Word: somalilands
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Less than 30 years ago, Aden Abdullah Osman was a houseboy for a minor Italian official in Italian Somaliland, a barren land on Africa's bulging eastern coast. Last week Aden Abdullah, now prematurely grey, rode through the streets of Mogadishu, the capital, past cheering crowds and saluting soldiers, to become the chairman of Somaliland's first elected Parliament and the leader of a new nation...
Aden Abdullah's rise from houseboy is typical of the changes that are taking place in Somaliland, a territory larger than Italy but with fewer people than Rome. When the British in World War II drove out the Italians who had ruled it since 1892, they found a backward, incredibly poor land populated chiefly by spear-carrying nomadic tribesmen. They seized every scrap of the country's machinery for reparations and tore up its only railroad...
...Blaring from loudspeakers in cafes and hovels throughout the Middle East, it is for a vast number of illiterate Arabs the only news they get. By relay stations up the Nile, it also aims at all Africa, beaming broadcasts in Swahili to Kenya (where it supported the Mau Mau), Somaliland and Uganda. Explained the Voice: "Egypt's geographical position requires her to work for the liberation of the African continent from all forms of imperialism." It helped get Glubb fired in Jordan, is now at work urging Arabs in Zanzibar to refuse a British offer of self-government. Nasser...
...Viceroy. Graziani was a natural for the campaign in Ethiopia. Laughingly he asked Mussolini whether he wanted Ethiopia with or without Ethiopians, and Mussolini replied that the task was to carry "Roman civilization" to East Africa. From Italian Somaliland he rode into Ethiopia at the head of an army of 60,000 men, a strapping figure in his desert uniform, wearing a monocle. His "Hell on Wheels" offensive bogged down. Finally, by liberal use of poison gas and bombs, he scattered Ras Desta's barefooted Ethiopians, and on horseback at the head of his troops he entered the village...
...Ismay was born in India, and raised to be a soldier. After Sandhurst, he served in the Punjab, and in World War I successfully led a camel corps in Somaliland against the fanatical forces of the "Mad Mullah" Mohammed Ibn Abdullah. Churchill first saw and admired Ismay during England's near-revolutionary general strike in 1926. Ismay, then on the Imperial Defense Committee, called out the territorial army to help put the strike down. Churchill signaled him to his side when he became Prime Minister...