the feeder caravan routes from the interior, and the ports of Berbera and Zeila, should function freely. But although travellers like Burton and local officials at Aden might advocate a definite British occupation of the Somali coast, their plans fell on deaf ears in Westminster. The British government was only interested in Somaliland’s meat supply as a necessary ancillary to the garrisoning of Aden. Only if this were seriously threatened would any occupation of the Somali coast be justified. This attitude on the part of Whitehall towards the Somali coast, given different emphasis by different administrations in England, was still the guiding policy when events had driven Britain to establish a Somaliland Protectorate in 1887. This evaluation is also reflected in the character of the Anglo-Somali treaties of protection. It figures strongly in the negotiation of the 1897 treaty with Ethiopia, and it later bred a tradition of parsimony and neglect which dominated British action in her Somali Protectorate throughout most of its life. Yet although Britain’s utilitarian interest in her Protectorate was always limited and secondary, this did not deter the government from using her holdings in Somaliland as a convenient counter in bargaining for bigger stakes with Ethiopia in 1897.
The other powers who began to display interest in the Red Sea coast had more definite and more directly imperial ambitions. In this region Britain’s main rival was, first, France. In 1859 the French consular agent at Aden obtained the cession of the Danakil port of Obock. Three years later a treaty was drawn up by which France purchased the port outright from the ‘Afar and the French flag was hoisted. But it was not until 1881, eleven years after the opening of the Suez canal, that France took advantage of her lonely stake at Obock and the Franco-Ethiopian trading company was installed there. In the interval, Italy had replaced France in claiming Red Sea territory, while Britain’s Liberal ministers were far from pressing imperial claims. Empowered by the Italian Foreign Minister to select a place on the Red Sea coast for an Italian settlement, Giuseppe Sapeto, a former missionary in Ethiopia, in 1869 obtained an interest in the port of Assab on the Eritrean coast. In the following year, Assab was bought outright from the local ‘Afar by an Italian shipping company which proposed to run services through the Suez canal and Red Sea to India. Britain did nothing to contest these Italian gains.
Meanwhile, however, no doubt prompted by this foreign interest, Egypt revived Turkey’s ancient claims to the Red Sea coast. By 1866 Turkey had transferred the Red Sea ports of Suakin and Massawa to the government of the Khedive Isma‘il, and the latter claimed that this new jurisdiction also embraced the Somali coast.1 In the following year the governor of the Sudan visited the Red Sea ports and also Tajura, Zeila, and Berbera, seeking declarations of fealty from the local leaders. In 1869 an Egyptian vessel visited Berbera, and in the following year Muhammad Jamal Bey was sent to the Somali coast to raise the Egyptian flag at Bulhar and Berbera.
The Egyptian occupation provoked immediate British protests. While not herself seeking to occupy Somali territory, in the interests of the safety of the Aden garrison’s meat supplies, Britain did not wish to see any other power established on the opposite side of the Gulf of Aden. Indeed to this end emissaries had already been sent from Aden to intrigue amongst the Somali against Egypt, and in 1869 British agents had successfully frustrated the cession of harbourage to France by one of the eastern Somali clans. The India Office accordingly urged that measures should be taken to preserve Somali independence from Egypt. But the home government refused to sanction any military action, although resistance to Egyptian claims to the coast east of Zeila was maintained through diplomatic channels from 1870 to 1874. During this period the area under effective Egyptian jurisdiction rapidly expanded. In Eritrea, Annesley Bay was occupied in 1873 and Keren in 1874, and the allegiance of the local peoples there and on the Somali coast won. Between 1874 and 1876 this forward policy was continued; Abyssinia was attacked and expeditions sent to the Somali coast south of Cape Guardafui, although no effective dominion was established there. As events turned out, the Abyssinian ventures failed, but the Egyptians succeeded in expanding behind Zeila and established a garrison in the ancient commercial city of Harar.
