There's a road in Somaliland that climbs seven hundred metres in ten kilometres of hairpin bends. Along the way, the landscape, the temperature and the vegetation all change completely. Below lies Berbera, with its forty degrees and its coral-stone old town baked bare by the sun. At the top is Sheikh: a town of straight streets at 1,430 metres, with trees, fresh air and British brick buildings that look like they belong to another colony.
The British made Sheikh their high-altitude retreat, the Somali version of the hill stations they built in India. It was a place to escape the heat of the coast, set up offices and a small garrison and, in 1958, open an elite boarding school. That school, the Sheikh Secondary School, now the Pharo School, educated a large part of the Somali and Somaliland ruling class, including two future presidents of Somaliland.
But the place's history goes back much further. On the edge of town lie the ruins of Fardowsa, a medieval stone city that between the 13th and 15th centuries was a trading hub between the pastoral interior and the ports of the Gulf of Aden. Excavations there have turned up imported pottery and Chinese porcelain. So Sheikh has two layers: a medieval trading post and a colonial mountain town. You can see both in a single morning.
For centuries, the mountain pass where Sheikh now stands was the natural gateway between the Somali pastoral interior and the port of Berbera. On the outskirts of today's town are the ruins of Fardowsa, one of the largest medieval settlement remains in the Horn of Africa. This stone city traded with the Indian Ocean world between the 13th and 15th centuries, as the imported pottery and Chinese porcelain found at the site show. When the British Somaliland protectorate was set up in the late 19th century, the colonial administration valued the place for a different reason, its cool mountain climate, and turned it into a hill station with offices, residences, a small detachment and gardens. In 1958 the Sheikh Secondary School was founded there. It was a free, selective boarding school with a British curriculum, and it went on to educate much of the political elite of Somalia and Somaliland, including the future Somaliland presidents Mohamed Haji Ibrahim Egal and Ahmed Silanyo. The school was destroyed in 1989 during the offensive by Siad Barre's regime and stayed closed for more than a decade. In January 2003 the British educators Dick and Enid Eyeington, a married couple, reopened it with 53 pupils. In October of that same year both were shot dead on the school grounds. In 2005 a Hargeisa court handed down death sentences and life sentences for the crime. The school kept going and today operates as Pharo Secondary School.
Read the full history ↓5,000-year-old rock art, a capital rebuilt from the rubble of 1988, and a state with its own currency, passport and elections that the world took thirty-four years to start recognising.
Read the history of Somaliland: Hargeisa and the interior (more stable, limited recognition) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The Golis range runs parallel to Somalia's northern coast like a wall. It separates the scorching plain along the Gulf of Aden from the inland plateau, home to Somali herders and the way up to the Ethiopian highlands. That wall has few passable crossings, and one of the best lies exactly where the town of Sheikh stands today, at an altitude of about 1,430 metres.
For centuries, everything moving between Berbera and the interior had to come through this point. Caravans came down loaded with hides, myrrh, frankincense, ivory and coffee from the Ethiopian highlands. Going up were the cloth, rice, dates, iron and pottery that arrived by sea from Arabia, Persia and India. The pass was more than a geographical feature: it was a natural toll point, a place to stop, water the animals and sleep before tackling the descent or the plateau.
The climate added a second advantage. At this altitude, the average annual temperature is around 19 °C, and about 466 mm of rain falls each year. That is a great deal by the region's standards, with peaks between April and May and between August and October. It means pasture, water and living conditions completely different from the coast, where Berbera stays above 40 °C for almost four months. Anyone who has driven up the slope in high summer understands at once why people stayed up top.
On the outskirts of the present-day town, among the scrub and the rocks, lie the remains of one of the largest medieval settlements documented in the Horn of Africa: the town of Fardowsa. It was a stone-built urban centre, with domestic and commercial buildings, that flourished roughly between the 13th and 15th centuries as a hub of trade between the pastoral interior and the ports of the Gulf of Aden.
The archaeological finds tell the story better than any chronicle. Surveys and excavations at Fardowsa and the other stone towns of inland Somaliland have turned up imported ceramics and Chinese porcelain, which in this region ranges from the Tang to the Ming period, along with glass and other long-distance goods. This is direct proof that this mountain town, remote today, was linked to the Indian Ocean networks that connected East Africa with Arabia, Persia, India and China.
Fardowsa is not an isolated case. Inland Somaliland is dotted with ruined medieval stone towns, and many others besides. Among them are Amud, near Borama, with hundreds of houses, mosques and courtyards full of glass and porcelain; Abasa; and Aw Barkhadle. Most of them date from the period of the Adal Sultanate and the region's Islamic trade networks. This sophisticated, cosmopolitan medieval urban world flatly contradicts the image of the Horn of Africa as a purely nomadic place.
