Ethiopia has a coastline
The core idea stands, but key numbers or details have changed.
TaughtEthiopia sits on the Red Sea, with ports at Massawa and Assab.
NowEritrea became independent on 24 May 1993, taking the entire coastline with it. Ethiopia is now landlocked, and with over 130 million people it is the most populous landlocked country in the world.
What actually happened
Eritrea was an Italian colony, then British-administered, then federated with Ethiopia in 1952 and annexed outright in 1962. The independence war that followed ran for thirty years, one of the longest in African history, and ended with the Eritrean People's Liberation Front taking Asmara in 1991. A referendum in 1993 recorded a vote of over 99% for independence.
The consequence for Ethiopia was enormous and is easy to miss on a map: a country of that size losing all sea access reshapes its economy permanently. Ethiopia now routes the overwhelming majority of its trade through Djibouti. Relations between the two collapsed into a border war from 1998 to 2000 that killed tens of thousands, and the border stayed closed until a 2018 peace deal that won Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed the Nobel Peace Prize.
Newsletter
Get new weekly revisions
Sources
- United Nations: Eritrea admitted to membershipun.org
- Encyclopaedia Britannica: Eritreabritannica.com
Who was taught this
Still standard through 1993, so anyone who finished school between 1950 and 1993 learned the earlier version.