The Battle of Adwa
Tuesday, December 10, 2019
The Kingdom of Italy, having been formed only in 1861, came late to the imperialist game. The so-called "Scramble for Africa" had gotten off the ground in the 1870's, but Italy got its first piece of the pie only in 1888, when it formed the colony of Italian Eritrea (though Italian missionaries had been in Africa since the 1830s).
In 1889, Italy and Ethiopia signed a treaty which ultimately led to the First Italo-Ethiopian War. The Italian version of the Treaty stated that the King of Ethiopia MUST do certain business only with the permission of the Italian king; the Amharic translation read that he MAY do so. In grammatical terms, the clause in question was permissive in Amharic and mandatory in Italian.
The Ethiopian king discovered the discrepancy, and abandoned the Treaty in 1893. Italy took this as cause to invade Ethiopia after stirring up trouble in Eritrea. Russia backed Ethiopia; Britain came in with Italy.
Italy had miscalculated the sentiment of many of Ethiopia's noblemen/warlords, assuming they would join Italy against the King. Instead, they supported him, and a popular saying went, "Of a black snake's bite, you may be cured, but from the bite of a white snake, you will never recover."
An army of 196,000 men from all over Ethiopia, more than half of them with modern rifles, gathered to face the Italians. In December, 1895, the Italians were forced to retreat back to Eritrea.
Bigotry prevented the Italians from accepting this humiliation, and on March 1, 1896, they undertook a foolhardy assault on a well-armed Ethiopian force that was perhaps five times larger than theirs, at the Battle of Adwa.
The Italians planned an early-morning surprise attack against the Ethiopians, unaware that as Christians they would rise early for church services. Thus aware of the impending Italian strike, the Ethiopians made a preemptive attack, and by noon what was left of the Italian army was in full retreat. What started as a force of 17,700 men suffered 6,394 dead, 1,428 wounded, and about 3,000 captured.
By the start of the 20th century, Ethiopia and Liberia were the only African nations to remain free of European control.