Month: February 2024

As battle waged around them, the generals of the various armies which had come together as a united Ethiopian force under Emperor Menelik II, directed combat. Empress Taytu Betel, Menelik’s astute and formidable wife, was no exception. Not only did she exhort the 5000 men of her personal army to be more courageous, she also mobilized the 10,000 or so women in the camp to create an endless supply chain carrying jugs of water from a nearby stream to Ethiopia’s thirsting warriors.

The Battle of Adwa, 1 March 1896, 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. Menelik’s army killed 3000 Italian troops, captured a further 1900 as POWs, and seized an estimated 11,000 rifles, 4 million cartridges, and 56 cannon. Menelik’s ability to not only assemble a force of at least 80,000, says Prof Raymond Jonas, author of The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire, but also to organize and sustain them on a months-long campaign was ‘unprecedented in 19^th Century Africa.’

Prior to the 1850s neither Ethiopia nor Italy even existed. But over the course of a few decades as chieftains and princes jostled for power, both nations started to take shape in the minds of their inhabitants. By the time Italy arrived, late for the party, at the Scramble for Africa, most of the spoils had already been divvied up between established European powers. But Ethiopia, which had long been an isolated exception on the African map, remained unclaimed.

After establishing a few bases near the Red Sea, the Italians gradually ventured further inland. ‘Taking a page from the British book of colonial domination [they] pursued a policy of divide and conquer’, writes Theodore Vestal, providing arms to any chiefs hostile to Emperor Yohannes. When Yohannes was killed in battle in 1889, the Italians sensed a chance to solidify their foothold through negotiation with the new Emperor, Menelik II.

Menelik, from the historically weaker South of the country, owed much to his wife Taytu. Their marriage was, says Jonas, ‘one of the great political unions of modern times.’ (They liked each other too.) Taytu, from a wealthy Northern family, ‘added geographical balance to the ticket.’ She also had a cunning political mind and a deep mistrust of Europeans. ‘She tended to map out maximalist positions,’ says Jonas, which magnanimous Menelik ‘could then moderate.’

The Treaty of Wuchalé, signed in Italian and Amharic versions 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 resistance for the Italians,’ writes Vestal, was the clause that obliged Menelik to make all foreign contacts via Italy. ‘The Amharic version made such service by the Italians optional,’ notes Vestal. Jonas argues that Menelik was probably aware of the discrepancy all along, and that it was a ‘convenient fiction’ which would allow him to get what he wanted in the short-term, before ultimately disentangling himself from it.

In 1890 Italy formed its first colony, Eritrea, and two years later the Italians were able to persuade Great Britain to recognize the whole of Ethiopia as a sphere of Italian interest, notes Vestal. This all came tumbling down in 1893 when Menelik denounced the Wuchalé treaty and all foreign claims to his dominions. Menelik paid back the loan ‘with three times the stipulated interest,’ but he kept the guns.

After this affront, Italy ramped things up a notch, annexing small territories near the Eritrean border, shipping tens of thousands of troops from the patria, and seeking to subvert Menelik’s power base by entering into agreements with provincial leaders. Menelik, a ‘master of the sport of personal advancement through intrigue’, according to Vestal, successfully persuaded the provincial rulers that the Italian threat was so grave that they must combine against it rather than ‘seek to exploit it to their own ends.’

Which brings us back to the morning after the great Battle. Taytu, characteristically, was all for treating the Italian prisoners severely: dismemberment, castration, execution and imprisonment were on her wishlist. Menelik took more cautious advice, says Jonas. ‘He realized the considerable bargaining leverage of the soldiers,’ and used it wisely.

