This is a brief designed to locate all the fuses under nearly all the explosive checkpoints, surrounding the chokepoint of grief, called Bab al-Mandab.
Tamer Mansour
Bab al-Mandab, often rendered “Gate of Lamentation,” is about 30 kilometres wide at its narrowest, split in two by the island of Perim, with Yemen on one shore and Djibouti and Eritrea on the other. Through it runs the traffic between the Indian Ocean and Suez, a corridor that Egypt’s own government puts at around 12% of world seaborne trade. Whoever can menace that gate can tax, bargain with, or blackmail everybody else. That is why so many have tried, and why the record of who actually owned it is so thin.
Bab el-Mandeb is called the Gate of Lamentation not because of geography, but because of the habit of empires to pay for entry
This first part of this series is a necessary backward dive into a timeline that runs from antiquity to the collapse of the Ethiopian Derg, which will seek the historical keys to today’s geopolitical setting of Bab al-Mandab. The second brings the story to this month’s headlines, which would look a lot less like breaking news once you have seen how old the script is.
Aksum crosses the water
We do not need to start with the Pharaohs, nor with Roman merchants reading the Red Sea like a price list. The first solid entry in the ledger is the Kingdom of Aksum. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a Greek merchant’s handbook from the 1st century CE, describes Adulis as Aksum’s port, busy with traders from Egypt and Arabia. By the sixth century the kingdom, enriched as the middleman between Rome and India, was strong enough to cross the water. King Kaleb (r. 514-542) invaded the Himyarite kingdom in Yemen between 518 and 525, urged on, by the Byzantine account, by Emperor Justin I, to end the persecution of Christians under the Jewish king Dhu Nuwas.
Holy war? Byzantine-Persian proxy contest? A quarrel over who taxed the India trade? Historians still argue, and the honest answer is “yes.” Aksum’s grip on southern Arabia did not last: Abraha displaced its appointee, Persian and later Muslim power reshaped the sea, Rome declined, and by the seventh century Aksum had stopped minting coins.
Solomon, Sheba, and a very useful family tree
Every great empire commissions a genealogy, and Ethiopia’s is the most famous. In the fourteenth century, the Kebra Nagast relates the story of the Queen of Sheba’s son by Solomon, Menelik I, and his bringing of the Ark of the Covenant to Aksum. The Solomonic dynasty, which claimed descent from that child, was “restored” in 1270 by Yekuno Amlak, who threw out the Zagwe. Modern scholarship sees it as a legitimising document written for the rise of that dynasty, and finds no historical evidence for the lineage.
Two clarifications for anyone tempted to read this as a purely Tigrayan story. First, it was the imperial tradition of Ethiopia as a whole: the dynasty had Tigrean, Gojjam and Shewan branches, and Menelik II came from Shewa. Second, Tigray’s own claim to legitimacy runs through Aksum itself, the ancient Red Sea power. That matters because for the highland elites who inherited these stories, the sea was never a novelty. It was a lost inheritance.
And note the irony, which no scriptwriter would dare: scholars commonly place biblical Sheba in South Arabia, on the far side of the very strait we are discussing. The founding myth of Ethiopian kingship is, at bottom, a story about crossing the Red Sea.
Cannons, coffee, and a failed Portuguese gambit
The Portuguese arrived to strangle the Red Sea spice route to Cairo and Venice. In 1513 Afonso de Albuquerque sailed for Aden with twenty ships and some 1,700 Portuguese soldiers, hoping to command the “straits of Mecca,” and punch the Mamluks. The scaling ladders broke under the weight of eager soldiers, the assault failed and Albuquerque later admitted he might have made a different choice “if I had reconnoitred Aden first.”
For without a base at the mouth of the Red Sea Lisbon could never impose her monopoly. The Mamluks responded by invading the Tihamah coast of Yemen, but were defeated by the Ottomans in 1517, who captured Aden in 1538 under Hadim Suleyman Pasha (the exact sequence is disputed). But the empire that kept Portugal out of the Red Sea was Ottoman, not European.
But the deeper lesson was Yemen itself. As the historian Jane Hathaway observes, its mountains and tribal divisions made it virtually impossible for one imperial power to master. Zaydi highlanders declared jihad on the Ottomans in 1566, and by 1635-36 the Qasimi imams, a Zaydi dynasty, had expelled them, despite a large Egyptian force fighting on the Ottoman side. The imams then prospered on coffee shipped through the port of Mocha.
The Dutch were there from 1616, when Pieter van den Broecke tried, unsuccessfully, to establish a permanent trading post; the same year, the Dutch smuggled a coffee plant out of Yemen. English, Dutch and French East India companies all kept houses at Mocha. They traded through the strait and never ruled it. Even the famous European appetite for “mocha” was a sideshow: by one estimate only about an eighth of the coffee leaving the port went to Europe, with the bulk heading to Ottoman lands, Persia and Mughal India. The Red Sea’s customers were mostly other Asians and Africans, a detail the Eurocentric version of this story conveniently loses.
Steam, Suez, and the scramble
The steamship changed the arithmetic. In 1839, Britain captured Aden. The East India Company had occupied Perim for a brief time in 1799 while Napoleon was in Egypt, but it pulled back after half a year. In 1857, Britain formally annexed the island and set up a lighthouse in 1861. Meanwhile, in 1862, France signed a treaty with the Afar rulers of Obock to get a coaling station as well as stop purchasing coal from the British at Aden.
