Once in a while, extraordinary things happen. Such an extraordinary event took place at the battle of Adwa, which resulted in a decisive defeat for Italy and secured Ethiopian sovereignty. The extraordinary reality of the battles comes to light when one asks ‘how come the illequipped black people became victorious against a well organized white colonizer’. Simply put it, it is the thing of David and Goliath. The Biblical account of David and Goliath is one of the most popular stories from Scripture.
It is a lesson of courage, faith, and overcoming what seems impossible. During the ancient war between Israelis and Philistines, the Bible tells, a great Philistine giant named Goliath that stood at over nine feet tall came to the front of the Philistine battle line each day for forty days and mocked the Israelites and their God. But the Israelis feared him. It was only David, small in size, who was sent by his dad Jesse to visit the front lines and bring back battle news from his brothers, had the courage to withstood him. “As the Philistine moved closer to attack him, David ran quickly toward the battle line to meet him. Reaching into his bag and taking out a stone, he slung it and struck the Philistine on the forehead.
The stone sank into his forehead, and he fell, face down on the ground,” the bible narrates. This is extraordinary. On March 1, 1896, Adwa was the scene of another extraordinary scene; a decisive Ethiopian victory over an invading Italian army. The African victory at Adwa assured the independence of Ethiopia, making it one of the most significant battles against a European army of the colonial era.
The battle took place during the time of the socalled Scramble for Africa when European powers were staking claims to African lands as colonial possessions, as the Encyclopedia Encarta narrates. “Launching a night march on the evening of February 29 to take the Ethiopians by surprise the next morning, Italian General Oreste Baratieri’s four columns became separated. In the morning they were surrounded and destroyed, with 6,000 killed outright and more than 3,000 wounded and captured. The number of Ethiopian casualties, from a much larger force, was roughly similar.
The Italian survivors retreated to Eritrea; the Ethiopians were too short of supplies to pursue them.” The amazing thing was the imbalance of armaments between both sides. But, for Ethiopians, the topography, wisdom, endurance, enthusiasm, courage, and love of motherland helped them to register triumph victory. “There is one African king who is highly respected by all the great powers of Europe. He has a standing army of 150,000 men, and in 1895, when Italy tried to annex one of his provinces; she was badly defeated in a few months. King Menelik II of Abyssinia…” as the Minneapolis Journal indicated on April 27, 1901 publication.
A well-disciplined and massive Ethiopian army did the unthinkable it routed an invading Italian force and brought Italy’s war of conquest in Africa to an end. In an age of relentless European expansion, Ethiopia had successfully defended its independence and cast doubt upon an unshakable certainty of the age that sooner or later all Africans would fall under the rule of Europeans.
This event opened a breach that would lead, in the aftermath of world war fifty years later, to the continent’s painful struggle for freedom from colonial rule, said Raymond Jonas in his book titled: “The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire” The Battle of Adwa in 1896 was the result of Italian encroachments south of their colony of Eritrea on the Red Sea.
Though bound by the Treaty of Wichale (1889) to friendship, the Italians and Ethiopians had different opinions about the nature of that friendship. This was the famous “mistranslation” where the Italian treaty indicated Ethiopia would be a protectorate of Italy, while Emperor Menelik II argued no such wording existed in his copy. After the Italians occupied the northern Ethiopian city of Adigrat, Menelik summoned his forces and defeated the Italians at the battle of Amba Alage.
In response to this defeat thousands of Italian troops were ferried to Eritrea and, with great pressure from Rome to attack quickly, General Oreste Baratieri advanced and, due to a series of blunders by his subordinate commanders, his force was overwhelmed. Aside from numerous casualties, one mission reported roughly 3,600 dead though the exact number remains unknown, the Ethiopians also captured 1,900 Italians and 1,500 Askari (African soldiers serving in the Italian armed forces).
The scope and scale of this victory – the campaign covered more miles than Napoleon’s advance into Russia – should rank alongside any European campaign in the 19th century and assured Ethiopia as the only independent nation, apart from Liberia, in Africa at that time, Jonas says. Near the town of Adwa, in Ethiopia, an African army convincingly struck down the colonizing Italian army in a battle that decisively shaped not only the contours of Ethiopia but also its future and that of the continent.
Jonas draws vibrant portraits of the personalities at the center of these events, from the shrewd Ethiopian monarch Menelik II and his bold, aggressive wife, Taytu Betul, to the unfortunate Italian general Oreste Baratieri, the leader of the defeated Italian forces. Generally, on the Ethiopian side, the notable commanders of the battle, according to Sean McLachlan’s book Armies of the Adwa Campaign 1896 are Emperor Menelik II, Itaghiè Taytu, Ras Mengesha, Ras Alula, Nigus Tekle Haymanot, Ras Mikael and Ras Mengesha Atikim and the forces under their command. In addition, there were spearmen and swordsmen as well as an unknown number of armed peasants.
As Jonas points out, the African victory at Adwa commenced the crumbling of European dominance of Africa; Ethiopia thus became a source of pride and lineage often indistinguishable from Africa itself. Jonas claims that Adwa served as the model for future anti-colonial efforts.
His book suggests that other resistance fighters learned lessons from the Ethiopian experience, such as using the press to build public sympathy. But the reader must infer them. In fact, exposing how the symbolism of Adwa developed far after the battle and divorced from Ethiopian support undercuts so much of the received wisdom that it is hard not to imagine most of the “lessons” are ex post facto rationalizations from other de-colonial conflicts. While he suggests that Adwa “set in motion the long unraveling of European domination of Africa” it is, again, a point the reader must accept on sentiment rather than evidence. Ethiopia was a shock to European self-assurance but was quickly forgotten, which is why Europe was, again, shocked by Japanese victory against Russia in 1905.
Herald February 28/2019
BY GIRMACHEW GASHAW
