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The Horn of Africa
The African peninsula that juts toward Arabia
The Horn of Africa is the blunt wedge of land that pushes east into the Arabian Sea, dividing the Gulf of Aden from the Indian Ocean and nearly touching Yemen across the strait the Arabs named the Gate of Tears. Its narrow definition holds four countries: Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and Somalia. A wider one, favored by aid agencies and by the regional bloc IGAD, reaches out to Sudan, South Sudan, Kenya, and Uganda, which is less a geographic claim than an administrative convenience. The tighter reading is the older one, and the one the shape of the coastline actually supports. Either way, this has been a hinge between Africa, Arabia, and the Indian Ocean for three thousand years.
The Horn is a study in extremes. The Ethiopian Highlands rise in a great basalt dome to Ras Dashen at 4,550 meters, cool and rain-fed, cut by gorges and by the Blue Nile, which gathers here most of the water that eventually reaches Egypt. Below and to the east the land drops into the Danakil Depression, one of the hottest places on the planet and more than 100 meters below sea level, where the Great Rift Valley is pulling the continent apart. Beyond lies the arid Somali plateau and a coastline of over 4,000 kilometers, the longest in mainland Africa. Rainfall is unreliable, and drought is the region's recurring catastrophe.
Some 156 million people live in the Horn, most of them Ethiopian, speaking Semitic and Cushitic languages, Amharic, Tigrinya, Somali, Oromo, that are ancient in place. Ethiopia adopted Christianity in the fourth century and was never colonized, an exception in Africa that shaped its self-image, while Islam arrived early through the same coastal ports that once shipped frankincense to Rome. The twentieth century brought Italian invasion, the Derg dictatorship, Eritrea's thirty-year war of independence, and Somalia's collapse into stateless conflict after 1991. Recovery is uneven: Ethiopia has grown fast, Djibouti rents harbor space to foreign navies guarding one of the busiest shipping lanes on earth, and Somaliland runs itself while no one recognizes it.