ABSTRACT
In 1948, a British District Officer travelled through the Mudug Province in north-east Somalia. With their occupation, the Second World War came to an end in the Horn of Africa. Conflicts in 1935 attacks on Ethiopia by Italian forces and reached a climax in 1940 when Italy, a member of the Axis coalition, launched military offensives to British posts across the Sudanese and Kenyan borders and occupied the Cte franaise des Somalis, todays Djibouti, and the British Protectorate of Somali-land. This chapter engages with the BMA positions and discusses how the Allied rhetoric of freeing Somali communities from fascist oppression found itself ill at ease when due to war contingencies the BMA restored structures of former colonial administration that it had initially attempted to overcome. It narrates the encounter between a British District Officer and a Somali chief in north-east Somalia in 1948, seven years after the defeat of the Italian Army and the establishment of a temporary military administration.
