The sultanate of Awsa lay in the Lower Awash Valley, in northeastern Ethiopia. It flourished during the seventeenth century, emerging out of the semi-sedentary Afar society that inhabited the Awash river delta. Until the late nineteenth century, Awsa was a major commercial centre on the route between Shewa and the Red Sea, as trade and shifting agriculture along the banks of the Awash river supported the creation of a semi-centralized polity in the middle of the fragmented Afar pastoralist landscape. The existing trading patterns were disrupted at the end of the nineteenth century, following construction of the Djibouti to Addis Ababa railway line, and the sultanate ceased to be independent soon thereafter. In 1895, Emperor Menelik marched into the lowlands and imposed a tributary relationship, although Awsa retained a considerable degree of autonomy. As a foreign observer travelling in the Awash Valley noted in 1934, ‘the country has never been effectively conquered by the Abyssinians, who are highlanders, unsuited by nature to operations in these hot and feverish lowlands'.Footnote 1 Emperor Haile Selassie marched against Awsa again in 1944. The purpose of this expedition was to punish the incumbent Sultan Mohamed Yayo, who had collaborated with the invading Italian forces in 1936. Mohamed Yayo was replaced by the young Ali Mirah Hanfare, who was granted the aristocratic title of dejazmach. Yayyo Hammadu, an Afar warlord who had assisted Ali Mirah in his struggle against Mohamed Yayo, was appointed to be the link between the central government and the sultanate with the rank of fitawrari. Footnote 2 Ali Mirah led the sultanate of Awsa from its capital Ayssa'yta until 1975. He experienced fluctuating fortunes, but did succeed in building a semi-independent enclave along the eastern border of the United States' main ally in Cold War Africa.
Scholars have undertaken extensive analyses of the remapping of the Ethiopian state in the twentieth century. Although early historians who embraced the Great Tradition theory tended to play down the role of non-highland, non-Christian, and non-cultivating components in the process of state formation, new historical narratives along subnational lines have expanded this centripetal perspective. The state of the art on the incorporation of the northeastern lowlands within the Ethiopian state after the Second World War is mostly informed by the ethnographic perspective of anthropologists and political scientists who have looked at how state intervention has shaped the social and economic landscape.Footnote 3 Recent historiography has shed light on the trajectory of the sultanate of Awsa, but this is largely based on secondary sources or oral interviews with members of the Afar ruling class.Footnote 4 There are two shortfalls to the dominant centre periphery paradigm: first, the notion of centre is usually meant in the sense of being synonymous with government or state, with scant attention being paid to the ramifications within the highland's ruling élite;Footnote 5 and second, the tendency to place the periphery at the centre of the analysis affects historical knowledge, ‘for the simple reason that each frontier has always two histories being narrated or written which spectacularly correspond to its two sides'.Footnote 6 This article seeks to fill this gap. Methodologically, it is built on primary sources collected in the archives of Ethiopia, the UK, the Italian bank Banco di Roma, the Ford Presidential Library at Ann Arbor, and the Library of the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). A cross analysis of these documents has helped with an understanding of the perspectives of the Ethiopian government, foreign diplomats, aid consultants, and the Awsa ruling class. My purpose is to move beyond a strictly centre periphery paradigm, and to look at the ‘multiple power poles that exist within, at the interface, and outside of the bureaucratic apparatus’.Footnote 7 Archival evidence shows us that the political economy of the Ethiopian empire did not develop as a result of a linear process, but rather out of the changing interaction among the various layers of government within the Ethiopian polity, private investors, and the foreign aid network. The correspondence between the Afar ruling class and its Ethiopian counterpart provides a clear illustration of the importance of local agency in the process of negotiating statehood.Footnote 8 The sultanate was not governed by a dependent local élite that bargained for autonomy in return for enforcement of the pax aethiopica; on the contrary, it protected its position by exploiting the multiple resources offered by the geopolitics of national borders and the political economy of foreign investments in land.
FRONTIERS AND EXTRAVERSION IN ETHIOPIAN HISTORY
Territorial expansion in the southern highlands and the lowlands at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries allowed Ethiopian emperors to consolidate their power by accumulating cheap agricultural labour and raw commodities to be exchanged on international markets. The variety of environmental conditions and political settings the empire encountered along this path paved the way for the emergence of a multiplicity of institutional arrangements between rulers and subjects.Footnote 9 The notion of frontier is therefore a useful heuristic device to understand the reproduction of political order in these areas.Footnote 10 The tone of ideological superiority that was embedded in the expansion oriented Christian society of the highlands tended to delegitimize local cultures and political organizations, and to turn the surrounding territories into a terra nullius that was open to lawful intrusion and settlement.Footnote 11 Turner's tidal wave frontier thesis captures the trajectory of imperial expansion into the southern highlands, which were well suited to sedentary agriculture. These areas were transformed into a settled frontier by northern soldiers (neftegna) and overlords (gultegna), who acted as a state vanguard on behalf of the Crown, performing military and administrative services in return for appropriation of the surplus produced by local peasants (gebbar).Footnote 12 Gradually, these territories were turned into k'elad regions: imperial power was consolidated through a process of land survey, measurement, and redistribution that sanctioned the interdependence between the central government and local élites for the maintenance of political and economic prerogatives.Footnote 13 Igor Kopytoff's concept of the interstitial frontier in precolonial Africa as ‘a politically open areas nestling between organized societies but internal to the larger regions in which they are found’ is a more appropriate description of the eastern and western lowlands, which were located along international borders that had been drawn up by the colonial powers at the beginning of the century.Footnote 14 Along the lines of Kopytoff's model, the Ethiopian lowland frontier was an ideal environment for the emergence of new political organizations that struggled to become centres of their own.