Later, Taytu (and several other Ethiopian generals) advised Menelik to consolidate the victory at Adwa by advancing into Eritrea and forcing the Italians from the continent. Menelik’s more measured response has been criticized by many over the years but Jonas argues that, once again, 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 one considers that more troops would be arriving from Italy and that marching North would put Menelik on shakier cultural ground. 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 need not be an inevitability. In Italy, there were (isolated) protests against the very idea of colonialism (Jonas wonders whether these may have been the first of their kind) but there was also a more widespread desire to avenge the defeat. Eventually, the Italian government decided to hang on to Eritrea and play at being better neighbours with Menelik. (That said, Italy’s ‘national shame’ over the event had a lot to do with Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia four decades later).

While Adwa is a source of great national pride for Ethiopia, it has not brought the kind of prosperity Taytu and Menelik would have hoped for. Despite never being colonised, the country has still not managed to achieve democracy, and the current government has pursued a policy of ethnic federalism that is the antithesis of Menelik’s vision of togetherness.

Since Ta-Nehisi Coates’s powerful argument for reparations for slavery, in his 2014 essay in the Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations,” the idea has not slipped from political view. And the case for reparations is seemingly gathering political momentum. Philosophers, economists, and historians have all added their weight to the argument. But there are others, like the black Marxist Prof. Adolph Reed, who argue against them.

In 2014, the public intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates made the point that colonialism and slavery were not simply about oppression, they were about theft. South African lawyer and historian Tembeka Ngcukaitobi agrees with this, saying ‘the continued poverty of Africans is directly and indirectly attributable to the policies of the British empire: slavery, taking of the land, cattle theft, mineral extraction, forced labour.’ As Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò, a philosophy professor at Georgetown University, argues, colonial conquests and practices ‘literally built the world and the planet-sized social, economic and political system that we have.’

Coates argues that a commission should be set up to uncover the crimes and identify who did what. As he says, ‘I think it’s crucial to tie reparations to specific acts.’  The French economist Thomas Piketty says government officials generally argue that ‘this history is too distant to be indemnified.’ Neither he nor Coates nor Ngcukaitobi find this a convincing argument. Ngcukaitobi says, ‘payment by a specific person to a specific individual’ should be what happens. In South Africa, for example, the issue is not historically complicated. Companies and mines have, within living memory, exploited and dispossessed people of colour in South Africa. Companies such as Nasionale Pers (Naspers) and De Beers Mining Company have well-known links to colonial oppression and apartheid.

Naspers, one of the wealthiest companies in South Africa, famously refused even to offer a submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. For over twenty years, Naspers declined to apologise for their very active role in producing apartheid’s propaganda. In 2015 an apology was made at the firm’s hundred-year celebrations, and black singers were invited to perform an anti-apartheid song.

But as the prominent black Marxist, and professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, Adolph Reed protests, the politics of reparations creates exactly these kinds of, largely meaningless, public apologies … What he calls ‘maudlin psychobabble.’ Apologies, he claims, distract people from the urgent necessity to act against poverty and to uplift those excluded from decent healthcare and education. Germany, Britain and Belgium have all apologised for their colonial practices. But as the ex-minister of Human Rights in the Democratic Republic of Congo says, during colonialism ‘we were destroyed. Apologies are easy, but when you do something, you have to take responsibility for it.’

So should countries pay? Ngcukaitobi says: ‘yes, they should.’ Colonialism he goes on, ‘created a life of affluence for British citizens and massive wealth for British corporations at the expense of Africans.’ He also adds that the Dutch, who were the first colonial power in South Africa, should also pay up for their genocidal practices against the Khoikhoi inhabitants of the Cape. As the black poet Robert Grendon wrote of the Dutch in 1902, only a few years before his own people, the Herero, faced acts of genocide at the hands of the Germans:

Thy race, great pioneer has hunted men—

The Bushman small—with horses and with dogs; 

Destroyed the bonds of love ‘twixt man and wife; 

And those ‘twixt parents and their little ones;

Have flayed alive without compassion both the frames

And limbs of those weak slaves; and then—alas—

Surpassing tigers in their cruelty

As Ngcukaitobi argues: ‘holding the Dutch society responsible today for what their ancestors did 300 years ago is not a churlish thing, but an act of justice.’ Interestingly, many Dutch people, until recently, seemed to agree with the idea of paying reparations. A 2021 study showed that the Dutch people ‘were more supportive of instrumental reparations than of political apology.’

