Djibouti's history: a port town and the question of whose land it is

What the coast held before France came

The oldest record on this ground is archaeological. Stones cut about 3 million years ago have been collected near Lake Abbe, and on the Gobaad plain the bones of an extinct elephant, Palaeoloxodon recki, carry butchery marks from basalt tools found beside them, dated to about 1.4 million years BC. Until about 4000 BC the Gobaad held lakes of its own, and Assal and Abbe were real bodies of water. At Asa Koma and Wakrita, two small Neolithic sites on the plain, pottery, fish bones and cattle bones date to the beginning of the second millennium BC. By about 1500 BC water was scarce, and engravings show dromedaries, some of them ridden by armed men.

The medieval record centres on Zeila, a port now in Somaliland. The Ifat Sultanate, founded in 1285 by the Walashma dynasty and based there, kept bases in what is now Djibouti, and Adal, which also ruled from Zeila, held large parts of the modern country at its height. Handoga grew from a semi-permanent settlement in the thirteenth century into a stone town in the fourteenth and was abandoned at the end of the sixteenth. Between the capital and Loyada stand carved stelae of uncertain age, 118 of them as reported in 1997.

When Adal came apart from the late sixteenth century the coast broke into small successor states, Aussa, Tadjoura and Rahayto among them, and Tadjoura came to dominate the salt trade from Lake Assal. Zeila, to which Tadjoura was counted subordinate, was held in turn by the Ottomans, by the rulers of Mocha and Sana'a and, in the nineteenth century, by Cairo. The Issa took shape as a confederation under the Xeer, a customary law that emerged in the sixteenth century, after the Oromo invasions had left no formal legal authority, and drew heavily on Sharia.

Why France bought Obock and then moved to Djibouti

France came for coal. On 11 March 1862 the Afar sultan Raieta Dini Ahmet signed an agreement in Paris selling Obock, on the north shore of the Gulf of Tadjoura, for 10,000 thalers, around 55,000 francs. French steamships otherwise bought their coal at British Aden, an unwise dependency in case of war, and the Suez Canal, opened in 1869, made a station of their own worth more. Henri Brunschwig's 1968 study of Obock's first quarter century is titled "Une colonie inutile", a useless colony.

Expansion came in the 1880s. France set up a protectorate in 1883 as the Territoire d'Obock et de ses dépendances, and between 1883 and 1887 signed treaties with the ruling Somali and Afar sultans. On 17 November 1884, after Egyptian forces had withdrawn, Léonce Lagarde raised the French flag at Tadjoura. The Gadabuursi signed on 25 March 1885 and the Issa the next day; no money changed hands, and the Somalis signed away none of their land rights. After sailors from the French vessel Le Pingouin were killed at Ambado in 1886, France blamed first the British and then the Somalis, and used the killings to claim the whole southern territory. A Russian adventurer, Nikolay Ivanovitch Achinov, who landed at Sagallo in 1889 with settlers, infantry and an Orthodox priest, was shelled into surrender by French gunboats and his colonists deported to Odessa.

The choice that made the country was to build on the other shore. In 1888 France began developing a port at Djibouti, a town on coral reefs at the southern entrance of the gulf whose harbour drew the caravans crossing from the interior. The administration followed from Obock, in 1892 by the State Department's dating, in 1894 by the date of Lagarde's permanent administration in the city and in 1896 by the Wikipedia history. Lagarde named the territory the Côte française des Somalis, French Somaliland, and its border with Ethiopia was marked out with Emperor Menelik II in 1897.

How the railway to Addis Ababa built the town

The port grew out of Ethiopia's search for an outlet to the sea, and the railway turned it into a town. Work on the Franco-Ethiopian line began in 1897 and the track reached Addis Ababa in June 1917. While it was being laid, Djibouti became a boomtown of 15,000 people. The population fell back when the line reached Dire Dawa and the original company went bankrupt, but the rail link let Djibouti take over the caravan trade of Zeila, then in British Somaliland, and become the port for coffee and other goods leaving southern Ethiopia and the Ogaden through Harar.

Who came to build the line and the docks

The railway brought people as well as freight. More than half of Djibouti's Somalis are Issa, and most of the rest are Gadabuursi and Isaaq, clans that in Britannica's account came from northern Somalia during the twentieth century to work on the railway and the port. In the 1960s the French built the Arhiba quarter for Afar dockworkers recruited from the north of the colony. Colonial rules limited houses in the old quarters to wood and corrugated iron, and a barbed-wire boundary round the city was meant to keep migrants out. The squatter settlement of Balbala grew up just outside it.

Between 1948 and 1957 four deep-water quays were built and the access channels dredged. Pétroles de Somalie, now Total, bunkered its first ship in 1952, and bunkering quadrupled in the ten years from 1954 to a peak of 1.8 million tons in 1965, when Djibouti worked as the service station of a Red Sea that had become a main shipping lane.

