Republic of Ajuran (AMW)

[Ajuran]

Factbook for Ajuran in the AMW universe. OOC comments fine as I'll be linking all relevant posts in the TOC. Work in very gradual progress.

Table of Contents

Overview

Overview

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Government
[url]Opposition[/url]

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Overview

Ajurani President Cusman Ali Al Samada

Map of the Republic of Ajuran. most major cities marked

Summary

The Republic of Ajuran is a large but thinly populated country situated in the Horn of Africa. Nominally a democracy, political discourse is dominated by the ruling Ajurani Freedom Party (AFP) and the Al Samada clan, whose head, Cusman Ali Al Samada, serves in a Presidency invested with great power over the legislature.

Independence from Gandvik was achieved by mutual consent in the years following the Great War as a Bantu minority insurgency threatened to spread to the Ajurani majority. In the decades since, the disenfranchisement of that minority has not abated, and militant resistance has crystallised around the banned United Lusakan People's Organisation (ULPO) and its armed wing, the Lusakan Revolutionary Alliance Corps (LRAC).

Today, the indigenous Ajurani people, forming an absolute majority of the population, are pre-eminent at the heart of government, while a substantial Arab population remains disproportionately affluent, dominating the nation's commercial relationship with its old colonial power. The Bantu population, not necessarily representing a single ethnicity but thought to descend from refugees forced from their homelands in Nilosahara during and after the Byzantine presence, are often collectively referred to as Lusakan, which is a reference to a village head-man who, in the first half the twentieth century, united the peoples of this most down-trodden minority in resisting the Gandvian empire and its favoured Arab 'managers' of the Ajurani protectorate.

Ajuran's population is marginally more than one tenth that of the nation's principle neighbour, Nilosahara, while per-capita GDP in Ajuran, a lower middle income economy, is more than three times higher.

Major languages spoken in the country include Ajurani (an Afro-Asiatic language), Arabic, and Swahili, though several local languages and dialects persist. Gandvian competes strongly with English as a second (or often third) language amongst educated classes.

[Ajuran]

Government

Type: Authoritarian republic
Capital: Beledweyne (56,000)
Head of State: President Cusman Ali Al Samada
Ruling Party: Ajurani Freedom Party (AFP)

[Ajuran]

History

More than a thousand years ago, Ajuran became one of the first places in Africa to see the adoption of Islam as a major religion. Several thousand years earlier it was the location of the legendary Land of Punt. Millennia prior to that, what would become Ajuran hosted a thriving stone-age culture, and some of Africa's oldest cave paintings may be found in the country. Ajuran is within or close to the cradle of modern humanity, with early sub-species of homo sapiens having arisen and lived in the wider region that the Republic now inhabits.

Arab traders visited the region and eventually established a lasting presence in the Horn of Africa in antiquity, forming a prosperous and influential minority, particularly in important coastal towns. A number of kingdoms rose and fell throughout the nation's history, several proving influential beyond the modern borders. The Ajurani Sultanate apparently took part in struggles over Zanzibar and parts of the Arabian peninsula during the Middle Ages.

During the Crusades, a second wave of immigration from Arabia caused major upheaval in Ajuran. Arab Muslims displaced by the Christian invasion came to Ajuran not as refugees but as conquerors in their own right. The privileged position of earlier Arab merchants was co-opted by the late arrivals as a new dynasty established itself in the Horn of Africa, ruling for some years and successfully resisting Byzantine hegemony in the wider region.

Respecting the Sultanate's resistance to Constantinople and other local forces, the English treated Ajuran as a legitimate political entity even as they colonised large tracts of Africa and declared whole -inhabited- regions terra nullius. Thus Ajurani independence was maintained during the height of the Euro-American colonial age.

However, despite its strong legal code, efficient tax system, well-organised and battle-hardened army, and large fleet of cannon-armed dhows, Ajuran was left behind by the industrial revolution, and its agricultural base remained unable to support rapid population growth. When, in the late nineteenth century, Gandvik came late to the colonial game and launched an expedition against the Sultanate, the European nation counted several tens of millions of subjects, and Ajuran not many more than one million.

Despite this disparity, Gandvik's remoteness from the Horn of Africa and its greater interest in European struggles meant that only three battalions came ashore to capitalise on the Gandvian fleet's decisive defeat of the Sultanate's obsolete navy. Supported by naval gunnery, their capture of key ports was rapid and in stark contrast with earlier Byzantine failures. The speed and scale of these achievements convinced many of Ajuran's 'first wave' of Arab clans to side with the invaders in hopes of securing a privileged position in any future administration.

Recruiting a number of locals, the Europeans hoped to be guided through the interior and to march quickly through the Sultanate in triumph. However, the Arabs who had flocked to the Gandvians were predominantly residents of the coastal region, and were not so familiar with the hinterland as the Europeans' wishful thinking allowed them to believe. Whether through ignorance or deceit, their Arab guides lead the Gandvians into a highly disadvantageous position under the Sultan's guns, where they were flanked by mounted troops, using both horses and camels, of an army several times the size of their own force.

