The Battle of Adwa

Background

In the late nineteenth century Italy held a foothold on the Red Sea coast and sought to expand inland. In May 1889, shortly before his coronation, Menelik II signed the Treaty of Wuchale with Italy, hoping to secure peace. The Amharic and Italian texts of the treaty did not match. Italy read it as making Ethiopia an Italian protectorate, while Menelik held that it only allowed him to use Italy as an intermediary with other European powers, if he chose. He formally rejected the Italian interpretation in 1893, and by 1895 the two states were at war.

The battle

The decisive clash came near Adwa in northern Ethiopia on 1 March 1896. General Oreste Baratieri commanded the Italian force, made up of Italian soldiers and colonial troops. Menelik II led the Ethiopian army, with Empress Taytu playing a significant role. According to a Library of Congress specialist, she warned Menelik about Italian deception during the earlier negotiations and helped control water sources during the campaign. An article in The Conversation puts Menelik's army at about 100,000 against some 20,000 on the Italian side, and notes the Italians' cannon and machine guns. Exact figures vary between accounts.

The Italian army was routed. World History Encyclopedia gives Italian losses of about 6,000 dead and more than 3,000 taken prisoner. Britannica's summary calls it the first crushing defeat of a European power by African forces in the colonial era.

Aftermath

The defeat brought down the Italian government of Francesco Crispi and ended Italy's war of conquest. In the Treaty of Addis Ababa, Italy recognized Ethiopia's independence and sovereignty. Negotiations over the prisoners involved Pope Leo XIII, and Menelik released a first group of 200 on 20 November 1896, with further releases in 1897.

Significance

Historians present Adwa as a turning point. In his Harvard University Press study, Raymond Jonas argues that the victory challenged the era's assumption that all of Africa would fall under European rule. He also credits Menelik, Taytu and their adviser Alfred Ilg with skilled diplomacy, and notes that people across the African diaspora grasped the battle's importance immediately. Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois and George Padmore are among those said to have drawn inspiration from it. An Afro-Brazilian newspaper of 1915–16 even took the name O Menelick.

Italy did not forget the defeat. The Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art notes that resentment over it fed into Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, which led to a five-year occupation.

In Ethiopia the victory is celebrated every March. It is also commemorated in art, such as a painting from about 1968, now at the Smithsonian, that adds St. George on a white horse to the battle scene.