The Horn of Africa

Aksum

When the Ethiopian empire of Aksum emerged into the light of history at the end of the 1st century ce, it was as a trading state known throughout the Red Sea region. Its people spoke Geʿez, a Semitic language, and they mostly worshipped Middle Eastern gods, although here and there a traditional African deity survived. Its port of Adulis received a continuous stream of merchants who offered textiles, glassware, tools, precious jewelry, copper, iron, and steel in return for ivory, tortoiseshell, rhinoceros horn, gold, silver, slaves, frankincense, and myrrh. Aksum, the capital, was five days’ march from the coast onto the Tigray Plateau, from which position it dominated trade routes into the south and west, where the commodities originated.

By the 4th century Aksum had become a regional power and an ally of Constantinople, whose language and culture attracted the ruling elites. Sometime around 321 Emperor Ezana and the Aksumite court converted to the monophysitic Christianity—a belief that Christ had one nature that was both divine and human—of Alexandria’s See of St. Mark. During the next 200 years Christianity penetrated the masses, as foreign and native-born monks proselytized the interior, building churches and establishing monasteries wherever they found pagan temples and shrines.

Through the first half of the 6th century Aksum was the most important state in the Red Sea–Indian Ocean region and even extended its power over the kingdom of the Ḥimyarites on the Arabian Peninsula. In the Horn, Aksum dominated Welo, Tigray, Eritrea, and the important trade routes to and from the Sudan. The capital’s stone buildings, monuments, churches, and 20,000 inhabitants were supported by tribute and taxes extracted from vassals and traders.

In 543 Abraha, the general in charge of Ḥimyar, rebelled and weakened Aksum’s hold over South Arabia. This event marked the end of the empire’s regional hegemony, allowed Persia to assume supremacy, and forced Constantinople into an overland trade route with India and Africa. Aksum’s international trade diminished, a shift reflected in the debasement of the state’s coins. The rise of Islam in Arabia a century later almost completely devastated Aksum, as Muslim sailors swept Ethiopian shipping from the sea-lanes.

Aksum lost its economic vitality, and Adulis and other commercial centres withered. State revenues were greatly reduced, and the government could no longer maintain a standing army, a complex administration, and urban amenities. The culture associated with the outside world quickly became a memory, and Ethiopia learned to exist in local terms. The Christian state moved southward into the rich grain-growing areas of the interior, where the rulers could sustain themselves. There they and the local Cushitic-speaking population, the Agau (Agaw, or Agew), worked out a new political arrangement for Ethiopia.

The Somali

Meanwhile, another Cushitic people, the Somali, had separated themselves from the Oromo in what is now north-central Kenya. For their livelihood, they depended upon the one-humped Arabian camel, sheep, and goats. During the first centuries ce they migrated in a southeastern direction, finally following the Tana River to the Indian Ocean. They then turned north and peopled the entire Somali peninsula, coming into contact on the coast with Arab and Persian trading communities, from whom they took Islam and a mythological Arabian origin. By the 12th century the entire northern Somali coast was Islamized, providing a basis for proselytism in the interior. But, as the Somali migration and Islam moved westward, they encountered a resurgent Christian Ethiopia.

The Solomonids

An amalgamated Christian state, led by Semitized Agau, had reappeared in the 12th century. This Zagwe dynasty gave way in the late 13th century to a dynasty that claimed descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, a genealogy providing the legitimacy and continuity so honoured in Ethiopia’s subsequent national history. During the 14th and 15th centuries the Solomonid monarchs expanded their state southward and eastward. By then Muslims dominated Ethiopia’s trade, which exited via Mitsiwa in Eritrea or through Seylac on the northern Somali coast.

The Solomonids permitted Muslim business activities in return for submission and taxes. In 1332 Ifat, a large Muslim polity with its port at Seylac, fed up with being a Christian vassal, declared a holy war against Ethiopia and invaded its territory, destroying churches and forcing conversions to Islam. The Ethiopian emperor, Amda Tseyon, fought back hard, routed the enemy, and carried the frontier of Christian power to the edge of the Shewan Plateau, overlooking the largely Muslim-inhabited Awash valley. One hundred years later, under Emperor Zara Yakob, the Solomonid empire extended its authority southward to modern Bale and Sidamo.

