East Africa (History)

The following text is a response sent to an email dispatched to me by the Chairman of the exiled Oromo Parliamentarians who struggle for the Independence and Self-determination of the 5 millennia long Kushitic Ethiopian Nation of the Oromos.
The Hamitic - Kushitic Oromo Nation - due to criminal, inhuman and evil persecution conceived by the colonial powers (France, England and America) and executed by the colonially promoted barbaric and incestuous pseudo-Christian Abyssinians - lost their kingdoms and were engulfed within the Cemetery of Nations Fake Ethiopia, which consists in the world's most tyrannical realm and the location of the world's more abhorrent, more enduring, and more multifaceted genocides. There are more than 45 million Oromos in Abyssinia (Fake Ethiopia) and Kenya today, despite the notorious and pathetic falsehood propagated by Wikipedia.
The present text enumerates all the major points of historical distortion and falsification carried out and diffused by the colonial academia, mass media, and diplomats, as well as by their local agents and criminal executioners, i.e. the barbaric, incestuous and Anti-Christian tribes of Amhara and Tigray (: the Abyssinians), who usurped the fair name of Ethiopia, which historically denotes the land of North Sudan and the Kushitic Nation that prospered there either in the Antiquity or in the Christian Era. Both, the Oromos and the Arabic-speaking (but not Arab) populations of Northern-Central Sudan are the descendants of Ancient Sudan's (i.e. Ancient Ethiopia's) Kushitic populations.
Representative photographic documentation was herewith added to the text in order to better illustrate the topic.

Refutation of historical forgeries propagated by European colonials and incestuous Abyssinians
First published here:
https://megalommatiscomments.wordpress.com/2017/07/26/kushitic-oromos-ancestry-in-ethiopia-ancient-sudan-semitic-amharas-tigrays-abyssinians-ancestry-in-yemen/

Abstract
This study describes traditions of writing in East Africa early to colonialism and
the attitude of colonial writers toward sources produced from these early
traditions. East Africa started to appear in writings from the classical era when
Roman visitors Documented the people of the coast of the region. The demise of
classical hegemony was followed by an epoch when Arabs visited the region for
trade and adventurous motives. The Arabs and east African coast people
relations culminated into writing literacy shrouded under Swahili civilization.
The tradition of writing under Swahili civilization started by Arabs and African
Muslim writers around the coast then adopted by interior Muslims in later
years. From 19 th CE, Europeans started to have interest in writing about East
Africa. This interest continued to the colonial era in 20 th CE and became
famously known as colonial historiography. Colonial historiography denied the
existence of the past significant for historical studies. Paradoxically, some of these writers worked in collaboration with African Muslim in interpreting
manuscripts produced by Muslim writers along the coast and interior. The
conclusive remarks on this study tell about how Islam was swahilized in East
Africa. Thus, African Muslim writing tradition subscribes to Africans rather
than foreign.
Keywords: History, Classical sources, Arab sources, African Muslim sources,
Colonial art of writing, East Africa.

This article traces the rise and decline of the Somali jihadi-insurgent group al-Shabab from 2006 to 2014. Particular attention is paid to the group’s implementation of a philistine and coercive interpretation of Shariah in areas under its control, the political economy of insurgent violence, local governing administrations, and internal schisms and recent deadly infighting. The group’s potential future trajectory is also assessed.

Please see the references (end notes) at: http://www.turkishreview.org/newsDetail_getNewsById.action?sectionId=360&newsId=223635

Today, the East African state of Tanzania is renowned for wildlife preserves such as the Serengeti National Park, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, and the Selous Game Reserve. Yet few know that most of these initiatives emerged from decades of German colonial rule. This book gives the first full account of Tanzanian wildlife conservation up until World War I, focusing upon elephant hunting and the ivory trade as vital factors in a shift from exploitation to preservation that increasingly excluded indigenous Africans. Analyzing the formative interactions between colonial governance and the natural world, The Nature of German Imperialism situates East African wildlife policies within the global emergence of conservationist sensibilities around 1900.

Ever since ancient times, marvellous yarns have been told about the existence of diminutive peoples in faraway lands. Despite their modern identification with short statured hunter-gatherers in the rainforests of Africa, the telling of similar tales has not entirely abated. Anthropologist Martin Walsh recalls his encounter with a former arrow poison trader who recounted his capture and imprisonment underground by a group of Wabilikimo, the fabled Pygmies of the East African interior. Was this just another tall story about short people, or a mangled memory of real events?

The Khōjā of Tanzania, Discontinuities of a Postcolonial Religious Identity attempts to reconstruct the development of Khōjā religious identity from their arrival to the Swahili coast in the late 18th century until the turn of the 21st century. This multidisciplinary study incorporates Gujarati, Kacchī, Swahili, and Arabic sources to examine the formation of an Afro-Asian Islamic identity (jamatī) from their initial Indic caste identity (jñāti) towards an emergent Near Eastern imaged Islamic nation (ummatī) through four disciplinary approaches: historiography, politics, linguistics, and ethnology. Over the past two centuries, rapid transitions and discontinuities have produced the profound tensions which have resulted from the willful amnesia of their pre-Islamic Indic civilizational past for an ideological and politicized ‘Islamic’ present. This study aims to document, theorize, and engage this theological transformation of modern Khōjā religious identities as expressed through dimensions of power, language, space, and the body.

