Читать книгу A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855–1991 - Bahru Zewde - Страница 16

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Unification and Independence 1855–1896

1. The first response: Kasa - Tewodros

The man who represented the first effective response to both the internal and the external challenge – to the squabbling princes as well as to the ‘Turk’ – was Kasa Haylu, who, on his coronation in 1855 as Emperor Tewodros II, inaugurated the modern history of Ethiopia. Kasa became Tewodros largely by dint of his own personal qualities: his sense of mission, his military skill and valour and his extraordinary intelligence. He was essentially a self-made man. Kasa the shefta (bandit) became Tewodros the emperor. Although his career was initially formed within the politics of the Zamana Masafent, finally he proved to be its antithesis.

Yet it would be drawing too idealized a picture if we ignored his family background in discussing Kasa’s rise to power. It was this background which gave him both his territorial base on the Ethio-Sudanese border – Qwara – and a taste of conventional politics. Kasa was related, if at a considerable distance, to Dajjach Maru of Dambya (south-west of Gondar), one of the leading participants in the Zamana Masafent. Maru in turn was a relation by marriage to both the Yajju dynasty and Dajjach Webe Hayla-Maryam of Semen. Ironically, though perhaps not surprisingly in the context of the period, it was fighting against these relatives that Maru met his death at the Battle of Koso Bar in October 1827. But his name survived in the fief which was grudgingly given to Dajjach Kenfu Haylu of Dambya by the Empress Manan Liban, mother of the Yajju Ras Ali II. The fief was known as Ya Maru Qammas (literally ‘What has been tasted by Maru’, a collective name for the scattered possessions of Dajjach Maru, which included Qwara). Kasa himself, who went to Qwara after the Battle of Koso Bar, was sometimes called Kasa Maru.

In Qwara, Kasa grew up in the family of Kenfu of Dambya, who was developing a reputation as a stalwart defender of the Ethiopian frontier against Egyptian encroachment. In 1837, Kenfu moved to the offensive when he defeated an Egyptian force at Wad Kaltabu, deep inside Sudanese territory. But the association between Kasa and Kenfu was not entirely a happy one, as the latter was apprehensive of Kasa’s claim to Ya Maru Qammas, which Kenfu wanted to reserve for his own sons. But his concern was all in vain. On his death in 1839, neither his sons nor Kasa could lay their hands on Qwara; it was appropriated by Empress Manan. The path of legitimate succession thus blocked, Kasa became a shefta in the plains of Qwara. He soon came to head a group of bandits composed of other disgruntled persons and ordinary robbers.

Kasa’s shefta days were probably the most formative period of his life. It was then that some of the enduring features of his personality were confirmed. Two of these were his simplicity and disdain for pomp. He lived the life of his followers, taking part even in ploughing and sowing. Another feature was his concern for social justice. His distribution of money that he had acquired by robbery to the peasants, so that they could buy ploughs, had an element of Robin Hood about it. It presaged his fateful decision to expropriate the Orthodox Church of some of its land to feed his soldiers.

Most significantly, his shefta life in Qwara brought him into direct conflict with the Egyptians. This conflict was at the root of his lifelong obsession with the ‘Turk’, and his wild dream of liberating Jerusalem from their rule. At the same time, it brought about the only major military defeat of his career. At the Battle of Dabarqi in 1848, Kasa’s troops, whose only advantage lay in their blind courage, were mown down by the artillery wielded to deadly effect by the disciplined Egyptian troops. Kasa came out chastened from the whole experience. At the same time was born his abiding interest in discipline and artillery. The former he tried to instil in his troops, with the assistance first of some Egyptian advisers and then of his trusted British friend John Bell. Tewodros’s interest in artillery culminated in the forging of his overvalued mortar, ‘Sebastopol’, whose final ineffectualness symbolized the futility of his life.

Kasa’s growing prominence in Qwara attracted the attention of the Yajju lords. In a desire to tame him, they resorted to diplomacy. Qwara, which Kasa had already come to control by dint of his military force, was formally given to him, and the daughter of Ras Ali, Tawabach, was also given to him in marriage. While his love for the daughter endured, the rapprochement with father and grandmother was short-lived. Embittered by the humiliation and contempt that seemed to have been reserved for him in the Yajju court, Tewodros resumed his shefta life. The campaign to subdue him ended in humiliating defeats, firstly of Dajjach Wandyerad, who had boasted to his Yajju overlord that he would haul back ‘the koso-vendor’s son’ (for there was a common gibe that Kasa’s mother sold koso flowers for tapeworm treatment), and secondly of Empress Manan herself, who spent some time in ignominious captivity.

2.1 Emperor Tewodros II’s mortar ‘Sebastopol’ being dragged up the slopes of Maqdala: the emperor is outlined in the background

These early victories of Kasa foreshadowed the major and even more decisive victories of the 1850s. In a series of battles which demonstrated his extraordinary talent as military leader and strategist, he defeated one major leader of the Zamana Masafent after another. In the Battle of Gur Amba (27 November 1852), the Gojjame war-lord and one-time patron of Kasa, Dajjach Goshu Zawde, was crushed fighting under orders from Ras Ali. The day-long battle claimed many casualties, including Goshu himself. The proximity of the battle-site to Gondar, the capital city of the north, was an indication that Kasa was no longer content to roam in the borderlands and that he was staking out his claims to control the centre. Some five months later, on 12 April 1853, Kasa defeated four of Ras Ali’s and Dajjach Webe of Semen’s vassals, each ranking as dajjazmach, of whom two were killed in battle. The turn of the masters themselves was not long in coming. Ali’s force was routed at the Battle of Ayshal (29 June 1853), and he was forced to flee to Yajju territory. This victory of Kasa over the last of the Yajju princes in effect symbolized the end of the Zamana Masafent. Between Kasa and the imperial throne, there remained only one obstacle, Dajjach Webe, the last of the warring princes. On 8 February 1855, Kasa defeated Webe at the Battle of Darasge, north-west of Gondar; and in the church that Webe had constructed for his own anticipated coronation, at the hands of the very same abun (Abuna Salama) that Webe had brought from Egypt, Kasa became Tewodros II, King of Kings of Ethiopia.

