The Somali Union of 1960 in Historical Context

[Deeq A.]

Mohamed Issa Trunji

Boosaaso (PP Comment) — One of the most controversial topics in Somali politics pertains to the Somali union in 1960. Mohamed Isse Trunji, a former judge of the pre-1991 Somali National Security Court, won a reputation as a self-taught historian after writing Somalia: The Untold History 1941–1969 following many years spent in British and Italian archives. His book contains a wealth of historical facts, some of which would have benefited from careful source examination.

Recently, Trunji claimed that Somaliland was a sovereign country before the 1960 union. “That is my view,” said Trunji. There is a difference between a historical fact and a political view. When a question of history is under discussion, the historical method remains the most solid approach to finding, checking, interpreting and explaining past events.

Mohamed Awale Liban designed the flag of Somalia in 1954.

To explain why the ex-British Somaliland Protectorate attained independence on 26 June 1960, the most reliable document is the Somaliland Protectorate Constitutional Conference, 1960. The report makes it clear how negotiations to secure independence for the ex-British Protectorate were hammered out and that the union was consensual. “The Somaliland delegation confirmed their desire to achieve independence and unite with Somalia when that country becomes independent on 1st July, and emphasised that this policy commanded the enthusiastic support of the people of the Protectorate. … They acknowledged that there were many legal, constitutional, and practical problems to be resolved if independence were to be achieved in so short a time, but felt that none of them were insuperable,” reads the report. The precondition for granting independence to the British subjects in the Somaliland Protectorate was union with Somalia, which was undergoing a ten-year trusteeship process that included self-rule in the run-up to independence on 1 July 1960.

On 26 June 1960, Mohamed Ibrahim Egal presides over the raising of the Somali flag, marking the independence of British Somaliland Protectorate.

Our founding fathers were not oblivious to the challenges that the union would pose to the new polity, not least the two languages used for administration in the North (English) and Italian in the South. Those challenges were formidable, even though the South had political parties and experimented with limited self-rule to prepare the new political class for the soon-to-be-formed republic. The indirect rule in ex-British Somaliland deprived northerners of the opportunity to form political parties of similar calibre to agitate for independence. “There was a great deal of naivety in the Somali leadership… we were new to this idea. They [southerners] were a little better than us because they had local autonomy under the United Nations trusteeship territory for almost five years before the union, so at least they tasted parliamentary practice …” said the former Somaliland President Mohamed Ibrahim Egal, speaking to the South African Broadcasting Corporation in 2000.

Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke

When ex-British Somaliland was granted independence on 26 June 1960, the flag raised in Hargeisa was the one used by Somalia and designed in Mogadishu by the late Mohamed Awale Liban in 1954. The flag was adopted in October 1954, one month before the signing of the second Anglo-Ethiopian Agreement to hand over the Haud and the Reserved Area to Ethiopia, in violation of the Protectorate Agreements Britain had signed with Somali clans during the latter part of the 19th century.

The Founding President of Somalia Aden Abdulle Osman.

The independence agreement committed ex-British Somaliland political leaders to honour “the Anglo-Ethiopian Treaty of 1897… [which] should be regarded as remaining in force as between Ethiopia and the successor State following the termination of the Protectorate… It would seem desirable that the Somaliland Government should undertake to recommend to a successor Somali Republic that they in turn should accept the Agreement.”

Mohamed H. Ibrahim Egal

The political leaders from the North lobbied for making the retaking of territories annexed by Ethiopia with the help of Britain a cardinal tenet of Somalia’s foreign policy. The most eloquent expression of that policy appeared in the preface written by Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke, the former Prime Minister of Somalia (1960–1964). “Our misfortune is that our neighbouring countries… are not our neighbours. Our neighbours are our Somali kinsmen whose citizenship has been falsified by indiscriminate ‘arrangements.’ They have to move across artificial frontiers to their pasturelands. They occupy the same terrain and pursue the same pastoral economy as ourselves. We speak the same language. We share the same creed, the same culture, and the same traditions. How can we regard our brothers as foreigners?” wrote Sharmarke.

The process through which what was Italian Somaliland went through before independence was two-fold: trusteeship and self-rule (known as Dakhiliyah). In the case of British Somaliland, the independence process was finalised in May 1960 during the constitutional conference. Ardent Somali secessionists are puzzled by the fact that Hargeisa was the first independent Somali territory where the Somali flag was raised, four days before the union. Paying attention to the historical facts can disabuse them of the flawed argument based on invoking colonial borders after the formation of the Republic of Somalia on 1 July 1960. Present-day Somali secessionists opposed the principle of the “inviolability of colonial borders” because Somali territories had been annexed by Ethiopia through what Mohamed Ibrahim Egal, in a 1968 speech at the Royal African Society in London, described as secret “treaties with Ethiopia … [to cede] to that country a portion of those very lands … [Britain] had undertaken to protect.”

© Puntland Post, 2026