From modest beginnings as the speech of a small group of mixed farmers, Swahili has become the lingua franca of millions of people in Eastern Africa and beyond (Lewis et al. 2015). How did this extraordinary transformation begin? This chapter outlines what is known (and not known) about the origins and initial development of the Swahili language and its dialects, and what this tells us in turn about the history of its speakers. It is based largely on research in historical and comparative linguistics undertaken since the 1970s and continuing through to the present. The potential contribution of research of this kind to understandings of the African past is well established (Nurse 1997; Blench 2006), and the Swahili-speaking world has already been the subject of important studies (including Nurse and Spear 1985; Nurse and Hinnebusch 1993). Needless to say, this work is neither exhaustive nor unproblematic. As we shall see, many gaps in our knowledge remain, while current research suggests that major revisions might be made to existing reconstructions of Swahili linguistic and cultural history.

In order for us to understand the current war in northern Uganda whose dying embers we are currently witnessing, we have to dig
into the past and unearth the remains of the history of Uganda.
The root causes of the war are long term, stretching as far back as precolonial Uganda, but then the immediate causes that sparked it off date as recent as 1986. My argument is that the causes of the war can be zeroed and summed up in the title of the paper – Uganda’s ethnic revolution.

Considering the advanced level of deterioration in the state of the historical monuments of Mogadishu and the gravity of the situation due to the grabbing of historical sites and the erection of modern constructions there, it becomes imperative to institute a governmental organization that deals with the problems of Mogadishu historical centers – because of the tremendous disaster caused by the civil war - and Somalia as a whole.

EAST AFRICA ITALY POW INTERNEES 1940-1947 BY WEISBECKER
NEW LIMITED EDITION over 130 illustrations in black & white, spiral bound. 166 pages 8 x 11 - Filled with very useful information complemented by a good 6-page INDEX. Plus a NEW 26-page ADDENDA & UPDATE to the 1981 edition of which only 100 copies had been printed. This research covers POW, Internee and Evacuee Camps in ETHIOPIA, SOMALIA, KENYA, SUDAN, TANGANYIKA, ERITREA, UGANDA, RHODESIA, BRITISH SOMALILAND.

Since 1961 the relatively tiny ex-Portuguese Goa has been transformed from a rather forgotten and underdeveloped colonial enclave to a state within the Indian Union with a strong tourism sector and one of the highest per capita-income of any Indian state. The success of Goa today allows one to forget that its colonial past resulted in thousands of Goans being forced to migrate to ‘British India’, East Africa and the Persian Gulf. Historical research has tended to focus on 16th and 17th century “Golden Goa” or its liberation. At the same time 19th and 20th century histories of the Persian Gulf and East Africa have been Eurocentric in focus or have stressed indigenous narratives in the post-colonial period. Both of these directives have excluded the migrant story, and it is this hidden history that is investigated in this paper, with particular reference to the development of an army of Goan administrators for the areas under the jurisdiction of the Bombay Presidency of British India. The paper also sets out to identify the relationship between Goans and their colonial rulers in East Africa and its implications for cross-cultural relationships between Goans and other Indians as well as Africans.

We referred to the Ancient Greek text 'Periplus of the Red Sea', which consists in a valuable information about all the coastal countries of the 'Red Sea' (Erythra Thalassa in Greek), a geographic term that in the Antiquity denoted the Arabian Gulf (this is what we call today 'Red Sea”), the Persian Gulf, and the entire Indian Ocean from Eastern Africa until Chryse (the 'Golden', as Indonesia and Indochina were called then). The 'Periplus of the Red Sea' was written ca. 70 CE by an anonymous Alexandrian Egyptian merchant and captain, who certainly had personal experience in vast parts of that navigation and trade network area, and wished to compile a kind of guide for sailors and traders. As continuation of our previous article, we will study further excerpts of 'the Periplus of the Red Sea' pertaining to 'the Other Berberia'.
http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard/Article/Ancient-Harbours-of-Northern-Somalia-and-Colonial-Anti-African-Historiography/101747
2008-05-17

In several previous articles, I examined the parallel characteristics of the fake colonial states of Sudan (real Ethiopia) and Abyssinia (fake Ethiopia) that have been the end result of the Freemasonic Orientalist fallacies of Pan-Arabism and Ethiopianism.