Why the colony was given a dollar franc

The currency was built for the same trade. Decree 49/374 of 20 March 1949 created the Djibouti franc, tied to fine gold and fixed at 214.392 to the US dollar, convertible on sight and without restriction. The Treasury took over the right of issue from a private bank and kept an account at the French American Banking Corporation in New York, and every franc issued had to be covered by its value in dollars, the arrangement known as a currency board. Under the exchange rules of the time the colony left the franc zone and, in the central bank's account, became a foreign country with the status of a free-trade zone.

The parity has moved twice, each time because the dollar's gold value was cut: to 197.466 on 18 December 1971 and to 177.721 on 13 February 1973, a rate the Banque Centrale de Djibouti records as unchanged since. The government that took over at independence kept the system, and the central bank was created on 3 December 1977.

What the colony did in two world wars

Somali soldiers from the colony fought in France. The 6th Somali Marching Battalion, formed in Madagascar on 11 May 1916, took part in the assault on Fort Douaumont in October 1916 and in the fighting on the Chemin des Dames in May 1917, and in the First World War 517 of its 2,434 riflemen were killed in Europe and 1,200 wounded.

The Second World War came to the territory itself. When France fell in June 1940 the colony passed to Vichy, and Italian troops from the Harrar Governorate, attacking from 18 June 1940, took nearly a third of it within days, with fighting near Ali-Sabieh over the railway. The Vichy administration held out for more than a year after Italy's defeat in East Africa in 1941, under a British blockade. In 1942 about 4,000 British troops occupied the city, and the State Department's note dates the end of Vichy rule to December 1942. A battalion raised in the territory fought in the liberation of France in 1944.

Who was allowed to vote on leaving France

The colony became a French overseas territory in 1946. A decree of 22 July 1957, applying the overseas reform law of 23 June 1956, gave it a territorial assembly that chose eight of its members for an executive council advising the governor general appointed from Paris.

The first referendum, in September 1958, fell on the eve of Somalia's independence in 1960, and the territory split by community. Afars and resident Europeans voted together to stay with France as an overseas territory. Most of the no votes were Somali, cast for joining a united Somalia as proposed by Mahmoud Harbi, vice-president of the government council. There were reports of widespread vote rigging, and of France expelling thousands of Somalis before the poll. Harbi and several associates died in a plane crash in October 1960, flying back from China to Somalia, in circumstances the sources describe as mysterious. Hassan Gouled Aptidon, the Issa politician who became the first president of the independent state, had campaigned for the yes vote in 1958.

In 1966 France rejected a United Nations recommendation to grant the territory independence. Charles de Gaulle's visit that August met two days of demonstrations by Somalis demanding independence, and on 21 September 1966 the new governor general, Louis Saget, announced a second referendum. It was held on 19 March 1967, and the State Department's note records that 60% chose to remain associated with France.

The register decided the result. On the official figures the territory then had 58,240 Somali and 48,270 Afar inhabitants, and 14,689 Somalis were allowed to register in 1967 against 22,004 Afars. Some 10,000 Somalis were deported on the pretext that they held no valid identity card. The United Nations noted an inordinate number of invalid ballots in Somali districts, which implied that the vote had been manipulated. Somali representatives charged that France had brought in thousands of Afar nomads from Ethiopia, and the French authorities denied it, answering that Afars already greatly outnumbered Somalis on the rolls. The announcement set off unrest in which several people died, and France strengthened its forces along the frontier.

Why France renamed the colony after two peoples

A directive from Paris in July 1967 changed the name to the Territoire français des Afars et des Issas, the French Territory of the Afars and the Issas. The new name acknowledged the large Afar electorate and was meant to play down the Somali share of the population, and of the Somali clans it named only the Issa. The governor general became a high commissioner.

The armed campaign came from the Front de Libération de la Côte des Somalis, the FLCS, which raided from Somalia and Ethiopia and aimed much of its violence at French personnel. The Organisation of African Unity recognised it as a national liberation movement and helped to finance it. On 24 March 1975 it kidnapped the French ambassador to Somalia, Jean Guery, and exchanged him in Aden for two of its members serving life sentences in France. In 1976 its members clashed with French gendarmes over a bus hijacked on the road to Loyada, and the French garrison had to be reinforced.

The political route ran through the Ligue Populaire Africaine pour l'Indépendance, the LPAI, formed when Gouled's Union Populaire Africaine merged with the mainly Afar Ligue pour l'Avenir et l'Ordre of Ahmed Dini. In 1975 the LPAI and the FLCS met in Kampala and settled on independence, and France began that year to accommodate the demand. In June 1976 the citizenship law, which had favoured the Afar, was revised to reflect more closely the weight of the Issa Somali.

The third vote, on 8 May 1977, went for independence, by 98.8% in the Wikipedia history and 99.8% in its article on the territory. The republic was proclaimed on 27 June 1977 under the name of its capital, with Gouled as president, Ahmed Dini as prime minister and Abdullah Mohamed Kamil as foreign minister, a first government drawn to show the mix of peoples in the movement. It joined the Arab League on 4 September 1977, and it signed an agreement keeping a strong French garrison: the 13th Demi-Brigade of the Foreign Legion was cut in size and never withdrawn.

