The history of Djibouti

Djibouti is a small, hot and largely arid country on the Bab-el-Mandeb, the strait where the Red Sea meets the Gulf of Aden. Its two main peoples, the Afar in the north and west and the Issa, a Somali clan, in the south, were for centuries pastoral nomads whose coasts belonged to the trading world of the Red Sea, Arabia and the Ethiopian highlands. Medieval Muslim sultanates based on the nearby port of Zeila fought long wars with Christian Ethiopia. France acquired Obock in 1862 and built the port and railway that made Djibouti the sea outlet of Ethiopia, and held the territory until independence in 1977. Since then the country has been ruled by two presidents, Hassan Gouled Aptidon and his nephew Ismaïl Omar Guelleh, and has turned its strategic position into an economy of ports and foreign military bases.

The Afar depression, which runs through the west of Djibouti, is part of the great rift system in which some of the oldest human ancestors have been found, and the narrow strait has long been considered a likely crossing point for early humans leaving Africa. Within Djibouti itself, sites around Lake Abbe and the Gobaad plain have yielded stone tools and fossil animal remains, and Acheulean hand axes have been found at Gombourta.

Several thousand years ago the climate was wetter than today, and lakes such as Abbe and Assal were larger. Around 2000 BCE herders at sites such as Asa Koma and Wakrita kept cattle and made pottery, the oldest evidence of herding in the region, and obsidian tools at Handoga show early pastoral communities. As the land dried, nomadic herding of goats, sheep and later camels became the main way of life. Rock engravings at Balho and Dorra show antelopes and giraffes, and later camels.

The coasts of Djibouti and its neighbours are widely thought to have formed part of Punt, the land of incense, ebony and gold that ancient Egypt reached by sea from the 25th century BCE. The best-known voyage was sent by Hatshepsut around 1470 BCE and is carved on the walls of her temple at Deir el-Bahari, which name the Puntite king Parahu and his queen Ati. The Afar and Somali languages belong to the Cushitic branch of the Afroasiatic family, and their speakers had probably lived in the region for millennia. In late antiquity the Kingdom of Aksum dominated the Red Sea trade from the highlands of Ethiopia and Eritrea, though how far its authority reached into Djibouti is uncertain.

Islam reached the Horn of Africa very early, carried by traders across the narrow sea from Arabia within a generation of the hijra of Muhammad in 622. The port of Zeila, just beyond Djibouti's south-eastern border in today's Somaliland, became the main Muslim trading town of the region, and by the late ninth century Arab geographers described Muslim communities along the coast.

From the late 13th century the Walashma dynasty built the Sultanate of Ifat, which in 1285 conquered the Muslim state of Shewa in the Ethiopian highlands and drew on the ports of the Gulf of Tadjoura and Zeila. Ifat's long rivalry with the Solomonic emperors of Ethiopia ended in defeat by Emperor Amda Seyon in 1332 and, decades later, its destruction. Its rulers fled to Yemen and returned in 1415 under Sabr ad-Din III to found the Adal Sultanate, with its capital first at Dakkar and from 1520 at Harar. Afar and Somali warriors made up much of its army.

Adal's greatest leader, Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, known in Ethiopia as Gragn, "the left-handed", defeated the Ethiopian army at Shimbra Kure in 1529 and for over a decade occupied much of the highlands, using firearms obtained through the Ottoman Empire. Ethiopia survived with the help of a small Portuguese force, and the imam was killed at Wayna Daga in 1543. Exhausted by the war and by the northward migration of the Oromo, Adal declined; in 1577 its rulers moved to the Aussa oasis, where the state was later taken over by Afar leaders.

After Adal's collapse, the Afar formed several small sultanates. The Sultanate of Tadjoura became the leading power on the coast, controlling the caravans that carried salt from Lake Assal, the lowest point in Africa, into the Ethiopian highlands, as well as slaves and other goods. Further north the sultans of Rahaita held the coast near the strait, and inland the Afar of Gobaad were linked to the sultanate of Aussa. The Issa, a clan of the Dir branch of the Somali, grazed their herds across the south and traded through Zeila, governed by elders and the customary law known as xeer.

During the 19th century, Zeila passed from Ottoman and Yemeni influence to Egyptian control, and Egypt briefly garrisoned Tadjoura in the 1870s and 1880s. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 transformed the strategic value of the Bab-el-Mandeb, and the British at Aden in Yemen and the Italians in Eritrea both sought footholds in the region.

France, wanting a coaling station on the route to Indochina and Madagascar, obtained the anchorage of Obock by treaty with local Afar rulers on 11 March 1862, though it did little there for two decades. During the Scramble for Africa, France signed treaties with the sultans of Tadjoura, Gobaad and Rahaita and with Issa leaders between 1883 and 1887, extending its protectorate around the Gulf of Tadjoura. The governor Léonce Lagarde made the territory a colony, and in 1888 the French founded the town of Djibouti on an uninhabited stretch of the southern shore, on land leased from local Afar and Somali rulers, because its harbour was better and closer to the caravan route to Harar. It became the capital of French Somaliland in 1896. A Russian adventurer, Nikolay Ashinov, who landed settlers at Sagallo in 1889, was quickly expelled by French bombardment.