In this article, I will examine a bogus-historical term that has been constructed by the Freemasonic Orientalist ateliers and academia of France and England to further spread confusion in the wider region, and – more importantly – consolidate the two fallacies in the area, namely the pseudo-doctrines of Pan-Arabism and Ethiopianism: Nubia.
First published in:
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/143394

Republished here:
http://www.oromoparliamentarians.org/English/Facts%20about%20Oromo/Ethiopia%20Kushati%20land.htm
and
http://www.egyptsearch.com/forums/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=8;t=006830;p=1

Avrupalılar Doğu Afrika’yı sömürgeleştirmeye başladıklarında Doğu Afrika sahilleri ile Güney Arabistan ve Basra Körfezi (dolayısıyla Osmanlı Devleti) arasında asırlardır süren kültürel, toplumsal, iktisadî, dinî ve politik bağlar vardı. Doğu Afrika’nın kaderinin belirlendiği uluslararası konferansların katılımcısı olan Osmanlılar, Doğu Afrika’da hüküm sürmekte olan Ummanlı Busaidi Hanedanı'nın hukukunu Avrupa devletlerine karşı savundular. Bu konferansların en önemlisi olan 1884-1885 Berlin Kongo Konferansı'nın Umumî Senedi'nde, Avrupa'da bir savaş çıkması durumunda Afrika’daki sömürgelerin savaşın dışında tutulacaklarına ilişkin bir madde vardı. Buna rağmen Afrika'daki durumu lehlerinde gören İngilizlerin saldırgan tutumları ve Almanya’nın savaşı mümkün olduğunca Avrupa dışına yayma eğilimi yüzünden Birinci Dünya Savaşı Doğu Afrika’ya da taşınmış oldu. Bu cephede düşmanlarını kesin bir mağlubiyete uğratmalarını sağlayabilecek ordu, lojistik ve donanmaya sahip olmadıklarını bilen Almanlar, karada ve denizde ellerinde bulunan sınırlı kuvvetlerle, İngilizleri Doğu Afrika'ya azamî miktarda asker, gemi, mühimmat ve lojistik malzeme sevk etmek zorunda bıraktılar. Bir yandan da Osmanlı Devleti ile müttefik olmaktan ve cihat fetvasından maksimum düzeyde istifade edebilmek için dindaşlarının ve yerlilerin memnuniyetsizliği pahasına Doğu Afrika'daki Müslümanları gözettiler. Yaklaşık dört buçuk yıl süren muharebelerde otomobil, traktör ve kamyonlardan, zırhlı tren, uçak ve zeplinlere kadar teknolojinin en yeni ürünleri kullanıldı. Cihan Harbi ve ortaya çıkardığı salgın hastalıklar Doğu Afrika için tam bir yıkım oldu. Bu süreçte yüz binlerce insan hayatını yitirirken, sağ kalanlar savaşın travmaları ile boğuştular. Feci bir insan ve hayvan kaybı yaşayan bu bölge savaştan önceki konum ve önemine elan erişemedi. Sadece Doğu Afrika’da mütareke sonrasına kadar direnebilen Almanlar, savaşı kaybettikleri için tüm sömürgelerini yitirdiler. Almanların zaten hukuksuz bir şekilde ele geçirmiş oldukları bu topraklar savaş sonunda İngiltere, Fransa, Belçika ve Portekiz arasında paylaşıldı. Ayrıca Almanya ile beraber Türkiye de Doğu Afrika'dan tasfiye edilmiş oldu: Türkiye ile "Sevahil" arasında yüzlerce yıldır cereyan eden toplumsal, kültürel, ticarî, siyasî ve diplomatik münasebetler Birinci Dünya Savaşı ile beraber maziye karıştı.
***

There were centuries-long cultural, social, economic, religious and political ties between East African coast and South Arabia and the Persian Gulf (hence the Ottoman Empire) when Europeans began to colonize East Africa. Ottomans, who participated in the international conferences in which the fate of East Africa was determined, defended the Omani Busaidi Dynasty, that rules in East Africa, against the European states. The Ottoman Empire, one of the largest state of the era also participated in the international conferences, which determined the fate of East Africa. In the General Act of the most important conference amongst them, i.e. Berlin Congo Conference of 1884-1885, there was an article in which it was specified that in the event of a European war, the African possessions of the belligerents might remain neutral and out of war. Despite this, because of the offensive attitude of the British, who thought that the situation in Africa is in their favour and Germany’s efforts to extend the war outside Europe as much as possible, The Great War was extended to East Africa. The Germans, knowing that they do not have the necessary amount of men, provisions and naval power, which may enable the total defeat of the British at this front, with their existing warriors both in sea and land, forced the British to dispatch the maximum amount of soldier, ship, ammunition and provisions here. Besides, in order to benefit from the jihad fatwa and alliance with the Ottoman Empire as much as possible, they favoured the Muslims in East Africa in the expense of their coreligionists and the natives. In the wars that lasted approximately four and a half years, the most recent technological inventions were used, i.e. automobile, tractor, trucks, armoured trains, planes and zeppelins (airships). The Great War and the epidemics caused by it were complete destructions for Africa. Hundreds of thousands of humans lost their lives and the remaining ones buffeted the traumas of the war. The region, which experienced a catastrophic human and animal loss, could not reach its pre-war situation and significance still. The Germans, who were able to resist only in East Africa until the aftermath of the armistice, because they were beaten in the war, lost all of their colonies. Already-unwarrantedly seized African territory of Germany was shared between British, French, Belgian and Portuguese mandates, after the war. Moreover, Turkey was also expelled from East Africa with Germany: the centuries old social, cultural, commercial, political and diplomatic relations between Turkey and “Swahili” ended with the Great War.

