The 1967 Referendum France Rigged to Keep Djibouti

By the mid-1960s, French Somaliland, a small territory on the Horn of Africa surrounding the port city of Djibouti, was one of the last pieces of France’s African empire still under direct colonial rule, and its population was split between two main communities: ethnic Somalis, many of whom favored independence with an eventual union with neighboring Somalia, and Afars, who leaned toward remaining associated with France. When Charles de Gaulle made an official visit to the territory on August 25, 1966, he was met by demonstrators demanding independence, unrest serious enough that he ordered a referendum to settle the territory’s status the following year.

France did not leave that referendum’s outcome to chance. In the months before the March 19, 1967 vote, colonial police rounded up and expelled Somali residents to Somalia on the grounds that they lacked valid identity cards, a bureaucratic pretext that stripped a share of the Somali community of any chance to vote at all; contemporary press accounts put the number expelled at around 6,000, while later scholarship has cited figures as high as 10,000. Voter registration figures reflected the effect directly: despite the two communities being roughly comparable in size, only 14,689 Somalis were registered to vote against 22,004 Afars. Somali political leaders also accused France of importing thousands of Afar nomads from across the border in Ethiopia specifically to pad the electoral rolls, and French authorities barricaded Djibouti City itself to keep outside “influence,” as the official justification put it, from reaching voters, while arresting opposition leaders in the run-up to the poll.

The result reflected the electorate France had constructed: 60.60 percent voted to remain part of France, against 39.40 percent for independence, a 22-point margin on a turnout of nearly 95 percent. The announcement triggered immediate, violent riots in Djibouti’s Shantytown district; French forces responded with armored cars and machine guns, killing an estimated 12 to 20 people, mostly Somalis. In the crackdown that followed, thousands of Somali men and women were rounded up and sent to a detention camp in the desert, with roughly 500 sent on to a penal camp, 1,500 expelled across the border into Ethiopia, and the rest eventually released. France then renamed the territory the French Territory of the Afars and the Issas, a name change that formally elevated the two smaller communities implied by that title over the Somali population the referendum had just been engineered to suppress.

A decade later, with decolonization pressure mounting across what remained of the French empire, a second referendum in 1977 produced a decisive vote for independence, and the territory became the Republic of Djibouti on June 27, 1977. The 1967 vote stands as one of the more thoroughly documented instances of a colonial power directly manufacturing a referendum result through deportation and selective registration rather than leaving the outcome to an accurately counted electorate.