Djibouti

The territory is the homeland of the Afar, who spread into Ethiopia and Eritrea, and the Issa, a Somali clan; both have herded livestock across this harsh land for centuries, and the port of Tadjoura was an old outlet for the caravan trade, including in enslaved people, between the Ethiopian highlands and the sea.

France acquired the coast in the 1880s and developed the deep natural harbour of Djibouti city as the terminus of a railway to Addis Ababa, making the colony — "French Somaliland," later the "French Territory of the Afars and the Issas" — a transit point for Ethiopia's trade. France kept it after most of its African empire had gone, and independence came only in 1977.

Since then Djibouti has been governed by a single party and, since 1999, by President Ismaïl Omar Guelleh. A brief civil war with an Afar rebel movement in the 1990s ended in a power-sharing deal. The country's fortune has been its location: astride one of the world's busiest shipping lanes, it hosts French, American, Japanese, Italian, and Chinese military bases and leans heavily on its container port, much of which handles landlocked Ethiopia's imports and exports.

Djiboutian society is Muslim and split between two closely related pastoralist cultures, Somali and Afar, each with its own language, poetry, and clan structure. Both share a nomadic heritage, an oral tradition rich in poetry and proverb, and strong codes of hospitality and honour.

The chewing of khat (also qat), a mildly stimulant leaf imported daily from Ethiopia, is a central social ritual for many men, who gather in the afternoons to chew and talk; its arrival by truck each day is a fixture of city life. Tea, heavy with sugar and spice, and cardamom coffee are the drinks of welcome.

Dress is modest, and Ramadan reshapes the daily rhythm. The capital has a distinctly cosmopolitan edge from the foreign military and shipping presence, alongside the traditional life of the herding interior.

Around two-thirds of Djibouti's roughly one million people live in the capital, Djibouti city, a hot, low-rise port on the Gulf of Tadjoura. The rest live in a handful of small towns and in scattered nomadic and semi-settled communities across the desert, herding goats, sheep, and camels.

The economy is almost entirely built on services tied to the port, the railway, the free-trade zones, and rent from the military bases; there is very little agriculture or industry, and most food and water are imported or desalinated. Unemployment is high, and the gap between the port economy and the pastoral interior is wide. Djibouti also hosts refugees from Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Yemen.

Daily life in the city runs early because of the heat, pausing through the hottest hours; the afternoon khat session and the evening, when it finally cools, are when the streets fill.

Djiboutian food blends Somali, Afar, Yemeni, and French influences. Rice or flatbread (canjeero/lahoh, a spongy fermented pancake) is eaten with spiced goat, lamb, or fish stews, often flavoured with cumin, cardamom, and xawaash spice mix. Skoudehkaris, a spiced rice with lamb, is a signature one-pot dish.

Grilled fish from the Gulf is fresh and plentiful in the capital, and sambusa pastries and bajiye fritters are common snacks, especially in Ramadan. The French legacy shows in good baguettes and pastries and in a few colonial-era restaurants.

Very sweet, spiced tea (shaah) and cardamom coffee are drunk throughout the day. Alcohol is available in hotels and some restaurants in the capital but is not part of the local culture.

Djibouti's sights are geological. Lake Assal, about 155 metres below sea level, is the lowest point in Africa and one of the saltiest bodies of water in the world — a brilliant white salt pan ringed by black lava and turquoise brine, roughly two hours from the capital.

Lac Abbé, on the Ethiopian border, is a semi-dry rift lake where hot springs have built hundreds of pale limestone chimneys, some tens of metres tall, venting steam across a lunar plain grazed by Afar camels — an overnight camping trip and the most striking landscape in the country.

Offshore, the Gulf of Tadjoura draws snorkellers and divers to reefs and, from about November to January, to a reliable seasonal gathering of whale sharks near Arta and the "Devil's Islands" (Îles Moucha and Maskali). Inland, the Goda Mountains near Tadjoura offer a rare patch of green — the relict Day Forest — and cooler air, and the Grand Bara desert is used for land-sailing and, once, as an airstrip in films.