The Red Sea Is Memory, Not Myth: Why Ethiopia Must Face Its Past Before Rewriting Its Future

By Alula Frezghi

At dawn in the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, the sea narrows to a corridor of global consequence. Oil tankers bound for Europe pass container ships heading toward the Indian Ocean, while naval patrols from multiple countries monitor one of the most heavily trafficked maritime chokepoints in the world. To the north lies the Eritrean port of Assab; to the south, the Yemeni coastline scarred by war. Nearly every vessel entering or leaving the Suez Canal must pass through this narrow gate.

The geography is unforgiving. The history is even more so.

Yet in recent months Ethiopia’s leadership has revived a narrative claiming that the country possesses historic rights to Eritrea’s coastline. In speeches and policy debates, PM Abiy Ahmed Ali has invoked Ethiopia’s supposed ancestral relationship with the Red Sea. The claim resonates domestically, where maritime access is often framed as a lost national inheritance.

But history tells a more complicated story, one that challenges the political mythology now circulating in Addis Ababa.

The Red Sea’s Human History

The Red Sea has long been a route of commerce and migration. It has also been a route of suffering.

Historian Jonathan Miran documents that the nineteenth century witnessed the largest movement of enslaved people from Northeast Africa across the Red Sea. Of the roughly half-million individuals trafficked during that century, more than 100,000 passed through the port of Massawa.

Many originated in the Oromo regions of Jimma, Limmu, Gomma, and Kaffa. They were marched from the Ethiopian interior to coastal markets, where they were sold and transported across the sea.

This history introduces a sobering irony into today’s political rhetoric. Abiy Ahmed himself was born in Gomma, one of the regions whose inhabitants were historically driven toward Red Sea markets in chains. Yet the same geography is now invoked as evidence of Ethiopia’s maritime destiny.

The historical record documents human movement toward the Red Sea, but it does not record Ethiopian sovereignty over it.

Africa Already Settled the Borders Question

Modern African borders rest on a foundational political compromise.

In 1964 the Organization of African Unity adopted the doctrine of uti possidetis juris, declaring that colonial boundaries would serve as the basis of post-independence sovereignty. The decision was not an endorsement of colonialism. It was a pragmatic attempt to prevent a continent-wide cascade of territorial wars.

Ironically, Ethiopia was among the strongest defenders of this principle. Today it hosts the headquarters of the African Union, the OAU’s institutional successor.

Ports and territorial waters are therefore not historical commons or demographic entitlements. Under international law they are exclusive sovereign territories. The principle applies equally across the continent from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea.

Reopening these boundaries would destabilize far more than a single bilateral dispute.

The Red Sea Was Not an Abyssinian Sea

The claim that a historical Ethiopia once controlled the Red Sea coastline collapses under closer scrutiny.

For centuries the region was administered within the sphere of the Ottoman Empire. Along the Eritrean coast authority rested with the Na’ib dynasty, a Beja-descended ruling family that governed Massawa and the Dahlak islands while managing trade routes between Africa and Arabia.

Their authority was widely recognized by contemporary observers. The British consul Walter Plowden described the Na’ib as “an independent sovereign on the mainland.”

By contrast, the Abyssinian kingdom was primarily a highland power. Its rulers were preoccupied with internal rivalries and territorial consolidation within the Ethiopian plateau. Access to coastal ports Massawa, Zeyla, or Obock, was episodic and negotiated rather than controlled.

Even during the late nineteenth-century expansion of Emperor Menellik II, Ethiopia’s maritime ambitions remained aspirational. European colonial diplomacy often encouraged these claims, but they never translated into durable coastal sovereignty.

Modern Ethiopia therefore emerged not as a historic maritime state but as a powerful inland empire whose borders were shaped by nineteenth- and twentieth-century geopolitical settlements.

Why the Red Sea Matters to the World

The stakes extend far beyond Ethiopia’s domestic debate.

The Red Sea has become one of the world’s most strategically significant maritime corridors. Nearly one-tenth of global trade passes through the route linking the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait to the Suez Canal. Energy shipments from the Gulf, container traffic between Asia and Europe, and military deployments from multiple navies converge along this narrow waterway.