"If a door is shut, attempts should be made to open it; if it is ajar, it should be pushed until it is wide open. In neither case should the door be blown up at the expense of those inside."

The above quotation was made by the Late Father of Our Nation, Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere (from his Stability and Change in Africa speech given to the University of Toronto, Canada, 2 October 1969), which in one way or another it entails the importance of opening up the doors (political and socio-economic) in Africa particularly in East African Countries by any possible means so as to develop the social, political and economic strength of the region. In order for the East Africa Community to exist effectively these doors must be completely opened in order to allow those obstacles which prohibit other from developing such as trade barriers and other to vanish.
The paper covers the historical background of the Community on the aspect of its legal institutions and various challenges and opportunities which the lawyers are facing in the Community.
For the purpose of this paper, the term, ‘Community’ means The East African Community and the term ‘Treaty’, means the East Africa Community Treaty of 1999.

Pemba is the second largest and northernmost island in the Zanzibar archipelago. Dubbed ‘The Green Island’ in Arabic, it was once known as the granary of Mombasa. For many years, it has also had a reputation for occult knowledge and power, and its practitioners are still consulted by people from far and wide. Anthropologist Martin Walsh investigates the source of the tales of buried treasure that are told on the island and are a part of its spiritual mystery.

After J. C. Smuts (1870-1950) managed to unseat J.B.M. Hertzog (1866-1942) as Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa it was clear that the country would enter the Second World War on the side of Great Britain. In spite of extensive changes and an increased budget the Union Defence Force (UDF) found itself in a state of war on 7 September 1939 with a Permanent Force of only 5400 men with limited training and antiquated equipment. While Hitler’s armies conquered Western Europe the Springboks prepared to go North and spite of trepidations about the might of Mussolini’s East African Empire the First South African Infantry Division set sail for East Africa in mid-July 1940.  In 5 short months Mussolini’s East African Empire had been torn to shreds. Victorious in every major engagement, the South Africans embarked for Egypt in June 1941. Here they encountered similar logistical problems as was prevalent before they embarked for East Africa. With two divisions in the field and a third in training UDF planners had a trying time marshalling enough motorised transport to enable the Springboks to keep pace with the increased mobility that was a hallmark of desert warfare. Expecting to build on their success over the Italians the South Africans confidently went into battle but by November 1941 the Fifth South African Infantry Brigade was annihilated and the victors of East Africa badly mauled. Fighting low-moraled Italian armies in the bush and mountains of Abyssinia was quite easy, beating the Germans in the desert would be a different story altogether.

Following South African entry into the Second World War on 6 September 1939, the Union Defence Force (UDF) transformed from an ageing peacetime defence force into a modern armed force capable of projecting offensive power. During the interwar period a certain state of melancholia had existed in the UDF in terms of military innovation, which resulted in muddled thinking in the UDF in terms of armoured warfare and mechanisation. The offensive potential of armoured forces was simply not understood by the South African defence planners, with the result that there was only a token armoured force in the UDF in September 1939. The South African entry into the war was the impetus for the development of a viable armoured force within the UDF, and the South African Tank Corps (SATC) was established in May 1940. Changes in both the nature and organisational structure of the South African defence establishment followed. The Italian presence in Abyssinia and Italian Somaliland was seen as a direct threat to the neighbouring British East African territories, and South Africa deployed to Kenya during June 1940, soon after the Italian declaration of war. The South African deployment to East Africa was the first deployment of the UDF in a situation of regular war since the First World War. Despite the doctrine that underpinned the South African deployment of armoured forces in East Africa, the SATC units soon learned that the accepted doctrine, borrowed from the British War Office during the interwar period, was but a mere guide to offensive employment. The story of the South African deployment to East Africa during the war is used as a lens through which to investigate the role and employment of both the UDF armoured cars and light tanks. By separately discussing the Allied offensives through Italian Somaliland and southern Abyssinia during 1940-1941, the tactical and operational employment of the South African armour during this time becomes paramount when evaluated against their successes and failures. The nature of the opposing Italian forces in East Africa, the ever-changing topography and climate of the theatre of operations, and the nature of the South African offensive operations throughout the campaign, all combined to shape the novel way in which the armoured cars and tanks of the SATC were employed throughout 1940-1941. The operational experiences that the UDF gained during the campaign in East Africa shaped the further deployments of South African armour to North Africa, Madagascar and Italy during the remainder of the war.