Much of what we know comes from systematic work begun in 2007 by the Somali archaeologist Sada Mire. As Somaliland's Director of Antiquities, she helped set up the Department of Tourism and Archaeology and recorded close to a hundred heritage sites in the territory. Like almost all of them, Fardowsa still has no large-scale excavation, no visitor facilities and no international protection.
When the British set up the Somaliland protectorate between 1884 and 1888, they inherited a domestic problem well known across their empire: the heat. Berbera, the protectorate's capital until 1941, was unbearable for European officials and soldiers for much of the year. The solution was the usual one, already tried in India: build a hill station.
Sheikh filled that role. At 1,430 metres, with a mild climate, water and greenery, it became the protectorate's highland retreat. It had residences, administrative offices, storehouses, a small military detachment and gardens planted with imported species. The town's layout, a grid of straight streets, gives away that origin. So does the architecture of its buildings, which more than one visitor has compared with the British hill stations of the Deccan plateau. The same goes for the ruins visible today: a fort, the governor's house and official housing.
The British also built the piece of engineering that defines the place. The road climbs from the village of Hudisa, at the foot of the Golis, rising some seven hundred metres in barely ten kilometres through a series of hairpin bends. This route is still the main road between Berbera and the interior. It is now paved and being rehabilitated in phases funded by the Somaliland Development Fund. It is the most spectacular road in Somaliland and one of the most impressive in the Horn of Africa.
It is worth remembering that the British protectorate was a bare-minimum colony. London invested little, built no infrastructure and treated the territory essentially as a source of meat for the Aden garrison. Against that backdrop of deliberate scarcity, Sheikh stands out precisely because the British did build something there, and for a far from selfless reason: so they could breathe.
The most lasting mark the British left on Sheikh was not an administrative building but a school. In 1958, two years before independence, Sheikh Secondary School was founded. It was a free, selective boarding school with a British curriculum, taking about fifty pupils a year from across the protectorate, chosen on merit by examination.
Its impact was far greater than its size. Between 1958 and 1989, those classrooms produced a large share of the Somali and Somaliland ruling class: ministers, prime ministers, academics, doctors and diplomats. Former pupils include Mohamed Haji Ibrahim Egal, prime minister of Somalia and later president of Somaliland from 1993 to 2002. They also include Ahmed Mohamed Mohamoud "Silanyo", president of Somaliland from 2010 to 2017, and Ali Khalif Galaydh, prime minister of Somalia. That a boarding school in a mountain town produced two heads of state and several heads of government says a lot about the role it played.
The end came with the war. In 1989, during the Siad Barre regime's offensive against the north, the school was badly damaged. The collapse of the Somali state and the civil war then kept it closed for more than a decade. The buildings fell into disrepair, the boarding school emptied and the town lost its most important institution.
In September 2002, a British couple of educators with forty years of work in Africa moved to Sheikh to reopen it. Dick and Enid Eyeington had taught in Swaziland and were working for SOS Children's Villages. The school reopened in January 2003 with 53 pupils and took in another fifty that same year. In October 2003, both were shot dead in their home inside the school grounds, and their bodies were found the next morning. In November 2005, a court in Hargeisa sentenced eight people to death and another seven to life imprisonment for the crime.
The school did not close. It kept going and grew, and today it operates as Pharo Secondary School, teaching both the Somaliland curriculum and IGCSE. Once again, it is one of the leading schools in the territory.
Today's Sheikh is a small town of straight streets where traffic on the Berbera-Burao road stops. It has very basic hotels, pharmacies, shops, truckers' canteens and tea houses. It lives off passing traffic, highland herding and the school. The herds of goats, sheep and camels move with the rains. There is no tourist infrastructure of any kind.
What makes it interesting is the layering. On the outskirts are the stones of Fardowsa, a medieval town that traded with China. In town are the ruins of a British fort and of a colonial governor's house. In between are a boarding school that trained presidents and a whole collection of 20th-century stories. All of it lies within a few kilometres, without a single information sign.
The lack of signage is no accident. Because no state recognises Somaliland, it cannot use the mechanisms of the UNESCO World Heritage Convention or put forward nominations. That rules out Laas Geel, the medieval stone towns and the colonial heritage of Berbera and Sheikh. Protection depends on the local Department of Archaeology, on occasional bilateral cooperation and, above all, on the local people.
The big change under way is the road. The section-by-section rehabilitation of the Berbera-Burao road, with the Sheikh-Berbera stretch now under construction, is part of the logistics corridor linking the port expanded by DP World with the interior and with Ethiopia. For Sheikh, that means more traffic, better access and probably more visitors. For now, though, it is still what it has always been: a cool spot at the top of a climb, where you stop for a cup of tea and look down.