Then came Suez, which made the strait a true chokepoint in 1869.
That same year an Italian shipping company, Rubattino, bought Assab Bay. The Italian state formally took it over in 1882, and in 1885 Italy landed at Massawa, encouraged by a Britain that wanted a counterweight to France. Emperor Yohannes IV and Ras Alula, defending the northern Tigrayan frontier, felt betrayed by London. Italy declared the colony of Eritrea in 1890.
Unsurprisingly, the first great-power foothold on the Eritrean coast was, in effect, a shipping company’s invoice.
Menelik, Adwa, and the coast that got away
Yohannes IV was killed fighting the Sudanese Mahdists at Gallabat in March 1889 and Menelik II of Shewa became emperor. That May, his Treaty of Wuchale with Italy existed in Amharic and Italian versions that disagreed on whether Ethiopia had accepted an Italian protectorate, and Menelik repudiated it in 1891. He responded to the ensuing invasion on March 1, 1896, at Adwa where Ethiopian forces defeated the Italian army and maintained the independence of the empire.
But Adwa won a country, not a coastline. Italy kept Eritrea. Ethiopia’s access to the sea ran through French-held Djibouti, on a railway begun in the late 1890s.
The pattern was set: an empire whose power lay in the highlands, and a sea whose ports were held by somebody else.
There is a Tigrayan footnote worth keeping. Tigrayan accounts stress that the northern frontier under Yohannes IV and Ras Alula bore the first, costly resistance to Italian advance from the coast, and Tigrayan commanders, Ras Alula and Ras Mengesha Yohannes among them, also helped run the intelligence and the fighting at Adwa itself. Yet, the victory became Menelik’s story.
The rivalry between a Shewan centre and a Tigrayan north, each convinced it had saved Ethiopia, runs straight through the twentieth century and into the present.
Haile Selassie: sovereignty for me, federation for thee
Italy occupied Ethiopia from 1936 to 1941, and Britain administered Eritrea until 1952. Under UN Resolution 390 (V) of December 1950, Eritrea was federated with Ethiopia as an autonomous unit under the Ethiopian crown, an arrangement Eritrean accounts describe as largely driven by American sponsorship.
A case study hosted by the US Defense Department likewise ties it to Cold War strategic interests. Haile Selassie gutted the federation, then in November 1962 dissolved Eritrea’s parliament and annexed it as a province. The armed struggle had already begun in September 1961.
The empire built a navy around its new coast: headquarters at Massawa, a station at Assab, another on the Dahlak Islands, with Norwegian officers as trainers. And it found a partner in non-other than a teenage Israel.
In 1963, leaders Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin traveled to the region, with Peres making a notable comment about the Blue Nile being “where the lifeblood of Egypt begins.” From the year 1966 to 1973, several Israeli military officers provided advice on the Eritrean war. In the opinion of Israel, this war was considered part of the larger picture within the Arab-Israeli conflict since the Eritrean Liberation Front was allegedly connected with the PLO after 1967.
Emperor Haile Selassie, similarly, reached out to Israel for help to fight against Somalia and the Ogaden rebels and expressed his opinion about Somali nationalism as a consequence of Nasserism during his meeting with Moshe Dayan.
The logic on both sides was simple and geographic: Israel’s southern port, Eilat, depended on a sea whose gates were held by others, and Ethiopia wanted a patron who shared its map of enemies.
Egypt’s closure of the Straits of Tiran was one of the causes of the 1967 war. Britain left Aden that same year and Perim passed to South Yemen. In October 1973, Egyptian ships coordinated with South Yemen to blockade Israel-bound traffic through Bab al-Mandab.
The first modern demonstration that two shores acting together could close the gate, and that neither could do it alone.
The Derg, the Soviets, and the lost coast
The alleged Solomonic line was broken with the deposition of Haile Selassie in September 1974. During the Ogaden War of 1977-78, the Ethiopian navy shifted its allegiance to Moscow after the Derg’s appointment in Ethiopia. This was a clear indication of how easily states changed loyalty in the geopolitics of this region during the Cold War when the Soviet Union began its support to Ethiopia instead of Somalia.
Meanwhile, to the north, the EPLF and TPLF, led by a young Meles Zenawi, fought against the Derg on two different fronts.
However, the supposed partnership between the two movements was not as smooth as it may seem in history. Their relationships altered severely during the course of the conflict, and their ideologies diverged drastically during the second half of the 1980
In 1991, the EPLF took Asmara; Eritrea achieved de facto independence in that year and de jure independence after the UN-monitored referendum in 1993.
Ethiopia, the Red Sea’s oldest African power, became landlocked.
A key aspect to highlight is that the transitional government in Addis Ababa, which is under the control of the TPLF, accepted the referendum. Thirty years later, that has turned into an issue of grievance used against Tigray since nationalists in Ethiopia hold the TPLF accountable for taking the country inland and away from the coastline.
This was a brief designed to locate all the fuses under nearly all the explosive checkpoints, surrounding the chokepoint of grief, called Bab al-Mandab.
To be continued in Part II …
Tamer Mansour, Egyptian Independent Writer & Researcher
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