Children of the Two Shores of the Red Sea Through the Lens of REDMIXMemory of Exile and the Diaspora of the Muwalladin
Sami Al-Shatibi
For thirty years of working on their issues, the children of the southern Red Sea’s two shores have confronted me with the same recurring question:
What is belonging? And what does it mean when land and politics abandon you?
On the other shore, REDMIX emerged to pose parallel questions:
What stories are born from the question of belonging? How can an individual story be transformed into research material that enriches the global debate on race, migration, and citizenship? How can we document the collective memory of the community produced by the mingling of the two shores—known as the “Muwalladin”—before it is erased? What documents and oral histories link Yemen’s shore to the shores of the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea that traditional archives have never reached? How does personal pain become a documented historical testimony preserved for history?
In short: Belonging is not born from nothing. We, the children of the two shores, create it with our own hands. We narrate it through our stories. We protect it when we document it. From this conviction, REDMIX sets out across the Red Sea—not merely to record history, but to resist erasure. To share our hopes of realizing those narratives and safeguarding those documents.
In an age when shared memory fades and our identities are reduced to numbers in a passport, the question grows more urgent: How did people forge a sense of belonging when the shores failed them?
To search for an answer, we head south—to the narrowest point of the Red Sea: Bab al-Mandab. It is not a barrier dividing two states, but a historic bottleneck that has swallowed thousands of stories. It is the bridge that connects, not the one that divides.
The Bridge That Was Never a Trench:
The Red Sea was never a watery trench separating Yemen from the Horn of Africa, but a pulsing artery of salt, wind, and people. Yet the relationship predates the prison of the Imamate that once ruled Yemen. It runs deep into the first Arab migrations that cut their path through Dahlak, Massawa, Assab, and Dankalia—driven by desert encroachment, trade, and tribal wars. Geographic proximity and the monsoon winds, which the Arabs used to organize their voyages, helped them. Their dhows carried frankincense and coffee, and with them, those fleeing the Imamate’s prison.
On the western shore, in the heart of Abyssinia, no “diaspora community” arose. A parallel homeland did. Yemenis in Ethiopia are a unique model of a community that combined deep integration into Ethiopian society with the preservation of its Yemeni identity and customs.
Nearly 400,000 Yemenis sought refuge in Ethiopia between 1920 and 1962. They entered from Aden and other Yemeni cities, and settled in Mekelle, Harar, Dire Dawa, Nazret, Jimma, and Addis Ababa. They did not stop at opening shops. They founded a school in Addis Ababa in 1942—the first foreign educational institution there—teaching Arabic and the Yemeni curriculum alongside Amharic and English. They built a headquarters, and wove a collective memory.
From this deep intermingling, the children of the two shores—the “Muwalladin”—were born: the children of Yemeni men and Ethiopian mothers. From the Tigray, Oromo, Amhara, and Gurage ethnic groups.
In the “Wollo” region specifically, what came to be called the “Arab Quba” tribe emerged—the Amharic meaning “the Arabs have entered.” They were not merely a biological product. They were a living human bridge, carrying on their shoulders the dual question of identity that the mother-state has failed to answer to this day.
Myth as a Passport:
As much as Yemenis influenced Ethiopia, they were influenced by it and harmonized with it, weaving themselves into the fabric of its life. The relationship was never one-way. In 1935, when Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, modern relations between Imam Yahya, then ruler of Yemen, and Emperor Haile Selassie were solidified. But the Emperor, in his hour of peril, did not appeal to the Yemenis through political statements or diplomatic cables. He appealed to something deeper than politics: he appealed to shared blood. He invoked Bilqis.
In the Yemeni-Ethiopian imaginary, the Queen of Sheba is not an ornamental legend told for embellishment or a tale to adorn gatherings. She is a certificate of lineage carved into memory, a blood covenant the years cannot erase. The Solomonic dynasty that ruled Ethiopia for centuries derived its legitimacy from a marriage between the Prophet Solomon and Bilqis—a marriage that mixed Yemeni blood with Abyssinian blood and made the two thrones a single continuum. Thus, when Mussolini marched on Addis Ababa in 1935, Haile Selassie did not ask for an emperor’s aid to an emperor, nor an alliance between two states on a map. He sent a call older than borders—a cousin’s call to his cousin. He appealed to Yemen not as geography, but as a womb. He appealed to Bilqis not as a queen in a book, but as a shared grandmother whose blood still runs in their veins. In that moment, politics fell away and lineage remained. Cables fell away and the story remained—the story both sides preserved: that we are not neighbors across the Red Sea. We are one household, split between two shores.
Thus the story became a rifle. Expatriates circulated the call as a collective duty. Thousands of young Yemenis fought in Adwa and Amba Alagi not as mercenaries, but as grandchildren defending a grandmother’s honor.
This is the genius of the lethal myth. It turns from a story told into fuel for war. Italy was not defeated by weapons alone, but by a three-thousand-year-old narrative.
Yet today, official Yemeni discourse invokes Bilqis in museums, while disowning her “Muwalladin” grandchildren at the gates of citizenship.
Children of the Two Shores: Forgotten Fuel of the Revolution:
Ethiopia was not an exile for Yemenis. It was the republic’s operations room. From there, major merchants—Al-Sunaidar, Al-Asbahi, Al-Aidarus—pumped their money into the veins of the Free Officers’ movement. They were the “oil of the revolution” before oil was discovered. The first draft of the republic’s constitution was not written in Sana’a, but drafted by Ahmad Muhammad Numan after his direct exposure to the community’s political consciousness in Addis Ababa. The Yemeni Revolution of September 26, 1962 would not have breathed without the oxygen of Ethiopia’s migrants.