It is a mark of the breadth of Tewodros’s vision that he did not see his victories over the northern regional rulers as the fulfilment of his goals. Soon after the Battle of Darasge, he turned his attention to the south – to Wallo and Shawa. With that action, he brought to an end the northern focus of the Zamana Masafent. One of the ultimate results of this turning southward of Tewodros’s aims was that Shawa was now irreversibly drawn into the orbit of imperial politics – a process which was to culminate in the coronation of Menilek II as emperor of Ethiopia, and the evolution of Shawa as the geopolitical centre of the empire.

By Ethiopian standards, the campaign in Wallo was prolonged, and presaged the chronic problem, partly of his own making, of insubordination which Tewodros was to face in that region. Started in March 1855, in the middle of the arduous fasting season of Lent, nearly two months long, hostilities continued – in defiance of Ethiopian military tradition – during the rainy season, and ended only towards the middle of September. In the process, Tewodros matched the fierce resistance of the Wallo people with a ruthless policy of terror, marked by the amputation of limbs that was to become proverbial. Tewodros’s seizure of the stronghold of Maqdala on 12 September 1865 terminated his Wallo campaign – for the time being. With that event, there was established a place which was to have great significance, both actual and symbolic, in the life of Tewodros. Maqdala became the centre of his model government. It was the den to which he retreated in his final hours of distress. It was the site where, in 1868, in a dramatic act of defiance that was to captivate the minds of future generations of Ethiopians, he committed suicide as British troops rushed in to capture him.

As in Wallo, the overlapping campaign in Shawa lasted some five months. There, Tewodros met a mixed reaction. Some of the regions, such as Manz, Gedem and Efrata, submitted without resistance. Led by Sayfu Sahla-Sellase, the fiery younger brother of Negus Hayla-Malakot, others resisted Tewodros’s march into Shawa. The negus died in the middle of the campaign. Tewodros then directed all his attention to capturing Hayla-Malakot’s son, Menilek, who had become the rallying-point of Shawan resistance. With this objective achieved at the Battle of Barakat in November 1855, Tewodros returned to Gondar after appointing another brother of Hayla-Malakot, Hayla-Mikael, to govern Shawa. Never ready to countenance the existence of a negus under him, Tewodros resuscitated the old Shawan title of mar’ed azmach to bestow it on his Shawan vassal. But Sayfu continued to challenge Tewodros’s authority. Elsewhere, too, as for example in Gojjam and Semen, rebellion was already boiling. Thus, the termination of the Shawan campaign, marking as it did the peak of Tewodros’s power, was also the beginning of the end for him.

Tewodros as modernizer

Tewodros has been described as ‘Ethiopia’s first monarch with a concept (however vague) of modernization’ (Crummey, ‘Tewodros’, 457). Given the breadth of vision and the energy that he brought to the Ethiopian scene, this is a fair assessment. The parenthetical qualification contained in the above characterization is highly appropriate, however. Not only was Tewodros’s concept of modernization vague, but his reforms also lacked consistency and method. Ultimately, they remained tentative gestures rather than comprehensive programmes of lasting importance. The social and political edifice of the Zamana Masafent proved too strong for Tewodros’s modernizing efforts. The military and administrative reforms he envisaged were bereft of economic and technological bases. The foreign assistance that he sought so avidly was not forthcoming. In the end, Tewodros remained a lone and somewhat confused prophet of change.

The lack of consistency and the force of inertia of the Zamana Masafent were also evident in his administrative policy. Tewodros did not make a clean sweep of the local dynasties. In many instances, he confirmed them in their regional bases, at best appointing those he considered pliant members of the dynasties. Thus, in Tegre, he appointed Dajjach Kasa Subagadis, the son of the Agame chief who had died fighting against Ras Mareyye of Bagemder in 1831. In Wallo, Tewodros placed first Dajjach Liban Amade and then Amade Ali, son of Warqit, an important female leader. It was later that Tewodros entrusted Maqdala to one of his most loyal followers, Grazmach Alame. In Shawa, while the resuscitation of the old title of mar’ed azmach was probably a calculated blow to Shawan royal pretensions, Mar’ed Azmach Hayla-Mikael in effect continued the Shawan dynastic line. It was only in Gojjam that, from the outset, Tewodros appointed one of his own commanders, Ras Engeda.

While such an appointment policy would appear to perpetuate the divisive tendencies of the Zamana Masafent, in actual fact it turned out that being Tewodros’s ‘own man’ was not synonymous with loyalty, nor did having a dynastic base inevitably lead to rebellion. Both Engeda and Alame eventually fell out with Tewodros. The defection of Alame, one of the Emperor’s most trusted followers, was a particularly bitter pill for him to swallow. Conversely, Mar’ed Azmach Hayla-Mikael dutifully paid his annual tribute. Dajjach Kasa Subagadis of Agame made a dramatic demonstration of his loyalty by sending the tongue of a follower of the rebel, Agaw Neguse of Semen; the unfortunate victim had bragged in front of his master that he would bring him the severed head of Tewodros. As a man who had been liberated from Dajjach Webe’s prison by Tewodros, Kasa Subagadis was understandably grateful to the emperor. Conversely, he was implacably opposed to Webe’s successors; after all, he had come out hunchbacked from prison.