A harsh climate and low population density made the reproduction of the gebbar gultegna hierarchy impossible. The empire did not exercise territorial control, but claimed sovereignty through international agreements and arrangements with local chiefs as well. Ruling practices were flexible, and reflected the objective of extracting as much profit as possible without having to meet the high cost of building an effective administration. Although Weberian statecraft prescribed the imposition of the monopoly of force over a clearly defined territory inhabited by a single set of citizens, the Ethiopian empire recognized different hierarchies of subjects and adapted itself to local political organizations. In conquered areas with greater economic potential, pre-existing ruling élites that had submitted voluntarily or new political organizations arising out of recent migratory patterns were able to preserve a significant degree of autonomy in return for the payment of tributes to the Crown – it is for this reason that they were classified as k'urt gibr regions – thereby creating a direct relationship that bypassed intermediaries at the provincial level.Footnote 15 These frontiersmen were not exclusive agents of the Ethiopian empire: they were able to participate in the reproduction of state sovereignty while also entertaining covert links with powerful neighbours on the other side of the border.Footnote 16 The accumulation of political and economic resources from crossborder activities was critical to the manipulation of the extent of their subordination and the reproduction of overlapping processes of state formation at a local level.Footnote 17 The western and eastern escarpments of the early twentieth century are rich in examples of semi-independent frontier regimes that consolidated their power by shifting the tribute burden to adjacent areas, thus reproducing new frontier processes on their fringes.Footnote 18 Peripheral areas such as Gubba, Nuqara, Jigjiga, or Nekemte emerged as powerful centres in their own right, and exploited the economic opportunities that arose out of their location on the fringes of the Ethiopian empire and neighbouring colonial powers. Their fortunes were invariably linked to special arrangements with the Crown or a powerful Ras. Accordingly, a drastic regime change in Addis Ababa would often bring about their sudden fall. In this respect, the Lower Awash Valley is a meaningful case study for highlighting the continuity of specific patterns of state formation across historical periods and consolidating our understanding of the Ethiopian state as a process spanning precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial times. The administrative reforms undertaken by Haile Selassie in the 1940s, which had the purpose of creating a salaried government structure in place of the aristocracy, are usually considered to represent a watershed in the transition from a feudal monarchy to a centralized bureaucratic empire and the absorption of the k'urt gibr regions within the administrative hierarchy of the state. Nevertheless, the trajectory of the sultanate of Awsa after 1944 fits neatly within the paradigm of the Ethiopian lowland frontier regime at the beginning of the century.
What makes this case study different from earlier examples of Ethiopian frontier regimes is the economic and political setting that underpinned the insertion of Awsa into the imperial power structure. In 1960, a major British company introduced commercial agriculture into the river delta with the backing of the FAO mission in Ethiopia. The inflow of new technologies, ideas, and organizational practices by the development network and the transformation of Ayssa'yta into a global frontier for the accumulation of capital offered state and non-state actors alike the opportunity to engage in the practice of extraversion.Footnote 19 The concept of extraversion was developed by Bayart when he argued that local rulers in sub-Saharan Africa have tended ‘to compensate for their difficulties in the autonomization of their power and in intensifying the exploitation of their dependants by … mobilizing resources derived from their (possibly unequal) relationship with the external environment’.Footnote 20 The underlying argument was that the appropriation of tangible and intangible resources under the umbrella of development assistance, financial loans, foreign direct investments, and diplomatic recognition allowed the African state to reproduce itself without being obliged to face the political costs associated with levying direct taxes from its population. In this regard, Ethiopia is often treated as an exception to the rule in sub-Saharan Africa. A well entrenched system of surplus extraction in the sedentary highlands supported the creation of a centralized polity and a large army that was able to resist foreign aggression and expand the reach of the empire; however, the Lower Awash Valley case study highlights the critical role played by foreign investments and development aid in shaping the state building process in the lowlands as well as the conduct of subaltern actors who resisted the statecraft project.
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF FRONTIER GOVERNANCE
From the perspective of the Ethiopian empire after the Second World War, Awsa represented the archetype of an unruly frontier where a hostile environment inhibited the reproduction of imperial rule. The superior military power of the Ethiopian state was wasted in the harsh terrain. Military operations on the ground were not feasible between July and October because of the periodic flooding of the Awash River. The lack of a local agricultural surplus made permanent military occupation extremely difficult, and in case of need, food and water supplies for the army had to be transported across the distant supply lines of the highlands.Footnote 21 Finally, life was not easy for highland officers deployed to the lowlands. Soldiers had great difficulty carrying out their duties because of malaria and other tropical diseases.Footnote 22 Civilian officials were reluctant to accept assignments there, perceiving them as a sort of exile from the life of luxury the capital was able to offer.Footnote 23
