Wakanda, the futuristic African nation of film and comic books is fiction. The Battle of Adwa, the victory of African forces over Italy in Tigray Province, Ethiopia, on March 1, 1896, is not.
On Saturday, March 2, a gathering of roughly 70 people, most of them members of Pittsburgh’s Ethiopian Orthodox religious community, gathered at the Parish Hall at Shadyside’s Calvary Episcopal Church to commemorate a war that still looms large in the Ethiopian and Pan African imagination 128 years later.
Known in the West as the First Italo-Ethiopian War, the decisive humiliation of the Kingdom of Italy by what military tacticians sympathetic to the colonial mandate of the 19th century assumed would be a fairly easy romp on the horn of Africa became a bloody rout by the Ethiopians.
Hundreds of officers and an estimated 7,000 Italian soldiers along with their local allies were killed and 10,000 wounded and captured during a hasty retreat from a slaughter of epic proportions. This was the first military defeat of an invading European army that had harbored nothing but disdain for an African people’s right to self-rule. It was also a stake in the heart of white supremacy when it came to colonial warfare.
Ethiopian independence had been maintained at the expense of a great colonial power’s dignity. Suddenly there was a new calculus to consider: There were no guarantees that the other colonial powers of Europe wouldn’t face a similar comeuppance as they systematically stripped their occupied territories of natural resources.
In response to the Battle of Adwa, Africans and descendants of Africans around the world, including those in colonized countries and protectorates from Kenya to the Caribbean, celebrated.
For several generations, Adwa became a source of pride to millions in the African diaspora, including those in America. It was not unusual to find Black Americans referring to themselves as “Ethiopians” and “Abyssinians” as a sign of solidarity with the Ethiopians even as they struggled with the indignities of Jim Crow in America.
Bloodied and humbled, Italy signed the Treaty of Addis Ababa that recognized, for the first time in history, an African country’s sovereignty over its own territory. This was a time when the rest of the continent was being carved up by such rapacious European rivals as Belgium, France and Britain, so the cognitive dissonance of such a defeat was inescapable.
Consequently, it didn’t take long for March 1, the day of that climactic battle in the valley of Adwa to become a national holiday for Ethiopians and their supporters around the world. Adwa Victory Day has been celebrated ever since, even during the darkest times when the country was buffeted by famine, civil war, drought, dictatorship, corrupt political elites and war with its closest neighbor, Eritrea.
Back in Italy, the shock of its once-vaunted military “losing a war to Africans” was so deep that many scholars believe it planted the seeds of fascism that Benito Mussolini, a clownish Axis stooge, exploited four decades later. Avenging that defeat in the valley of Adwa became a national obsession for decades leading up to the Second Italo-Ethiopian War in 1936.
This time the Italian invaders returned with overwhelming air power, modern tanks, robust supply lines, a larger, more disciplined military, a thirst for vengeance and chemical weapons outlawed by international treaties since World War I. Even so, it took a year to defeat the Ethiopians who fought like demons. Many Ethiopian fighters were convinced that another Adwa was possible despite the overwhelming odds, so occupation of a previously unconquered African nation would not be easy as the Italians quickly found out.
The Italian occupation of Ethiopia lasted five tumultuous years. The colonizers were finally sent packing in 1941 by an alliance of Ethiopian guerrillas known as the Arbegnoch and, ironically, British forces who backed the Ethiopians for reasons that had more to do with their own colonial interests than respect for an African country’s sovereignty. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was no friend of the Ethiopian people and everyone knew it.
Celebrating victory
Green, yellow and red balloons, the colors of Ethiopia’s flag, were everywhere at Calvary Episcopal Church. Children squealed with delight and chased each other around the refectory, oblivious to the solemnity of the Zoom lectures by three speakers explaining the importance of that war to grownups who leaned forward in their chairs to catch every word.
Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes, senior lecturer and researcher at the Center for Human Rights Education at Curtain University, Perth, Australia, got the ball rolling followed by Raymond Jones, a history professor at the University of Seattle and the author of “The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire” (Belknap / Harvard University Press, 2015).
Jones concentrated on the battlefield logistics and implications of Adwa and how it rewrote the narrative about late 19th-century colonialism in general and Ethiopia in particular.
Deacon Dawit Muluneh, an African Studies doctoral student at Howard University and the author of “Hopeless Romantic: The Untold History of Ethiopia,” presented last. Later, Deacon Muluneh shared thoughts with NEXTpittsburgh about Adwa and what it means as more people become aware that one of the most titanic battles of that century even happened.
“[Adwa] is a clear case of where Black people defeated the white man,” Muluneh said. “That was a necessary narrative not just for Ethiopians, but Black descendants throughout the world to really ponder the question: Is it possible, or is what [Georg Hegel] and other Western philosophers, historians and writers have said — that Africa has no history and we were to be dismissed?
“The case for the battle of Adwa challenges that narrative and turns it upside down. The important thing to understand is that the Ethiopians defeated the Italians to an embarrassing level. It was a battle that was decisively won. It was an important narrative because, at that time, the prevailing understanding was that all Black people were savages who had nothing to offer.”
Muluneh said that Adwa was also a story about Ethiopian unity and the coming together of different regions of the country that were previously in conflict. To make the trip on foot and on horseback to the north of the country to confront the Italian brigades required that Ethiopian fighters from the south and other parts of the country be welcomed into the homes of people they may have fought against not too long ago. It was an astonishing example of setting aside grievances for a higher good — expelling the colonizers.
“This is an important narrative for Ethiopians to think about unification,” Muluneh said.
Belachew Ayele, a member of the congregation who was born in Ethiopia, but grew up locally, agrees that Adwa presents unique inspirations on many fronts.
“The battle of Adwa teaches us how freedom is valid and how people are on equal footing, that we are all human and how freedom is on all of our hearts. That’s what I carry with me every day,” Ayele said.
Former Hill District native Dr. Nzingha O. Uhuru, a Howard University alum who served in Ethiopia as part of the Peace Corps after her graduate studies concluded, expanded on Ayele’s observations.
“My last name [Uhuru] means ‘freedom’ and that was the premise for the battle,” she said. “They wanted freedom for their country. The last speaker [Muluneh] talked about freedom from a colonized mind; that’s my goal and that’s why I educate myself about such things. It’s all about freedom.”
Adam Kidane, another friend of the congregation who was born in Ethiopia, didn’t realize at first how important that nation’s history was to his life in Pittsburgh or its relevance even though his father, an academic who worked for the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, was deeply engaged in research on that country and its history.
“As a kid, I never understood the value of it,” Kidane said. “For me, it was just someone doing their job.”
The more Kidane became exposed to people like the speakers who addressed the congregation on Saturday and their passion, the more he appreciated that history and his father’s lifelong work.
“Connecting to the passion that people have about the history [of Ethiopia] means a lot,” he said.
For the children who played on the floor under the Adwa banner, it was just another weekend gathering in the meeting hall that has been the home to the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church in Pittsburgh for the last few years while the search for a permanent worship space continues. They know nothing about war or peace yet, but their elders will make sure that they eventually learn an important part of their cultural history.
But that would be another day.
Behind their giggling was the expectation of access to the cakes, pies, cookies and other sweet goods sitting on a table against the wall that would push their energy levels even higher once the grownups stopped talking about a war from long ago and got down to the far more serious business of chowing down.
Tony Norman’s column is underwritten by The Pittsburgh Foundation as part of its efforts to support writers and commentators who cover communities of color.