When Ethiopia defeated its would be colonizers
By dopper0189, Black Kos, Managing Editor
The Battle of Adwa was fought on March 1st 1896 between the Ethiopian Empire and the Kingdom of Italy near the town of Adwa, Ethiopia, in Tigray. Ethiopia’s victory in this battle sent shock waves around the world (“The pope is greatly disturbed,” reported The New York Times) and turned the narrative of colonialism on its head.
Prior to the 1850s, modern Ethiopia and Italy really didn’t exist as nation states. But shortly there after, over the course of several decades, the two nations began to take shape on maps and most importantly in the minds of their citizens, as chieftains and princes jostled for power. As the 20th century dawned, Africa had been carved up among the European powers at the Berlin Conference. The only two independent exceptions were the former America colony the Republic of Liberia in West Africa and Ethiopia (then still known as Abyssinia), in the eastern Horn of Africa region.
The newly unified Kingdom of Italy was a relative newcomer to the European imperialist scramble for Africa. Italy had recently obtained two African territories: Eritrea and Italian Somalia. Both were near Ethiopia on the Horn of Africa. Italy sought to increase its territory in Africa by conquering Ethiopia and joining it with its two territories. Menelik II as the contemporary Ethiopian leader pitted Italy against its European rivals while stockpiling weapons to defend Ethiopia against the Italians.
The Italians fortified several bases near the Red Sea and then gradually ventured inland. “Taking a page from the British book of colonial domination,” writes Theodore Vestal in The Battle of Adwa: Reflections on Ethiopia’s Historic Victory Against European Colonialism, they “pursued a policy of divide and conquer,” providing arms to any chiefs hostile to Yohannes IV, Ethiopia’s emperor until he was killed in battle in 1889. It was then that the Italians immediately moved to solidify their foothold by negotiating with the new emperor, Menelik II.
Menelik, from Ethiopia’s historically weaker southern region, owed much to his wife, Taytu. Raymond Jonas, author of The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire wrote heir marriage was “one of the great political unions of modern times.” She came from a wealthy northern family, which “added geographical balance to the ticket,” and she possessed a cunning political mind and a deep mistrust of Europeans.
The Treaty of Wuchalé, signed in both Italian and Amharic in May 1889, provided the pretext for the Battle of Adwa. Under the treaty, the Italians were given large swaths of land in exchange for a hefty loan of cash, arms and ammunition. “The pièce de résistance for the Italians,” writes Vestal, was the clause obligating Menelik to conduct all foreign affairs via Italy. “The Amharic version made such service by the Italians optional,” notes Vestal. Some have argued that Menelik was aware of the discrepancy, treating it as a convenient fiction that would deliver short-term gains (guns, money) before ultimately disentangling himself from it.
Italy formed its first colony, Eritrea, in 1890; two years later, the Italians persuaded Great Britain to recognize the whole of Ethiopia as a sphere of Italian interest. It all came tumbling down in 1893, however, when Menelik denounced the Wuchalé treaty and any foreign claim to his dominions. Menelik repaid the loan “with three times the stipulated interest,” notes Vestal, but kept the guns.
Italy responded by annexing small territories near the Eritrean border, shipping over tens of thousands of troops and seeking to subvert Menelik’s power base by entering into agreements with provincial leaders.
The Italians believed they had tricked Menelik II into giving his allegiance to Rome in the treaty. Mistakenly, they believed him to be unsophisticated in the way the Europeans believed themselves to be. To the Italians surprise, the treaty was rejected despite their attempt to influence the king with 2 million round of ammunition. He would have none of it and denounced them as liars who had attempted to cheat himself and Ethiopia.
When bribery failed Italy did what so many nations have tried throughout history. They attempted to set up Ras Mangasha of Tigray as rival by promising to support him with money and weapons, and hoped he would overthrow Menelik II who had denounced Italy. Menelik, a “master of the sport of personal advancement through intrigue,” according to Vestal, convinced the provincial rulers that the Italian threat was so grave that they must resist as a united force rather than “seek to exploit it to their own ends.”
