ABSTRACT
If Eritrea provided the crises that proved fatal to both the imperial and the military governments of Ethiopia, the three neighbouring Somali colonies were almost equally uncomfortable neighbours, The northern French section of the Somali territory controlled the port at the end of Ethiopia’s commercial and strategic railway and continued to do so, despite nominal decolonization, when it became a military base for the French foreign legion. The central British section of the Somali nation laid post-war claims to swathes of inland grazing behind their arid coast, but in the 1950s this land was granted to Ethiopia, leaving Somali nationalists bitterly anxious for revenge. The southern Italian section of Somalia was treated in equally cavalier fashion. In defiance of Somali nationalist feelings
the Western powers persuaded the United Nations to hand Somalia back to Italy, although with the proviso that the Italians should prepare the territory for independence within ten years. The decision was a blow to those who sought immediate independence, but it was also a slow fuse for nationalists elsewhere who began to see 1960 as a target date for the decolonization of black Africa. When 1960 arrived the British and Italian zones agreed to form a joint republic. The new nation aspired to recover and unify all the lands of “greater Somalia” and won some support for the project from the Soviet Union in exchange for the granting of military and naval facilities on the Indian Ocean. But the attempts to expand Somalia failed, the Soviet Union shifted its alliance to Ethiopia, and the republic fell apart as the rival clans fought one another for access to scarce land, water and foreign patronage. The United States took over the military and naval leases but was unable to restore a semblance of statehood to Africa’s most fragmented former colony.
