Review from ROAPE Volume 3 Number 6
ABAAR: The Somali Drought (Lewis)

The Somali drought which came finally to an end in June of this year is generally agreed to have been the worst in the living memory of a people by no means strangers to lack of water; and it produced the conditions for a national catastrophe. The way in which these conditions were met by the government of Somalia so as to prevent an irrecoverable disaster to hundreds of thousands of nomads and seminomads is a story of courage, honesty, determination, and of a unity of effort not before seen in modern Somali history, or, perhaps, in any Somali history that we know. By the time that good rains began to fall this year, somewhat more than 260,000 nomads were in twenty government relief camps, while upwards of another million people were receiving government relief outside the camps: altogether, between a quarter and a third of the country's whole population.