From 1944, Awsa was characterized by two overlapping levels of power. The Ministry of the Interior was responsible for security and the management of government land, performing these duties in collaboration with the governor general of Wollo (the province), who in turn was assisted by the awrajia (subprovince) and woreda (district) governors according to their territorial jurisdiction. The prerogatives of the provincial and subprovincial administration partially overlapped with those of the Awash Valley Authority (AVA), a parastate agency created in 1960 to manage the allocation of land and water resources and the collection of land taxes in the Awash Valley. Alongside this official hierarchy was the royal house, in this case represented by the ubiquitous Special Office of the Crown Prince in Addis Ababa, Dessie, and Ayssa'yta. The heir to the throne, Asfa Wossen, also retained extensive powers in his capacity as overlord of Wollo. He granted government land to members of the aristocracy and the army, and authorized the appointment and supervision of the activities of the governor general (enderassie) and awrajia governors.Footnote 24 Asfa Wossen had the last word on the most important issues affecting the internal affairs of the province until the late 1960s, when the decision making process gradually shifted towards the office of the Ministry of the Interior and the Wollo governor general.Footnote 25
Awsa was extremely important for imperial Ethiopia in security terms. First of all, it was located at the extreme northeastern corner of a province that had a long history of resistance to Haile Selassie's rule.Footnote 26 Secondly, it was crossed by a section of the 468 kilometre-long highway that had been built by the Italians to connect Bati to the Eritrean harbour of Assab, relieving the country's external trade from dependence on the Djibouti to Addis Ababa railway. Third, Awsa bordered the French Territory of the Afar and the Issa, in which the port of Djibouti was located. Frontier governance was affected by the need to maintain unhindered access to the sea, but the pax aethiopica was threatened by interethnic conflicts over natural resources, arms smuggling, and, since the early 1960s, the growing activity of Eritrean rebels, which were labelled by Ethiopian government officials as shifta to stress their nature of common bandits.Footnote 27
When Ali Mirah came to power in 1944, Ethiopian sovereignty over the Lower Awash Valley would barely have qualified as such according to Weberian notions of statehood. Awsa was an isolated frontier outpost with no functioning surplus extraction system. Its commercial links with the highlands were limited to the occasional exchange of goats, maize, and butter at the Bati market in return for manufactured goods from Tigray and Shoa. The state was not able to claim people's labour through taxation or conscription. Political units were classified according to local balabbats, internal boundaries were not comprehensible for state officials, and the regulations on crossborder movements of people and goods to and from French Somaliland were not enforced.Footnote 28 Asfa Wossen's military advisors in the lowlands soon concluded that this state of affairs threatened the integrity of the empire. They were particularly worried about the territorial dispute with France over the frontier district of Afambo, where the French administration was seeking to impose its jurisdiction by extending colonial citizenship to local clans in return for gifts and medicines.Footnote 29 Another concern was the escalation of violence between the Afar and Issa, who were rapidly expanding into the surroundings of Awsa in search of new pastures.Footnote 30 The Issa had accumulated modern firearms during the Italian invasion and maintained privileged access to weapons through the Dire Dawa black market.Footnote 31 Their aggrandisement alarmed the Ethiopian army, the fear being that the defenceless Afar subjects would forget their allegiance to the Crown and facilitate the manoeuvres of neighbouring powers. For the military, the solution lay in the enforcement of territorial control over the lowlands and the establishment of additional garrisons along the border with French Somaliland.Footnote 32 Army officers considered the new Afar rulers to be part of the problem, not the solution. Ali Mirah and Yayyo Hammadu were accused of a lack of commitment to the border commission that had been established to resolve the dispute over Afambo. They reportedly held secret meetings with French spies and were blamed for the appropriation of public funds the government had allocated to clan chiefs along the border to secure their support. In addition, the dejazmach and the fitawrari were accused of undermining the authority of the Ethiopian empire in the Lower Awash. The two chiefs were taking land indiscriminately from followers of the late Sultan Mohamed Yayo, provoking resentment among local clans. Most importantly, they seemed not to recognize their subordinate status within the empire: they behaved as if they were ‘kings in their own right’.Footnote 33
In 1946, Asfa Wossen gave his blessing to his military advisor's proposal to revisit state governance in the river delta. Awsa was included within a larger awrajia with Bati as its capital, a woreda being then established in Ayssa'yta under the guidance of an army officer, Neggadaras Sahle.Footnote 34 The establishment of the highland administration did not change the situation significantly, however: the Ethiopian state presence across the whole river delta amounted to 13 untrained soldiers and one woreda office that lacked sufficient staff to run the day-to-day administration.Footnote 35 The Christian governors did not speak Afarigna and were forced to rely on local chiefs. In contrast, the limited success of Ethiopian rule was counterbalanced by the growing influence of the sultan, who had fled into exile along the border with French Somaliland after the appointment of Neggadaras Sahle. Ali Mirah renewed contacts with his ethnic fellows in French Somaliland and Eritrea, thereby increasing his stance as peace mediator and religious leader. He then established new links with Ethiopia's neighbours, exploiting Arab resentment over the treatment of Muslim citizens in Ethiopia to present his case before the monarchies in the Arabian Peninsula.Footnote 36
In 1953, Ali Mirah received an imperial pardon from Haile Selassie and was reinstated to his chiefdom.Footnote 37 In turn, Yayyo Hammadu was appointed as woreda governor in Ayssa'yta in place of Neggadaras Sahle, the highlands administration being confined to Bati. The reason for the restoration of the sultanate is not clearly stated in government documents, but it seemed to have been related to the growing insecurity around Ayssa'yta, since many Afar notables who collaborated with Neggadaras Sahle had been killed in unclear circumstances.Footnote 38 Another reason was the changing political configuration of the northeastern frontier. In the north, Eritrea had been incorporated as a federated entity under the sovereignty of the Ethiopian Crown in 1952, but the Federation met with opposition from large segments of the Muslim lowlands, who saw Ali Mirah as a potential ally.Footnote 39 In addition, the border dispute with France had been resolved in 1954 by a bilateral convention that placed Afambo under Ethiopian sovereignty. While we have no direct evidence, the Afar ruling house had probably regained the trust of the emperor on the border issue, since Yayyo Hammadu would later claim the governorship of Afambo in return for his role in handing over the district.Footnote 40
