ABSTRACT
In the last decades of the nineteenth century the Somali Peninsula, located on the Horn of Africa, fell subject to the colonial ambitions of a series of states: Egypt, Ethiopia, France, Italy, and Britain. By the early part of the twentieth century the colonizers had divided the Somali Peninsula (the native land of ethnic Somalis who belong to one of six major clan-families) into five Somalilands: the British-controlled north central, the French southeast (contemporary Djibouti), the Italian south, the Ethiopian west (the Ogaden), and the “frontier district” in the southwest, not directly controlled by any state and later part of Kenya. The Somalilands were configured and reconfigured in the machinations of World War II: Italy conquered British Somaliland early in the war, but in 1941 British troops regained the north central part and subsequently captured the Italian south as well as the Ogaden. Nuruddin Farah was born in Baidoa in 1945, a city in Italian Somaliland at the time under British control. In 1948 the British restored the Ogaden to Ethiopian rule; in 1949 the recently formed United Nations returned the south to Italy.
