Qualla: Zeila

Zeila: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Seepsimon, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1410, in the port town of Zeila, Emperor Dawit I of Ethiopia caught up with the last sultan of Ifat, Sa'ad ad-Din II, and killed him. The sultan's children escaped by boat to Yemen; five years later they returned and rebuilt the sultanate at Dakkar, inland. One of those children would eventually lead the armies that reshaped the Horn of Africa. This is the kind of history that Zeila carries, in layers, in its dust and coral walls. The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta described the town in the fourteenth century as a big metropolis with many great markets filled with wealthy merchants. The Benjamin of Tudela, a twelfth-century Jewish traveller, identified Zeila with the Biblical land of Havilah. The Italian explorer Ludovico di Varthema visited in the sixteenth century. Somali, Afar, Arab, and Persian merchants lived here simultaneously, speaking different languages, praying in the same mosques.

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Image: Seepsimon | CC BY-SA 4.0

Zeila: Avalites

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Seepsimon, CC BY-SA 4.0. The first-century Greek travelogue known as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea names a trading port called Avalites on the coast of what the Greeks called Barbaria, and most modern scholars identify Avalites with Zeila. The Periplus describes the inhabitants, whom it calls Barbar...

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Image: Seepsimon | CC BY-SA 4.0

Zeila: The Adal Capital

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Abdihakimper, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the late ninth century, the Arab geographer Al-Yaqubi wrote that Muslims were living along the northern Somali coast and that the kingdom of Adal had its capital in Zeila. By this reckoning the town was already a Muslim political center when the Abbasid caliphs were still ruli...

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Image: Abdihakimper | CC BY-SA 4.0

Zeila: Imam Ahmad Gran

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Francisco Álvares, Andrea Corsali, Paulus Orosius, CC0. In the sixteenth century, Zeila produced Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, known to his enemies as Ahmad Gurey and to Ethiopians as Ahmad Gran, the Left-Handed. From the inland Adal capital at Harar, Ahmad led an army that invaded the Christian Ethiopian highlands between 1529 and...

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Image: Francisco Álvares, Andrea Corsali, Paulus Orosius | CC0

Zeila: Haji Sharmarke and the Colonial Pivot

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit S. Martini-Bernardi, c, 1877, Public domain. By the first half of the nineteenth century, Zeila had been reduced to, in one British description, 'a large village surrounded by a low mud wall, with a population that varied according to the season from 1,000 to 3,000 people.' Still, it served as the principal maritime outlet ...

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Image: S. Martini-Bernardi, c, 1877 | Public domain

Zeila: What Remains

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Elisee ReclusC. Perron, Public domain. The Djibouti-to-Addis Ababa railway, completed in the early twentieth century, bypassed Zeila and carried the trade that had once made the port wealthy. By 1911, the Encyclopaedia Britannica described Zeila as a shadow of itself, with camels of old Somali women still bringing wat...

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Image: Elisee ReclusC. Perron | Public domain