Early activity on the coasts

From their connection with the Ethiopian hinterland, their proximity to Arabia, and their export of precious gums, ostrich feathers, ghee (clarified butter), and other animal products as well as slaves from farther inland, the northern and eastern Somali coasts have for centuries been open to the outside world. This area probably formed part of Punt, “the land of aromatics and incense,” mentioned in ancient Egyptian writings. Between the 7th and the 10th century, immigrant Muslim Arabs and Persians developed a series of trading posts along the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean coasts. Many of the early Arab geographers mentioned these trading posts and the sultanates that grew out of them, but they rarely described the interior of the country in detail.

Intensive exploration really began only after the occupation of Aden by the British in 1839 and the ensuing scramble for Somali possessions by Britain, France, and Italy (see below The imperial partition). In 1854, while Richard Burton was exploring the country to the northwest in the course of his famous journey from Berbera to Hārer, his colleague John Hanning Speke was making his way along the Makhir coast in the northeast. This region had previously been visited by Charles Guillain, captain of the brig Ducouedid, between 1846 and 1848. Guillain also sailed down the Indian Ocean coast and went ashore at Mogadishu, Marca, and Baraawe, penetrating some distance inland and collecting valuable geographic and ethnographic information. In 1865 the German explorer Karl Klaus von der Decken sailed up the Jubba River as far as Baardheere in the small steamship Welf, which foundered in rapids above the town. Decken was killed by Somalis, but much valuable information collected by his expedition survived.

Penetration of the interior

In 1883 a party of Englishmen (F.L. and W.D. James, G.P.V. Aylmer, and E. Lort-Phillips) penetrated from Berbera as far as the Shabeelle River, and between 1886 and 1892 H.G.C. and E.J.E. Swayne surveyed the country between the coast and the Shabeelle and also reached farther east toward the Nugaaleed valley. During 1894–95 A. Donaldson-Smith explored the headwaters of the Shabeelle in Ethiopia, reached Lake Rudolf, and eventually descended the Tana River to the Kenyan coast. In 1891 the Italian Luigi Robecchi-Bricchetti trekked from Mogadishu to Hobyo and then crossed the Ogaden region to Berbera. About the same time, further explorations were made by another Italian, Capt. Vittorio Bottego. In the 20th century several extensive surveys were made, especially in the British protectorate, by J.A. Hunt between 1944 and 1950, and much of the country was mapped by aerial survey.

Peoples of the coasts and hinterland

Until recent times the history of the Horn of Africa was dominated by two great themes: the southward expansion of the Somali from the Gulf of Aden littoral and the development by Arab and Persian Muslim settlers of a ring of coastal trading towns dating from at least the 10th century ce. By this time, Islam was firmly established in the northern ports of Seylac (Zeila) and Berbera and at Marca, Baraawe, and Mogadishu on the Indian Ocean coast in the south. These centres were engaged in a lively trade, with connections as far as China. Initially the trend of expansion was from these coastal centres inland, especially in the north.

Probably by the 10th century the country from the Gulf of Aden coast inland had been occupied first by Somali nomads and then, to their south and west, by various groups of pastoral Oromo who apparently had expanded from their traditional homelands in southwestern Ethiopia. To the south of these Cushitic-speaking Somali and Oromo—the “Berberi” of classical times and of the Arab geographers—the fertile lands between the Shabeelle and Jubba rivers were occupied, partly at least, by sedentary Bantu tribes of the Nyika confederacy, whose ancient capital was Shungwaya. Remnants of the Zanj, as these people were known to the Arab geographers, still survive in this region, but their strongest contemporary representatives are found among the coastal Bantu, of whom the Pokomo live along the Tana River in northern Kenya. Another smaller allied population consisted of the ancestors of the scattered bands of hunters of northern Kenya and southern Somalia known as the Wa-Ribi, or the Wa-Boni, a people whose appearance and mode of existence recall those of the San of other areas of Africa.