Journal of Eastern African Studies
ISSN: 1753-1055 (Print) 1753-1063 (Online)Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjea20
Dr Cedric Barnes
To cite this article: Dr Cedric Barnes (2007) The Somali Youth League, Ethiopian Somalis and
the Greater Somalia Idea, c.1946–48,Journal of Eastern African Studies, 1:2, 277-291, DOI:
10.1080/17531050701452564
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17531050701452564
Published online: 24Jul 2007.
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Journal of Eastern African Studies
Vol. 1, No. 2, 277- 291, July 2007
The Somali Youth League, Ethiopian Somalis and the Greater Somalia Idea, c.1946-48
CEDRIC BARNES
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
ABSTRACT From 1946 to 1948 the Somali Youth Club (SYC) grew from a small Mogadishu based urban self-help group into a burgeoning nationalist organisation calling for the unification of all the Somali-speaking lands into Greater Somalia, changing its name to the ‘Somali Youth League’ (SYL) in the process. The reason for this rapid expansion and radicalisation was a conjuncture of several factors, but it is most immediately attributable to the international deliberations over the future of the Italian East African Empire. In 1946 the international community began to address the future of the Italian Empire, and the British raised the possibility of creating a Greater Somalia administration (under British trusteeship) as a basis for future independence. The SYC, which had until then concentrated on a more limited and arguably more achievable political programme for the furtherance of Somali interests in ex-Italian Somalia, became mesmerised by the idea of Greater Somalia. Greater Somalia became a popular rallying call for the expanding nationalist project. However, as this article argues, although the Greater Somalia project galvanised the SYC into a mass nationalist organisation (the SYL), the expansion of its activities into the greater Somalia hinterland, such as the Ethiopian Ogaden region, brought different priorities and perspectives to project. The differing histories of clans and regions dissipated the cohesion, discipline and aims of the SYL at a crucial historical juncture. Ultimately the SYL was unable to create a Greater Somalia, nor prevent the repartition of the Somali- lands and the return of former colonial and imperial powers.
From 1946 to 1948 the Somali Youth Club (SYC) grew from a small Mogadishu based urban self-help organisation into a burgeoning nationalist organisation calling for the unification of all the Somali-speaking lands into Greater Somalia, changing its name to the ‘Somali Youth League’ (SYL) in the process. The reason for the rapid expansion and radicalisation of the SYC/L was a conjuncture of several factors, but it is most immediately attributable to the international deliberations over the future of the Italian East African Empire. In 1946 the international community began to address the future of the Italian Empire, and the British raised the possibility of creating a Greater Somalia administration (under British trusteeship) as a basis for future independence. The SYC, which hitherto had concentrated on a more limited and arguably more achievable political programme for the furtherance of Somali interests in ex-Italian Somalia, became mesmerised by the idea of Greater Somalia. Once the idea of Greater Somalia gained public currency it became a popular rallying call for the expanding nationalist project.
Correspondence Address: Dr. Cedric Barnes, Department of History, School of Oriental and African Studies, London WC1H 0XG, UK. E-mail: cb62@soas.ac.uk
ISSN 1753-1055 Print/1753-1063 Online/07/020277 – 15 # 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17531050701452564
278 C. Barnes
However, as this article argues, although the Greater Somalia project galvanised the SYC into a mass nationalist organisation (the SYL), the expansion of its activities into the greater Somalia hinterland, such as the Ethiopian Ogaden region, brought different priorities and perspectives to the project. The differing histories of clans and regions included in the Greater Somalia project dissipated the cohesion, discipline and aims of the SYL at a crucial historical juncture. Ultimately the SYL was unable to create a Greater Somalia, nor prevent the repartition of the Somali-lands and the return of former colonial and imperial powers.
