Tag: Colonialism

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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