Estimates for the size of the European contingent range from 2,250 to 2,700, along with 750-900 Arab levies for a total strength between 3,000 and 3,600, with 10 to 12 guns, mostly small pack artillery pieces. The Sultan's army, meanwhile, numbered anywhere from 14,000 to 24,000, of whom three quarters were armed either with muskets or recently imported rifles possibly obtained from Gandvik's European rivals, and the remainder with spears, lances, bows, and sabres. The Ajuranis are believed to have had 6 to 10 artillery pieces of various sizes, some being archaic cannon and others slightly more modern, but they had the advantage of having deployed their guns ahead of the engagement and on the high ground.

Some 1,400 Gandvians died on the field and 600 were captured (including several dozen who would later die of their wounds), while as many as 300 who escaped would be listed as wounded, meaning that virtually no European was left unscathed. Of the Gandvian's Arab allies accounts vary, some suggesting that they quit the field early and left the Christians to the slaughter, while others, today in academic favour, report that many Arabs were amongst the last resisting in scattered parts of the chaotic battlefield, no doubt rightly fearing the grim traitor's fate that awaited those who were captured.

In one of the worst defeats for a European army fighting non-white opposition, the Gandvians lost to the Sultanate several thousand modern rifles, a number of light artillery pieces, countless rounds of ammunition, and hundreds of pack animals. Making the most of their triumph, the Ajuranis demanded a steep ransom for their European captives, perhaps too steep, for in addition to the injury dealt to national pride, Riga would there after be in pursuit of lost treasure, and determined to exact a stuff penalty from the Sultanate.

When the Gandvians returned near the turn of the century, they brought fewer but more professional troops, this time all armed with repeating rifles and machine-guns. The force of 1,500 was able to capitalise on the Sultanate's harsh treatment of the supposedly 'rebellious' Arab communities to raise an even larger local force, and brought on board a number of black African fighters arrived in Ajuran as refugees from Byzantine rule and inter-communal strife in Nilosahara. In all, some 5,000 men marched against the weakened Sultanate, which had itself lost some 2,500 men in the prior engagement and could no longer count on its minority populations to support it. With around 10,000-11,000 men on the field, the Sultan, outnumbering his opponent 2-1 and remembering their previous encounter, chose not to wait for further reinforcements when his main army encountered the enemy on open ground. He engaged, but with the Europeans bolstered by several machine-guns and hundreds of five-round magazine rifles, and this time able to bring their modern artillery to bear, almost half the Ajurani force was destroyed for only a few dozen Gandvian casualties.

The Sultan retreated to one of his fortified palaces, hoping to regroup for a guerrilla resistance campaign in the northern highlands, but deserted by ever more of his subjects and hotly pursued by the Gandvians, he was soon besieged and eventually forced to surrender his sovereignty and retire into exile.

The Gandvian Protectorate of Ajuran was to be occupied by just a few thousand European soldiers and administrators, and the Arab minority, some tens of thousands strong by the mid twentieth century in a total population of perhaps two million, became heavily favoured at the expense of the Ajurani majority and small Bantu population.

Resistance came most strongly from the latter community, a village elder named Lusaka instigating a revolt in southern areas, his warriors apparently often slipping back and forth across the long and poorly developed Nilosaharan border. Lacking the numbers for a full scale independence war, the Lusakans, as they came to be known, carried out a number of assassinations, bombings, and sabotage attacks against the colonial administration and its supporters.

During the Great War, Gandvik raised an Ajurani regiment to support Byzantine forces fighting the Geletians in Central Africa. The strain of the general conflict told considerably on the colony, and growing unrest in the Ajurani population seemed to threaten a widening of the resistance movement to include more than simply the Bantu minority. Fearing that the support of the Arab community alone would be insufficient to maintain order in the event of an Ajurani uprising, especially with Gandvian resources otherwise engaged in Europe, Riga entered negotiations with representatives of the Ajurani and Arab populations, excluding the newly established United Lusakan People's Organisation and its militant Lusakan Revolutionary Alliance Corps.

In return for Ajurani support during the Great War and the continuation of certain economic and diplomatic privileges in future, the Protectorate would be granted independence within five years of the war's conclusion. Under the agreement, the Arab population was able to retain most of its economic advantage in the country, while the bulk of the new government would be drawn from the Ajurani populace.

Most governmental instruments had been handed over by the end of 1948, and the independence of the Republic of Ajuran was formally ratified in Beledweyne in 1949. In the decades since, relations between Ajuran and Gandvik have remained fairly strong, especially in terms of Gandvian investment in the Horn of Africa and a continued Ajurani preference for the purchase of Gandvian military equipment. The ULPO and LRAC have continued their campaign of resistance despite independence, viewing the new order as neo-colonial and little different in practical terms from the old Protectorate.