Tegre’s loyalty to Tewodros had even more concrete manifestations than the dramatic gesture by Dajjach Kasa Subagadis. The largest portion of royal revenue came from Tegre, including, that is, the regions of Hamasen, Saraye and Akala Guzay. It amounted annually to about 200,000 Maria Theresa thalers (compared with the less than 50,000 thalers from Bagemder). Of this, over 35,000 thalers, some 18%, was paid by Dajjach Baryaw Pawlos, the governor of the northern part of present-day Tegray, who was married to Aletash, daughter of Tewodros. About 32,000 thalers, or over 16%, came from Dajjach Haylu Tawalda-Madhen of Hamasen and Saraye, and over 17,000 thalers, or about 9%, came from Basha Gabra-Egzie of Akala Guzay.

Tewodros’s commitment to military reform was less equivocal than his administrative policies. The army has generally been the first concern of any modernizing ruler of a country, because of its pivotal role in the conquest and maintenance of political power. Even in the case of Ethiopia’s medieval rulers, their correspondence with European monarchs was dominated by requests for the fruits of modern military technology. To Tewodros, who owed his political power more to his military prowess than to his genealogy, the central role of the army must have been even more vital. He accordingly set out to remould the military structure of Ethiopia in three important respects: organization, discipline and armament. Yet, like almost all the other reforms of Tewodros, those in the military sphere were also vitiated by lack of consistency and of thoroughness.

What Tewodros attempted to do in the organizational sphere was to replace the regional armies of the Zamana Masafent with a national army which cut across local loyalties. Thus soldiers coming from different regions were formed into one regiment. A new hierarchy of command, with military titles which are still in use in the Ethiopian army – for example, yasr alaqa, yamsa alaqa, ya shi alaqa, respectively commander of ten, commander of fifty, commander of a thousand – was introduced. Tewodros also cut down on the traditional retinue of the army, which had retarded its mobility and at the same time presented logistical problems. Although there is no evidence as to the amount and manner of payment, Tewodros is also credited with replacing the vicious system of billeting by payment of salaries. At least at the outset, before his sense of justice fell prey to his indiscriminate violence, he was severe towards any of his soldiers caught looting. Yet, when Wallo rebels killed his night guard and stole some mules, he gave his soldiers permission to loot the locality in retribution. In another situation, the uncontrollable urge of his soldiers to plunder led him into a desperate consideration of abdication.

Discipline remained a lasting concern of Tewodros; one of the lessons that he had drawn from the Battle of Dabarqi in 1848 was of its value, but he proceeded to apply a harsh version of it. During his first Wallo campaign, he had the limbs of his own soldiers amputated for unauthorized fighting in which they had lost both men and firearms. In Shawa, when some of his soldiers mutinied because of strong rumours that he planned to send them on a campaign to Jerusalem, he punished them with a severity intended to prevent further such occurrences: forty-eight of them were hacked to death or shot. The two ringleaders first had their limbs amputated, and were then hanged. Yet such measures of primitive justice, far from reinforcing Tewodros’s authority, only tended to spiral towards universalized violence. The very last letter of his life – written to Sir Robert Napier, the leader of the British military expedition, in the aftermath of the Battle of Aroge, which led to Tewodros’s suicide in 1868 – was a pathetic admission of his failure to instil discipline in his subjects. ‘My countrymen have turned their backs on me,’ he wrote, ‘because I imposed tribute on them, and sought to bring them under military discipline. You have prevailed against me by means of a people brought into a state of discipline’ (Holland and Hozier, II, 42).

The third aspect of Tewodros’s military reforms was his unrelenting drive to acquire modern arms. Although his stockpile grew largely through purchases and seizure from vanquished enemies, it was to arms manufacture that he applied himself with remarkable persistence. The first experiment came right after the Battle of Dabarqi: as Kasa Haylu, Tewodros improvised a rather crude explosive from the trunk of a tree. It was to be set off from a distance by means of a connecting thread. The whole experiment was aborted when one of Kasa’s followers, captured by the enemy, divulged the secret under torture. When Tewodros later sought foreign assistance, it was not so much the arms that he sought as the skilled manpower to manufacture those arms and to impart those skills to Ethiopians.

The upshot of this strategy appeared at Gafat, an area near Dabra Tabor which, more than any other place, symbolized Tewodros’s modernizing drive. Gafat was at the same time a symbol of the uneasy relationship between Tewodros and the European missionaries. The latter came to Ethiopia to preach the gospel of love. They ended up being commandeered to manufacture weapons of destruction by a Christian sovereign who wanted from the Europeans their science, not their religion. At Gafat, a school was established where Ethiopian youths acquired literacy and some technical skills. By trial and error, and under the emperor’s ceaseless prodding, the missionaries managed to manufacture some weapons.

At Maqdala, the first well-documented arsenal in Ethiopian history was established, with 15 cannon, 7 mortars, 11,063 rifles of different types, 875 pistols and 481 bayonets, as well as ammunition including 555 cannon-shells and mortar-shells and 83,563 bullets. But the objective of creating a trained Ethiopian cadre of technicians could hardly be realized when the apprentices were drawn from groups then regarded as social outcasts, such as the Muslims and Falasha, and from Oromo captives. Nor could the weapons forged at the Gafat foundry bring about any dramatic change in the military equation – as the fate of the highly prized mortar ‘Sebastopol’ demonstrated. This show-piece of Tewodros’s arms manufacture was dragged in 1867 all the way up to the Maqdala massif at considerable sacrifice. But, when the moment came to empty it against the British, it misfired.