Territorial Divisions in the Somali-lands
The territorial divisions of the Somali inhabited lands of Northeast Africa had been a problem from the outset of colonial administration in the Horn of Africa. In the late nineteenth century, the growing Ethiopian Empire and the Ethiopian defeat of the Italian colonial army at Adwa in 1896 made Ethiopia a direct threat to colonial possessions and spheres of influence in the region. Faced with an armed and aggressive African state, European colonial powers in the Somali-lands were forced to curtail their territorial claims for the sake of greater imperial stratagems.1 Colonial administrators in British Somaliland saw the territorial concession to Ethiopia as a mistake and the subsequent boundary agreement as unworkable, storing up problems for the future. The boundary with Ethiopia became an obsession upon which the many woes of an economically poor and administratively volatile colony were blamed. A similar case applied to Italian Somalia.2 However to the Ethiopians, for whom their independence and sovereign territory became an article of faith, any adjustment to colonial boundaries seemed like a concession to colonial aggrandisement. Soon, however, all the Somali-lands became engulfed in the twenty-year ‘Dervish’ religious revolt led by Sayyid Maxamad Cabdille Xasan, forcing Ethiopia, Britain and Italy to cooperate, and the differences over the boundaries faded from view.
In the 1920s and 1930s, as ‘peaceful’ administration returned to the borderland areas between the colonial Somali-lands and the Ethiopian Empire, the unresolved boundary issues came back into view. Throughout the inter-war period there were continual skirmishes on the boundaries between the Somali-lands, not only between the colonial administrations and Ethiopia, but also between the colonial administrations themselves.3 However it was on the boundary with Italian Somalia at the wells of Wal Wal that the issue became altogether more serious. A clash between Italian and Ethiopian border patrols well inside the Ethiopian boundary in the Ogaden region provided the pretext for the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Despite the international outcry that the Italian annexation of Ethiopia occasioned, the absorption of the Ethiopian Empire into the Italian empire was quickly recognised by the British whose colonial territories shared the longest boundary with Ethiopia. After the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935- 36, the Italian Empire incorporated Eritrea, Ethiopia and Italian Somalia into one regional bloc of semi- autonomous governorships and rationalised some of the old international boundaries. One of the most significant adjustments the Italian Empire made was the creation of a much larger Somali administration by excising the Ogaden region from the Ethiopian governorships and combining it with the coastal colony of Italian Somaliland, creating a ‘greater’ Italian Somalia.
The SYL, Ethiopian Somalis and the Greater Somalia Idea 279
Britain’s initial sympathy and cooperation with the enlarged Italian Empire ended abruptly with the Italian entry into the Second World War, on the ‘wrong’ side. In 1940, as France capitulated and Italy joined the Axis powers, suddenly the Italian Empire changed from a benign modern administration (the very opposite, it was thought, of the ex-Ethiopian Empire), to a belligerent power in the midst of the British Empire in Africa. After initially successful Italian offensives, including the brief invasion and occupation of the British Somaliland Protectorate, British and Commonwealth forces aided by Ethiopian exiles and internal ‘patriot’ resistance defeated the Italian forces in East Africa. The collapse of the Italian East African Empire came surprisingly quickly, and the upshot of this rapid victory was the need for a British Military Administration (BMA hereafter) over the Empire’s vast area, now designated as Occupied Enemy Territory (since the Italian conquest had been legally recognised by the British in 1938). The occupation of this territory, justified as a military necessity, then became entwined with larger and older imperial questions in northeast Africa, such as frontier rectification and rationalisation.4 However, the British maintained territorial adjustments made by the Italians for the duration of the war, and left decisions over the future of the Italian Empire until the projected post-war peace conferences.