This essay explores concepts of space and relation at the turn of the twentieth century. Specifically, I concentrate on globalism in Zanzibari public discourse and the cognitive maps of individual perception. I focus closely on the voluminous writings of the first Zanzibari, indeed the first Arab woman, to publish her memoirs: Emily Ruete, born Sayyida Salme bint Said, a  daughter of the sultan of Zanzibar. Ruete’s autobiography, Memoiren einer arabischen Prinzessin (Memoirs of an Arabian princess; 1886), narrates a series of seeming contradictions. Ruete eloped with a German merchant and converted to Christianity, but she became a fierce defender of Islam; she was an East African woman of Omani, Persian, and Georgian descent who assimilated into bourgeois German society but found cultural solace only in Beirut. Her writings, which also include a great many letters and a treatise on Syria, are among the most detailed reflections on cosmopolitanism and global interconnectivity composed by a Zanzibari. Ruete’s body of work thus provides a unique window on self-definition, the imagination of supranational space, and the constitution of a worldview in the Age of Steam and Print.

For a long period of time, a general belief has reigned in the academic and non-academic circles that Somalis are an extremely exceptional people, in that theirs is a homogeneous society composed of men and women from one eponymous father from Arabia, celebrating monoculturality, monolinguality as well as monotheologicality! In the background of all the said shared commonalities, this study intends to argue that the Somali people have a composition of various communities of distinct ethnic background, with each ethnic community practising its own distinct mode of living and culture in the midst of a conglomeration of multi-ethnogenic societies. Therefore, subsequent to the believed universality of Somali culture and origin, the study aims at clarifying the vagueness of Somaliness or Somali citizenship, and that distinct identities, ethnicities and cultures are categorized or marginalized in the melting-pot of Somaliness. The core theme, however, is to put in the limelight the social situation of the Jareer/Bantu people amidst the racialist nature of pastoral Somaloid stock. Relatively, the study intends to investigate the subject by focusing on some basic questions such as:-

(a) Does Somalia constitute a homogeneous society of Arab origin?

(b) Do the Somali Bantu/Jareer suffer ethnic marginalization?

(c) Who is a Somali and by what criteria is the paradigm of Somaliness/Somalihood determined?

Somalia is generally thought of as a homogenous society, with a common Arabic ancestry, a shared culture of nomadism and one Somali mother tongue. This study challenges this myth. Using the Jareer/Bantu as a case study, the book shows how the Negroid physical features of this ethnic group has become the basis for ethnic marginalization, stigma, social exclusion and apartheid in Somalia. The book is another contribution to the recent deconstruction of the perceived Somali homogeneity and self-same assertions. It argues that the Somalis, just like most societies, employ multiple levels of social and ethnic distinctions, one of which is the Jareer versus Jileec divide. Dr. Eno successfully portrays another Somalia, in which a mythical homogeneity masks the oppression and social exclusion suffered by some ethnic groups in the country

First published in the American Chronicle, Buzzle and AfroArticles on 2nd May 2010

Republished in the portal of the exiled Oromo Parliamentarians

https://www.oromoparliamentarians.org/English/News_Archive/Oromo%20Action%20Plan%20for%20the%20Liberation%20of%20Oromia.htm

The present article is not an original, new text; it consists in the merge of eight articles first published in 2008. The text has been slightly modified, edited and updated. As the series was not completed, I will further expand in forthcoming articles in order to extensively describe the types of actions needed to be undertaken by independent average Oromos in view of the liberation of Oromia and the ultimate destruction of the monstrous colonial tyranny of Abyssinia, the world´s most racist and inhuman state. The present article consists of 21 units, as per below:

1. The Search for Oromo Leadership

2. A New Oromo Leadership: A Global First

3. Weaknesses of the Traditional Political Leadership

4. Identification of the Oromo Nation in 2010

5. Who is the enemy of the Oromos?

6. Local – Regional-level Foes

7. Authentic Oromos and Fabricated Amharas; the Total Opposition

8. Direct and Indirect Colonialism

9. Differentiation among Colonial Rulers

10. Anglo - French Colonial Establishment: Arch-enemy of the Oromo Nation

11. Millions of Oromo Leaders Organized in Independent Groups

12. Present Oromo "Leaderships" and their Inertia

13. Key Figures to Be Considered by All the Oromos

14. Biyya Oromo Independent – Whose Work Is It?

15. Groups of Oromo Liberation Activity – GOLA

16. Ground work

17. GOLA Security – Impenetrability

18. GOLA – Commitment

19. GOLA – Function

20. Basic Directions for GOLA Projects and Endeavours

21. Collection of Information Pertaining to the Oromo Nation

African states have been seen to struggle with the implementation of democracy, both before and after they adopted multiparty electoral systems, from the 1990s onwards. Many states continued to be dominated by a single party and opposition parties have found it difficult to establish themselves as regime parties dominate the political competition. The neo-patrimonial literature, as the most widely used framework for analysing African politics, explains this in terms of a misuse of state power and corrupt electoral practises favouring the ruling parties. This thesis argues that African politics cannot be adequately understood using a neo-patrimonial framework, because this framework discounts the possibility of African political thought and the development of a political organisation in Africa as a basis for democracy and public good politics. In the case of Tanzania it is argued that the continued electoral success of CCM (Chama Cha Mapinduzi) cannot be explained either by the misuse of state power or corrupt election practices, and that the explanation lies in the capacity of CCM to use a legitimacy narrative to build a political organisation and the continued mobilisation of the party and the electorate on the basis of ‘public good politics’ founded on the ideas of the independence movement. It analyses the way in which the regime built legitimacy and popular support between 1961 and 1985 and how the regime party used this legacy of legitimacy to control the transition to a multi party system. It demonstrates that the continued high levels of electoral support for the regime party CCM rested on a successful legitimacy narrative developed during the multi-party era and linked to the ideology of the independence movement rather than the factors indicated by the Neo-patrimonial literature. Contrary to the argument of neo-patrimonial approaches, which posits a pessimistic view of the capacity of African states to evolve into democracies, this thesis argues that the case of Tanzania indicates that a form of African public good politics and the building of a political community can be a foundation for the development of democratic government.