By this time, faced by other less predictable rivals, Britain had come to regard the Egyptian occupation as more in keeping with her interests than hostile to them. Accordingly, in 1877 a convention was signed with the Khedive by which Britain recognized Egyptian jurisdiction as far south as Ras Hafun. This arrangement Lord Salisbury described as ‘our only security against other European powers obtaining a footing opposite Aden’. The convention included the precautionary provision that ‘no part of the Somali coast . . . should be ceded on any pretext whatever to a foreign power’, a stipulation which was later to be written into Britain’s treaties of protection with Somali clans.
The Egyptians, it seems, had little difficulty in establishing their authority over the ports of Zeila, Bulhar, and Berbera, though their influence over the nomads of the interior was more limited. At this time the Somali had no firearms, and had to depend for their security upon the traditional spear and dagger. In addition, despite their sense of cultural identity, they did not constitute a single political unit. Foreign aggression thus encountered not a nation-state, but a congeries of disunited and often hostile clans which themselves were regularly divided by bitter internecine feuds. The Egyptians consequently experienced no united opposition, although they had serious difficulties with individual clans and lineages throughout their brief rule of the coast (1870–84).
At Zeila ruled Abu Bakr Pasha, a local ‘Afar, who had been Turkish governor of the town before the arrival of the Egyptians, having earlier supplanted his Somali predecessor Haji ‘Ali Shirmarke. Abu Bakr was actively engaged in the slave trade, still considerable at this time, and was regarded by the British at Aden as favourable to the interests of their French rivals. The governor at Berbera was an Egyptian, ‘Abd ar-Rahman Bey, whose rule, according to the vigilant Aden authorities, was oppressive and unjust: certainly it aroused the hostility of his Somali subjects. And despite the community of religion between the Egyptian colonizers and their Somali subjects, at both Zeila and Berbera there were the inevitable difficulties with the nomadic clans of the interior. The new administration sought to manage the appointment of Somali clan Sultans, and in order to secure some degree of control over the smaller clan segments appointed headmen (Akils) to represent them. These Egyptian candidates were not always acceptable. In 1883, there was trouble with the Gadabursi clan over the recognition of their leader, Ugas Nur, who was eventually sent to Egypt, where, if tradition is accurate, he was feted by the Khedive and presented with a gift of firearms. Other similar incidents occurred.
Yet, however distasteful their régime to the eyes of the British at Aden, the Egyptians did succeed in creating tangible evidence of their presence on the Somali coast. This was especially the case in the field of public works where much was achieved by corvée labour. The port facilities of both Zeila and Berbera were greatly improved; piers and lighthouses were erected; and at Berbera the ancient Dubar aqueduct was restored to supply fresh water to the town. The Egyptians also naturally encouraged Islam and several new mosques were built during their tenure of the coast. Whatever its merits or demerits, however, the Egyptian régime was abruptly terminated by the Mahdi’s revolt in the Sudan which necessitated a concentration of Egyptian resources and a drastic curtailment of outlying responsibilities in Eritrea, Harar, and the Somali coast: or, at least, so it seemed to Britain. The consequent Egyptian evacuation of Harar, Zeila, and Berbera took place in 1884 and immediately raised again the question of how these areas were to be administered to the advantage of Britain.
Meanwhile France and Italy had also been active. Recent French acquisitions in Madagascar and China, and the collapse of the Anglo-French condominium in Egypt gave France an impetus to establish a base on the Red Sea route which was now a vital link in her overseas communications. The time had come to rescue Obock from the oblivion of its moribund trading company, and to create an efficient coaling station. This was all the more necessary since, in the climate of acute Anglo-French rivalry of the period, the British authorities at Aden now refused to allow French transports to coal at the port. Léonce Lagarde, who laid the foundations of the French Côte des Somalis, and who played so prominent a part in the expansion of French influence in Ethiopia and N.E. Africa, was nominated governor of Obock in June 1884.
In