Tewodros also made the first attempt to put an end to the slave-trade which had become endemic in Ethiopian society. During one of his campaigns in Gojjam, he freed all the slaves at the Basso market and, in an impromptu wedding ceremony, he had all the male slaves married to the females. He followed this by an official ban on the slave-trade throughout his realm. In Qallu, Wallo, he forbade his soldiers to resell slaves they had captured. Such measures against the slave-trade did not extend to an abolition of the institution of slavery itself; perhaps understandably so, since slavery had come to be embedded in the Ethiopian social fabric. Indeed, later in his reign, we find Tewodros, exasperated by the guerrilla tactics of the Wallo rebel Amade Bashir, authorizing his soldiers to enslave the Muslim followers of his enemy.

Culturally, Tewodros’s reign is significant because it witnessed the birth of a fairly well-developed literary Amharic. A world of stylistic difference separates the Amharic correspondence sent by Tewodros and that of previous correspondents such as Dajjach Subagadis. Amharic prose attained even higher, almost poetic, elegance in the chronicle of Dabtara Zanab, the emperor’s admirer.

Like all modernizing rulers, Tewodros realized that introducing far-reaching reforms was impossible without a secure financial base. It was in an effort to solve this problem that he came into collision with the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. That ultimately proved his undoing. His conflict with the clergy initially arose from two different levels of morality. With understandable exaggeration, Zanab draws a striking contrast between the virtues of Tewodros and the vices of the clergy of the Zamana Masafent: purity versus debauchery, chastity versus licentiousness, monogamy versus polygamy, and honesty versus dishonesty. Further, just as he sought to establish a unitary state, Tewodros wanted to see the church overcome its doctrinal divisions and emerge as a united institution. His ‘concordat’ with the Egyptian bishop Abuna Salama, whereby the latter gave his blessing to Tewodros’s seizure of political power in return for his enforcement of the Tawahedo doctrine, appeared to have ushered in a new era of the unity of church and state.

But this spirit of co-operation was short-lived. The relationship between Tewodros and the clergy was soon beset with fundamental political and economic contradictions. As was revealed by the controversy over the temtem, the turban customarily worn by Ethiopian Orthodox Christian priests, Tewodros appears to have been bent on establishing absolute power over the clergy. He could not tolerate the fact that they appeared turbaned in front of him, whereas they had to take off their turbans in the holy of holies, the inner sanctuary of a church. It was the vital question of land, however, which made the church a sworn enemy of the emperor. In a question of striking directness, Tewodros enquired of the clergy in 1856: ‘What shall I eat, and with what shall I feed my troops? You have taken half the land as masqal maret and the other half as rim and gadam’ (Zanab, 28). (Tewodros was here referring to three of the various categories of church land.) The response of the clergy was as medieval as the emperor’s question was modern. He was told to roam from one province to another and live off the land, ‘as in the past’. Tewodros found the suggestion not at all attractive. After four years of procrastination in view of strong clerical opposition, he expropriated what he deemed was land in excess of the clergy’s requirements and distributed it among tribute-paying peasants.

Tewodros and the foreigners

Interrelated with the broad vision which Tewodros brought to solve the internal problems of the country was his energetic response to the external challenge. This challenge had two elements: Egyptian and European. But there was an intimate link between the two, just as the external and the internal elements were closely interconnected. The quest for European assistance could be regarded as the pivot of Tewodros’s policy. It was with that assistance that he sought to eliminate the Egyptian danger (in his words, the ‘Turkish’ danger) and to bring about internal reforms. Knowledge of the alignments during the Crimean War of 1853–1856 (Christian Britain and France against Orthodox Christian Russia on the side of Muslim Turkey) must have been a shock to him. But it did not deter him from continuing to invoke the principle of Christian solidarity against Muslim Egypt. Conversely, the possibility of a Crimean-like collusion between the ‘Turks’ and the Europeans, particularly the British, perennially haunted him. Captain Cameron, the British consul appointed to Ethiopia in 1862, was finally imprisoned because, after his visit to Massawa, he failed to bring back a response to Tewodros’s letter of that year to Queen Victoria, in which he asked for British assistance to help him break out of the Muslim blockade. Cameron also compounded his error by returning via Matamma, then under Egyptian control, and, so Tewodros suspected, by plotting with the ‘Turks’.

Given his background of border clashes with the Egyptians, it is not surprising that Tewodros continued to harbour an ingrained suspicion of them. This was clearly seen in 1857, when he suddenly arrested the Coptic Patriarch Qerilos (then on a visit from Alexandria to Ethiopia) and Abuna Salama (head of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church) – both Egyptians – on discovering that they had sent a request for Egyptian military assistance on Tewodros’s behalf, but without his knowledge. Simultaneously, he tried to undermine Egyptian authority in Sudan by using Sudanese refugees such as Wad Nimr, son of Makk Nimr, leader of a Sudanese revolt against Egyptian rule in 1821, to make inroads into Sudan and even collect taxes in Tewodros’s name. But Tewodros the emperor, unlike Kasa the shefta, was preoccupied mainly with the coast rather than with the western borderlands. As he groped outwards for contacts with Europe, he found his outlet Massawa sealed off by the Egyptian presence. This feeling of insulation underlay his letter to Queen Victoria.