MA Thesis in Maritime History (Faculty of Letters, Lisbon University FLUL, 2014) - revised version

The present thesis Shipwrecks of the “Carreira da Índia” (1595-1623) – Sources
for the Study in Portuguese Maritime History deals with factors which caused losses of
ships of the Carreira da Índia which linked the European metropolis Lisbon with its
Goa based Estado da Índia between 1595 and 1623. Although Portuguese-Asiatic
shipping was formally separated from the Habsburg Empire during the Union of the
Two Iberian Crowns (1580-1640), the European policies of the Spanish Kings,
especially towards the United Provinces and the Netherlands had its influence and
effects on the Portuguese side.
Shipwrecks, either on the outward bound or homeward bound voyages had
occurred for various reasons since the early days of the Carreira da Índia yet the
emergence of the two private European Companies, the Dutch United East India
Company (founded in 1602) and the British East India Company (founded in 1600)
were a new momentum by which’s characteristics of concurrence and struggle for
supremacy of the European-Asiatic spice trade, losses of Portuguese ships were caused
by planned and executed military operations as well.
Focusing on the geographical region of the Mozambique Channel in which the
losses have taken place, the thesis combines a historiographical approach with records
of underwater archaeology analyzing questions related to the political environment and
planed military operations in which shipwrecks have occurred as well as causes of
shipwrecks observing ship building and design modifications and effects related to
economic patterns such as the monetary flows of the Portuguese outward bound
shipping during the period of observation.

Naufragios da Careira da Índia (1595-1623)

This article explores the intertwined history of late 19th century Sudan and Ethiopia from a transboundary perspective. Focusing on a specific border zone in a period of growing tensions between the newly-established Mahdist state and the expanding Christian kingdom (1885-1889), the study analyzes how various patterns of commercial, military and diplomatic interactions shaped and were shaped by the Sudanese-Ethiopian conflict. That the ruling elites used religious arguments to legitimize military operations did not prevent intense flows of people, things and representations in the borderlands northwest of Lake Tana. A precise historical enquiry into the changing conceptualizations of the border, trade dynamics in goods and human beings, war booty practices, and diplomatic epistolary exchanges allows assessing the complex role of this portion of the border zone in the evolution of Sudanese-Ethiopian relations. The research is based on previously untapped Mahdist archives, European travel accounts, and scholarly works in Arabic, English, French and German. It is meant to contribute to the rapidly expanding field of border studies, as well as give new insights into the entangled history of African societies which retained their political sovereignty in the early years of the European scramble for Africa.

The East African Community (EAC) consists of the following countries: Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, South Sudan, Rwanda, and Burundi. The EAC is one of the vibrant regional organizations on the African Continent. Through a constitutive treaty framework, the EAC seeks to realize effective social, economic, and political integration in the region by the year 2024.  Unfortunately, member states are embroiled in inter-state conflict/ disputes. This threatens the cohesion and the integration process within the EAC. One such situation is the current Uganda-Rwanda Katuna border closure situation. This situation requires the urgent attention of the relevant EAC organs and structures mandated to deal with conflict and dispute management under the EAC treaty.
This research investigates whether the EAC system has well-functioning dispute settlement/conflict resolution mechanisms in place. It further seeks to establish how the system's capacity to deal with conflict/disputes can be enhanced to avoid a repeat of the 1977 EAC collapse.  The perceived weakness and absence of the EAC involvement in the various conflict/ dispute management process, particularly those of an interstate political nature tests the credibility of the EAC. This perception affects the integration process and slows down the roadmap to the envisioned EA political federation. This generally undermines the confidence of member states to resort to its organs and structures to solve any conflict or disputes likely to arise.  Whereas the EAC treaty enjoins member states to use peaceful dispute settlement mechanisms, member states have violated this obligation; a phenomenon this study investigates to ascertain why EAC member states are not making the full use of the IDS mechanisms embedded in the EAC system and are not using the existing organs to manage and resolve conflict/disputes, and finally to come up with relevant recommendations that can optimize the EAC's capacity to resolve conflicts and disputes peacefully within its legal framework.