Coates has pointed out that paying reparations for doing wrong is nothing new. Following the Holocaust, West Germany paid Israel 3 million marks. As Piketty points out, the heirs of the Hohenzollern (the Prussian royal family, which fell from power in 1918) ‘are currently suing the German state for residences and works of art for which they claim they were insufficiently indemnified.’ And then there is the case of the United States Civil Liberties Act of 1988 where $20,000 was paid out to each of the Japanese Americans interned during World War II. As Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò points out, there are also well-established legal frameworks in personal injury litigation. However, Táíwò worries that these kinds of debates have the potential to ‘view Black suffering in accounting terms’ and will not redress issues to do with suffering and trauma.

Certainly, the idea of paying compensation in the context of slavery is far from unprecedented. The British, after abolishing slavery in their empire in 1834, paid an incredible £20 million worth of compensation. However, this money was paid to the slave owners rather than the slaves. Most of the money, in fact, never left Britain. Much of it was paid to the stay-at-home Caribbean plantation owners, who had been active participants in some of the most heinous crimes against humanity the world has ever witnessed. According to Piketty, the £20 million was about 5 percent of the United Kingdom’s national income at the time. As he says, ‘if a government decided to devote to such a policy the same proportion of the British national income, it would have to pay approximately 120 billion euros.’ The question remains: if the British could do it then for the slaveowners, why not now for the victims’ descendants?

Prof. Reed, however, has famously argued against the politics of reparations. He does not deny ‘that blacks have been systematically disadvantaged as a result of slavery and its aftermath.’ But Reed believes that reparations for racial groups go some way to suggesting that ‘the inequality produced by capitalism is legitimate.’ That is, it suggests that poverty and inequality has simply been created by racism and not the capitalist system. Reed fears that ‘racial interest-group politics’ is displacing social-democratic beliefs for a fair and equitable distribution of resources. What is needed, Reed argues, is to build ‘broad solidarity across race, gender, and other identities.’  Clearly defined racial reparations, Reed says, ‘cut precisely against building such solidarity.’

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Convict Crisis at the Cape: John Fairbairn and the quest for democracy

On 4 July 1849, braving Cape Town’s infamous winter rain and wind, a large multi-racial crowd began to gather outside the Commercial Exchange on Heerengracht Street (now Adderley Street). The date had been chosen for very specific reasons, being the anniversary of the declaration of American independence. For once Capetonians of all varieties had come out, as AF Hattersley put it, ‘Coloured folk and Malays…[and] many of the comfort-loving occupants of suburban homes’ mingled together. For seven hours the crowd of 7000 stood warming their hands in their pockets and stamping their feet against the cold but all the while listening attentively to 23 speakers.

This rare showing of community solidarity had been provoked when news reached Cape Town that a ship named the Neptune had picked up 286 mainly Irish prisoners in Bermuda and was heading for Simon’s Town. Exactly ten months previous, on 4 September 1848, Queen Victoria ‘was advised to direct, by Her Order in Council,’ that the Cape Colony should be a place for the transportation of convicts. This policy was heartily agreed to by the governor of the Cape, Sir Harry Smith, who believed convict labour would be a significant boon to the colony.

Cape Town itself was up to this point a peaceful town with little crime and very little violence. The idea that it would be turned into a penal colony was abhorrent to citizens from the Cape to the Kat River Settlement. It also suggested something else to the people of the Cape who had begun to yearn for their own representative government. Till this point, the Cape had only a legislative Council comprising colonial officials and a few hand-selected locals chosen because of their closeness to the governor.s

The people of Cape Town soon realised that if the Cape were to become a penal colony, wrote Hattersley, ‘an autocratic government’ was ‘a necessary condition.’ The minute one of the 286 prisoners took their first small step on the Cape’s dry land, it would be a giant step backwards for any hope of a representative democracy at the Cape.

