Accustomed to centuries of invasion by Muslim adversaries, the Christian kingdom of Abyssinia faced a new menace during Europe’s scramble for Africa: Italy. When the Egyptians withdrew their garrison from Massawa in 1885, at Britain’s behest, the emperor, Johannes IV, had hoped to reclaim the Red Sea port for Abyssinia. It provided Abyssinia with its main outlet to the outside world. A treaty signed by Britain in June 1884 – the Treaty of Adwa – had given Johannes grounds for optimism. In exchange for agreeing to facilitate the withdrawal through Abyssinia of Egyptian garrisons in eastern Sudan, besieged by the Mahdi’s army, Britain had promised to secure free transit through Massawa of all merchandise, including arms and ammunition. But in October 1884, Britain had then reached a secret agreement to allow Italy to take possession of Massawa in order to prevent the French from getting it and thereby gain a route to the Nile.
The Italian flag was duly raised in Massawa in February 1885. Encouraged by the outcome of the Berlin conference, the Italians soon began to push inland to the Bogos lowlands and probe southwards along the coast. In a letter sent to Queen Victoria in April 1886, Johannes complained: ‘As for our friendship with the Italians, until now we had no enmity, but they have taken my land when I did not take theirs, so I should like to know how to make friends with them.’ When an Italian contingent occupied Sahati, an outpost halfway between Massawa and the highland town of Asmara, Johannes’s general, Ras Alula, went on the attack, asserting it was Abyssinian territory. At the battle of Dogali in January 1887, Ras Alula’s forces annihilated a column of 550 Italians dispatched from Massawa to relieve Sahati. Shocked by the disaster, the Italians resolved to fortify their small colony with roads, bridges, fortresses and the construction of a fifteen-mile railway between Massawa and Sahati. A 20,000 strong expeditionary force was sent to occupy the area.
Johannes marshalled an army to confront the Italians but faced a simultaneous threat from Mahdists invading from Sudan. In January 1888, a Mahdist army reached Gondar, sacked the city and burned down most of its churches. Facing war on two fronts, Johannes chose to fight the Mahdists. In March 1889, he marched at the head of 100,000 men to take the Mahdist town of Metemma. But on the verge of victory, he was mortally wounded. Three days after his death, the Mahdists intercepted a party of nobles and priests taking his corpse back to Abyssinia. His head was severed and sent to Omdurman.
On learning of Johannes’s death, Menelik, the king of Shoa, immediately proclaimed himself negus negast, king of kings. During the eleven years that he had ruled Shoa, he had extended his territory southwards, conquering Oromo neighbours, capturing the Muslim city of Harar and developing his own trade links to the Gulf of Tadjoura, where the French had established a coaling station along the route to Indo-China. Always in need of money, he allowed his southern domain to be ruthlessly exploited for livestock and for slaves for export across the Red Sea. An admirer of modern technology, he drew widely on European assistance to help him acquire arms and develop trade. One of his most trusted aides was a young Swiss engineer, Alfred Ilg, who served as architect, builder, plumber, medical consultant, concessionaire and foreign affairs adviser, remaining with Menelik for twenty-nine years. Menelik also struck up a close friendship with an Italian explorer, Count Pietro Antonelli, who had arrived in Shoa in 1879 to join a mission set up by the Italian Geographical Society three years before. In 1883, Antonelli persuaded Menelik to open up a trade link with the Italian port at Assab and in exchange arranged for the delivery of two thousand Remington rifles. For the next six years, Antonelli served as Italy’s official representative in Shoa.
In 1886, Menelik moved his headquarters from the mountain range in Entoto to a new site in a valley south of the mountains which he named Addis Ababa or New Flower. It was from there, on the death of Johannes, that he claimed his right to the imperial throne. There was little resistance. Menelik rapidly set out to tour the northern regions in force, receiving the submission of local officials. Henceforth, the empire was run not from Tigray but from Menelik’s sprawling encampment at Addis Ababa.
His immediate need was to come to terms with the Italians. At a ceremony at Menelik’s camp at Wichale in northern Wollo in May 1889, Menelik and Antonelli signed a treaty demarcating the extent of territory claimed by the Italians. Menelik agreed to cede to Italy the far northern provinces of Bogos and Hamasien and a small slice of the Christian high plateau that included Asmara. The border between Italian territory, later known as Eritrea, and Menelik’s northern province of Tigray lay along the Mareb River.
The Italian version of the treaty, however, differed from the Amharic version, as Antonelli, speaking both languages, must have known. The text of Article XVII of the Amharic version gave Menelik the option of using Italy’s good offices for contacts with other countries. In the Italian version, Article XVII required Menelik to make all such contacts through Italy. The Italians insisted that Article XVII made Abyssinia an Italian protectorate. Menelik protested that the Italians were trying to cheat him of his country.
In January 1890, the Italians issued a proclamation formally establishing their Colonia Eritrea, incorporating all the territories they occupied in northern Abyssinia as well as the coastal strip from north of Massawa down to French-controlled territory around the Gulf of Tadjoura. But the dispute over the meaning of the Wichale treaty rumbled on unresolved. Italy continued to claim its right to a protectorate over Abyssinia. Menelik demanded Italy withdraw the claim. After three years of argument, Menelik decided to abrogate the treaty altogether.
It is with much dishonesty that [the King of Italy], pretending friendship, has desired to seize my country. Because God gave the crown and the power that I should protect the land of my forefathers, I terminate and nullify this treaty. I have not, however, nullified my friendship. Know that I desire no other treaty than this. My kingdom is an independent kingdom and I seek no one’s protection.