The institutional configuration that was the outcome of the 1953 agreement reproduced the typical political economy of the Ethiopian empire in the lowland frontier before the Second World War, the main features of which were flexibility and the maximization of profit. According to the awrajia governor in Bati, state control could be only enforced if the subprovincial security apparatus received modern military hardware and 500 soldiers, but the Crown found it more convenient to delegate law enforcement and border intelligence to Ali Mirah and Yayyo Hammadu in return for a few salary concessions.Footnote 41 In 1956, the military strength of the Awsa awrajia consisted of fifty foot soldiers with no motor vehicles or radio communications stationed in three strategic garrisons at Oranso, Millè, and Sardo with the duty to protect the all weather road from Bati to Assab.Footnote 42 Beyond the highway was a no man's land inhabited by outlaws, smugglers, and nomads who travelled across internal and international borders with impunity.Footnote 43
The arrangement between the Crown and Ali Mirah was an exception to the administrative order adopted after liberation from Italian rule, since it restored a vacuum in the territorial jurisdiction of the provincial administration. The sultanate was placed in a direct relationship with the Crown that bypassed the office of the Awsa awrajia and the governor general of Wollo. Ali Mirah had direct access to both Haile Selassie and Asfa Wossen, while Yayyo Hammadu was the de facto liaison officer between the sultanate and the governor general of Wollo. The ultra legem nature of the relationship between Ali Mirah and the Crown emerged clearly from official correspondence: the sultan ended every document with his own signature, instead of the official stamp employed by ordinary state officials, such as Yayyo Hammadu himself.Footnote 44 Another important aspect of this relationship was the imposition of a lump sum tribute in place of direct taxation: Ali Mirah levied tribute on cattle, trade, and seasonal crops in Ayssa'yta, Dubti, and Dit Bahari in his capacity as overlord and major landowner, and then delivered an annual tribute to the Special Office of the Crown Prince. Nonetheless, it should be noted that although Ali Mirah retained surplus extraction prerogatives and controlled vast tracts of land in the form of arkaytoh ardi – the land of the throne, according to the Afar customary law – Awsa did not fit narrowly within the k'urt gibr paradigm, because the territorial extension of the sultanate's land domain varied according to norms and regulations enacted by the highland ruling élite. The 1955 imperial constitution sanctioned the principle of public ownership over unsettled land devoted to pasture or shifting cultivation, a definition that potentially encompassed the whole Awash Valley, and in 1960 the Ethiopian government leased 24,000 hectares of land to the British company Mitchell Cotts Ltd, which then established the Tendaho Plantation Share Company (TPSC) joint venture with the objective of developing four cotton plantations at Dubti and Dit Bahari.Footnote 45 Another 1,000 hectares estate managed and subsidized by the TPSC was then transferred to the personal ownership of Asfa Wossen, thereby introducing a fiscal enclave of the Crown into the river delta, while additional expropriations were at times performed by the AVA to create pilot settlement schemes.Footnote 46 The correspondence between the sultan and Asfa Wossen also highlights the fact that the heir to the throne periodically recognized Ali Mirah's claims to land in the form of rist, an inheritable property right historically used in the highland society.Footnote 47
The most powerful opposition to the 1953 agreement came from the Awsa awrajia and the AVA. The reason for this was the fact that the tributary relationship between the sultanate and the Crown deprived the state administration of tax revenues and sovereign prerogatives. The approach to frontier governance advocated by the awrajia in 1956 was anything but flexible. Governor Felleke Dagne insisted that the Ethiopian empire had to impose its monopoly of power in order not to lose the allegiance of its subjects and blamed the move of the highlands administration out of Ayssa'yta, since it had led to the emigration of the Christian population and a deterioration of the cultural ties between the highlands and the lowlands. Above all, Felleke Dagne lamented the inability to check crossborder movements with French Somaliland.Footnote 48 The governor justified his position by the need to contain smuggling, but he was also implicitly denouncing the free hand of the sultan in developing autonomous relations with the French authorities without authorization from Dessie and Bati.Footnote 49 The various governors who succeeded at the head of the Awsa awrajia almost invariably sought to promote covert operations in the Lower Awash with the purpose of delegitimizing the Afar rulers and asserting their authority in the area. For instance, in 1964 the subprovincial administration released the heir of the late sultan, Habib Mohamed Yayo, from prison, and he relentlessly spread hostile propaganda against Ali Mirah, while in an exchange of letters with the Wollo governor general dated 1967, Yayyo Hammadu accused the general secretary of the Awsa awrajia of intentionally sabotaging his attempts to mediate in the dispute between Oromo tenants and Afar pastoralists.Footnote 50 The various managers who succeeded at the head of the AVA also opposed the sultanate, because its special relationship with the Crown de facto prevented the enforcement of the principle of state ownership on land and hampered the extension into the Lower Awash of the prerogatives the agency exercised in the Middle Awash Valley. Hostility materialized in repeated attempts to condemn Ali Mirah for the appropriation of government land and a strenuous lobbying activity beside the central government to thwart the sultan's petitions for state subsidies on commercial lending and agricultural inputs.Footnote 51