The most prominent man to stride onto the platform on that rainy day on 4 July was John Fairbairn. A Lowland Scot whose fighting spirit had some twenty years earlier brought a free press to the Cape, Fairbairn had scant regard for the distinctions of class, rank and race. He had begun to strongly identify with his adopted country and longed for a democratic representative government. He called out to the crowd that what the Cape required were ‘free institutions, self-government, perfect liberty and the open field for virtue, industry and talent’.

Fairbairn was by then already seen as the leader of what became known as the Anti-Convict Association. At this and other meetings, Fairbairn called on the people of the Cape to take a pledge:

We hereby solemnly declare and pledge our faith to each other that we will not employ or knowingly admit into our establishments or houses, work with or for, or associate with any convict felon sent into this Colony under sentence of transportation and that we will discountenance and drop connection with any person who may assist in landing, supporting or employing such convicted felons.

Thousands in the Cape agreed to the pledge which effectively placed a sanction on the Cape government and the British administration. Very few – in fact, hardly any – merchants, tradesmen or farmers broke the pledge, as it meant they would be ‘held in public odium’. Governor Harry Smith was himself threatened by the Anti-Convict Association with ‘starvation’ – it claimed it would attempt to stop people selling him food.

In the days that followed these meetings, crowds began to gather on the streets of Cape Town, hooting and hissing at government officials as they went about their business. And, as fate would have it, during this period the death of one member of the Legislative Council and the resignations ‘due to ill health’ of two more left the body without its decision-making quorum. Three new members were needed for it to function legally. Fairbairn, who had now become the moving spirit of the anti-convict movement, would proclaim: ‘Will any colonist venture to accept the vacant seat? To offer it at this moment to any gentleman would be an insult. To accept it would be eternal degradation.’

The Council scheduled its next meeting for 10 July 1849. After learning of the meeting, the people of Cape Town downed tools and gathered around the Council’s building, some forcing their way in. To their shock, they discovered that three new members had been sworn in. When the large angry crowd outside caught wind of this, they began calling for the three new members’ heads. Let us ‘testify our “respect” for the new members,’ somebody was heard to cry and the crowd began to press towards the doors.

When Smith left the building supported by his aide-de-camp, he was met with stony silence. The same could not be said for two of the new members who followed Smith out of the door, Mr Cloete (a wealthy Stellenbosch farmer) and Mr de Smidt (owner of Groote Schuur). ‘Down with them – shame on them – traitors – let them have it,’ the crowd began to yell, and with this verbal downpour came a shower of rotten eggs and rubbish from the street.

Cloete managed to escape to his brother’s offices nearby, but De Smidt was left to his own devices, which were few and insufficient for defending himself against the angry crowd. In short, he received a swift beating before taking shelter in the offices of the Road Board, where he managed to lock the door behind him.

Mr Jacob Letterstedt, the third new member and owner of the Newlands Brewery, had seemingly been more sensible than Cloete and De Smidt. On seeing the unruly crowd gathered at the doors of the legislature, he waited before leaving. Mistakenly believing the crowd had settled down, he finally strode out. As historian Sir George Cory puts it, he left ‘under the protection of the great man’s wig’, but ‘in this however Mr Letterstedt miscalculated’. Like the others, he was assailed with sticks and stones and harmful words. He managed to find refuge in the South African Club House on Plein Street, however, and there he waited until mounted police came to scatter those still intent on furthering their ‘discussions’ with him.

During the night a large crowd of protestors gathered on the Grand Parade, where they burnt effigies of the three new councillors. They were said to have danced around the fires ‘with savage glee’ while others ‘amused themselves by destroying property belonging to the members of Cape Town’. The crowd was finally broken up by another charge by mounted police.

But they had not finished with Letterstedt. Crowds gathered at his various properties across the city and destroyed one of his general stores as well as his large brewery in Newlands. In the coming weeks, when he tried to have these repaired, he learnt that his ‘great man’s wig’ was no influence against the Anti-Convict Association’s pledge: no tradesman, carpenter or glazer would fix any of the damage done to his property.

