The Battle of Adwa that took place on 1 March 1896 sent shock waves around the world and turned the narrative of colonialism on its head.
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 19th 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.