Despite protestations of friendship, both sides began to spar across the Mareb River border. In March 1895, Italy’s commander in Eritrea, General Oreste Baratieri, advanced into Tigray, taking Adigrat. Returning briefly to Rome, he was acclaimed a national hero and given funds for a full-scale conquest. Back in Massawa in September, he issued a proclamation annexing Tigray to Eritrea and moved to Makelle to establish a fortress there.
Menelik responded to the Italian invasion by ordering a massive mobilisation:
Assemble the army, beat the drum. God in his bounty has struck down my enemies and enlarged my empire and preserved me to this day . . . Enemies have come who would ruin our country and change our religion. They have passed beyond the sea which God gave us our frontier . . . These enemies have advanced, burrowing into the country like moles. With God’s help I will get rid of them.
With the support of provincial governors, he gathered an army of 100,000 men and set off on the 500-mile march to Tigray. In December 1895, his vanguard annihilated an Italian outpost on the mountain of Amba Alagi in southern Tigray and laid siege to Makelle, forcing the Italian garrison there to surrender. Despite the setbacks, Baratieri remained confident that his Eritrean forces, armed with more than fifty field guns, were more than a match for the Abyssinian hordes. Pressed by Rome to bring Menelik to heel and restore Italian prestige, he led an attack on Menelik’s army at Adwa on 1 March 1896 but was routed. By the end of the day, some 4,100 Italians were dead or missing and about 2,000 were captured, out of an original total of 8,500; in addition, some 4,000 Eritrean auxiliaries were killed or captured, out of 7,100. Menelik’s casualties were at least as high, but his army remained a fighting force. The Italians were left with shattered remnants.
In the aftermath, the Italians publicly renounced their claim to a protectorate and recognised Abyssinia as an independent sovereign state. Menelik, rather than engage in another round of debilitating warfare, allowed the Italians to keep Eritrea with the Mareb River marking the frontier. Other European states also recognised Abyssinia’s independence. By the end of the scramble for Africa, Abyssinia was the only African state in the entire continent to achieve this status.
Secure on his imperial throne and fortified by international recognition, Menelik himself joined the scramble for territory, adding lands to the east, west and south that had never previously been part of Abyssinia’s empire. He extended his rule further into Oromo territory, seized Somali territory on the Ogaden plateau, and raised the Abyssinian flag as far south as the shore of Lake Turkana. Between 1896 and 1906, he doubled the size of the empire, imposing Amharic language and culture on subjugated populations. Soldier-settlers, known as neftennya, were sent to peripheral areas to ensure imperial control. Christian administrators presided as a ruling elite from fortified villages.
The areas that Menelik conquered were duly recognised by Europe’s colonial powers in a series of frontier agreements intended to demarcate separate zones of occupation in north-east Africa. In 1897, a French mission signed a treaty granting Abyssinia most of the desert lowlands in the hinterland of Djibouti, a port on the Gulf of Tadjoura that France had established in 1892. France’s Somaliland protectorate was reduced largely to an enclave around Djibouti. In return, Menelik accorded Djibouti recognition as Abyssinia’s official outlet to the sea and commissioned the construction of a railway between Djibouti and Addis Ababa.
Similar negotiations were conducted with the British in 1897 to settle the frontier with British Somaliland, an area which included the ports of Zeila and Berbera that Britain had established initially to ensure that the British garrison at Aden was kept regularly supplied with meat. Menelik’s officials argued that now that Abyssinia possessed Harar, this entitled them to all the territory between Harar and the sea. The boundary they eventually agreed upon allocated the coastal region to the British but gave virtually the entire Ogaden plateau to Abyssinia. It left the grazing grounds of Somali nomads divided by an international frontier. The Somali people were further divided when Italy proclaimed protectorates over areas of southern Somaliland and then established a colony called Somalia based on Mogadishu.
Thus, by one of those cruel twists of fate that occurred so often during the scramble for Africa, the Somalis, a people sharing a common language, culture and religion, were divided up by the boundaries of the new territories decided on by imperial powers.
For twenty years, a Somali religious preacher, Muhammad Abdullah Hassan, waged an intermittent guerrilla campaign against foreign occupation of Somali territory, confronting both the British in northern Somaliland and the Abyssinians in the Ogaden. To the British, he became known as the ‘Mad Mullah’. In the 1900s, the British launched five military expeditions to defeat him, recruiting to their side rival Somali clans opposed to Hassan’s Darod clan. But Hassan always managed to escape. ‘I warn you of this,’ he wrote in one of many messages sent to British officers, ‘I wish to fight with you. I like war, but you do not.’ A renowned poet, he used poetry as a propaganda weapon to sustain Somali resistance. A poem he wrote about the death of a British military commander at the battle of Dul Madoba in 1913 became part of Somali national heritage.
As the insurgency dragged on, Britain’s War Office recorded that ‘the continued immunity of the Mullah, who now stands alone as an unsubdued native potentate in Africa, is a source of constant anxiety.’ A British official, Douglas Jardine, who served in the Somaliland protectorate from 1916 to 1921, later wrote of an enemy ‘who offered no target for attack, no city, no fort, no land . . . in short, there was no military objective’.
The British tried to lure Hassan into surrendering by promising him a guarantee of safety, reunion with his family, and settlement in Mecca or Medina. But Hassan spurned their offer. In a poem he wrote shortly before his death, he warned Somalis against the schemes and plots of colonisers: ‘I have rejected the abundant wealth the colonizers were willing to offer me. / By abandoning my religion for the colonizer’s wealth is just accepting to be placed in the hell which I will not do. / Only dreadful result is inherited from collaborating with the colonizers.’
Hassan died of pneumonia in the Ogaden in 1920 at the age of sixty-four. Facing aerial bombardment, his band of followers had dwindled to only a few hundred. But he remained defiant until the last. ‘I wish to rule my country and protect my own religion,’ he told the British.