Although Tewodros sought to cultivate friendly relations with all European nations, it was towards the British that he manifested a special, almost affectionate, regard. It was to be one of his tragedies that this affection went unreciprocated. Such a special attitude may have been the result of his close association with John Bell, a British traveller who came to Ethiopia early in the 1840s and later won the favour of the emperor to such a degree that he became Tewodros’s liqa makwas (an important court official who, among other things, acted as the emperor’s double, with the aim of misdirecting possible assassination attempts), and with Walter Plowden, the first British consul to Ethiopia, who arrived in 1848. Tewodros went to great lengths to demonstrate his liking for the British. The killing of Plowden and then of Bell in 1860 by Garad, Tewodros’s rebellious nephew, roused the emperor to a furious act of revenge against his own relatives. In the letters that he wrote to Hormuzd Rassam, the British envoy sent in 1864 to negotiate the release of the Europeans imprisoned in January of that year, Tewodros repeatedly expressed his ‘love’ for the British. At the same time, however, he could not conceal his dismay at the fact that, far from responding positively to his friendly overtures, the British appeared to be conspiring with his avowed enemy, the ‘Turks’. This contradiction lay at the root of his quarrel with the British; hence the irony that the nation he had hoped would be his most reliable ally turned out to be his most bitter enemy.

Tewodros’s unrelenting quest for European technical assistance arose from his acute realization of the backwardness of his country. Not only was he aware of this backwardness, but he was also not ashamed to publicize it. And he chose the most forceful language to do so: in his letters to Queen Victoria and Rassam, he called himself ‘blind’, ‘ignorant’, ‘a blind ass’. He repeatedly contrasted the ‘darkness’ of Ethiopia with the ‘light’ of Europe. In the letter that he wrote in 1866 when he sent the Protestant missionary Martin Flad to Europe to recruit artisans, Tewodros was at pains to emphasize the favourable terms of employment that he envisaged for potential recruits:

I am sending Mr. Flad to Europe. I am seeking skilled artisans. I shall gladly receive all artisans who come to me. If they stay, I shall ensure that they live happily. If they wish to return to their country once they have taught their skills, I shall pay their salary and let them leave, happy and with an escort.

(Girma-Selassie and Appleyard, 336)

It was also Tewodros’s eagerness to introduce European technology into his country that shaped his relations with the missionaries, particularly the Protestants. His relations with the Catholics were never happy. This was partly the result of the greater influence that Catholicism had come to exercise in northern Ethiopia, and the threat that this posed to Tewodros’s own authority. Partly, too, it arose from the closer identification of the Catholics with a secular power, France. The conflict between Catholicism and Orthodoxy came to be dramatized in a personal antagonism between Giustino De Jacobis and Abuna Salama. Tewodros’s ‘concordat’ with the latter inevitably placed him against the former. De Jacobis was expelled from Ethiopia in 1854, and his Ethiopian followers were persecuted. Thereafter the Catholics and the French became enemies of Tewodros and worked towards his downfall. In Agaw Neguse of Semen, nephew of the defeated Dajjach Webe who had been a patron of the Catholics, they found a domestic ally. Adopting the title of negus to bolster his pretensions, Agaw Neguse began a policy of active collaboration with Paris and the Vatican, going to the extent of offering the French the port of Zula, south of Massawa, in return for arms. The suppression of his rebellion and his own death in 1860 deprived the French and the Catholics of a strategically located and enthusiastic ally.

With the Protestants, Tewodros had more amicable relations. The influence of the Protestants Bell and Plowden and the educational background of Abuna Salama in the Church Missionary Society have been adduced as factors in this relationship. Protestant strategy, which aimed at the internal reform of the Orthodox Church rather than at conversion, also helped. The more practical orientation of the Protestant missionaries, such as their programme of introducing crafts like joinery and masonry, must also have made them more attractive to an emperor bent on introducing European artisanship. At any rate, the rapport between emperor and missionaries attained such degrees of intimacy as partaking together of holy communion. Two of the missionaries, J. Mayer and Theophil Waldmeier, married Ethiopians. Waldmeier, a steadfast admirer of Tewodros even when the ruler’s later excesses made him a solitary figure, gave passionate expression to the Protestant image of Tewodros as a Reformation prince:

Where is another king to be found, who in spite of his power and greatness in self-denial disdains all comforts, luxury and good-living? . . . We all firmly believe that the Lord has proclaimed this man with His strength, and that subsequently He will use him still more as an extraordinary instrument for the physical and spiritual well-being of his entire people.

(Crummey, Priests and Politicians, 126)

Yet, however enthusiastic the Protestants might have been towards Tewodros, they were not prepared for the task that the emperor had in store for them: the manufacture of heavy armaments. They had to be coerced into it. As far as their evangelical activity was concerned, it was confined on the emperor’s order to such non-Christian communities as the Falasha, although occasionally they could count among their converts such close associates of the emperor as his chronicler, the ecclesiastic Dabtara Zanab. In the end, the emperor did not spare the Protestant missionaries when he turned against the Europeans. It was indeed one of these missionaries, Henry A. Stern, who, because of his rather indecent references to Tewodros’s parentage, fanned the flame of the emperor’s anti-European fury. A number of the missionaries were subsequently among the captives at Maqdala.

2.2 The prisoners of Emperor Tewodros II. Captain Cameron, the British consul, is first on the right; Hormuzd Rassam, the envoy who was sent to negotiate the release of the prisoners but ended up joining them, is seated second on the left; the missionary Henry Stern is standing first on the left

The end of Tewodros

Both domestically and externally, therefore, Tewodros was confronted with a gloomy picture. Internally, he faced nation-wide opposition and rebellion. From the Europeans whom he had expected to come to his aid, he received only indifference or insolence. The frustration of his lofty objectives led him to seek extreme solutions. In exasperation, he spared neither friend nor foe. His indiscriminate violence aggravated his situation. At home, it multiplied his enemies. Abroad, it moved the British to action – against him. They were indifferent to his demands for assistance, but not to his imprisonment of Europeans.