In 1897 France and Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia agreed the border, and work began on a railway from Djibouti into the highlands. The line reached Addis Ababa in 1917 and made Djibouti the main port for Ethiopian trade, drawing Somali, Afar, Arab and Ethiopian workers to the growing town, which had about 18,000 inhabitants by 1916.

During World War II the colony sided with the Vichy government after France's defeat in 1940, while Italian forces from neighbouring Italian East Africa occupied part of the territory and bombed the town. After the British conquered Italian East Africa in 1941, they blockaded Djibouti, causing severe hunger, until the colony went over to Free France in December 1942. A local battalion later fought in France, including at the liberation of Paris.

After the war French Somaliland became an overseas territory with its own assembly. Politics increasingly split along ethnic lines. In the 1958 referendum on the French Community, voters chose to remain with France; the Somali nationalist leader Mahmoud Harbi, who favoured union with an independent Somalia, lost, amid allegations of fraud and the expulsion of Somalis, and died in a plane crash in 1960.

When Charles de Gaulle visited in August 1966, pro-independence protesters, mostly Somalis, were met with force. A second referendum on 19 March 1967 again chose continued association with France. Restrictions on Somali registration, the deportation of thousands of Somalis and the barbed-wire barrier built around the capital made the result highly contested. The territory was renamed the French Territory of the Afars and the Issas, recognising the Afar, whose leader Ali Aref Bourhan headed the local government, and downplaying the Somali majority.

In the 1970s, amid the wider decolonisation of Africa, pressure grew from the African People's League for Independence (LPAI) led by Hassan Gouled Aptidon, an Issa politician who had sat in the French parliament, and from the armed Front for the Liberation of the Somali Coast, which kidnapped the French ambassador to Somalia in 1975. Both movements opted for full independence rather than union with Somalia. In a third referendum on 8 May 1977, 98.8 percent voted for independence, and the Republic of Djibouti was proclaimed on 27 June 1977, with Gouled as president. France kept a large garrison, including Foreign Legion troops.

Djibouti's early years were overshadowed by its neighbours. The Ogaden War between Ethiopia and Somalia in 1977 and 1978 cut the railway and sent refugees across the border, and the young state relied on French military protection and aid. Gouled's People's Rally for Progress (RPP) was declared the only legal party in 1981, and power was concentrated in the hands of Issa politicians around the president.

Afar grievances over exclusion erupted in November 1991, when the Front for the Restoration of Unity and Democracy (FRUD) launched an insurrection and quickly took much of the north and west. Government forces counter-attacked in 1992 and 1993, with heavy costs for civilians in the Afar regions. A new constitution approved by referendum in 1992 allowed a limited number of parties, though the RPP continued to dominate elections. A peace agreement with the main faction of FRUD in December 1994 brought its leaders into the cabinet, and a final accord with the remaining faction, led by Ahmed Dini Ahmed, was signed in 2001.

In 1999 the aged Gouled stepped down, and his nephew and long-time chief of staff, Ismaïl Omar Guelleh, was elected president. Guelleh set out to make Djibouti a commercial and logistical hub. After Ethiopia's war with Eritrea from 1998 closed Eritrean ports to it, nearly all of Ethiopia's foreign trade passed through Djibouti. A new container terminal at Doraleh, operated by DP World of Dubai, opened in 2009, and a Chinese-built electric railway to Addis Ababa replaced the old French line in the late 2010s. In 2018 the government seized the Doraleh container terminal from DP World, a dispute that international arbitrators later ruled in the company's favour.

Djibouti also leased its position to foreign armies. Alongside the long-standing French base, the United States established Camp Lemonnier, its main base in Africa, after 2001, and Japan opened its first postwar overseas base there in 2011. On 1 August 2017 China formally opened its first overseas military base near Doraleh. Italy and other countries also maintain a presence, drawn by the anti-piracy patrols off Somalia and the shipping lanes of the Red Sea.

Tensions with Eritrea over the Ras Doumeira headland led to fighting from 10 to 13 June 2008, in which Djibouti reported 44 of its soldiers killed. Qatar mediated from 2010 and deployed peacekeepers, but withdrew them in 2017; Djibouti and Eritrea agreed to normalise relations in 2018.

At home, a constitutional amendment in 2010 removed the two-term limit, allowing Guelleh to win further terms in 2011, 2016 and 2021, elections the main opposition largely boycotted. The 2024 census counted about 1.07 million people, nearly three-quarters of them in the capital. In November 2025 parliament removed the upper age limit of 75 for presidential candidates, and on 10 April 2026 Guelleh, then 78, was re-elected for a sixth term with about 98 percent of the official vote against a single challenger, in a poll most of the opposition boycotted.