When that failed, the Italians turned to the governor of colonial Eritrea, General Oreste Baratieri, who had shown some promise in his handling of government affairs in Eritrea. Baratieri was no stranger to battle and devised a good strategy to lure the Ethiopians into an ambush. There were three main problems with his strategy.
First, he had drastically underestimated the strength and will of the army facing him. Although aware he was outnumbered, the Governor of Eritrea believed the Ethiopians to be undisciplined and unskilled at the art of war negating the advantage in numbers. Certain he would have an advantage over the ‘savages’, he dug in his 20,000 troops and 56 guns at Adawa awaiting the King and his men.
In the meantime, Menelik II had trapped a thousand or so of the Italian army and besieged them. He agreed to allow them safe passage if Italy would reopen negotiations with him concerning a peace treaty. The Italian government refused and in fact did the opposite, authorizing more dollars to pursue the war in Ethiopia. Their Nations’ pride had been hurt by the African King and they sought to restore their ego and influence.
The second error Baratieri made was the assumption he could lure the Ethiopians out into an ambush. He did not think they had the tactics or knowledge of battle he possessed as an important leader in a civilized European nation. After a 3 month standoff his troops were out of basic supplies and he had to move forward or retreat. After a message came from higher up in the government calling him out as ineffective and unsure, he was pushed ahead to attack.
Baratieri’s third mistake of not understanding how poor his battle intelligence was became the most costly of his errors. The strategy he employed was to outflank the Ethiopian army under the cover of darkness and move in on them from the mountains above their camp. While Sun Tzu would have approved, the Italian commander did not account for the extremely harsh terrain nor the lack of direction and difficulty in communicating with his men would have out in the wild country.
After setting out confident in their battle strategy, the officers in charge of implementing the attack learned how poor the rough sketches they had were. It was dark and cold in a high mountain pass in February and it was doomed. Divisions of Italian soldiers became confused, lost, and disorganized. Through the confusion a two mile gap in their battle line was opened and the Ethiopians rushed in cutting the Italian attack in two. Baratieri had failed to claim the high ground and Menelik II hastily moved his artillery in above the attacking soldiers. Able to lob shells down upon the invaders, the Ethiopians raced to seize the advantage but the Italians held their ground and at mid morning it looked as if they may be able to win in spite of all the difficulty they had encountered.
As battle waged around them, the generals of the various armies that had come together as a united Ethiopian force under Emperor Menelik II directed combat. Empress Taytu Betul, Menelik’s formidable wife, was no exception. Not only did she exhort the 5,000 men of her personal army to be more courageous, she also mobilized the 10,000 or so women in the camp to form a supply chain to transport jugs of water from a nearby stream to Ethiopia’s thirsty warriors.
Menelik’s army killed 3,000 Italian troops, captured another 1,900 as prisoners of war and seized an estimated 11,000 rifles, 4 million cartridges and 56 cannons. The emperor’s ability to assemble a force of at least 80,000, says Raymond Jonas, author of The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire, and to organize and sustain them on a monthslong campaign was “unprecedented in 19th-century Africa.”
Taytu, not surprisingly, proposed harsh punishments for the Italian prisoners: Dismemberment, castration and execution were on her wish list. But her husband adopted a more strategic stance, says Jonas: “He realized the considerable bargaining leverage of the soldiers,” and used it to negotiate a treaty that recognized Ethiopia’s independence and included a considerable cash indemnity from the Italians.
With Taytu (and other Ethiopian generals) urging Menelik to consolidate their victory by advancing into Eritrea and expelling the Italians from the continent, Menelik once again took a more measured response. Jonas argues that here too he got it right: “He’d already done an amazing job of holding together his army over huge distances, but it’s hard to say whether he could have managed all the way to the coast” — especially when more troops would be arriving from Italy. Either way, Menelik’s decision formalized the divide between Ethiopia and Eritrea.
