The Lessons and Legacy of Adwa: Forging Our Future in Struggle
June 1998, Ethiopian Review
By Maulana Karenga
One of the most essential and valuable ways of celebrating history is to constantly search for its enduring and current meanings and to identify and strive to meet its many challenges. History is a very serious thing to African people. It is more than dates, persons, places and events of the past. It is living memory, accented by the messages it sends us and the challenges it brings and poses for us. It is, moreover, a fundamental way we understand ourselves and an inescapable path and practice by which we envision and forge our future. At the center of our celebration of history, then, is the constant call for and commitment to study it and approach it as a living concreteness. For it is perceived, at its best, not as some past process, but as a continuously unfolding reality. And the challenge here is to understand and self-consciously participate in the shaping of the process and not let it simply happen behind our backs. Self-understanding determines self-assertion in the world and no self-understanding is more important than historical self-understanding.
Again, the key here is celebration of history through engaging it. And engagement is through remembering, studying and practicing it in ways “that aid in our self-understanding and development as a people. Thus, celebration is not simply ritual and rejoicing, but a remembering, studying and practicing which shapes our self-understanding and movement through time.
We celebrate history, then, in the sense of a meaningful marking and an instructive engagement for several basic reasons. And in these we discover both its meaning and challenge. First, we celebrate history to learn its lessons. As Malcolm X taught, “Of all our studies history is best prepared to reward our research. Secondly, we study and celebrate history to sense and absorb its spirit of human possibility. For as Marcus Garvey taught, “What humans have done humans can do.” Thirdly, we study and celebrate history to extract and emulate its models of human excellence and achievement. It is Mary McLeod Bethune who taught that “We are heirs and custodians of a great legacy” and urged us to discover that legacy and to bear the burden and glory of that legacy with strength, dignity and determination. And finally, we, as an African people, celebrate history in order to honor the moral obligation to remember those who paved the path down which we now walk, who gave their lives so that we could live fuller and more meaningful ones. This is the meaning of Fannie Lou Hamer’s teaching that there are two things we all “must care about: never to forget where we came from and always praise the bridges that carried us over.”
It is out of this understanding of history that we must and do constantly ask ourselves, how can we use our past to inform and enrich our present and lay the foundation for a more meaningful and beneficial future? In a word, what lessons, models and spirit of human possibility and excellence can we borrow from the past to build the world we want to live in? The Akan word for the historical quest which is inspired and informed by these questions is sankofa which means “to return and retrieve it.” In a word, to reach into the past, recover its richest and most rewarding lessons and models and put them in the service of the present and future.
In the midst of our history, the most ancient human history, there are unlimited models of human excellence and human possibility from which we extract, study and seek to emulate in our ongoing quest to bring forth the best of what it means to be African and human in the fullest sense. Certainly, the Battle of Adwa offers an instructive and inspiring example of our self-understanding and self-assertion in history. It provides both a legacy and lessons of achievement and points to possibilities we are obligated to pursue in our ongoing struggle for the world we want and deserve to live in.
The first lesson of the Battle of Adwa is that our future will be forged in the crucible of struggle. Our very focus on the battle and its results teach us that struggle is essential to achievement. As Frederick Douglass says, “Without struggle, there is no progress.” And “the struggle may be moral or physical or both, but there must be struggle.” This is the lesson Emperor Menelik II understood as he patiently and painstakingly secured modern weapons, organized troops and prepared the country for war as the Italians continued to intrude and make false claims on the country. And it is also the lesson the patriarch at St. Gabriel’s church understood when on the decisive day, March 1, 1896, when the Italians attacked hoping to find Menelik and other leaders unprepared and worshiping on a sacred day at the holy city of Aksum. For when the patriarch heard the heavy guns thunder, he interrupted the regular ritual, prayed, gave benediction and then challenged the congregation to battle, to life-and-death struggle saying, “This is the day…Go forth and fight for your faith, king and country.” And it is this call to “go forth and fight” that constantly challenges us to struggle continuously for our freedom, dignity, and the right to live dignified, decent and meaningful lives and pass on the legacy to our children.
Secondly, the Battle of Adwa offers us a lesson of unity, more particularly what my Organization Us calls “operational unity.” By operational unity we mean unity in diversity and unity without coercive conformity. One of Menelik’s greatest challenges was to unite the people of Ethiopia into a wall of steel against the invaders and the army into a disciplined and dedicated fighting force with a common goal and will. In his September 1895 Proclamation of Mobilization, he advised the people of the imminent danger of war and called on them to be supportive for the sake of the country, their families and their faith. He told them, “I do not think I have been unjust to you before and you have not failed me either. And now I ask all of you who are strong to give me your strength and all of you who are weak to give me your prayers.” Thus Menelik united the heretofore factious warlords, feudal lords and rulers of Shoa, Gonder, Gojjam, Tigre and other regions and welded them into a mighty shield of defense and an invincible sword of victory. This, thus, is an ongoing challenge and call to us as African people to unite in our diversity and move forward in unity to win and maintain our freedom and dignity and build our lives in ever-expansive ways.
