Djibouti

• 1. The Country Named For A Plate

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  Djibouti is a country in the Horn of Africa, and it carries the smallest population in mainland Africa. The 2024 census counted 1,066,809 people, recorded on the 20th of May. The nation takes its name from its capital, the City of Djibouti, but where that name comes from is disputed. One theory traces it to the Afar word gabouti, meaning plate, perhaps describing the area's geography. Another points to gabood, meaning upland or plateau. A third reading turns it into Land of Tehuti, after the Egyptian moon god Thoth.

  The land sits at a meeting point of seas, plates, and empires. It is bordered by Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and the waters of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. It controls access to some of the world's busiest shipping lanes. How did a territory of 8958 square miles become a place where the United States, France, Japan, and China all pay to keep soldiers? Why do foreign armies rent ground here, and why does neighboring Ethiopia depend on Djiboutian docks for nearly all its trade? The answers run back through butchered elephants, a drowned sultan, rigged colonial votes, and a single overwhelming referendum.

• 2. Cut Stones And Drowning Lakes

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  Cut stones about 3 million years old have been collected near Lake Abbe, and the Bab-el-Mandeb region has often been viewed as a crossing point for early hominins leaving East Africa. In the Gobaad plain, between Dikhil and Lake Abbe, the remains of an extinct elephant, Palaeoloxodon recki, were found, visibly butchered with basalt tools and dated to around 1.4 million years BCE. A Homo erectus jaw turned up in Gobaad too, dating from 100,000 BCE.

  At Asa Koma, an inland lake area on the Gobaad Plain, pottery predating the mid-2nd millennium has been recovered, marked with punctate and incision geometric designs. Its ware resembles the Sabir culture ceramics from Ma'layba in Southern Arabia. Long-horned humpless cattle bones found there suggest domesticated cattle were present around 3,500 years ago. The nearby Neolithic site of Wakrita, excavated in 2004, sits on a wadi in the Goba'ad depression and yielded the first evidence of caprine herding in the area.

  Up to 4000 years BCE, the region enjoyed a climate close to a Mediterranean one, with lakes Assal and Abbe far larger and resembling real bodies of water. The fauna was rich with felines, buffaloes, elephants, and rhinos, recorded in cave paintings at Balho. Around 1500 BCE the climate began to dry. Fresh water grew scarce, and engravings start to show dromedaries, some ridden by armed warriors. The sedentary people returned to a nomadic life, leaving stone tumuli sheltering graves across the territory.

• 3. God's Land

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  The first mention of the Land of Punt dates to the 25th century BC, and Djibouti is considered among its most likely locations. The Ancient Egyptians also called this territory Ta Netjeru, meaning God's Land. The earliest recorded expedition was organized by Sahure of the Fifth Dynasty, returning with cargoes of antyue and Puntites, though gold from Punt reached Egypt as early as the time of Pharaoh Khufu.

  Hatshepsut, in the Eighteenth Dynasty, built a Red Sea fleet and personally backed the most famous expedition that sailed to Punt. Her artists recorded the royals, the inhabitants, and the trees, describing a region far to the east in the direction of the sunrise. Traders came home with gold, ivory, ebony, incense, aromatic resins, animal skins, live animals, fragrant woods, and cinnamon. According to the temple murals at Deir el-Bahari, Punt was ruled then by King Parahu and Queen Ati. The land would be remembered in Egyptian literature too, celebrated in the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor.

• 4. Zeila And The Sultanates

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  Zeila was one of the earliest cities in the world to embrace Islam, shortly after the hijra, and the Masjid al-Qiblatayn there dates to the 7th century as the oldest mosque. The city served as the capital of Adal, a small wealthy kingdom established by local Somali clans in the early 9th century. The Arab scholar Al-Yaqubi wrote of its wealth, and Marco Polo mentioned Adal in 1295 as a state continuously in conflict with Abyssinia.

  The Walashma dynasty are regarded as the founders of the Ifat Sultanate, which Adal helped form. In 1320 a long conflict began between the Christian monarchs of Ethiopia and the Muslim leaders of Ifat. Emperor Amda Seyon I threatened the Mamluk ruler Al-Nasir Muhammad, vowing to retaliate for the persecution of Copts and even to divert the Nile. The rebel Sabr ad-Din declared his wish to be King of all Ethiopia, to turn churches into mosques, and to plant khat at the capital.

  Ifat's troops were defeated in 1403 on the Harar plateau. Sultan Sa'ad ad-Din II fled to Zeila, where pursuing soldiers besieged him and cut off his water. Al-Maqrizi records that he was wounded in the forehead, fell, and was pierced with swords, dying happily in God's cause. His children fled to Yemen and lived in exile until 1415. The strength of the Muslims, as Maqrizi put it, was abated.

• 5. Gran And The Fall Of Adal

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  Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, remembered as Ahmad Gurey or Gran, led the Adal Sultanate's great campaign known as the Futuh Al-Habash between 1529 and 1543. His army of Afar, Harari, and Somalis brought three-quarters of Christian Abyssinia under Muslim control, slaughtering any Ethiopian who refused to convert. Within fourteen years the Imam conquered the country's heartland.