Stephanie Wynne-Jones and Adria LaViolette eds., The Swahili World. New York: Routledge, 2018

This chapter explores the socioeconomic and political reconfiguration of the Swahili world from the arrival of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean until the relocation of the Sultan of Oman-Zanzibar’s capital to eastern Africa in the nineteenth century. The early modern period was one of upheaval and transition for Swahili-speakers. Swahili polities experienced sustained violence and most lost both economic and political autonomy. External powers aggressively pursued their interests in the Swahili world, which exacerbated local frictions and drew polities into multiple imperial spheres of interaction. Yet, Swahili-speakers to a degree shaped the social and economic networks of the era. New or expanded networks linked Swahili polities to other eastern African societies, regions well beyond the Indian Ocean basin and global intellectual currents. These, in turn, contributed to a Swahili cultural renaissance and altered social hierarchies in ways that would reverberate into the twentieth century.

Although scholars of Somali Studies have engaged themselves in examining the Somali society from several perspectives, colonial and early Somali writers mainly observed the Somali people as homogenous, egalitarian and nomadic pastoral. Themes on multi-ethnicity, multiculturalism, and linguistic diversity were ignored as topics that sully the myth of the selfsame ideology colorfully embroidered in the official historiography. The notion also deluded pioneering Somali scholars from critically studying their people and analyzing colonial writing; at least not beyond the western scholars' knowledge boundary. Accordingly, the Horn of Africa was exemplified as a unique African nation where citizens enjoy equality and share an all-in-one identity: culturally, ethnically, historically, and linguistically. Contrary to that notion, though, the everyday social situation makes the primordial ideology of selfsameness unsustainable. To establish the evidence, this essay discusses about how the Bantu Jareer agrarian community, a section among the different groups of subalterns in the country, views its environment and social space within the boundary of deeply offensive segregation by an extremely suppressive Somali society.

This dissertation explores narrative strategies of self-identity in autobiographies by six pioneering women writers, each of whom lost what has traditionally been woman’s place: her home. The accounts of emigration, expatriation, and exile by Anna Brownwell Jameson, Catharine Parr Traill, Susanna Moodie, Ada Cambridge, Isak Dinesen, and Alyse Simpson illustrate the implications of this loss, as each woman struggled to recover a sense both of home and of grounded identity. The writings span more than a hundred years, from the 1830s to the 1950s, and tell of lives lived in locations as different as Canada, Australia, and British East Africa (now Kenya), places that variously proved to be confining and/or liberating. By narrating the ways in which identity adapts to and is transformed by a new environment, these texts provide access to the construction and alteration of the self in relation to place. This study probes this process by using the concept of place, rather than the more conventional one of time, as the dominant category of analysis.
My readings are both intertextual and interdisciplinary: they rely on theorizing by sociologists and psychologists concerned with the relationship between place and identity, studies on the same subject by literary scholars, and formulations by women’s autobiography theorists. My investigation reveals, among other discoveries, that the gender-specific aspects of the process of adaptation persistently centre on the notion of homecoming and that they are articulated with reference to the figure of the mother.

As a writer participating in public debates in the Age of Identities, and we might add, the Age of Youdentities, for we are not born with identities; we achieve them in some ways (identities) and have them thrust upon us in other ways (youdentities), I understand that we are all read through the lens of who we are perceived to be, and many arguments for and against our writing are made ad hominem. This piece of writing can usefully be added to anything already ‘out there’ so that the ad hominem arguments are at least a little better informed. And if, as a consequence of the perceived need for affect and/or self-reflexivity, so much academic writing is thinly-veiled autobiography, I like to think I have skilfully outmanoeuvred my fellow academics in this piece by tearing off that veil altogether.

A new report from Hate Speech International examines the history and evolution of al-Shabab’s media operations capabilities and narrative messaging. The report, written by Christopher Anzalone – a Research Fellow with the International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs – gives particular attention to their strategic use and position within the insurgents’ broader strategy of territorial control, survival, and rule in light of shifts on the ground inside Somalia and, since 2012, increasingly in neighboring countries such as Kenya.

Also analyzed are the multiple target audiences of Al-Shabab’s multi-faceted media campaign; the importance of on-the-ground organizaiton and performance of political rituals and events as an integral part of insurgent propaganda; the growing battle between the group and Islamic State and its domestic and regional sympathizers in Somalia and East Africa; and the construction of specific media operations narratives designed to attract particular target audiences – domestic, regional and international.

Understanding the ways in which AlShabab’s sophisticated media campaign operates and identifying this multimedia output’s multiple intended audiences and its ability to advance insurgent influence and power projection are key to reaching a fuller comprehension of the successes and failures of one of the most successful insurgent movements of the 21st century.

https://www.hate-speech.org/new-report-on-al-shabab-media/

In three earlier articles,, we briefly described the place of Somalia as commercial and navigational hub at the times of the Late Antiquity, we identified Malao (today's Berbera) as capital of 'the Other Berberia', and we underscored the fact that the port of call Avalites (Assab) was presented as part of Somalia (the 'Other Berberia'), and not Axumite Abyssinia. In addition, we refuted aberrations advanced by Jesse Benjamin, who believes that (no Somalis, no Yemenites, no Meroitic Ethiopians, no Axumite Abyssinians but) Nabataean Aramaeans controlled the African land routes and that these roads helped transport the largest part of the merchandise.

