What is Bab El Mandeb?
The Gate of Tears is a strait at a political hotspot: the Red Sea. The Strait is a narrow bottleneck between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East, and a strategic link between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. Therefore, smaller boats do not need to make a much longer trip around the Cape of Good Hope. A significant proportion of world trade passes through the Strait, which has Djibouti and Eritrea on one side and the Republic of Yemen on the other, with Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Somalia nearby. Several million barrels of crude oil pass through the Strait every day.
The Gate of Tears, called Bab al Mandeb in Arabic (there are several spellings) has been a focus of commerce for many centuries. The name is said to derive from the navigation difficulties and the lives that have been lost there for many centuries; Alternatively, legend has it that it was named after the death of large numbers of people when the series of earthquakes that separated Africa from Asia occurred. An alternate English name, The Gates of Grief, is also used.
The strait is nearly twenty miles wide and is bisected by Perim Island (also known as Mayyun), a 65m high volcanic rock that now belongs to the Republic of Yemen. In the fairly recent geological past, Perim volcanic eruptions are believed to have closed this inlet to the Red Sea and caused it to dry out on several occasions. Biblical stories are intriguing in this context.
Bab el Mandeb included two channels: the eastern channel, Bab Iskander (Alexander’s channel), is about 2 miles wide and 30 meters deep. The Dact el Mayyun (the western channel) is more than 15 miles wide and 310 meters deep. However, the larger tankers are restricted to 2-mile wide lanes of traffic as part of the Western Canal Traffic Separation Plan.
The strategic importance of the Gate of Tears has increased since Saudi Arabia built an East-West pipeline. This was done so that Saudi oil could be exported through the Red Sea, reducing dependence on the Strait of Hormuz (2 miles wide), at the entrance to the Persian Gulf. Any physical or military blockade of the Gate of Tears would lead to oil exports being transported only via smaller tankers that could pass through the Suez Canal; there is also an oil pipeline (“Sumed”), to the Mediterranean.
The Strait also has a meaning that goes back to the origins of man himself. The so-called Recent Single Origin Hypothesis postulates that the oldest anatomically modern man (which is us) migrated across the Strait from his place of origin in the Great Rift Valley in Africa, some 60,000 years ago.
The Strait also has a religious significance, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church maintains that the first Semitic language migrated to Africa through the Strait.
Recently, a company owned by Tarek Bin Laden has presented a plan to build a bridge across the Strait, linking Yemen and Djibouti. It would count as one of the longest suspension bridges in the world. The proposed name is ‘The Bridge of the Horns’.