For the United States, the Red Sea is a critical artery connecting the Mediterranean and Indo-Pacific theaters. European states depend on it for energy supplies and commercial shipping. Gulf countries view stability along the African coast as essential to the security of their trade routes and investments.

This explains why Washington, Brussels, and Gulf capitals increasingly monitor political developments along the Horn of Africa’s coastline.

Maritime instability in this corridor does not remain regional. It reverberates across global supply chains and energy markets.

Ethiopia Already Knows the Peaceful Path

None of this denies Ethiopia’s legitimate economic needs. With more than 100 million citizens, the country requires reliable access to maritime trade.

But access is not the same as sovereignty.

During the early 1990s Ethiopia enjoyed precisely the type of cooperative arrangement that could still exist today. Between 1991 and 1997 Addis Ababa used the Eritrean port of Assab with minimal fees, utilized Massawa for commercial traffic, and conducted transactions in Ethiopian birr.

These arrangements functioned because they were grounded in negotiation and mutual recognition of sovereignty.

The precedent remains instructive. Port access can be negotiated. Territorial revisionism cannot.

A Doctrine for Red Sea Stability

The Horn of Africa sits at the intersection of global trade routes, fragile state systems, and unresolved historical memories. In such a landscape, the temptation to reinterpret history for political mobilization is powerful.

But the stability of the Red Sea depends on a different principle.

Maritime sovereignty in the region must remain anchored in international law, not historical mythology. Coastal states must retain authority over their territorial waters, while inland states secure access through diplomacy, commercial agreements, and regional integration.

This formula is neither new nor revolutionary. It is the same legal architecture that governs maritime relations across the world from the Baltic to the South China Sea.

The Red Sea carries centuries of human memory: migration, trade, empire, and tragedy. It cannot be reduced to a symbolic prize in a modern political narrative.

If the Horn of Africa is to avoid another cycle of conflict, its leaders must treat the sea not as a lost inheritance to reclaim but as a shared maritime system governed by law, sovereignty, and cooperation.

History, after all, is not a myth waiting to be rewritten. It is a record that warns against repeating the past

References

1. Jonathan Miran, Red Sea Citizens: Cosmopolitan Society and Cultural Change in Massawa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).
2. Miran provides detailed documentation of Massawa’s role in Red Sea trade networks and discusses the scale of enslaved persons transported through the port during the nineteenth century.
3. Ehud R. Toledano, The Ottoman Slave Trade and Its Suppression, 1840–1890 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). A foundational scholarly study of the slave trade networks linking Northeast Africa, the Red Sea, and the Ottoman world.
4. Richard Pankhurst, The Ethiopian Borderlands: Essays in Regional History from Ancient Times to the End of the 18th Century (Lawrenceville: Red Sea Press, 1997). Provides historical analysis of Ethiopian highland relations with coastal trade routes and neighboring polities. Ottoman Empire administrative control of Massawa and the Dahlak archipelago is documented in: Haggai Erlich, The Cross and the River: Ethiopia, Egypt, and the Nile (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002).
5. Walter Plowden, Travels in Abyssinia and the Galla Country (London: Seeley, Jackson & Halliday, 1868). Plowden, the British consul in Massawa and Tigray, describes the political autonomy of the Na’ib rulers of Massawa.
6. Resolution AHG/Res.16(I), adopted by the Organization of African Unity at its first summit in Cairo in 1964, established the principle of uti possidetis juris as the governing norm for postcolonial African borders.
7. African Union, Constitutive Act of the African Union (2000), Article 4(b), reaffirming respect for borders existing at independence.
8. Menelik II’s late nineteenth-century expansion and territorial ambitions are examined in: Harold G. Marcus, A History of Ethiopia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
9. For the geopolitical significance of the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait and Red Sea trade routes see: David H. Shinn and Joshua Eisenman, China and Africa: A Century of Engagement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), chapters on Red Sea maritime corridors.