The Battle of Adwa, the battle that kept Ethiopia a free country
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.
East Africa circa 1930
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.
Battle of Adwa, 1896
Image Courtesy of the Library of Congress
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.
An 1890s Italian map of Adwa. A small arrow indicates that north is to the right
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.
Ethiopians mark Africa’s first victory over a colonial power in 1896
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. But since taking office in April, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has fired corrupt civil servants, freed political prisoners and normalized relations with Eritrea.
Sources: Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica, The Battle of Adwa: Reflections on Ethiopia’s Historic Victory Against European Colonialism by Theodore Vestal, The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire by Raymond Jonas
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Following months of pressure from the Trump administration to scale back diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and limit the number of international students, Black and Latino enrollment at Harvard has dropped this year.
On Thursday, October 23, the university released enrollment data for the class of 2029, showing that the share of Black and Latino students has fallen to nearly 10 percent.
About 12 percent of this fall’s incoming freshmen identify as Black or African American, down from 14 percent in 2024. The percentage of students who identify as Latino also saw a sharp decline, from 16 percent last year to 11 percent. By contrast, Asian American representation rose from 37 percent to 41 percent. International students decreased slightly from 16 percent to 15 percent, according to The New York Times. The percentage of students identifying as white was not disclosed.
The university also noted that students could select more than one race, while about eight percent chose not to report their race.
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An Alabama man convicted of helping to burn a man alive was executed by nitrogen gas – a form of suffocation which defense lawyers have described as cruel and unusual punishment – on Thursday shortly after the US supreme court signed off on the seventh execution using the contested method.
Anthony Boyd, 54, was sent to the death chamber at the William C Holman correctional facility on Thursday evening.
“I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t participate in killing anybody,” said Boyd in his final words, per the Associated Press. “There can be no justice until we change this system … Let’s get it.”
He was strapped to a gurney and forced to breathe nitrogen through an industrial mask, fatally depriving his body of oxygen. He was pronounced dead at 6.33pm.
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A new congressional map passed by North Carolina Republicans has caused outrage amid a nationwide redistricting strategy demanded by President Donald Trump that is primarily targeting Black members of Congress.
The 1st Congressional District, currently held by U.S. Rep. Don Davis, North Carolina’s only Black congressman, has been redrawn to become an unwinnable seat for Democrats. The district, comprised of many Black rural voters, has elected a Black Democrat since 1992.
“We’ve seen this pattern before: it’s what I call surgical racism with surgical precision — the use of redistricting and voting laws to divide, diminish, and deny. But the truth is simple: when you steal people’s representation, you steal their healthcare, their wages, and their future,” said civil rights leader Bishop William J. Barber II, who is the head of Repairers of the Beach and is national co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign.
“That’s why we will fight back — in the courts, in the streets, and at the ballot box — to make clear that in North Carolina, and across America, the people’s will cannot be gerrymandered out of existence.”
U.S. Rep. Don Davis, North Carolina
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An Alabama man convicted of helping to burn a man alive was executed by nitrogen gas – a form of suffocation which defense lawyers have described as cruel and unusual punishment – on Thursday shortly after the US supreme court signed off on the seventh execution using the contested method.
Anthony Boyd, 54, was sent to the death chamber at the William C Holman correctional facility on Thursday evening.
“I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t participate in killing anybody,” said Boyd in his final words, per the Associated Press. “There can be no justice until we change this system … Let’s get it.”
He was strapped to a gurney and forced to breathe nitrogen through an industrial mask, fatally depriving his body of oxygen. He was pronounced dead at 6.33pm.
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