Internal opposition to Tewodros’s authority had started as early as 1855. In the subsequent decade, Tewodros was to spend most of his time moving in haste from one province to another, faced with a fresh outbreak of rebellion before he had succeeded in putting down the previous one. In Gojjam, Tadla Gwalu, a member of the local dynasty, remained a permanent thorn in the flesh. Closer to the emperor’s seat of power, Tesso Gobaze of Walqayt threatened his authority to the extent of once even occupying Gondar. In Lasta, Wag Shum Gobaze – the future Emperor Takla-Giyorgis (r. 1868–1871) – raised the standard of rebellion after he had seen his own father executed by Tewodros. In Shawa, ever-defiant Sayfu Sahla-Sellase and also Bazabeh, the man whom Tewodros himself had appointed, rose against him. Likewise, the emperor’s appointee in Wallo, Dajjach Liban Amade, was joined by an even more implacable opponent, Amade Bashir, to make that province Tewodros’s political graveyard.

Both the reverses of his political fortune and his own spiralling violence depleted his own ranks. By 1866, as a result of desertions, his army, which had once numbered about 60,000, had been reduced to some 10,000 men. Tewodros had been forced to restrict his movements to the Dabra Tabor–Maqdala axis. Soon, even this stretch of territory was put at the mercy of the growing rebel forces. Towards the end of 1867, Tewodros was forced to abandon the old capital, Dabra Tabor, and establish his last stronghold in Maqdala. This retreat symbolized the ultimate frustration of his dream. The man who had dreamt of uniting all Ethiopia came to be confined to one isolated amba, a hilly stronghold. In his final letter to Sir Robert Napier, leader of the British and Indian forces in 1868, Tewodros himself called it ‘this heathen spot’ (Holland and Hozier, II, 42). Yet, although it marked the nadir of his political and military fortune, Maqdala also symbolized the spirit of defiance which was to endear him so deeply to future generations. Three places could be said to have epitomized his life: Qwara, Gafat and Maqdala. The first served as his initial political and military power base; the second symbolized his modernizing zeal; the third became his last refuge. It was in this refuge, in the act of suicide which has provided both traditional and modern artists with a popular motif, that the forlorn emperor denied the British the satisfaction of capturing the man against whom they had sent such a huge expedition.

The expedition itself had been sent after a fairly long parliamentary debate in Britain. Its objectives were the liberation of the European captives and the punishment of Tewodros. The force led by Sir Robert Napier was 32,000 strong. In historical writings, the exploits of the expedition have been given a prominence incommensurate with their historical importance. In actual fact, the fate of Tewodros had been sealed before the British started their journey to the interior. The war had been won by the British before a shot was fired. Not only was Tewodros deserted by his followers, but some of his enemies had decided to do everything possible to expedite the march of the British troops. The British thus obtained most valuable support from Kasa Mercha of Tegre (the future Emperor Yohannes IV), who ensured that the expeditionary force would be supplied with the provisions and the means of transport essential for its march; indeed, the expedition proved to be the first army in Ethiopian history which was prepared to pay for its food. Kasa’s collaboration with the British arose partly from the fact that he shared the almost universal disaffection from Tewodros; partly from a desire to strengthen his regional position, and thereby to present a stronger bid for the throne; partly also from his trust that the British would honour their promise to leave the country once their limited objectives had been achieved. At any rate, the result of such internal support for the invading force was that it was able to reach Maqdala from the coast in less time than it took Tewodros to traverse the distance between Dabra Tabor and Maqdala, although the invaders’ journey was three times as long.

As it turned out, the British did keep their word to leave the country once their mission was accomplished. This prompt withdrawal of the British has remained somewhat enigmatic to students of Ethiopian history. Why, it is often asked, did the British withdraw after they had managed to penetrate to the very heart of Ethiopia? The puzzle ceases to be a puzzle when we recall the fact that the Napier expedition antedated the European scramble for African colonial possessions by almost two decades. The expedition was what we may describe as pre-colonial, in a country where Britain had not yet established vital interests worthy of defending by continued political and military presence. The British point of view was unambiguously put forward by Lord Stanley (later Earl of Derby), the British Foreign Secretary:

Her Majesty’s government have no concern with what might befall Abyssinia from the removal of King Theodore from the country . . . it will in no way concern them what may be the future that awaits Abyssinia; what Ruler may hold power in the country; what civil wars or commotions may arise in it. On grounds of humanity Her Majesty’s government would desire the country to be well governed, and the people to be contented and prosperous; but they do not consider it incumbent on them to set up or to support any form of government or any particular Ruler under which it shall be carried out, in a country in which they have really no British interests to promote.

(Rubenson, Survival, 275; emphasis added)

As for Tewodros, his last word to his countrymen and the world at large was contained in the letter he wrote to Napier on the day after the British victory on 10 April at the Battle of Aroge, which preceded the storming of Maqdala and the emperor’s suicide. It is a document quintessentially Tewodrosian, crystallizing as it does his lifelong dreams and ambitions. Although it is addressed to the British general, the thrust of the message is a castigation of Tewodros’s countrymen for their insubordination. It is a document that combines his compassion for the weak and the aged with lamentation for the frustration of his dream of freeing Jerusalem; pride at his record of invincibility with regret for the discipline which he tried to inculcate among his countrymen and which eluded him to the end. It also has a poignant line about the artillery on which he had staked so much, and which ultimately proved so useless: ‘Believing myself to be a great lord, I gave you battle; but by reason of the worthlessness of my artillery, all my pains were as nought’ (Holland and Hozier, II, 42). In short, the letter is Tewodros’s testament to posterity, indicating what he had set out to do and how and why he had failed to do it.