The highland ruling élite's approach to commercial agriculture is a useful lens through which to appreciate the different political economies of frontier governance envisaged by the Crown and the subprovincial administration. According to a dispatch from the Awsa awrajia governor in 1956, foreign investments in land were aimed at obtaining the necessary technological and managerial know how to regulate population movements, enforce administrative control, and introduce direct taxation into the Lower Awash, thereby promoting the transition of Awsa from k'urt’ gibr status into a k'elad area.Footnote 52 Furthermore, both the awrajia administration and the army relied on Mitchell Cotts to bypass the opposition of the Crown to budget allocations in favour of the security apparatus. Ethiopian soldiers stationed in Wollo took advantage of the infrastructures built by the European multinational to turn the small village of Dubti into a strategic outpost of the imperial army: Mitchell Cotts built a new airstrip that was periodically monitored by the Ethiopian Air Force and a hospital specializing in the treatment of malaria.Footnote 53 After 1965, the TPSC began to plant sorghum as a rotational crop, providing highland soldiers with a local food supply in case of long-term deployment.Footnote 54 For the Crown, foreign investments in land were a useful device for centralizing surplus extraction without having to meet the high costs associated with administrative and infrastructural development. According to the 1962 agreement signed with Mitchell Cotts, the Ethiopian government was expected to set up dams, government controlled agricultural schemes, police outposts, and woreda offices in Dubti and Ayssa'yta, but the emperor never completed the provision of the necessary budget allocations, in spite of repeated pressure from the British multinational, FAO advisors, and the British Embassy in Addis Ababa, leaving the financial burden resting entirely on the shoulders of the TPSC and the network of associated donors.Footnote 55
NEGOTIATING RESOURCES AT THE NATIONAL FRONTIER
In spite of the hostile posture of the subprovincial state administration, the deterioration of security conditions on the northeastern flank of the Ethiopian empire in the 1960s provided the sultanate with the opportunity to exploit the typical repertoires of a frontier regime, and to engage in an image management strategy aimed at bolstering its status as the Crown's key ally.Footnote 56 Ali Mirah and Yayyo Hammadu carried out undercover diplomatic operations on behalf of the imperial family in the French Territory of the Afar and the Issa, where Ethiopian interests were threatened by Somali territorial claims over the strategic port of Djibouti. The two Afar chiefs were first enrolled as informal diplomatic agents of the emperor and the crown prince in September 1958, when they were sent to the French colony to win the Afar people's support for the constitutional referendum on acceptance of the French Union. On the occasion of the 1963 local elections, they received funds from the central government to mobilize the Afar electorate in favour of the then Prime Minister Ali Aref and the Minister for Foreign Affairs Mohammed Kabil.Footnote 57 The Crown praised Ali Mirah again four years later for his role in addressing the March 1967 referendum that rejected independence for the French colony.Footnote 58
A second opportunity for resource extraction arose out of the dispute with Somalia over the Ogadeen province. Tensions between the two countries erupted into open warfare in 1964, transforming the Awsa awrajia into a strategic outpost adjacent to the Somali inhabited territories. The Ethiopian archives contain several examples of how the Afar ruling house sought to align the resource conflict between Issa and Afar to the interstate war between Ethiopia and Somalia in order to improve access to firearms. In 1966, for instance, Yayyo Hammadu reported an ongoing programme sponsored by Mogadishu to train hundreds of Issa guerrilla fighters hostile to the Crown. These irregular troops were intended to be the vanguard of a larger Somali army, which would invade the country soon thereafter. Yayyo Hammadu claimed that the duty to repel the Somali aggression lay in the hands of ‘the heroic Afar warriors', who were ready to fight for the empire if only the central government would provide rifles, bullets and machine guns.Footnote 59
Another threat to the integrity of the empire was presented by the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), an armed movement largely composed of Muslim lowlanders who were contesting the end of the federation with Eritrea. Rebels entered the Lower Awash Valley in small groups from their rear bases in Assab, carrying out hit and run attacks against transportation infrastructures and administrative outposts.Footnote 60 Ali Mirah and Yayyo Hammadu played on the difficulties faced by the Ethiopian army in the harsh environment of the lowlands to put the sultanate at the forefront of the counterinsurgency campaign.Footnote 61 The two chiefs transmitted intelligence information on rebel movements, collected food supplies from Afar clans when highlands soldiers were deployed on the ground, and, when requested to do so, mobilized hundreds of Afar irregular soldiers for the protection of bridges and roads that were beyond the power of the army.Footnote 62 The correspondence with the Crown also highlights how the two Afar chiefs appropriated the political terminology of the highland ruling élite, referring to Eritrean rebels as shifta who committed acts of banditry against Afar pastoralists.Footnote 63
Image management was critical in order to obtain tangible resources that were not immediately available in Awsa. Ali Mirah and Yayyo Hammadu were first awarded a monthly salary from the Crown in 1958, after the successful mission in the French colony.Footnote 64 In return for their role in influencing the 1963 elections, their salary was more than doubled, and the sultanate was allowed to take control of the imperial prisons in Ayssa'yta.Footnote 65 Following the 1967 mission, Ali Mirah was invested by the emperor with the aristocratic title of bitwoded – the highest title ever granted to a Muslim during Haile Selassie's rule – a further salary increase, and the authority to represent all the Afar clans in the Awsa awrajia and the Middle Awash Valley.Footnote 66 Yayyo Hammadu in turn was promoted to the rank of dejazmach and deputy governor of the Awsa awrajia. Footnote 67 The Ethiopian government's interest in the political situation in French Somaliland was also manipulated in an attempt to achieve the ambitious project of unifying all the Afar peoples in the Horn of Africa under the flag of the sultanate, as evident from a number of telegrams to Haile Selassie, in which Yayyo Hammadu repeatedly stressed the attachment of the Afar people in the French colony to their Ethiopian motherland and his commitment to accomplish ‘Your Majesty's vision for the unity of all Adals'.Footnote 68 The security discourse used in relation to the Somali conflict and the ELF insurgency was useful for obtaining modern weaponry. In the late 1950s, the sultanate's arsenal consisted of a few dozen old rifles imported from Yemen, but by 1967 it had increased to hundreds of modern rifles and some machine guns from the arsenal of the imperial army, which put the sultan in the position of being able to promote a successful counteroffensive against the Somali Issa.Footnote 69 All these assets were critical to the consolidation of the internal position of the sultanate in the eyes of its subjects. A telegram from the Awsa awrajia confirms that in 1966 Ali Mirah had overcome his past difficulties, and had been accepted by the local Afar society as the legitimate ruler of Awsa.Footnote 70