For the first year after the Italian defeat in 1941, the former Ethiopian Empire was administered as Occupied Enemy Territory since it was viewed as part of the Italian Empire. However the designation of Ethiopia as Occupied Enemy Territory was complicated by the presence of the Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Sellasie, who had returned with the British Army. A formal political relationship between the BMA and the Emperor needed to be established and the result was the 1942 Anglo-Ethiopian agreement,5 which handed back a certain amount of administrative control to the Emperor over much of the former Ethiopian Empire, although the Emperor’s sovereign power was severely limited. Moreover, under the 1942 agreement (reluctantly agreed to by the Emperor), the BMA retained complete control over the railway line to Addis Ababa, the eastern railway town of Dire Dawa, and the eastern borderlands with French, Italian and British Somali-lands. The north-eastern part of this territory, including the borderlands with British Somaliland, known as the Hawd, and the main market town of Jigjiga (the traditional centre for Ethiopian government of their Somali borderlands), was known as the Reserved Areas (RA hereafter) and had its own small BMA administration. The south-eastern borderlands, the vast plains known as the Ogaden, that the Italians had excised from Ethiopia added to Italian Somalia, continued to be administered from Mogadishu (the capital of Italian Somalia) under a larger separate BMA. It is important to note here that although the British did not deny Ethiopian sovereignty over the RA and the Ogaden, they did not they clearly acknowledge it either. Moreover, as long as significant parts of Ethiopian territory remained under BMA, the British had a certain amount of leverage over the restored Ethiopian government, and retained the possibility of the territorial adjustments that the surrounding British colonies might desire. Plans and arguments for Greater Somalia and territorial adjustments in Northeast Africa constantly figure in the archival record for this period, demonstrating that in the minds of the British the future of the RA and the Ogaden was implicitly bound up with the fate of the ex-Italian Somaliland, to be decided at the end of the war.6
Despite the restoration of the Emperor Haile Sellasie to his throne, from 1941 to 1948 a significant proportion of the pre-1936 Ethiopian Empire was directly ruled by Britain as part of a de facto Greater Somalia administration. The restoration Ethiopian government,
280 C. Barnes
in nationalistic mood, baulked at the continuing curtailment of its sovereignty, but given the circumstances it could dolittle. Over the next few years, as the Ethiopian government gained strength and coherence, gradually assuming more territorial sovereignty, the Emperor’s officials began to press for the return of the eastern fringes of its Empire still under the BMA. During 1946 the BMA withdrew from Dire Dawa and the railway, but continued to administer a reduced Reserved Area of the Jigjiga district and the Hawd borderlands with British Somaliland. The Ogaden area continued to be ruled under the BMA of Italian Somalia. However, within the stipulations of a further Anglo-Ethiopian agreement of 1944, the Ethiopian government could give the BMA notice to quit Ethiopian territory (i.e. the RA and the Ogaden) within three months. The Ethiopian government did not do so for another two years, but meanwhile Somali nationalist organisations had begun to grow in ex-Italian Somalia, and their influence spread into the Somali inhabited areas of the Ethiopian Empire.7
The Somali Youth Club
The first Somali clubs and professional organisations had begun before the war in British and Italian Somali-lands but these were fairly small-scale organisations.8 However the social and economic experience of the expanded Italian empire, world war and the promise of a new post-war order under BMA had an encouraging affect on Somali political activity, and the most concrete result was the first recognisably Somali ‘nationalist’ organisation, the Somali Youth Club. Founded in Mogadishu on 15 May 1943, the club originally acted as an urban self-help organisation mostly restricted to Mogadishu.9 It was established against a background of wartime uncertainties, especially high food prices in urban markets dominated by non-Somali Arabs and Indian traders, and a rapidly increased population due to large numbers of demobilised soldiery.10 Club membership was restricted to Somalis between the ages of 18 and 32, drawn from what a British report described as the newly emerged ‘middle class’ of Somali, especially private traders and young men from monthly-salaried groups such as government clerks, servants of Europeans, medical dressers, and members of the Somalia Gendarmerie. By 1947 approximately 75 percent of the Somalia Gendarmerie stationed in Mogadishu were members of the club.11
By the mid-1940s, from its base in Mogadishu, the SYC began to spread to other urban centres in former Italian Somalia. As the club expanded in range and membership, its initial social welfare role developed into a more ambitious programme for the unification and progress of the Somali people. The club wished to confront and break down the pervasive clan system of Somali society and end divisive clan disputes, and promoted education and social improvement programmes.12 Although it appears that the club was an indigenous initiative, it was quickly recognised as a useful auxiliary organisation by the young and inexperienced BMA in ex-Italian Somalia, so hastily established after the unexpectedly rapid collapse of the Italian colonial armies in 1941.13 There developed a very close relationship between the BMA and the SYC in the early years. Club members appeared to be Anglophiles, and English classes given by teachers from the government schools were an important feature of club life. The British clearly regarded the club favourably; their only concern was an oath taken which bound the members not to reveal clan affiliation,but to admit only to being Somali, a practice that went against the British ideal of indirect rule.
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