The Horn of Africa:  Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, & Djibouti, by Harold & Geraldine Woods

This book is unacceptable on any level of study.  Before I begin my rant about the numerous and serious deficiencies in this book, it would be good to provide some sort of analysis of the scope of the book and what limited compliments I can offer it.  For one, the book is very short, and it contains a focus on the games, literature, and marriage customs of the peoples who inhabit the Horn of Africa region.  These are the nicest things that I can say about the book.

The rest of the picture is not too pleasant.  For one, this book has an extremely skewed and biased perspective, going out of its way to whitewash Islamic Arabic-speaking North Sudanese from their harsh and tyrannical treatment of minority peoples, including genocide in Darfur and slaving in South Sudan.  The book consistently blames colonial powers for what is wrong with the Horn of Africa, insults the Ethiopian Jews, the Fulashas, as “devils” in the minds of other Ethiopians (for their work with metal) and says nothing wrong about the Sudanese leaders, blaming Britain for the North-South Sudanese divide and entirely neglecting to mention the strong presence of Christianity in South Sudan (calling their religious beliefs merely animist).  Its sources fail to include a single work on Somalia, which it blithely considers a unified country (ignoring the effects of comparative colonial regimes on the formation of national identities), and fail to provide much of any in-depth information on Somalia, or any other country in the Horn of Africa for that matter.

The book itself, which is as old as I am, is woefully out-of-date, but that could be forgiven if it made an effort to be even-handed in its approach, which it does not.  The book similarly fails to take the Communists to task for their machinations, considering the Western nations more of a threat for their desire to have military bases in strategic areas like Djibouti.  In particular, the book fails to take the native dictators of the region like Barre and Mengistu to task for their destructive policies, and only comments on the joining of British and Italian Somaliland together in a brief sentence without an examination of why the union failed.  This book is more useful as a “what not to write about the Horn of Africa” than any kind of honest or reputable work about the region.  Handle this work with extreme care and deep skepticism.