Somalia

From the incense ports of Punt and the medieval Adal Sultanate to independence in 1960, state collapse and the slow rebuilding of a federal republic.

Occupying the easternmost tip of the Horn of Africa, Somalia has been a crossroads of Indian Ocean trade since antiquity, when its coast is widely associated with the 'Land of Punt' that supplied incense, gold and ivory to pharaonic Egypt. From the early Islamic centuries its ports of Zeila, Berbera and Mogadishu grew rich on commerce with Arabia, Persia and India, while inland Somali society organised itself around pastoral clans bound together by Islam, customary law and a celebrated oral poetry. The medieval Adal Sultanate launched the wars of Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi against Christian Ethiopia in the sixteenth century, and the Ajuran, Geledi and Majeerteen sultanates ruled into the modern era. In the late nineteenth century European powers partitioned the Somali lands among Britain, Italy and France, leaving the Ogaden to Ethiopia, and provoking the twenty-year Dervish resistance of Sayyid Mohammed Abdullah Hassan. British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland gained independence and united on 1 July 1960 to form the Somali Republic. A 1969 coup brought the military-socialist dictatorship of Mohamed Siad Barre, whose failed 1977–78 Ogaden War and brutal repression ended in the collapse of the central state in 1991. The ensuing civil war, the 1992 famine, foreign intervention and the rise of the Islamist insurgency Al-Shabaab marked decades of suffering; the self-declared Republic of Somaliland broke away in 1991. Since the establishment of a Federal Government in 2012, Somalia has slowly rebuilt its institutions.