Few people in Britain have heard of it. Britain took the northern Somali coast in the 1880s mainly to feed its garrison in Aden, spent twenty years failing to defeat a Somali religious leader, then ended the war with its first ever bombing campaign. In 1960 the protectorate was independent for just five days before choosing to join Somalia, a choice many in Hargeisa now regret.
Britain held Aden, at the mouth of the Red Sea, as a coaling station on the route to India. Aden's garrison and ships needed meat, and the Somali coast across the Gulf of Aden was full of sheep, goats and camels. When Egypt pulled out of the coast in the 1880s, Britain stepped in to keep France and Italy away.
From 1884 British officials signed treaties of protection with the Isaaq and other northern Somali clans, and in 1887 a Somali Coast Protectorate was declared. It was run from British India, through Aden, until 1898. Britain was interested in the ports, Berbera and Zeila, not the interior. Somali clans kept running their own affairs, and the British presence was tiny.
In 1897 Britain signed a treaty with Ethiopia that left the Haud, the vital dry-season grazing lands used by Somali herders from the protectorate, on the Ethiopian side of the border. That decision would come back to haunt Britain sixty years later.
In 1899 a Somali religious scholar and poet, Sayyid Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, declared holy war against the British, the Ethiopians and the Italians, who were all carving up Somali lands. His followers were known as Dervishes. The British called him the "Mad Mullah", a name that says more about them than about him. Somalis remember him as a national hero and one of their greatest poets.
Before the First World War, Britain sent four military expeditions against him. They failed. The Dervishes moved fast across the desert, won battles, and built stone forts, with their main base at Taleh. At one point Britain withdrew its forces to the coast and left the interior to him. The war devastated the region; large numbers of Somalis died from fighting, raids and famine.
After the First World War, the new Royal Air Force was fighting for its future, and it saw Somaliland as a chance to prove that aircraft could police the empire cheaply. A small self-contained unit, "Z Force", was secretly shipped to Berbera with twelve de Havilland DH9 bombers, six flying and six in reserve, under Group Captain Robert Gordon.
From 21 January 1920 the DH9s bombed Hassan's base at Medishe and his fort at Jidali, then the forts at Taleh. The Camel Corps, a battalion of the King's African Rifles and Somali levies followed on the ground. Hassan's forts were destroyed and his forces scattered. He escaped into the Ogaden, where he died of illness soon after. The RAF Museum calls it the RAF's first "little war". The RAF claimed it had done in three weeks, for about £84,000, what the army had failed to do in twenty years.
In June 1940 Italy entered the Second World War. Italian forces in Ethiopia and Italian Somaliland surrounded the British protectorate on almost every side. On 3 August 1940 they invaded. A small British, African and Indian force, with the Somaliland Camel Corps, fought a delaying battle at the Tug Argan pass from 11 to 15 August, then fell back to Berbera and was evacuated by sea. Italian troops entered Berbera on 19 August. It was the only British colony Italy conquered in the war.
British and Commonwealth forces retook the protectorate in early 1941, as Italy's East African empire collapsed. The capital moved from Berbera to Hargeisa.
During and after the war, Britain had run the Haud and the "Reserved Area" next to the protectorate under military administration. Under an Anglo-Ethiopian Agreement of November 1954, Britain withdrew and handed control back to Ethiopia, which had held them in international law since the 1897 treaty.
Somalis were furious. The Colonial Secretary told Parliament in February 1955 that the news had caused widespread feeling in Somaliland and that a delegation had come to London to protest. The agreement promised that Somali herders would keep their grazing rights, but in the years that followed there were repeated clashes with Ethiopian forces, and British ministers admitted to Parliament that Ethiopia was not keeping its side of the bargain.
The loss of the Haud fed the movement for a "Greater Somalia" uniting all Somali lands, and with it the wish to join with the Italian-run trust territory to the south.
Britain had done little to prepare the protectorate for self-government; the first elections to its Legislative Council were held only in 1959–60. In April 1960 the Council asked for independence and union with Somalia, which was due to become independent from Italian trusteeship on 1 July. At a constitutional conference in London in May 1960, Britain agreed. The Colonial Secretary told the Commons that the elected ministers had proposed, and the government accepted, 26 June as independence day.
On 26 June 1960 Britain and the new State of Somaliland signed an agreement on its independence. Five days later, on 1 July 1960, Somaliland joined the former Italian Somalia to form the Somali Republic. In Parliament weeks later, a minister admitted there was still some uncertainty about how far the Act of Union had actually been carried through.
"The elected Ministers proposed and Her Majesty's Government accepted that the date of independence shall be 26th June."Colonial Secretary, written answer, House of Commons, 12 May 1960
Many northerners soon felt that the union gave power to Mogadishu and left them marginalised. Under the military dictatorship of Siad Barre in the 1980s the north rebelled, and Hargeisa was bombed and largely destroyed in 1988. When Somalia collapsed in 1991, the north declared independence as the Republic of Somaliland, inside the old British protectorate's borders.
Somaliland has its own government, currency, passports and elections, and has been far more peaceful than the rest of Somalia. For more than three decades no UN member recognised it. On 26 December 2025 Israel became the first to do so. Somalia, the African Union and many other states condemned the move. In parts of eastern Somaliland, communities reject Hargeisa's claim to independence.
Britain has a large Somali community, with old roots in the seamen of Cardiff, South Shields and London's docks, many of them from the British protectorate.
Somali history runs back to the ancient Land of Punt and the medieval trading ports of the Horn. Our partner sites cover the continent's independence stories:
The RAF Museum at Hendon in north London holds records and photographs of Z Force. Colonial Office files on the protectorate and the Haud are at The National Archives in Kew, and the debates on the 1954 agreement and on independence can be read online in Hansard.
Most visitors fly to Hargeisa via Addis Ababa or Dubai. In Hargeisa, the MiG jet monument remembers the 1988 bombing. Berbera has old Ottoman and British buildings by the harbour. Near Hargeisa, the Laas Geel rock-art caves hold some of the finest Neolithic paintings in Africa. Check travel advice carefully before visiting; parts of the region, especially the east, are not safe.
Entrance fees are included in the tour price; tips are not included but are always welcome. There are no bookable tours in Somaliland itself. Most travellers pass through Ethiopia on the way, and the story of Britain's empire starts in London:
The Somali seamen who made Britain home.
The other great resistance in north-east Africa.
South Shields: Africans in north-east England long before the Somali seamen.
Next: southern Africa, from the Cape to the Union.
All of Britain's African territories, country by country.
Britain Adventures is an independent partner website. Our partner sites on Africa and its history are where the stories on this page continue:
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