Word: harar
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Cupped in hills, just a mottled dun patch from the air, lies Harar, Ethiopia's second city. After miles of rocks and dust elaborated only by anthills and scrub, after more miles of hills ugly with boulders and cactus, Harar is a welcome sight. It is an ancient city state, founded by Arabs From across the Red Sea, rich in a peculiar hybrid culture expressed at one extreme by thatched roofs decorated at their pinnacles with bright enameled chamber pots, at the opposite extreme by minarets of the rigid Moslem faith. It is a community of ruinous houses girdled...
Wherever three or four women squat beside piles of grain and peppers, there is Harar's market place. Before the town's Law Courts there is a constant babel of dissatisfied litigants. In five minutes on any street one may see an Armenian fighting with a Hindu; an Abyssinian woman with her simian face smeared with rancid butter to keep vermin away; an old bishop who knew the strange, sad, lame poet-adventurer Rimbaud, France's Byron, when he lived in Harar; a beautiful, brown-skinned, high-breasted Harari woman carrying a load of wood...
...special fever last week were the Italian soldiers stationed in Harar. For the city had become the next British objective...
Early last week the South African and British column pushing up from Italian Somaliland approached Giggiga, 50 miles east of Harar. Its supply lines were then about 600 miles long, and were potentially threatened from the east by Italians garrisoning British Somaliland, which the Italians occupied last summer. The threat was removed at the strategic moment by a British naval force which appeared off Berbera, British Somaliland's capital and main port, one midnight, and landed men and machines in two places near the town. By 9:30 a.m. they had taken it. They pushed inland at once...
...soon as that column got word that British Somaliland was British again, it captured Giggiga, a nondescript one-square town of tin-and straw-roofed houses. From there the troops pushed on for Harar. Soon they reached trouble. Between Giggiga and Harar lies some grim hill country. There the motor road turns and digs through narrow denies, and the hills, with their boulders and scrub, afford plenty of cover for defenders. It is the sort of country where a handful ought to be able to hold off an army...