Author: Nick Dall

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.

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.