Seven days later, with all of this going on and the Colony baying for their blood, ‘Messrs Cloete, Letterstedt and de Smidt found it expedient to resign their seats in the Legislative Council.’ And when the Neptune came to anchor in Simon’s Bay on 19 September, a vigilance committee was set up to closely monitor the ship. This was how it was discovered that Captain Robert Stanford and Mr Letterstedt (rather predictably) had broken the boycott and profited off the Neptune’s presence in the bay by selling produce to the ship’s captain. The vigilance committee did, however, make sure that no convict reached Cape soil.

While the Neptune was docked in a form of purgatory in Simon’s Town, violence began to spread through Cape Town, and Governor Smith declared martial law. As more protests were called, Fairbairn was attacked and beaten in his home in Green Point by a group of ‘coloured inhabitants, but also a few Whites in disguise’. These men were seemingly in somebody’s pay, and rumours abounded of a plot to murder Fairbairn.

Harry Smith was, like the Neptune, now tethered to unwelcoming shores and unable to perform his duties. Eventually, going against the British demands, he refused the Neptune permission to release its cargo into the Colony. Due to pressure from the likes of Fairbairn, Smith had stated that he was ‘profoundly opposed to the Cape of Good Hope being made into a Penal Colony for ordinary felons’. Finally, with the Anti-Convict Association refusing to give up their protest, Earl Grey gave instructions for the Neptune to weigh anchor and head for Van Diemen’s Land (modern-day Tasmania).

The anti-convict campaign had showed what collective and steadfast protest could achieve. As McCracken puts it, Fairbairn’s crusade ‘had stirred political consciousness as never before and evoked an unprecedented unity.’

(The events of 1849 would lead to the Cape achieving representative government, with men of all races voting for their leaders in the 1854 elections. This remarkable tale is covered in detail in our book Spoilt Ballots.)

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The Cape outpost founded by Jan van Riebeeck in 1652 was never intended to be anything more than a victualling station (not only for food, but for all types of maritime replenishment) for Dutch East India Company (VOC) ships bound to or from the East. A cure for scurvy would only be discovered a century later, but the Company had already worked out that stopping midway through the eight-month voyage to take on fresh provisions had a positive effect on the health of both its men and its balance sheet. The Company, which made all its money importing Asian goods like spices, textiles and ceramics to Europe, had no desire to establish a meaningful colony in ‘dark’, ‘dangerous’ and ‘unprofitable’ Africa.

When the fleet from Batavia (present-day Jakarta, the VOC’s administrative centre in the East) docked – bringing with it copies of documents which showed that an official complaint had been made about his behaviour – Willem Adriaan went into publicity overdrive. His actions would have made a modern-day reputation manager proud.

Before the fleet sailed on to Amsterdam, Willem Adriaan summoned all the male inhabitants of Cape Town to his official residence at the Castle of Good Hope. Whites, blacks, liberated slaves and ex-convicts mustered at the unpopular governor’s residence. Artisans and labourers of every description, fishermen and farmhands, all gathered in the handsome courtyard overlooked by Table Mountain.

Imagine their surprise when, instead of receiving the moering they’d come to expect, they were plied with wine, beer and coffee. Even their pipes were stoked with the finest tobacco at the governor’s expense. They should have known there was no such thing as a free lunch – not even in 1706.

Once sufficiently loosened up, the men were required to sign a certificate in which the governor was described as:

A person of all honour and virtue in his whole conduct, government, intercourse, and treatment. That he always set, and always has set, a splendid example of modesty, of zeal for the public welfare, of religion in the Christian form; further, that he is affable towards everyone, in listening and in granting audience, and finally, that he is of a very kind and gentle nature. During the time of his presence and government here, he has conducted himself always as a peace-loving, just, and faithful chief towards the Lords his masters, and in the interests of the people. He has done right and justice to all, protected the good, and punished the evil, and helped forwards and placed on their legs all the people who had by their good conduct deserved it…by giving them lands on which they could properly earn a living; by taking care as much as possible of their corn, vineyards, and cattle, so that they were able to supply everything to the Company, as much as was required here from time to time, as well as to the passing ships’ crews and others, selling and getting rid of their produce to their satisfaction.

