Jijiga

Description

This book presents the history of Jijiga, a town of great strategic, commercial, political, and military significance in the Horn of Africa. The town’s history is associated immensely with the attempts of the Ethiopian government to establish a solid frontier base in the course of the incorporation of the Ogaden in 1891 and later in the process of maintaining a strong posture in the region. Its naming by the local Somalis as Laa, the shining spot, indicates that it was one of the earliest modern urban formations in the Ogaden. The book mirrors the political vicissitudes of the Horn of Africa through the prism of the social and political history of Jijiga by highlighting major events such as the fluid but momentous period of Lij Iyasu, the Ethio-Somali war of 1963, and that of 1977 with regional and international ramifications.

The book presents fresh insights into the study of center-periphery relations.

Telling of the various components of Jijiga’s history expands our understanding of frontier history. The story of Jijiga is also a narrative of how people of diverse origins and ethnic groups built a corporal urban megala culture that lent its inhabitants a distinctively Jijigan identity. By highlighting this aspect of its history, the book presents a nuanced discourse of ethnicity in the Horn of Africa. Jijiga’s unique place in the Horn of Africa offers multiple opportunities to foray into the fields of social, political, and military history. Consequently, it is an undertaking that incorporates several dimensions of interrelated phenomena within the broader compass of the history of the Ogaden and the wider environs.