Adwa 1896: Who Was Civilized & Who Was Savage?
By Negussie Ayele
March 1997
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Zulu, Ndebele, Xhosa and other indigenous peoples continued to carry on now hidden, now open, resistance struggles in southern Africa against Boer settler colonialists and/or British and German remote control imperialists. Against such historical backdrop, then, we can see that the Battle of Adwa in 1896 was neither the first nor the last military confrontation between European colonial armies and African fighters. However, whereas European colonial forces sooner or later crushed African resistance by the Ashanti, the Sudanese, the Zulu, the Herero, the Bakongo, the Ndebele, the Somali and others, they were denied this sweep in Ethiopia. Victory over the Italian invaders at Adwa was decisive and, though its territory was reduced, Ethiopia remained the only independent state in Africa at the time of the scramble at the end of the Nineteenth Century. This unique phenomenon had salutary symbolic meaning to Africans at home and abroad even as it telegraphed shock and consternation over the self-styled “civilized” European or white world. Thus, the fact that 1996 marks the centennial of the historic events of 1896 provides an occasion for all concerned to reflect upon those events, to bond with the ancestors and acknowledge the legacies and lessons they bequeathed to successive generations.
Furthermore, periodically our knowledge (or lack thereof) about what happened before, during and after the Battle of Adwa in 1896 in the broader context of the colonial scramble in Africa needs once again to be refreshed, corrected or replenished as the case may be from a more distant and more detached vantage point. In the Nineteenth Century, there were no written indigenous African languages except for Ethiopic and, of course, Arabic for the Arabized parts of Africa. Consequently, a nagging drawback for much of the political historiography of black Africa is the exclusive reliance on contemporary European, i.e., colonial, writings and renderings regardless of who (Africans or non-Africans) carry on researches afterwards. To the extent that there was a written language in this part of Africa and there was some recording of events and correspondence done in the vernacular, we are enabled to cross-check colonial historiography and European versions of events against indigenous sources and perspectives.
As the current residents of the Horn who are older than the ancestors look back to the past century of history and prepare to envision the coming of the 21st Century, hence it is incumbent upon all concerned to ensure that the correct conclusions and appropriate lessons about the past and present are drawn to pass on to succeeding generations. Specifically, this essay on the Centenary of Adwa culminating in armed confrontation between Roma and Addis Abeba at Adwa in 1896 focuses on a vital and intriguing but so far unexplored question of who really was ‘savage’ and who was ‘civilized’ in the contemporary peace and war struggles between Africans and Europeans. As we shall see one reason that made the armed conflict at Adwa in 1896 inevitable when it might well have been avoidable was the condescending (in today’s parlance, racist) Italian attitudes exhibited towards Ethiopians.
Struggles in the Horn and the Making of the Adwa Confrontation
In the larger scheme of European colonial adventures in this part of the world, “Adwa was no episode. It was the last dramatic act in a long play, the culmination of a struggle that had begun decades earlier. The Ethiopian protest was slow and patient, but unyielding.” Indeed, European colonial encroachments into the Horn were underway very early on in the nineteenth century and by the 1840s an Ethiopian ruler from Tigray, Dejach Wube, had had enough of French and British machinations. One of his guests, Arnaud d’Abbadie, paraphrased Wube’s reaction as follows:
Take care that you never again tread the soil of my country. The English and you are confined to cursed lands and you covet our healthy climate: one collects our plants, another our stones; I do not know what you are looking for, but I do not want it to be in my country that you find it.
As Sven Rubenson has documented, these scenarios in his classic work, The Survival of Ethiopian Independence, there were many struggles and tugs-of-war between overt/covert colonial agents and indigenous leaders and forces intent on withstanding the devious and wiley ways of Europeans in the Horn of Africa. Europeans represented themselves not as ordinary Christians but as superior to any other brand of Christianity in Ethiopia or in the Orient. On the other hand, the Ethiopians who had been Coptic Christians for nearly as long as Christianity was formed and had neither a superiority nor an inferiority complex had assumedmistakenly, as it turned outthat there were minimum universal Christian values, principles and standards of behavior to be shared, respected and adhered to by all Christians in relations with one another, be they Europeans or Africans. Consequently, Ethiopians continued to operate from fundamental Christian values, premises and dictates both in peace and in war in their relations with Europeans and continued to appeal to them to behave as becoming of Christians. But events associated with the Adwa confrontation between Italy and Ethiopia were to show these latter day Roman marauders in Africa had a very strange way of showing that they were either Christian or ‘civilized’. Though the Europeans neither appreciated nor acknowledged it, the Ethiopians showed by word and deed in peace and in war what it is like being and behaving Christian and civilized. All this notwithstanding, Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans and other Protestant denominations from America and Europe, including non-colonial Scandinavia, were undertaking large-scale missionary activities in Ethiopia, as in other parts of Africa, to proselytize indigenous Christians to Western versions of Christianity. Consequently, some of the contemporary bitter conflicts between Ethiopian rulers and Europeans revolved around missionary activities and their often poorly disguised covert colonial vanguard roles. Exasperated by recurrent ‘the flag follows the cross’ patterns of European colonial penetration in Africa, one contemporary Ethiopian ruler, Emperor Tewodros, is said to have expressed his indignation thusly:
I know the tactics of the European governments when they want to seize a country in the Orient. First they send missionaries, then consuls to support the missionaries, then battalions to sustain the consuls. I am not a rajah from Hindustan to be made a fool of like that; I prefer to engage the battalions at once.
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