Another critical lesson of Adwa is the unshakable determination of Emperor Menelik of the people of Ethiopia before, during and after the Battle. There is clear and repeated evidence of the resolute determination of the Emperor Menelik and Empress Taytu to preserve national independence, build a modern Ethiopia and a modern army to defend it. Speaking of the Wuchale Treaty and the arrogant claims the Italians made from it, Menelik declared, “I am not the man to accept it.” We too must repeat this daily in our rejection of external rule, discrimination and threats to our freedom and dignity and our right to full and meaningful lives. And Empress Taytu also evidenced this resoluteness in defense of African freedom and dignity when she told the Italian envoy that Ethiopia had the need and obligation to respect its own dignity and defend its freedom. Speaking to the Italian proposition for a protectorate over Ethiopia, she declared, “This will never be.” These then must be our standard responses to proposals to limit or deny our rights, freedom and dignity: “We are not the people to accept this. This will never be.”
There is also the lesson of the indispensability of meticulous preparation in the Battle of Adwa. Early Menelik realized both the inevitability of war and the need to prepare seriously for it. He needed above all national unity, a modern army and he focused intensely on this. He established Addis Abeba as a focus for modernizing activity, made himself accessible to all the people, insisted on national unity and loyalty and began to stockpile modern weapons and to train officers and men in the conduct of modern warfare. A master of statecraft, he continued conversations with Italy, Britain, France and Germany even when he knew their imperialistic intentions. This was not only to keep them at bay, but to search for ways to cultivate and increase their divisions and prevent their alliance against him. He recognized the passing of an era and did not let the past imprison him in what he understood or sought to know and accomplish. He understood, as our Organization Us taught in the 60s, that “our defense depends not on the enemy not coming, but our being ready to receive him when he does.” Our challenge here then is to put aside illusions and prepare for struggle, to use the past not as a place to escape and fantasize about better times, but to use the best of our past as a foundation to ground and frame a better future. And again, we must keep in mind that at its best, our future can only be forged in the crucible of struggle.
Finally, a central lesson we can draw from the Battle of Adwa is the protracted nature of struggle, the ongoing need to struggle to build the world we seek and deserve. Menelik anticipated that the Italians would not simply forget their defeat and go on with their lives in Europe. They would, he rightly thought, return. Thus, he understood and we must understand the teachings of Amilcar Cabral who said that the struggle is a long and difficult one and, therefore, we should “mask no difficulties, tell no lies and claim no easy victory.” To have imagined that Adwa was the end of imperialism’s advance in Ethiopia would have been to claim an easy victory and mask the difficulties of the larger struggle yet to come. Menelik did not have time to realize his dream of a fully modern Ethiopia able to define, defend and promote its interests in the world. But he began the long and difficult process to establish a process for building a modern infrastructure with focus on education, technology, communication systems, transportation and links with other parts of Africa and the world.
The challenge to master and effectively use the best available education and technology remains with us. The world African community can never play its rightful role in history, if its sons and daughters do not collaborate like Menelik and Taytu in this historical project of African liberation, of the struggle to free ourselves, harness our human and material resources and live full and meaningful lives. And this requires at a minimum universal education, mastery of technology, adequate health services, substantive democracy and ongoing, equitable and sustainable economic and social development. It is in such a context that we honor Adwa and the other sites of decisive struggle and achievement in our history and are again able to speak our own special truth to the world and make our own unique contribution to the forward flow of human history. Let us “go forth and fight” then and declare to all forms of oppression that “we are not the people to accept this” and to all proposals for our secondary roles in history, “this will never be.” And as I said in the Million Man March/Day of Absence Mission Statement, let us struggle and work in such a way that “we always know and introduce ourselves to history and humanity as a people who are spiritually and ethically grounded; who speak truth, do justice, respect our ancestors and elders, cherish, support and challenge our children, care for the vulnerable, relate rightfully to the environment, struggle for what is right and resist what is wrong, honor our past, willingly engage our present and self-consciously plan for and welcome our future.”
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Maulana Karenga, Ph.D., is professor and chair of the Department of Black Studies, California State University, Long Beach; chair of The Organization Us and the National Association of Kawaida Organizations (NAKO). He is also the creator of the African American and Pan-African holiday of Kwanzaa and author of numerous scholarly works and books including: Kawaida: A Communitarian African Philosophy and Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community and Culture.