The conduct of the sultanate towards the ELF and the French authorities is nonetheless symbolic of the ambivalence with which Ali Mirah carefully balanced his allegiance among powerful state and nonstate neighbours. Although the sultan professed his undying commitment to the Ethiopian empire, he had independent contacts with the French government, with which he collaborated on both border matters and internal affairs, and often crossed the border to rally support among his ethnic fellows in French Somaliland without informing higher authorities in the highlands.Footnote 71 Ali Mirah was also careful not to alienate the sympathy of Eritrean armed factions, whose military strength overshadowed his personal army. The sultan had provided undercover assistance to the Eritrean Liberation Movement since its foundation in 1958, and he continued this policy with the ELF.Footnote 72 Support took the form of money and weapons, but the archival documents also suggest that he allowed the rebels to retreat safely to Assab while his militia was in charge of military operations.Footnote 73
NEGOTIATING SOVEREIGNTY AT THE CAPITALIST FRONTIER
The introduction of cash crop agriculture in the river delta in 1961 represented something of a watershed for Ali Mirah, even if the political economy of cotton agriculture originally developed by British investors and the FAO mission was a blatant attack on the sultanate's prerogatives. The UN agency demonstrated distaste for the pastoralist economy of the Awash Valley, which contrasted with the ideal order of the sedentary highlands inhabited by ‘highly civilized peoples with a social organization fairly well developed around the parish church and the local administration’.Footnote 74 As much as the Awsa awrajia governors and the AVA managers, the FAO experts believed that the Ethiopian government should survey the area, turn Afar pastoralists into sedentary farmers, and replace customary authorities in the management of natural resources and the collection of land taxes.Footnote 75 The British company shared the same perspective: not only did Mitchell Cotts's management impose a precondition for investment during the initial rounds of negotiations that the AVA should be vested with land allocation prerogatives in the river delta, but it also exploited its connections with the Foreign Office to obtain signature of a bilateral concession loan from the UK government in 1964 with the objective of financing the establishment of a system of agricultural schemes and compulsory marketing cooperatives managed by the AVA at Dubti and Ayssa'yta.Footnote 76 The reason for this was that the TPSC was aiming to obtain access to the fertile plains around Ayssa'yta, where water was abundant and the land was deemed as more fertile.Footnote 77 British experts also considered state managed agricultural schemes to be essential to coordination of the immigration of smallholders from the highlands and an increase in the supply of raw material for the TPSC cotton gin at Dubti.Footnote 78
Notwithstanding difficult relations with the farenji, Ali Mirah turned the new economic setting to his own advantage. The impressive demographic growth experienced in the Wollo highlands in the previous decade offered to the sultan the opportunity to bypass the labour bottleneck that had historically affected the lowlands and to inaugurate his own outgrower scheme in Ayssa'yta in 1962. Gradually, Ali Mirah built up a complex administrative structure to manage land allocation and surplus extraction, inviting highland farmers to grow cotton under his overlordship and entitling local Afar clans to sharecropping according to their customary land possession.Footnote 79 Ali Mirah's expansion was tacitly supported by the crown prince in return for payment of an increasing tribute, but Mitchell Cotts looked with favour on the sultan's initiative, too: in 1967, his farms accounted for 28 per cent of the raw materials processed by TPSC's gin, compared with the negligible 3 per cent provided by the AVA.Footnote 80 The main problem for Ali Mirah was that the agricultural scheme in Ayssa'yta depended on erratic rainfall and labour intensive techniques. Good harvest years might be followed by less successful ones, but investments in irrigation canals, tractors, and fertilizers were thwarted by the hostile posture of the AVA. The chance to overcome the credit crunch materialized when the British management decided that instead of spending the UK loan being negotiated for the proposed AVA agricultural scheme at Dubti, it was better to rely on the sultan's outgrower scheme and concentrate bilateral aid on expansion of a second TPSC plantation at Dit Bahari.Footnote 81 The shift in Mitchell Cotts's business strategy was a turning point in the sultanate's trajectory: the British management in London convinced the Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) to abandon the former project proposal, thereby depriving the AVA of external financial support to enforce its claims to the natural resources of the river delta, and then exploited its international connections to provide Ali Mirah with economic subsidies which were not available internally.Footnote 82 The broker of this financial alliance was the Addis Ababa Bank, an Anglo Ethiopian bank of which Grindley's Bank was a 49 per cent shareholder and the de facto controller through a management agreement.Footnote 83 The Addis Ababa Bank opened a new branch in Ayssa'yta in 1968, and eventually provided the sultanate with the capital necessary to purchase modern inputs, expand production, and obtain a significant source of income independently from the Crown.Footnote 84