We referred to the major textual source of our information, namely the Ancient Greek text 'Periplus of the Red Sea', which was written ca. 70 CE by an anonymous Alexandrian Egyptian merchant and captain, who certainly had personal experience in vast parts of that navigation and trade network area and wished to compile a kind of guide for sailors and traders.

From 'the Other Berberia' to Azania

Completing the series of articles on the excerpts of the 'Periplus of the Red Sea' that bear evidence to the 'Other Berberia', a country that spanned from Eritrea's Assab to the Somali harbour of Ras Hafun, we will focus here on the easternmost coasts of that land.
2008-05-19
http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard/Article/Sailing-around-the-Horn-of-Africa--before-2000-years/102092

From the beginning of European involvement in Africa and the Middle East to the present, working with indigenous irregular forces has been, and remains, an integral part of engagement in these regions. This article examines one aspect of this relationship: the command pathways that allowed these relationships to function. By comparing the command pathways of cases in Palestine Mandate and the Horn of Africa during the Second World War, the author explores the structures that led to success and shows the importance of such cooperation. He then applies the lessons gained to suggest a way forward for contemporary operations.

Following an earlier article about the recent developments in the area of Sanaag, I came to recall a fascinating text that is not widely known among today´s Somalis. I would characterize it as a Classic of Orientalist literature, and it was written in the middle of the 19th century.

However, it was not written for the purpose of educating the ancestors of modern Somalis. In fact, it was composed by a leading English adventurer and Orientalist who contributed greatly to the formation of a great number of ideas and preconceived schemes the English shared about the wider Red Sea area, involving the Eastern African coast, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Horn of Africa.

The book is a real goldmine in revealing precisely

1. how the colonial European powers, and more specifically, the English, projected their preconceived ideas about other nations, religions, faiths, histories and cultures, their misconceptions, delusions, misapprehensions, and their misunderstandings onto the sphere of academic knowledge, science, and truth,

2. how they fell victims of their own errors,

3. how their initial errors dragged them to further and more critical, political, errors,

4. how they projected their aforementioned inconsistencies onto the sphere of the foreign policy, and more particularly onto their relationship with the various local peoples, and

5. how this unfortunate chain of discrepancies and anomalies was projected onto the Somalis to plunge them in confusion and tie them with the colonial power.

The book, in and by itself, reveals in a splendid way what colonialism has always been: a misunderstanding and an aberration built thereon.

Somalia in its totality is not the main subject of the book; a marginal part of Somalia is. However, Harar´s historical magnificence and radiance was such that anything written about Harar normally concerns parts of the greater Somalia.

Not a single chapter of the main part of the book describes the illustrious province of Sanaag; the first Appendix does. As a matter of fact, it is about a diary written and the observations made by an English army lieutenant, who was the first to identify the Lake Victoria as source of the Nile, and he was the first European to reach there. The lieutenant is not the author of the book, who also was a famous explorer, and bitter rivalry characterized the two English explorers.

The diary concerns none else than Lieutenant Speke for whom an interesting, brief but informative, profile was composed by the BBC Historic Figures section (http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/speke_john_hanning.shtml).

The book was written by Richard Burton, the famous explorer and treacherous traveler, who – due to his excellent linguistic skills in Arabic – managed to enter Mecca, although a Christian. He was the first European to enter Harar, Africa´s holiest Islamic shrine and the Islamic world´s fourth most venerated place. An introductory presentation can be found in wikipedia, but it is highly biased (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Francis_Burton). On the contrary, an interesting book review about his ´First footsteps in East Africa or, An Exploration of Harar´ and Burton´s adventures in Harar was published here: http://www.roadjunky.com/article/711/richard-burton-harar-travel-book.

I republish here integrally the Appendix I, Diary and Observations Made by Lieutenant Speke, When Attempting to Reach the Wadi Nogal. Richard Burton´s ´First footsteps in East Africa or, An Exploration of Harar´ was published in 1856.

I would be ready to publish various comments, and to comment on excerpts of Lieutenant Speke´s Diary, so I welcome your comments, corrections, rectifications, and criticism of this deeply anti-Somali text.

I re-publish the controversial text here because I am convinced that it reveals negative intentions against, and a wrong perception of, Somalia; the ensuing English colonization of the northern part of Somalia was carried out by people who were based …. precisely on this text!

It is therefore essential for today´s Somalis not to have illusions about the permanently anti-Somali policies of England. To liberate, pacify, re-unify, and rehabilitate Somalia, one has to bear this in mind.

Diary and Observations Made by Lieutenant Speke, When Attempting to Reach the Wadi Nogal - Appendix I
From: First footsteps in East Africa or, An Exploration of Harar
by Richard Burton
First published in AfroArticles, American Chonicle, and Buzzle on 17th July 2008
Republished on 23rd July 2008 here:
http://xaqsoor.blogspot.com/2008/07/richard-burton-on-sanaag-at-origins-of.html