These men were not mere financiers. They were “historical actors” who built a parallel economy: they exported crops, Harari coffee, and frankincense to Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Turkey, China, America, and Japan. They invested in Addis Ababa’s restaurants that became landmarks: mandi, madhbi, sabaya, burma, ma’soub. They ran companies and factories, and many received commendations and official certificates from the Ethiopian state for their service to the economy. They worked “as Ethiopians—whether by birth, by naturalization, or as investors.”
But here begins the great historical betrayal: the Republic that the “Muwalladin” helped deliver, expelled them after birth. With the rise of Gulf oil, the community’s economic role diminished in Sana’a’s eyes, and so did recognition of it. The state replaced the sons of Harar with the oil of the Gulf. It replaced those who funded the revolution with those who funded palaces. The name “Muwalladin” shifted from a social descriptor to a symbolic bullet. It became a stigma. Some were stripped of citizenship, others barred from employment. The Republic used them as kindling to ignite the revolution, then shook the ash from its robe.
The Impossible Return:
In the 1970s, the caravan reversed. The Muwalladin returned to the “homeland” they had preserved in songs and their fathers’ tales. But they collided with the homeland-nightmare—a bureaucratic homeland that did not resemble their imagination. They found themselves foreigners with Yemeni features. Without identity papers, without a dialect the passport officer could understand, without a recognized memory.
Here, “internal exile” was born. To be a stranger in your father’s house. That was the horrifying moment of revelation: to fund the revolution, then be treated as a burden on the state. To write the Republic’s constitution, then be denied its ID card.
And the irony is that the Yemeni presence in the Horn of Africa was never the product of policy, but of geographic proximity, shared interests, and historic intermarriage. They succeeded in forging a dual identity: Ethiopian by citizenship, Yemeni by culture and memory. The Ethiopian state recognized them. The mother-state chose erasure.
“The Muwalladin do not die strangers. They die holding the two shores so that history does not drown.”
The Essence of REDMIX Today:
Can the archive rise from the shelves of oblivion to become a living digital repository, speaking in all the tongues of the Red Sea?
A repository that ensures organized access to layered strata of knowledge—multidisciplinary resources that trace the dynamics of cultural pluralism as it forms and fractures on both shores, from the early nineteenth century to the turmoil of the twenty-first. An archive that does not hoard paper, but curates memory: historical materials carefully selected, rigorous scholarly research, documents saved from decay, all disseminated on a searchable platform that does not distinguish between a professor in Turin and a student in Aden.
But the deeper question: Can this digital edifice overturn the balance of narrative, and reclaim for the “Muwalladin” the name that was confiscated? To erase from them the stigma of “humanitarian cases” displayed on the tables of pity, and affirm for them the status of “historical actors” who carved the region’s fate with their own hands, and sealed with their bodies the rifts between its two shores?
And will researchers find in this essence new raw material—not to write the history of victims, but to write the history of makers?
These are not passing questions. They are the questions that haunt the REDMIX team, from top to bottom: Valentina Fusari, the principal investigator who searches the archive’s silence for the voice of gender, labor, and mobility; Francesco Dragoni, who brings the project out of academia’s walls to the people; Adnan Al-Ghali, who reads hybridization in city maps; Tiziana Pasciuto, who preserves memory through ontology; Stefano Talamini, who wipes the dust from documents; Sara Zanotta, who traces threads of intermingling from Iran to the sea; and Sara Amerio, who holds all the project’s threads so they do not unravel.
They are their questions because they are history’s questions. And they seek their answers not with ink, but with excavation. Excavation before oblivion shovels its final earth.
Between the “Arab Quba” who entered, and the “Muwalladin” who left, lies an entire sea of untold stories. A sea where a guard died pulling the rope, and a flag did not fall.
Where Saeed Abdo stands in the strait, one leg here, one leg there, his back sealing the rift. Where a mother hid a torn birth certificate and told her son: “This is your only paper. Do not lose it.”
Oblivion shovels its earth every day. A handful over a name, a handful over a voice, a handful over an unmarked grave.
REDMIX has come with its pickaxe. Not to weep over graves, but to open them. To bring Bilqis out from between the lines—from between “entering” and “leaving.”
To say to her: “Rise. Your children did not die strangers. They were here. They built, they guarded, they loved, and they died holding the two shores so the house would not drown.”
If Bilqis rises from the archive, we rise with her. And if she speaks, every borrowed name falls away, and our true name remains:
We are not the bridge between two civilizations. We are the civilization with two shores.
Images:
Image: Headquarters of the Yemeni Community in Addis Ababa, 1945
Caption: Members of the Yemeni community in front of their established headquarters in Addis Ababa, 1945. This headquarters was their miniature parliament and popular embassy. Source: Private archive, Sami Al-Shatibi Collection.
Image: School guard of the Yemeni community in Addis Ababa
The guard of the Yemeni community school in Addis Ababa. For fifty years he raised the Yemeni flag each morning. On his last morning, he died pulling the rope, the flag ascending. His shadow on the pole, and the flag on his shadow.
Image: Saeed Abdo Saeed, hero of the novel They Die Strangers by Muhammad Abdul-Wali
Caption: Saeed Abdo Saeed, the real inspiration for the protagonist of They Die Strangers. His face is the silent archive of an entire tragedy. Source: Private archive.
