Adwa at 105: A Time for Celebration and Reflection
By Berhanu Abegaz
Ethiopian Review, April-June 2001
“What really saved Ethiopia from falling under colonial rule was the determination with which this heritage of consciousness, international recognition, and political/diplomatic skill was developed to meet the new challenges.”
– S. Rubenson, The Survival of Ethiopian Independence (1978)
For Ethiopians, Adwa is much more than a victory of an African nation in its confrontation with European imperialism. It is rather one of the few defining moments in the history of modern Ethiopia:
1. Adwa was a culmination of the long and painful “northern march” of southern Ethiopians following Gragn’s jihad. It resulted in the demographic, cultural and political absorption of Islam and the Oromo into the mainstream of highland Ethiopian society. The centralization campaigns of Atse Theodros and Atse Yohannes closed the so-called “era of the princes” just in time for the country to prepare itself for the many waves of external invasion that came.
2. Adwa was also a watershed in our modern history in the other direction. It symbolized the shift in the center of national power to Shoa. The “southward march” of the Ethiopian empire in the decade before and after Adwa led to a painful incorporation of a the southern provinces with all the migration, cultural diffusion and new agricultural practices that accompanied it.
3. Adwa was an affirmation of the remarkable resiliency of our national consciousness, quickly shared by newly incorporated peoples, which proved itself as a most inclusive war in the participation of Ethiopian communities from all corners of the empire in the defense of national independence.
4. Finally, Adwa was a dramatic illustration of the truth that victory is little more than postponed defeat if a defensive country neglects to build up its domestic economic base and political capability. As subsequent developments showed, the failure to modernize fast enough, and in its own terms, left Ethiopia ill prepared to meet the challenges from within as well as from an emergent global economy.
Adwa teaches us the universal truth that empires and nation-states are forged with a precarious mix of leadership and violence. There is hardly any ethno-linguistic community in Ethiopia that did not participate in the invasion as well as the accommodation of the “other” until the conqueror and the conquered eventually became one. It is this legacy that makes us a “nation of settlers and resettlers.”
Adwa also teaches us that wars in defense of national sovereignty provide the litmus test of whether a “state” has the solid backing of a “national consciousness” to deserve the label, nation-state. Ethiopians have demonstrated again and again, in times of territorial expansion and contraction, that their polity transcends the narrow confines of ethnicity, class, religion or region. This is because centuries-old internal conquest and migration have produced a population with a multitude of blood lines in its veins, a blending of value systems from various religious traditions, and an illustrious history of a united front against external enemies.
We must resist the temptation to glorify our past in order to rationalize away our present failures. We rather must do it to reaffirm the truth that a self-confident and single-minded people can overcome any hardship by relying on their shared vision of the future and own resources.
Ethiopians, along with millions of victims of colonialism, remember Adwa with pride precisely because it inspires us all to face the future with studied confidence.
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The author is a professor of Economics at the The College of William and Mary in Virginia.