Iran’s Houthi allies have tightened their grip on the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, opening a second front against global shipping just as pressure from the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz had begun to ease.

The Yemeni militia has seized the coastal town of Mokha and occupied Perim, an island in the strait itself. The strait is the 20km-wide channel between Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, and via the Suez Canal it forms the shortest sea route between Asia and Europe.

Now dug in along the Yemeni coast, the Shia militia is enforcing the Red Sea blockade on Saudi vessels that it declared in July. Shipping in the area has been under threat since the Houthis began attacking merchant ships after the 7 October 2023 attacks, in solidarity with Gaza.

For Africa, the stakes cut both ways. Since 2024, the continent has established itself as a credible alternative to Suez, and ever-larger container ships have come to west Africa’s ports. But with oil above $100 a barrel, carriers are being drawn back to the shorter Red Sea route. That would pull the biggest vessels out of the Gulf of Guinea and leave only a few African deepwater hubs as winners.

Saudi oil boxed in

The escalation continues. Fighting goes on in the hills above the strait. On 19 September, the Houthis said they had fired drones and missiles at Riyadh and at strategic Saudi oil installations, including the Yanbu terminal on the Red Sea.

Yanbu, which had become the kingdom’s main crude export outlet, was already out of action. On 10 September, drones launched from Iraq struck the east-west pipeline that supplies it. It is a heavy blow for Riyadh, which had diverted part of its exports to the Red Sea after Hormuz closed. Since June, nearly 7% of Saudi oil output has left through Yanbu and passed through Bab el-Mandeb on its way to Asia.

With the southern exit shut, the only remaining sea route is north through the Suez Canal. For now, no one appears to be seriously considering that option, even as crude looks set to stay above $100 a barrel, close to April’s record highs.

“Demand for oil is so strong that anything seems possible,” said Paul Tourret, director of Isemar, the French maritime economics institute. Even an extra 20 to 30 days at sea to sail round Africa? “Shipping companies will have to get their calculators out and find the solution that suits them best.”

Bodom Matungulu, director of the think-tank RDC Stratégie, sees an opening for African producers such as Nigeria and Angola. African oil and gas could “partly replace Saudi hydrocarbons, for reasons of transport costs and delivery times”, he said.

Back to the Red Sea

Container lines are already testing the route. In recent months the largest have made repeated attempts to return to Bab el-Mandeb, which cuts two weeks off the costly Asia-Europe voyage round the Cape of Good Hope. Traffic through the strait is at its heaviest for a long time.

For years, carriers insisted they were making the best of a bad job, and that claim now looks hard to credit. “Current fuel prices are forcing them to reconsider,” Tourret said. That means rethinking, once again, how they serve Africa.

If container and ro-ro traffic resumes in the Red Sea, 24,000 TEU giants are less likely to anchor in the Gulf of Guinea. “In time, they will have to go back to the maritime motorways they were designed for,” Tourret said. Ships of 8,000 to 12,000 TEU would replace them, more in line with the region’s port volumes over the past two years.

The mega-ships’ arrival nonetheless shows how far West Africa has come. They are four times the size of the vessels that called a decade ago. “Since 2024, the continent has shown shipowners how much it matters,” Matungulu said. It has done so in tonnage, but even more as a credible alternative to Suez. Tourret called it “the meeting of port modernisation in the Gulf of Guinea and growing volumes of Chinese capital and consumer goods”.

Africa has earned its place, but not enough for carriers to lock in today’s rotations as a standing hedge against future Red Sea disruption.

Bypassing the continent

Instead, ships from Asia may skirt Africa altogether. They would run down Madagascar’s east coast and past South Africa before heading north-west to Europe.

Such services might call at a few deepwater hubs beyond Lomé, the regional transhipment port of MSC, the world’s largest container line. The candidates are Toamasina in Madagascar and Walvis Bay in Namibia, both expanding fast, and Senegal’s future port at Ndayane, followed by a final African call at Tanger Med. Mombasa in the east, and Pointe-Noire, Kribi, Tema and Abidjan in the west, would be too far off the route for direct calls.

Salalah and Djibouti

For now, fuel costs are pushing carriers to chance the Bab el-Mandeb, where the Houthi blockade formally targets only Saudi vessels. Services in the area will also shift with the fortunes of Dubai’s Jebel Ali hub, which is trapped behind Hormuz.

So far Oman’s Salalah is the main regional beneficiary, but Djibouti has not had its last word. It has yet to prove itself as a transhipment hub. But it has used the crisis to build up its bunkering and ship services, which will make it an unavoidable technical stop when the world fleet returns to the Red Sea.