By then Ethiopia faced a challenge from Adal, Ifat’s militant successor. Located in the semidesert Harer region, Adal employed highly mobile Somali and Afar cavalry, whose raiding Ethiopia could not control. Meanwhile, the Solomonid state had begun to decay, owing to succession problems and the sheer complexity of governing a large empire. The Muslims consequently stopped paying tribute and a percentage of their trading profits to the hated Christians. Thereafter, they grew stronger and more daring, responding in part to overpopulation among the Somali.

The distress was exploited by the charismatic Aḥmad ibn Ibrāhīm al-Ghāzī, known to the Ethiopians as Aḥmad Grāñ (“Aḥmad the Left-handed”). A pious, indeed rigorous, Muslim, Aḥmad railed against the secular nature of Adal, mobilized tribesmen to purify the state, and trained his enlistees to use the modern tactics and firearms recently introduced by the Ottomans into the Red Sea region. After he took over Adal about 1526, his refusal to pay tribute triggered a Solomonid invasion in 1527, which his army easily repulsed.

Aḥmad thereupon declared a holy war, led his men into Ethiopia, and won battle after battle, fragmenting the Solomonid state into its component parts. During 1531–32 the Muslims pushed northward, traversing the rich Amhara Plateau north of the Awash and destroying churches and monasteries. Aḥmad Grāñ built a civil administration composed of his own men, remnants of the pre-Solomonid ruling classes, and collaborators. By 1535 he headed a vast Islamic empire stretching from Seylac to Mitsiwa on the coast and including much of the Ethiopian interior, but not the staunchly Christian mountain fastnesses.

There, in 1541, Emperor Galawdewos learned that 400 Portuguese musketeers had disembarked at Mitsiwa in response to pleas for assistance. Though they lost half their strength moving inland, their weapons and tactics inspired Galawdewos to exploit Ethiopia’s difficult terrain by undertaking hit-and-run warfare. Aḥmad never knew where his adversaries would strike and therefore placed his forces in defensive positions, where they lost their mobility, while he and his personal guard acted as a rapidly deployed reserve. Encamped at Weyna Dega near Lake Tana, Aḥmad’s unit was attacked on Feb. 21, 1543, by Galawdewos and a flying column. During the hard-fought battle Aḥmad was killed, and that single death ended the war.

Christian Ethiopia was reprieved, but at a great cost. The country had lost hundreds of thousands of lives, confidence in itself and its religion, and its store of capital. Unable to follow Europe into commercial and then industrial capitalism, Ethiopia rebuilt feudalism, because the state simply had to restore affordable administration. By the early 1550s Galawdewos had fashioned a reasonable facsimile of the high Solomonid empire. Muslims, especially in the border provinces of Ifat, Dawaro (in the modern Arsi region), and Bale, remained disaffected. Christian converts along the periphery of the heartland, south of the Blue Nile and the Awash River, chafed under renewed exploitation, and the Judaized Beta Israel, to the north of Lake Tana, returned to their life of dispossession and economic marginalization. Finally, south of Lake Tana, in modern Gojam, Welega, Ilubabor, Kefa, Gamo Gofa, and Sidamo, a whole range of people remained tributary to the Christian kingdom. From among this last category emerged a new and more fundamental threat to old-fashioned Ethiopia.

Rise of the Oromo

The challenge came from the Oromo, a Cushitic-speaking pastoralist people whose original homeland was located on the Sidamo-Borena plain. From there, the related Afar and Somali peoples had hived off northeastward to the Red Sea coast, the Indian Ocean, and the Gulf of Aden, perhaps in some way causing the pressures that finally erupted in Aḥmad Grāñ’s invasion of the Solomonid state. Some Oromo may have climbed onto the high Christian plateaus as early as the late 13th century, only to be repulsed. Garrisons established along the empire’s periphery by Amda Tseyon and Zara Yakob were designed to keep the Oromo out, but, when these defenses were destroyed during the war with Aḥmad Grāñ, the Oromo naturally resumed infiltrating.

The Oromo had an age-set form of government that changed every eight years, when a new warrior class sought its fortune by raiding and rustling in order to provide resources that the natural environment lacked. Every eight years, from the 1540s on, they advanced farther into the well-watered, fertile highlands—a sharp contrast with their arid bush country. Helped by their adversary’s war-weariness, demoralization, and depopulation, the Oromo invariably won territory after territory. By the beginning of the 17th century they had pushed northwestward into the modern regions of Arsi, Shewa, Welega, and Gojam and northeastward into Harerge and Welo, stopping only where they were blocked by forest, high population density, or effective mobilization of Christian forces.