The Red Sea is salty and hot, with air so stifling, one medieval traveller wrote, that ‘it turns wine sour within 10 days’. Despite this geographical inhospitality, the vast hinterlands of the Horn of Africa, the Nile Valley and the Arabian Peninsula have for centuries been dependent on the Red Sea – known variously as Yam Suf (Sea of Reeds) in the Hebrew Old Testament, Bahr al-Hijaz (Sea of Hijaz) in Arabic, and the Mare Rubrum (Red Sea) to the Romans – for the flow of goods, people and ideas.
The port cities of the Somali coast, from Zeila to Mogadishu, were key to this medieval world of trade, but by the 19th century they had become shadows of their former glory. The opening of the Suez Canal reversed their decline. Somalis joined in with the new wave of colonial commerce in the Gulf of Aden as merchants and sailors but also as ‘protectors’ who guarded long-distance trade in exchange for tribute.
