Lausanne World Pulse – Urban Articles – An Overview of Eastern Africa

By Justin Long

From twenty-eight million people in 1900 to 255 million today (and likely 450 million by 2025), Eastern Africa is the most densely-populated region on the continent. It is roughly the same as the United States and twice Western Europe. Children under the age of fifteen make up a third (100 million in all) of the population. Three-quarters reside in rural areas.

Eastern Africa has the second largest total farmland area and vast natural resources, yet droughts and food scarcity are still serious issues. Ethiopia currently faces a horrific famine. Much of this is due to war, grinding poverty and a lack of infrastructure.

The region’s recent history began in the first century after Christ, when the developing Axum Kingdom emerged as a world power to rival Rome and Asia. Supposedly led by the Solomnid Dynasty (with ties to Solomon and the Queen of Sheba), it ruled modern Ethiopia and Eritrea, most of Somalia and Sudan, and collected tribute from states across the Gulf, including Yemen. It traded with Arabia, India and China, and was a world market in ivory. In the third century, so the legend goes, a shipwrecked youth from Tyre was taken in by the king as a servant; he later converted the king to Christianity. And with the king came the kingdom. Whatever the truth of the story, the Axum Kingdom certainly did become Christian. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church was founded sometime around 332 AD.

Saddled with debt and riddled with corruption, the countries in Eastern Africa today are broken and impoverished, with half to three-quarters of their people living in poverty.

When Muslims came in the early seventh century, the Axum Kingdom—which was made up of Christians—sheltered some of the people. The Muslims did not attempt to overthrow the kingdom and it endured through the tenth century. It was succeeded by the Zagwe Dynasty, which was equally passionate about Christianity and constructed many churches and monasteries. In the thirteenth century, the Solomnids returned to power but were pressured by coastal Muslims and Oromo insurgents. The Europeans were new players on the scene and throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came to dominate the region. The early 1900s saw ongoing battles of colonizers versus colonized, with the result being independence for the countries of East Africa by the mid-twentieth century. Unfortunately, this independence did not yield immediate peace and prosperity.

Saddled with debt and riddled with corruption, the countries in Eastern Africa today are broken and impoverished, with half to three-quarters of their people living in poverty. Many are subsistence farmers, dependent on crops whose value is set by the whims of the global market. Whole crops can be lost to drought or, more often, war. Yet even with this bleak picture, Eastern Africa is responsible for twelve percent of Africa’s Gross National Product (GNP).

Virtually every country has been wounded by many decades of conflict. Rwanda and Burundi have barely recovered from the horrific genocides of the 1990s. Comoros has endured more coups than any other nation. Djibouti has only barely kept out of war, and is now a base for Western forces seeking out terrorists; over half of its GNP is related to the French military. Ethiopia and Eritrea fought a costly border war in the late 1990s. Mozambique’s civil war only further impoverished it. Uganda’s civil war continues to this day. Worse, future wars are not impossible as many of the problems have not been solved. Refugees can be found everywhere; for example, refugees from Ethiopia and Somalia make up ten percent of the population in Djibouti. At the root of many of the conflicts are both ongoing tribal and religious wars which have yet to be resolved.