  The tide turned at the Battle of Wayna Daga, where the Bahri Negash joined Emperor Gelawdewos and the Portuguese. Tradition holds that Imam Ahmad was shot in the chest by a Portuguese musketeer named Joao de Castilho, who had charged alone into the Muslim lines and died. The wounded Imam was then beheaded by an Ethiopian cavalry commander, Azmach Calite. When his soldiers learned of his death, they fled the field. The war opened the way for the Oromo people to migrate and conquer new territories.

  In 1550, Nur ibn Mujahid became Emir of Harar and fortified the city with a defensive wall still standing today. He killed Emperor Gelawdewos at the Battle of Fatagar in 1559, but the same fighting saw Sultan Barakat ibn Umar Din die and the Walashma dynasty end. Nur died in 1567. The Adal Sultanate collapsed into rump states such as Aussa, Tadjourah, and Rahayto. With Islamic centers destroyed and scholars gone, Islam became largely nominal, and the Xeer customary law emerged to unite scattered groups into the Issa confederation.

• 6. Coal, Treaties, And A Boomtown

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  On the 11th of March 1862, the Afar sultan Raieta Dini Ahmet signed a treaty in Paris selling lands around Obock to the French. The French wanted a coaling station for steamships, a need that grew urgent with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Until then French ships had to buy coal at the British port of Aden, an unwise dependency in case of war. On the 26th of March 1885, a second treaty made the Issas a French protectorate.

  In 1894, Leonce Lagarde established a permanent French administration in the city of Djibouti and named the region French Somaliland. The Imperial Ethiopian Railway pushing west turned the port into a boomtown of 15,000, at a time when only Harar in Ethiopia exceeded that size. The rail link let Djibouti supersede the caravan trade at Zeila and become the premier port for coffee and goods leaving southern Ethiopia and the Ogaden.

  The colony sent men to war far away. The 6th Somali Marching Battalion formed in Madagascar on the 11th of May 1916 and fought in the October 1916 assault on Fort Douaumont. Of 2,434 riflemen deployed in Europe, 517 were killed and 1,200 wounded. In June 1940 France fell and the colony came under the Vichy government. The British blockaded the port, and in 1942 about 4,000 British troops occupied the city. A local battalion took part in the Liberation of France in 1944.

• 7. Three Referendums To Independence

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  In 1958, a referendum asked Djiboutians whether to remain with France or become independent, and the vote favored continued association. A combined yes vote from the sizable Afar group and resident French carried it, alongside allegations of widespread vote rigging. Mahmoud Harbi, Vice President of the Government Council, had urged a no vote toward union with Somalia. He was killed in a plane crash two years later under suspicious circumstances.

  In 1966 an official visit by President Charles de Gaulle met demonstrations and rioting, and he ordered another referendum. The 1967 plebiscite again backed a looser tie with France, divided along ethnic lines and again marred by reports of rigging. The territory was then renamed from French Somaliland to the French Territory of the Afars and the Issas. During the 1960s the Front for the Liberation of the Somali Coast led the armed struggle, and on the 24th of March 1975 it kidnapped the French ambassador to Somalia, Jean Guery, exchanging him for two jailed members in Aden.

  The third referendum, held on the 8th of May 1977, backed independence. A landslide 98.8% of the electorate supported disengagement from France. Hassan Gouled Aptidon, an Issa politician who had campaigned for a yes vote back in 1958, became the nation's first president, serving from 1977 to 1999. In its first year the new state joined the Organization of African Unity, the Arab League, and the United Nations.

• 8. Rented Ground On The Strait

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  Djibouti's strategic location by the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, which separates the Gulf of Aden from the Red Sea and guards the approaches to the Suez Canal, has made it a prized site for foreign military bases. Camp Lemonnier was abandoned by the French and leased to United States Central Command in September 2002, with the lease renewed in 2014 for another 20 years. The country hosts the only overseas Japanese military base and a Chinese support base, and the United States has accused the Chinese of targeting U.S. military aircraft with a high-powered laser near that base.

  The rents matter to the economy. The United States pays $63 million a year for Camp Lemonnier, France and Japan each pay about $30 million, and China pays $20 million. Together these payments came to more than 5% of Djibouti's total GDP in 2017. The economy itself leans heavily on services, which made up around 79.7% of GDP, with industry at 17.3% and agriculture at 3%.

  The ports tie the country to its neighbor. As of 2018-95% of Ethiopian transit cargo moved through the Port of Djibouti. The Doraleh Container Terminal, a $396 million project begun in 2012 with DP World, can handle 1.5 million twenty-foot container units a year. The electrified Addis Ababa-Djibouti Railway opened in January 2018 to carry freight between the Ethiopian hinterland and the Port of Doraleh. At Lake Assal, the lowest point in Africa, the firm Salt Investment runs a desalination operation at an annual capacity of 4 million tons, drawing fresh water and export revenue from the same depression that sits at the bottom of the continent.