2. A new approach to unification

The death of Tewodros opened once again the issue of the throne. Three persons emerged as the chief contenders for it. Wag Shum Gobaze of Lasta had emerged as Tewodros’s bitter opponent. Wag Shum Gobaze’s victory over his rival, Tesso Gobaze of Walqayt, a few days before the British storming of Maqdala, had greatly enhanced his chances of supremacy in the historic centres of political power. But his lack of contact with the Napier expedition deprived him of access to the modern arms which were to prove so vital to his future rival, Kasa Mercha. Starting from his base in Tamben, an area bordering on Semen, this latter contender had extended his sway through a large part of Tegre by 1867, and had begun expanding beyond the Marab river. To the south, after managing to escape from the Maqdala prison in 1865, Menilek of Shawa had reasserted his claims as the lord of that province, and was expanding in the direction of Wallo, to the north.

But it is a measure of the new era ushered in by Tewodros that there was to be no return to the Zamana Masafent, to puppet kings controlled by one powerful ras after another. The coronation of Tewodros in 1855 had symbolized the end of the divorce between political power and political authority. Military muscle became as legitimate a ground for claiming the throne as Solomonic descent, if not a better entitlement. Thus, soon after the death of Tewodros, Wag Shum Gobaze had himself crowned as Emperor Takla-Giyorgis. Although Menilek had already started styling himself negusa nagast, he reached some kind of agreement with Takla-Giyorgis whereby the Bashilo river became the boundary between their respective spheres. The new strong man of Gojjam, Ras Adal Tasamma, also submitted to Emperor Takla-Giyorgis and, to cement the relationship, received the emperor’s sister in marriage.

Marriage links, however, did not deter Kasa Mercha from challenging Takla-Giyorgis, who happened to be also his brother-in-law. Their rivalry culminated on 11 July 1871 in the Battle of Assam, near Adwa. Although outnumbered in the ratio of 5 to 1 (60,000 troops against 12,000), Kasa had the telling edge in armaments and discipline. The battle was over two hours after it began. The emperor’s losses were estimated as 500 killed, 1,000 wounded and about 24,000 captured, including the emperor himself. Thus came to an end the brief and largely uneventful reign of Takla-Giyorgis. Six months later, on 21 January 1872, Kasa ascended the throne, with the name of Yohannes IV.

2.3 A sketch of Dajjach Kasa Mercha, the future Emperor Yohannes (r. 1872–1889)

While the imperial idea so dramatically resuscitated by Tewodros was to endure, Yohannes nevertheless followed a policy of unification substantially different from that of his predecessor: his choice of the title of r’esa makwanent (head of the nobility) as he bid for the throne set the tune of his policy. He continued to regard himself as primus inter pares (first among equals), a negusa nagast (king of kings) in the strict sense of the word, not an undisputed autocrat. Tewodros had once styled himself ‘husband of Ethiopia and fiancé of Jerusalem’, and he was to prove himself a jealous husband indeed! Yohannes, in contrast, was ready to share Ethiopia with his subordinates, provided his suzerainty was recognized. In place of Tewodros’s head-on collision with regionalism, Yohannes followed a more cautious approach, which amounted to a conscious toleration of it. While this more realistic approach had the merit of recognizing the objective impediments to establishing a unitary state, it had the disadvantage of encouraging the latent centrifugal tendencies of the Ethiopian polity.

2.4 Negus Takla-Haymanot, hereditary ruler of Gojjam from 1881–1901

Side by side with his policy of controlled regionalism, Yohannes pursued another of maintaining a political and military equilibrium between his two main vassals, Menilek of Shawa and Adal of Gojjam. In view of the fact that the actual as well as potential challenge to the throne came from Menilek rather than from Adal, this policy in effect meant that the emperor found himself more often on the side of the Gojjame rather than on that of the Shawan ruler.

Initially, however, relations between Adal and Yohannes were anything but smooth. This is not surprising, as Adal had been Takla-Giyorgis’s protégé. But the emperor’s campaigns to subdue the Gojjame lord were frustrated by the latter’s resort to guerrilla tactics – a pattern of confrontation that was to be repeated in later times. In an effort to undermine Adal’s authority in Gojjam, the emperor then made Dasta Tadla (son of the rebel Tadla Gwalu, who had given Tewodros such a hard time) ras and governor of Gojjam. Adal’s victory over Dasta in July 1874 ensured his supremacy in Gojjam, and induced both the emperor and Adal to seek a rapprochement. After assurances from Yohannes that he would honour Adal’s legitimate rights to the throne of Gojjam, Adal submitted at Ambachara in October 1874.

Thereafter, Yohannes began to support Adal as a counterweight to Menilek. He also apparently gave his blessing to Adal’s expansion south of the Abbay river in order to forestall the Shawan ruler. Adal reciprocated by suppressing rebellions in Bagemder and Semen in 1875–1876, while Yohannes was engaged with the Egyptians. In 1878, at Leche, as a member of the emperor’s entourage, Adal had the satisfaction of witnessing the chastening of his rival, Menilek. The high point of the Yohannes-Adal accord came in January 1881, when the emperor made Adal negus of Gojjam and Kafa, thereby publicizing his desire to deprive Menilek of the resource-rich south-west, and to stifle his bid for imperial power. The Battle of Embabo one year later, when Menilek ensured for himself mastery of the south-west by defeating Negus Takla-Haymanot (as Adal had come to be called), was thus a source of serious alarm to the emperor, as it significantly upset his policy of equilibrium. The ultimate failure of this policy came in 1888, when the two vassals created a common front against Yohannes. The emperor reacted by devastating Gojjam, the land of his relatively more favoured vassal, with a fury which he himself found hard to explain: ‘I do not know whether it is through my sin or that of the peasant, but I went on devastating the country’ (Heruy, 83).