The aforementioned partnership with the sultan did not prevent the TPSC from attempting to comply with the terms of the 1962 agreement authorizing the construction of two additional plantations, but realization of the business plan depended on the release of an ODA loan for the construction of a dam at Tendaho in order to redirect the Awash River water flow from the sultanate's farms in the river delta to the envisaged plantation site.Footnote 85 For the project to be successful, however, the TPSC had first to deal with the insecurity on the ground, whereas displaced Afar pastoralists were increasingly crossing the plantation's fences to feed their cattle and clashing with immigrant farmers in the surrounding of Dubti.Footnote 86 The security issue became dominant in June 1971 when the Awsa awrajia governor, in an attempt to reassert the authority of his office in the lowland, fuelled a major armed confrontation between the local Afar and Oromo farmers that only ended after the intervention by the Ethiopian Special Forces.Footnote 87 The subprovincial governor sought to exploit the incident to obtain financial support from Mitchell Cotts for the deployment of a permanent police division in the river delta, but he did not succeed.Footnote 88 On the contrary, the investigation led by the UK diplomats in the lowlands in the months that followed offered Ali Mirah the opportunity to bypass the central authorities in Addis Ababa and directly engage with the network of foreign donors. The tone of the conversations he held with Western officials in 1971 is an illustration of his attempt to frame his relationship with foreign investors, diplomats, and consultants according to their own priorities. If the farenji wanted state authority, he would show that the sultanate had the requisites to reproduce it. During a meeting with the FAO extension officer, Ali Mirah represented the sultanate as a modern bureaucratic entity, introducing his closest collaborators as ministers in order to show that he was not merely a backward traditional leader, while his meeting with the envoys from the Foreign Office offered an occasion to express his opposition to the Tendaho dam, while at the same time giving assurances of his commitment to protect the TPSC and provide every assistance to the ODA consultants who would arrive in Ayssa'yta a few months later for a feasibility study of the area.Footnote 89 The British diplomats were impressed by the sultan, and came to the conclusion that the TPSC should agree on terms with him.Footnote 90 Mitchell Cotts's management and the UK government behaved accordingly: the ODA expert suggested postponing construction of the Tendaho dam, as requested by Ali Mirah, and the TPSC de facto gave up its residual claims to natural resources in the river delta, shifting its core business from primary production to processing, and agreed to provide irrigation and technical assistance to the sultanate for the creation of another outgrower scheme at the northeastern end of the Dubti plantation, in the same area claimed by the AVA since 1964.Footnote 91 The expansion at the expense of the AVA allowed Ali Mirah to impose de facto his monopoly of the supply of raw cotton on the TPSC's gin at Dubti and shift the tribute burden to the British investors, since he could set a higher price than the one that had been applied up to 1971.Footnote 92
APOTHEOSIS AND FALL
The partnership with the TPSC and the economic wealth he accumulated from cotton farming allowed Ali Mirah to strengthen his sovereign claims to the Lower Awash. The sultan first turned to the network of bilateral and multilateral donors that supported the TPSC project to secure international recognition for himself. The meeting with British diplomats in 1971 presented an occasion to demonstrate the Sultanate's pro-Western position in the realm of foreign policy: Ali Mirah remarked on his opposition to communism, his long-standing friendship with Saudi Arabia, and his backing for the UK government.Footnote 93 One year later, he travelled to Great Britain and then on to the United States at the invitation of the State Department, arranging contracts with foreign export companies without the intermediation of the Ministry of Commerce or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.Footnote 94 His diplomacy bore fruit: the ODA and FAO consultants sent to Ayssa'yta in 1972 and 1973 no longer called on the Ethiopian government to support the AVA, but openly stressed the need to include the Sultanate in the management of land and water resources in the river delta.Footnote 95 Similarly, the World Bank advisor working on the AVA settlement schemes recognized the sultanate ‘as a permanent institution to find an accommodation with’.Footnote 96 On the internal front, Ali Mirah was no longer influenced by the pro-Ethiopian Yayyo Hammadu, with whom relations had worsened dramatically since the Ayssa'yta riots, and had another powerful ally in the new Wollo governor general, with whom he had recently reached an accommodation for the establishment of a tax office in Ayssa'yta.Footnote 97 The arrangement with the Wollo governor general protected the sultan from the AVA general manager's attempt to imprison him for appropriating government land: Ali Mirah could now afford to expand the farming area under his overlordship and challenge the jurisdiction of the AVA well beyond the historical core of the sultanate, establishing new cotton schemes in the Middle Awash in return for payment of compensation to local Afar clans.Footnote 98 What is more, he was no longer dependent on Addis Ababa for military supplies, because he was in a position to reinvest the considerable proceeds from cotton in the creation of a powerful army. Modern weapons were purchased from Eritrea and French Somaliland without any intermediation on the part of the Ministry of Defence, while displaced Afar pastoralists from Wollo, Shoa, Harar, and French Somaliland offered a sizeable source of military manpower. When the Ethiopian revolution began in 1974, the sultan controlled a 2,000-strong militia trained by Eritrean advisors and equipped with thousands of modern rifles and machineguns, whose potential overshadowed the military power of the ill trained Wollo provincial army.Footnote 99
The civil and military unrest that followed the outbreak of the Ethiopian revolution in February 1974 gave to Ali Mirah the opportunity to bargain his support for the parties involved in the power struggle at the centre in return for formalization of his territorial claims to the Afar lowlands. In April, the recently created association of Afar landlords, elders, and students in Addis Ababa despatched a letter of protest to the new Ethiopian government asking for recognition of customary Afar rights to the Awash Basin's natural resources and the imprisonment of the AVA general manager, who had backed enforcement of state ownership of land.Footnote 100 A few days later, Ali Mirah's son sent a similar allegation letter to the Ministry of the Interior in which he blamed the AVA manager, while the sultan wrote to the emperor stressing the support of the Afar people to his majesty.Footnote 101 Unfortunately for Ali Mirah, Haile Selassie was deposed in September by the Provisional Military Administrative Council, a military junta commonly known by its Amharic name ‘Derg’. A few months later, the Solomonic empire was replaced by a socialist republic under the nationalistic motto ‘Ethiopia first’, and, in February 1975, the Derg proclaimed the nationalization of foreign assets and land.
