Greater Somalia

French Somaliland, the Northern Frontier District (NFD) in Kenya and the Ogaden region in Ethiopia were placed under the control of neighboring states, despite the pre-independence unification efforts of Somali nationalists.

In 1946 the Somali Youth League selected Harar as the future capital of Greater Somalia and subsequently sent delegates to the United Nations office in Mogadishu to reveal this proposal.

During World War I, Britain secretly reached an agreement with Italy to transfer to the Italians 94,050 square kilometers of the Jubaland protectorate, which was situated in present-day southwestern Somalia.

[9][10] Britain retained control of the southern half of the partitioned Jubaland territory, which was later merged into the Northern Frontier District (NFD).

[16] Britain included the proviso that the Somali residents would retain their autonomy, but Ethiopia immediately claimed sovereignty over the area.

[17][18] The first armed conflict following the independence and unification of the former British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland territories, known collectively as the Somali Republic, began in 1963 in an ethnic Oromo and Somali district, Elekere, then part of Bale province, instigated by the Oromo founder of the United Liberation Forces of Oromia, Waqo Gutu.

The Bale revolt, a peasant revolt stemming from issues involving land, taxation, class, and religion,[19] raged in the province for several years until a number of developments took the energy out of the militants, as well as the decision of Somali Prime Minister Muhammad Haji Ibrahim Egal to focus his country's resources on economic development.

The referendum turned out in favor of a continued association with France, largely due to a combined "yes" vote by the sizable Afar ethnic group and resident Europeans.

Harbi was killed in a plane crash two years later, and Hassan Gouled Aptidon, a Somali who campaigned for a yes vote in the referendum of 1958, wound up as Djibouti's first president post-independence (1977–1991).

In 1981, Siad Barre visited Nairobi, and asserted that Somalia was suspending its claim on the North Eastern Province (NFD).

With the start of the Somali Civil War, the vision of uniting the various historically and predominantly Somali-inhabited areas of the Horn of Africa into a Greater Somalia was temporarily sidelined.

[24] Talk of pan-Somali unification movements for the moment took a backseat, as the Republic splintered into a few autonomous smaller regional or clan-based governing zones.