The decisive victory at Adwa affirmed Ethiopia’s sovereignty and showed both Africans and Europeans that colonial conquest was not inevitable. In Italy, isolated protests erupted to decry the very idea of colonialism, but these were met by a more widespread desire for revenge. Eventually the Italian government decided to hang on to Eritrea and play at being better neighbors with Menelik. (That said, Italy’s national shame over its defeat had a lot to do with Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia four decades later.)
While Adwa continues as a source of great pride for Ethiopia, it has not brought the kind of prosperity Taytu and Menelik would have hoped for. The country evaded colonization, but it has never achieved democracy, and the current government’s policy of ethnic federalism is the antithesis of Menelik’s vision of strength through unity.
Sources:
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Democrats in the South Carolina Senate turned debate about a bill to set guidelines for history curriculum on subjects like slavery and segregation into discussion about why the body can’t take a vote on a hate crimes bill.
South Carolina and Wyoming are the only states in the U.S. without a law allowing extra punishment for hate crimes — which a judge or jury determines were motivated by hate over someone’s race, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, age, national origin, or physical or mental ability.
For the past three years, a hate crimes bill has made it through the South Carolina House and to the Senate floor, only to stop there. The outlook for the bill this year is grim. The Republican-dominated chamber has not held any debate or brought the proposal up for a vote despite the support of survivors of a racist attack that killed nine at a Charleston church, in addition to business leaders.
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White House officials for years warned that opioids were becoming rampant in Black communities. Then came Covid-19.
In 2020, the rate of drug overdose deaths among Black Americans skyrocketed, increasing faster than that of any other racial or ethnic group in the country. Fentanyl, which had become more ubiquitous, drove the rising toll. On Wednesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report showing that more Black Americans died from fentanyl overdoses than from any other drug in 2021 and at far higher rates than whites or Hispanics.
“The seesaw was already tipped to the wrong side,” Jerome Adams, who was surgeon general during the Trump administration, said in an interview. “We were barely holding it up prior to the pandemic and then it just completely tipped — particularly for communities of color.”
Between 2016 and 2021, the rate of fentanyl overdose deaths rose 279 percent for all Americans, the new CDC data shows. Even as the total number of overdose deaths in the U.S. held relatively steady last year, the growing fentanyl threat and racial disparity present a stark challenge for the Biden administration, which has made health equity a priority.
“The numbers tell us that we have a lot to do,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
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Former first lady Michelle Obama is continuing her mission to improve children’s health and wellness through her newest business venture. This week, the bestselling author announced the launch of PLEZi Nutrition, a food and drink company geared toward kids and putting health at the forefront, CBS News reports.
On a mission to create higher standards in producing and marketing children’s food, Obama is a co-founder and strategic partner of the company. “I am rolling up my sleeves in a different way,” she said in remarks at The Wall Street Journal Future of Everything Festival in New York City, where she made the disclosure about the company. “There are companies and organizations all across the country and around the world that are working hard every day to get healthier, more affordable food to more people.
“But I believe that we still have so much more to do and we cannot wait to do it because the future of everything truly starts within us, and particularly in our young people, the ones who will be leading the way in boardrooms and classrooms and operating rooms and the halls of power.”
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California and New York attorneys general announced Thursday they are beginning an investigation into the National Football League, focusing on claims of workplace discrimination and a hostile environment more than a year after dozens of former female employees disclosed negative experiences working within the organization.
The probe will examine allegations of gender pay disparities, harassment and gender and race discrimination in potential violation of state and federal laws, according to a joint statement released by California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and New York Atty. Gen. Letitia James.
The states have subpoenaed the NFL, which has offices in New York and California, for relevant information.
In an interview Thursday, Atty. General Bonta said the investigation is being conducted jointly with New York because the organization has its headquarters in New York, with secondary offices in California, comprising more than 1,000 employees across both offices. He pointed to “very disturbing and concerning reports” alleging discrimination and pay inequity for women that have surfaced in investigative articles, lawsuits and congressional hearings that led to the investigation.
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