coastal centres before the partition of the Somali region.
Afrer the decline of the Adal state, Zeila retained its commercial position as the main outlet for the ancient caravan routes from the hinterland, particularly those descending from the Abyssinian highlands through Harar, although in the sixteenth century trade was severely disrupted for a time by the Oromo invasions. In the following century Zeila, and apparently to some extent Berbera also, fell under the authority of the Sharifs of Mukha and both ports were thus nominally incorporated in the Ottoman Empire. And this was still the position when Sir Richard Burton visited the coast in 1854 in the course of his celebrated expedition to Harar which, in contrast to Zeila, was still an independent Muslim principality.
Zeila’s governor was now a Somali, Haji Shirmarke ‘Ali Salih (of the Habar Yunis clan), who had begun his remarkable career as the captain of a training dhow. Having acquired wealth and reputation, the Haji obtained the office of governor about 1840 from the hereditary holder Sayyid Muhammad al-Barr, representative of the Ottoman Pasha of Western Arabia. His success was also apparently facilitated by the gratitude which he had earned from the British government of Bombay for protecting the lives of the crew of the Mary Ann, a British brig attacked and plundered by the local Somali at Berbera in 1825. Notwithstanding Haji ‘Ali’s intervention, this incident had led the British to blockade the coast regularly until 1833, when £6,000 in compensation had been recovered from the Somali. In the meantime, in 1827, a commercial treaty had been signed between the British East Africa Company and the local Habar Awal clan.
In 1854, Burton records that Haji Shirmarke, tall and, despite his sixty-odd years, strong and active, had not forgotten the military exploits of his youth and contemplated the conquest of Berbera and Harar. He lived modestly, however, in an indifferent mud and wattle ‘arish, and not in one of the grander double-storeyed stone houses of the town. His ‘secretary’ was a Swahili slave; and although he was himself illiterate, his eldest son Muhammad, married to an Arab woman, had been educated at Mukha and proved to be something of a scholar. The town, Burton found, Haji ‘Ali governed with a light hand, and the aid of a tough Hadrami soldier and forty mercenaries from Hadramaut, Mukha, and Aden, all armed with matchlock and sword. The Kadi administering Islamic law was at this time a Hawiye Somali whose predecessors, from about 1670, had been Sayyids from Arabia.
The dimensions of Zeila Burton compares to Suez, sufficient to hold a few thousand inhabitants, and provided with six mosques, a dozen large white-washed stone houses, and two hundred or more thatched mud-and-wattle huts. The ancient wall of coral rubble and mud defending the town was no longer fortified with guns, and in many places had become dilapidated. Drinking water had to be fetched from wells four miles from the town. Yet trade was thriving: to the north caravans plied the Danakil country, while to the west the lands of the ‘Ise and Gadabursi clans were traversed as far as Harar, and beyond Harar to the Gurage country in Abyssinia. The main exports were slaves, ivory, hides, horns, ghee, and gums. On the coast itself Arab divers were active collecting sponge cones. And provisions were cheap.
Burton soon found that this orderly town life at Zeila did not extend far beyond the gates of the city. The nomadic clans, through whose pastures Burton and his companions passed on their way towards Harar, recognized no political dependence upon Zeila. Indeed raids and skirmishes occurred under the very walls of the city.
While in 1855 Zeila thus continued the coastal tradition of instituted authority under a Somali governor, although its political influence was a mere shadow of what it had once been, at Berbera the position was very different. Here Burton found that the process of nomadic encroachment had gone much further and the town was in fact no longer politically distinct from its nomadic hinterland. In February 1855, when Burton, having successfully completed his exploration of Harar, entered Berbera he discovered that the Habar Awal clan were in possession, but divided as to which of their sections should control the port. At the same time, the Habar Yunis clan was also advancing claims to the lucrative trade which the town commanded.
Before this, and prior to the British settlement at Aden in 1839, the Ayyal Yunis and Ayyal Ahmed lineages of the Habar Awal clan had held Berbera and jointly managed its trade, sharing in the profits on all commercial transactions as ‘protectors’ (abans) of foreign merchants from Arabia and India. When under the stimulus of developments at Aden the port’s prosperity markedly increased, the numerically dominant Ayyal Yunis drove out their rival kinsmen and declared themselves commercial masters of Berbera. This led to a feud in which each side sought outside help; the defeated Ayyal Ahmad turned to Haji Shirmarke ‘Ali and his Habar Yunis clansmen for support. With this backing, they were then able to re-establish themselves and to expel the Ayyal Yunis who moved to the small roadstead of Bulhar, some miles to the west of Berbera. By 1846, however, the menace of other clans had led the two rival Ayyal lineages to compose their differences and Haji ‘Ali’s services had been dispensed with: he had been ‘British Agent’ at Berbera in 1842.
This struggle and earlier vicissitudes had left their mark on Berbera, for while the bare ground for about a mile on either side was strewn with broken glass and pottery, the debris of former generations, the area of the town actually inhabited, ‘a wretched clump of dirty mud-huts’, occupied only a fraction of the ancient contours. And the old aqueduct from the wells at Dubar eight miles to the south-east had long ceased to bring sweet water to the town.
Having formed this unfavourable impression of Berbera, Burton and his companions left the Somali coast for Aden which they reached on 9 February, 1855. April of the same year, however, saw Burton back again at Berbera as the leader of a new expedition, with the object of exploring the Ogaden hinterland. In the two months in which he had been absent the appearance of the port had greatly changed. It was now filled with bustle and activity: ‘The emporium of East Africa was at the time of my landing in a state of confusion. But a day before, the great Harar caravan, numbering three thousand souls, and as many cattle, had entered for the purpose of laying in the usual eight months supplies, and purchase, barter, and exchange were transacted in most hurried and unbusiness-like manner. All day, and during the greater part of the night, the town rang with the voices of buyer and seller: to specify no other articles of traffic, 500 slaves of both sexes were in the market. Long lines of laden and unladen camels were to be seen pacing the glaring yellow shore: . . . . . . already small parties of travellers had broken ground for their return journey: and the foul heap of mat hovels, to which this celebrated mart had been reduced, was steadily shrinking in dimensions.’13
Burton and his companions were not allowed long to contemplate this scene. On 19 April, 1855, in the early hours of the morning, several hundred Somali spearmen launched a savage attack upon Burton’s camp. In the ensuing mêlée, Lt Stroyan was killed, and Lt Speke (later to gain fame for his explorations of the Nile source) severely wounded: Burton himself received a spear-thrust in the mouth. Yet despite the numerical superiority of their assailants, Burton and his companions managed to escape to Aden, and the expedition was abandoned: Burton never returned to Somaliland. He is still remembered, however, with a mixture of amusement and admiration as ‘Haji ‘Abdallah’, the guise he assumed for his journey to Harar, and as one who regularly led the prayers in the mosques, and could hold his own with any sheikh.
The British authorities at Aden reacted promptly to the incident in the manner of the times. Two vessels of the India command were dispatched to blockade the coast until Stroyan’s murderer and Speke’s attacker were surrendered to justice. The following year the elders of the Habar Awal clan announced that Stroyan’s assailant had been executed by his own kin and offered 15,000 dollars as compensation. Then in November, a treaty was signed with the Habar Awal in favour of British commerce at Berbera and to provide for the eventual appointment of a British Resident. Much the same series of events had followed the plunder of the brig Mary Anne off Berbera in 1825 when Shirmarke ‘Ali had intervened. Now, however, the link between Aden and the northern Somali coast had been strengthened and the basis laid for future British activity.