Not that the men who signed the document were aware of its contents. They only got to hear a few lines, read by a clerk in ‘an extremely indistinct voice’ before being politely ‘requested’ by some heavies to put pen to paper – presumably while the governor leered over their shoulders.

Beelzebub comes to Satan’s aid

A bit of free booze may have been enough to secure the signatures of the townsfolk on Van der Stel’s certificate of good character; getting the burghers to sing his praises, on the other hand, would prove far trickier. It was, after all, the burghers – under the leadership of Adam Tas, Henning Hüsing, Jacobus van der Heiden and Pieter van der Bijl, who were more literate (and wealthy) than most of the other burghers – who had lodged an official complaint about the governor’s corrupt practices.

In an effort to get the burghers on board, Willem Adriaan resorted to violence, intimidation and torture. Or at least his henchman Jan Starrenburg, did. Starrenburg was the landdrost of Stellenbosch, a town that Willem Adriaan’s father, Simon van der Stel, had founded and named after himself. Starrenburg, who’d only been landdrost a few months, had already earned himself the nickname Beelzebub among the burghers, thanks to his status as ‘Satan’s’ right-hand man.

Together with a band of armed ruffians, Beelzebub went from farm to farm trying to persuade the burghers to sign the document. His tactics, as per Adam Tas’s diary, were not subtle: ‘First the Landdrost tried to induce them to sign by promises, and afterwards with fierce threats. During the time he was so overcome with wrath that he became livid in the face and was shaking as he read out the document. A ruffian stood guard at the door, which he had locked.’

Similar scenes played out at farmhouses throughout the Boland. Beelzebub would sit at a table with his sword and pistols drawn while armed thugs stood guard at the door. There, he would induce the landowners to sign their names, trying ‘every possible means; fair promises of favour and land, dire threats of how the governor should deal with all who refused to sign, how they would be stripped of every privilege, how they should be punished as rebels….’ But still, as Tas recorded in his diary, many of the burghers refused to sign.

This evening, the table being ready set for a mouthful of meat, there put in two Frenchmen, Etienne Niel and Jaques Malan. They told me that at Hercules du Pre’s, Landdrost Beelzebub had made question of them, if they had aught to say against the Governor, and if they did not know him for an honest man, that did govern well, and was an upholder of religion. The same was read out to them in a letter, in order to their signing, but Mr. Niel declared to know nothing of it, and that he would not sign. Then come the Landdrost aboard him with harsh threatenings, but he give him for answer that he would not sign, no, not though Haman’s gallows was building for him, and that he would make bold to affirm the same to the Governor his face, that he was dismayed of no man, and that rogues and robbers might be afeared, and more of like purport. The Landdrost declaring they should meet again, the man departed. Then Jaques Malan entered into the apartment, and received the same treatment, but give for answer that he would not sign, whereupon the Landdrost did call out. Then get you gone from here, and with that the man went off.

Between the free lunch at the Castle and the strongarm tactics of Beelzebub, Willem Adriaan was able to muster 240 signatures on the document attesting his good conduct. But it (people whose opinions weren’t normally canvassed in those days) in an attempt to bump up the numbers, and of the remaining signatures, many are suspected to be fraudulent. As one of the fathers of South African historiography, George McCall Theal, puts it:

Many of the ‘respectable names found on that extraordinary document are certainly not genuine, for they appear with a cross, though the men they professed to represent could write letters and sign other papers as well as the Governor himself could do’.

Considering the tactics used by Willem Adriaan, and the fact that the Cape’s European population in 1705 numbered 526 adult men, 240 signatures was actually a rather poor showing.