How the republic balanced Issa and Afar

Britannica records that no Djiboutian leader, Afar or Somali, ever condoned union with Ethiopia or Somalia. Djibouti held to strict neutrality between them, kept friendship treaties with both, refused to support armed groups opposing either government, and hosted the talks between Somalia's and Ethiopia's leaders that produced a series of accords in 1988. During the Ogaden War some influential Issa politicians imagined a Greater Djibouti, an Issa-land running from the Red Sea to Dire Dawa, and the idea died when Somali forces were routed in Ethiopia.

At home, by 1978, the state had been through two cabinet crises, and the prime ministers removed were Afars accused of stirring ethnic strife. Barkat Gourad Hamadou, an Afar, became prime minister in 1978 and was reappointed in 1987, Gouled was elected president in 1981 and again in 1987, and ministries were shared out to keep the ethnic balance. The Rassemblement Populaire pour le Progrès, the RPP, replaced the LPAI in 1979, and opposition parties were banned in 1981, leaving it the only legal party. Britannica describes Issa predominance in the civil service, the armed forces and the party as "only slightly masked".

Balbala, the settlement outside the old wire, tripled in size within a decade of independence and was taken into the city in 1987 with a promise of water and sanitation. Djibouti was among the founding members of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development in 1986, and IGAD set up its secretariat in the city in 1996.

Why the Afar north took up arms

The year 1991 broke the arrangement. The governments of Siad Barre in Somalia and Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia fell, an influx of refugees estimated at 100,000 followed, and Ethiopian soldiers who fled across the border in May 1991 were sent back but left many of their weapons behind. In mid-1991 several opposition groups merged into the Front pour la Restauration de l'Unité et de la Démocratie, FRUD, which demanded a greater political share for the Afar and opened a guerrilla war that autumn.

How the fighting reached the capital

FRUD attacked Obock on 21 November 1991 and was beaten off, then took every military post in the north and laid siege to Tadjoura and Obock. On 18 December 1991 government troops entered Arhiba, the Afar quarter built for the dockworkers, and fired on crowds, killing at least 59 people, and Afar deputies resigned from the National Assembly in protest. By mid-1992, in Britannica's account, FRUD held some two-thirds of the country, most of it sparsely populated.

The army grew from about 5,000 men to 20,000, and a counter-offensive from 5 July 1993 took the main FRUD base at Assa-Gueyla and drove about 70,000 civilians from their homes, with another 30,000 leaving as refugees. The war also hurried a political change. A constitution approved by referendum in September 1992 allowed four legal parties for ten years, and in the assembly elections that December the RPP won all 65 seats on a turnout below half the electorate.

How the peace was signed twice

In February 1994 Ougoureh Kifleh Ahmed displaced Ahmed Dini at the head of FRUD and opened talks. The Abb'a agreement of 26 December 1994, mediated by France, put 200 FRUD representatives into the administration and 700 of its fighters into the army, and FRUD was registered as a legal party on 6 March 1996. Ahmed Dini, the republic's first prime minister, kept a radical faction fighting in the north. Gouled announced in 1999 that he would not stand again, and his nephew and chief of staff of more than twenty years, Ismail Omar Guelleh, won the April election with 74% of the vote, in the first presidential poll since independence that no group boycotted. Ahmed Dini returned from exile in Yemen in March 2000, and the final peace accord was signed on 12 May 2001.

What the port has earned since the war

Ethiopia's war with Eritrea turned Djibouti back into its harbour. With Ethiopia cut off from the Eritrean port of Assab, Djibouti by the State Department's account of 2004 handled all of Ethiopia's imports and exports, including large shipments of US food aid during the drought of 2000, and that year Jebel Ali Port Managers of Dubai took over the port's management.

The foreign garrisons multiplied around the French one. US troops arrived in 2002, at Camp Lemonnier, a former French Foreign Legion base on the edge of the city. Japan opened a base in 2011 and Italy in 2013 for the anti-piracy operations off Somalia, and China opened a naval support base near Doraleh in 2017. In 2017 the finance minister set out the yearly rents: US$65 million from the United States, US$30 million from France, US$20 million from China and just over US$3 million each from Italy and Japan.

The railway was rebuilt as well. The metre-gauge line decayed from the 1980s, and Addis Ababa had lost its rail link to the sea by 2004. Chinese state companies built an electrified standard-gauge line between 2011 and 2016, and it opened for commercial service on 1 January 2018 with 93 of its 759 km inside Djibouti. Doraleh brought a dispute of its own. DP World of Dubai had won a 30-year concession there in 2006, the government ended it by presidential decree in February 2018, and in 2020 the London Court of International Arbitration ruled the expropriation illegal.

The rules for the presidency changed twice after the war. A constitutional amendment of April 2010 abolished term limits, and one of November 2025, which also banned female genital mutilation, removed the maximum age of 75 for a candidate.