Language and National Identity in Africa edited by ANDREW SIMPSON 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. 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Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–928674–4 HB ISBN 978–0–19–928675–1 PB 13579108642 15 The Horn of Africa: Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and Somalia David Appleyard and Martin Orwin 15.1 Introduction The Horn of Africa is here understood as comprising four countries: Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia. Of these the largest both in terms of landmass and population is Ethiopia, followed by Somalia, Eritrea, and Djibouti in that order. Ethiopia also has the highest overall density of population of the four countries. Whilst all four countries have in part shared histories and some common cultural patterns and influences, owing in large part to their geographical contiguity, the dominant factor that has been central to history and culture alike across the region is the ancient and at times con- flicting presence of two world religions, Christianity in the case of highland Ethiopia and Eritrea, and Islam elsewhere. Ethiopia and Eritrea, which historically formed a single entity, have been Christian since the fourth century and the Ethiopian kingdom constituted an expansive political and cultural nucleus in the Ethiopian highlands from even before that time. Islam already entered the Horn from its earliest days in the seventh and eighth centuries AD, and the growth of Islamic states in the southern and eastern parts of the region from the thirteenth century onwards inevitably led to conflict with the Christian kingdom. Islam today is dominant in the east of the Horn and along the Red Sea littoral, in Djibouti and Somalia, and with around 50 per cent of the population of Eritrea. Historically religion rather than language seems to have been the main criterion of identity and adherence to a political entity or state, at least judging from written histories, both chronicles and hagiographies. The region has had varying experiences of colonialism. Djibouti, Eritrea, and Somalia have had as long a period under colonial rule as most other countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Djibouti was, for instance, under French control from 1862 to 1977, and even after independence French influence has remained strong. Eritrea was an Italian colony from 1890 until 1941, after which it passed first under British and then Ethiopian control. Somalia was formed in 1960 out of the union of two former colonies, British Somaliland in the north, which had been a British protectorate since 268 D. Appleyard and M. Orwin 1886, and the more populous Italian Somaliland in the south, which originated in 1889 and attained its final extent in 1927. It could be argued that these three countries are creations of their colonial past, insofar as neither Djibouti nor Somalia derive from any historical polity other than the artificial creations of French, British, and Italian Somaliland, and Eritrea arises out of the Italian domination of what was historically part of the Ethiopian kingdom. Ethiopia, on the other hand, had only the briefest experience of foreign domination, from 1935 to 1941, when it was occupied by Italy, and is one of very few African countries that escaped a significant colonial period in its history. Indeed, it has sometimes been said, especially by nationalities within Ethiopia seeking greater autonomy, that Ethiopia herself was a colonial power during the last decades of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, the period that saw the greatest expansion of the Ethiopian empire. The Horn of Africa has more recently been beset with considerable unrest and political upheaval, during the last forty years of the twentieth century, first with thirty years of Eritrean separatist struggle culminating in 1991 in the defeat of Ethiopia and, in 1993, the achievement of full independence and separation. Secondly, at around the same time, Somalia, which had achieved independence from its British and Italian colonial masters barely some thirty or so years before, was riven by clan warfare and to all intents and purposes ceased to exist, having broken up into several entities which have not achieved internationally recognized status. The collapse of the Somali state had in part been triggered by a disastrous war with Ethiopia in 1977–78 over the Ogaden region, the south eastern portion of that country inhabited by Somalis. Then, following Eritrean separation from Ethiopia, these two countries engaged in bitter conflict over ill-defined portions of their common frontier. All of these conflicts were to a considerable extent driven by a sense of ethnic identity and the perception that that sense needed formal recognition in the nation-state. The Horn is amongst the linguistically more complex, or diverse, areas of Africa in terms of the numbers of languages spoken. According to Ethnologue (2005), there are 114 languages spoken in the four countries of the region: Djibouti with five (but this includes French, the ex-colonial language, and Standard Arabic), Eritrea with twelve (again including two ex-colonial languages, English and Italian, and also Standard Arabic), Ethiopia with eighty-four (which includes English), and Somalia with thirteen (also including English and Standard Arabic). If we exclude these ‘outside’ languages of wider communication, there are then just over 100 languages spoken in the Horn. Some languages in the Ethnologue lists are spoken in more than one country of the region, for instance, Somali which is spoken not only in Somalia but also in Ethiopia and Djibouti, and Tigrinya which is spoken in Eritrea and Ethiopia. The Ethnologue numbers are also slightly inflated owing to the fact that in some instances varieties of what is commonly considered a single language are counted separately. This is the case with Somali, for which five varieties are listed under Somalia alongside the standard language, or with Oromo, another major language of the area, spoken mostly in Ethiopia, but also in Somalia and indeed outside the Horn properly speaking, in The Horn of Africa 269 Kenya. However, taking these factors into consideration a total number of just above 100 gives a good idea of the overall situation. When we actually look at the distribution of languages in the region, however, the highest density of languages occurs in the west and especially the southwest of Ethiopia. This is not just in terms of the number of separate languages, but also in terms of the range of different language families involved. Of course, this makes the Horn much less linguistically diverse than some other African countries or regions, such as Nigeria, or East Africa (Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda), but more diverse than, say, South Africa, Botswana, Swaziland, and Lesotho combined. 15.2 Ethiopia, including Eritrea before 19931 The states that were to develop into Ethiopia and Eritrea have a long history, going back over two millennia. In the first century BC the kingdom of Aksum, named after its capital city, arose out of the amalgamation of a number of small independent kingdoms or chiefdoms in what is now Eritrea and northern Ethiopia to become a powerful and expansive trading state that dominated both the Horn of Africa and the lands on the opposite shore of the Red Sea before the rise of Islam in the seventh century. Aksum was a literate society, at least insofar as its rulers left inscriptions some of which were written in three languages: Greek as the international language of the period; Sabaic, the principal ancient language of Southern Arabia with which Ethiopia had long had cultural contacts, which evidently still carried some historical prestige in Ethiopia; and Ge’ez, the indigenous language of Aksum itself. With the adoption of Christianity as the religion of the Aksumite kingdom in the fourth decade of the fourth century and the eventual translation into Ge’ez of the Bible and a few other Christian texts probably towards the end of the following century, Ge’ez attained the status of a written language that was to far outlast its life as the spoken language of the region. Over the following centuries, and especially after the loss of Ethiopian control over the Red Sea coast with the spread of Islam and the Arab seizure of the coast, the nucleus of the Christian kingdom moved progressively further south into the Ethiopian highlands, where Ge’ez as the dialect of the Aksum region had presumably not been the spoken language.