Awsa became the catalyst for Afar resistance to the Derg in August 1974, when a group of Afar notables, coordinated by Ali Mirah's son, founded the Afar Liberation Front (ALF). Security agents in Harar and Shoa reported of Afar individuals from the Ethiopian police joining the sultan's militia in Ayssa'yta with their weapons.Footnote 102 The Afar army worried the awrajia administration to such a degree that the awrajia governor called on the new governor general of Wollo to remove Ali Mirah.Footnote 103 The sultan reacted to these accusations with the same strategy he had successfully used with the Crown up to that time: he contacted the governor general in Dessie, stressing his undying commitment to the integrity of the Ethiopian state and his adherence to the Derg's programme. Once again, Ali Mirah gave proof of his diplomatic skills by appropriating the political terminology of the new Ethiopian rulers: instead of using the seal that was usually employed in correspondence with the emperor, he concluded the letter with the revolutionary slogan ‘Ethiopia first’.Footnote 104 In the meantime, Ali Mirah's son instigated correspondence with the minister of the interior in which he blamed Habib Mohamed Yayo for the accusations made against his father: in his view, Habib was responsible for both the creation of an anti-Derg militia trained by Eritrean rebels and spreading anti-Ethiopian propaganda among the Afar in French Somaliland.Footnote 105 Deceit was a useful device for obtaining the temporary trust of the provincial administration and gaining more time before direct confrontation.Footnote 106 A month later, Ali Mirah was knocking at the door of the American Embassy for military assistance, but Cold War constraints were working against the sultanate: the US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger did not wish to place additional strain on his country's relationship with the new Ethiopian government, and recommended that the American Embassy cut off all contact with the sultan.Footnote 107
On 2 June, Ali Mirah was invited to a meeting with Derg officials in Addis Ababa, but he did not attend; instead, he fled in secret to Djibouti with the collaboration of the French authorities and then moved to Saudi Arabia, where he remained in exile until 1991.Footnote 108 When the Afar army in the Lower Awash rose up, the Derg sent a military expedition to disband the insurgents, and appointed Habib Mohammed Yayo as head of a counterinsurgency militia made up of loyal Afar followers. Military resistance in the Lower Awash would last for several months, and when the Derg did succeed in bringing peace to Awsa, new police divisions were permanently deployed in the lowlands to guard the recently created state-owned farms and government-controlled settlement schemes.
CONCLUSION
The case of the sultanate of Awsa highlights the historicity of the process of state formation in the Ethiopian lowlands across different historical periods. Ali Mirah built up a powerful Muslim polity on the eastern fringes of the Christian empire of Ethiopia and escaped domination from the provincial and subprovincial administration by exploiting the typical repertoires of the frontier regime: he played stronger state and nonstate neighbours against each other and manipulated local events in order to represent them as conforming to the fears and expectations of the empire, with the purpose of obtaining protection from the Crown against the intermediate levels of government. Ali Mirah was also able to draw from different sources of political legitimacy: he preserved autonomy by adapting to the political rituals and regulations of the highlands, but then used his resulting economic wealth to consolidate the traditional Afar structure by both supporting the recognition of customary Afar right on land and enrolling local clan militias into his own army. The sultan was as effective as Hamdan of Gubba in asserting a semi-independent chiefdom on the edges of the empire, and far more successful than Al Imam of Nuqara or Abdullah Tahir of Jigjiga were. What is more striking is that Ali Mirah succeeded in his quest at a time when former semi-independent enclaves in other parts of the country had been absorbed within the administrative hierarchy of the Ethiopian state.
Achievement of sovereign prerogatives would not have been possible without the complicity of the Crown, which reactivated the typical tributary arrangements that had been used at the beginning of the twentieth century to centralize surplus extraction. For Haile Selassie and Asfa Wossen, the economic initiatives of the sultan could be tolerated as long as they were instrumental in increasing trade revenues, since cotton was being processed in Dubti by foreign investors who could be easily controlled and with whom the imperial family maintained close links. Nevertheless, archival documents reveal that the various power poles within the highland ruling élite had different visions of how relations with the sultanate should be managed. While the political economy of the Crown was flexible and profit oriented, civil and military servants in the AVA and the Awsa awrajia almost invariably saw themselves as the vanguard of the pax aethiopica in the unruly lowlands, and looked on the Lower Awash as a wild area that needed to be civilized at all costs by imposition of the political order of the highlands. This dichotomy reinforces the hypothesis that the more frontier governance on the eastern escarpment was delegated to the lower levels of government within the highland ruling class, and the more these levels of government were effectively empowered to impose their own agenda, the more the encounter between the Ethiopian administration and local societies reproduced the tidal frontier trajectory experienced elsewhere.Footnote 109
The trajectory of the sultanate of Awsa cannot be considered in isolation from the political economy of foreign investors and international donors. By defining the Lower Awash as an institutional vacuum open to legitimate intrusion on the part of state agencies, the public private development network contributed towards reinforcing the narrative of the unruly frontier, and provided the subprovincial levels of government with the administrative and technological skills to expand the exercise of bureaucratic state power and make agricultural development synonymous with state building, in the sense of ‘a conscious effort at creating an apparatus of control.Footnote 110 Extraversion also worked the other way round, however: once Ali Mirah proved to be more effective than the Ethiopian bureaucracy at enforcing security and supervising cotton production, he was rewarded with tangible and intangible resources that transformed the sultanate into a de facto state entity with independent access to international capital and foreign assistance. It was by acting as a broker in the process of integration between local agricultural production and global commodity markets that Ali Mirah succeeded in expanding the territorial extension and internal revenues of the sultanate, and eventually became the vanguard of an Afar national project that challenged colonial and postcolonial boundaries. Although it is not the intention of this article to enter into an analysis of the present day, one might go further and argue that the current wave of foreign investments in land might pave the way for the emergence of new frontier regimes along the edges of the contemporary Ethiopian state, thereby reproducing a trajectory that can be traced over several centuries.