Menilek’s challenge to Yohannes began soon after he returned in 1865 to Shawa from his ten-year captivity in Maqdala. He had inherited an area of relative prosperity, and it also had a tradition of strong autocratic leadership. With this secure base, he began to expand to the north, partly because this was a natural line of expansion at the time and partly to enhance his credentials for the throne. In the process, he founded the town of Warra Illu, north of the border between Shawa and Wallo. His expansion was challenged locally by Mastawat, one of the rulers of Wallo, and later by her son Amade Liban (alias Abba Wataw), and nationally by Emperor Yohannes himself. Soon, Wallo developed into a bone of contention between the emperor and Menilek. But they did not come into a direct clash over it. Instead they fought the war through the surrogates they had groomed from the two rival houses of Wallo: Abba Wataw for Yohannes and Muhammad Ali for Menilek. In the early 1870s, however, Yohannes was too absorbed in the Egyptian menace to give any meaningful help to his candidate. Towards the end of 1875, therefore, Menilek successfully captured the stronghold of Maqdala, imprisoned Abba Wataw and appointed Muhammad Ali as governor of Wallo.

Yohannes’s victories over the invading Egyptians at Gundat (1875) and Gura (1876), both near the Marab river where it turns north into what is now Eritrea, changed the situation. In the aftermath of the battles, Yohannes moved south to deal with a problem that had been nagging him since his coronation, but which he had never previously had the time to solve. With the adroitness which was to be the hallmark of his political career, Muhammad Ali shifted allegiance from Menilek to the more powerful emperor. Yohannes kept on pushing southwards, determined to solve the problem of Menilek once and for all. In January 1878, he entered the district of Manz, in north-west Shawa. Menilek gave the order for mobilization. There were even some minor clashes, after which Menilek retreated to Leche. It was there that, urged by his advisers, he made his submission; with his supplies dwindling, the emperor was probably not unenthusiastic about a peaceful resolution of the conflict.

The Leche Agreement, as it has come to be known, took place on 20 March 1878, and forms a landmark in the history of the Ethiopian state. It resolved the political uncertainty of the post-Tewodros period. Yohannes’s suzerainty was unequivocally recognized, and in very dramatic circumstances indeed. In the formal ceremony of submission, Menilek had to carry the traditional stone of penitence and prostrate himself in front of his overlord, as the azmari (minstrels) chanted songs chiding him for his ambition. The Shawan ruler also agreed to pay annual tribute to the emperor and to provide supplies for the imperial army when it passed through Shawa.

Yet the agreement was also a clear demonstration of the emperor’s liberal approach to the issue of political power, his objective of being a feudal suzerain rather than an absolute autocrat. He left Menilek defeated but not shattered; he made him renounce the title of negusa nagast which he had paraded since the death of Tewodros; but he sanctioned Menilek’s assumption of the title of negus with the following words:

You are accordingly king and master of a land conquered by your forebears; I shall respect your sovereignty if you will be faithful to the agreements decided between us. Whoever strikes your kingdom, strikes me, and whoever makes war on you, makes it on me. You are accordingly my eldest son.

(Marcus, Life and Times, 56)

On Menilek’s side, too, his decision to submit was a mark of his tactical wisdom. Humiliated though he was, he came out militarily intact. The big lesson that he learned from the whole encounter was the need for patience. And, in the following decade, he was to work patiently, but assiduously, for the throne which he had earlier mistakenly thought to be within easy reach. After the Leche Agreement, Wallo was no longer his exclusive preserve. He was reduced to the role of a junior partner to the emperor, who began to subjugate Wallo with extraordinary ruthlessness. But, for Menilek, his frustration in the north was to prove a blessing in disguise. It opened his eyes to the south. His southern campaigns were to provide him with the resources, hence the military power, to pose a more formidable challenge to the throne, so that, when Yohannes died at the Battle of Matamma against the Sudanese Mahdists in March 1889, Menilek’s succession was an almost foregone conclusion.

2.5 Ras Alula Engeda, Emperor Yohannes’s governor of the Marab Melash, and implacable opponent of Italian encroachment, shown in Arab costume, 1887

While Yohannes was content to exercise only indirect control in Gojjam and Shawa, he could not afford to pursue a similar policy in the area most threatened by foreign intrusion – the Marab Melash, the territory north of the Marab river and stretching to the Red Sea. The defection in 1876 of its ruler, Walda-Mikael, to the Egyptian side spelt out the inherent dangers of indirect rule only too clearly. Soon after the Battle of Gura, therefore, Yohannes entrusted the administration of the Marab Melash to his trusted general, Alula Engeda, after promoting him from shalaqa (the Ethiopian army equivalent of major) to ras. Being of humble origin and owing his position entirely to the emperor, Alula showed steadfast loyalty. He executed his task as frontier governor with extraordinary energy and dedication. On the other hand, his meteoric rise provoked the disgruntlement of the Tegrean nobility. One of its members, Dajjach Dabbab Araya, a cousin of the emperor, was to provide as shefta a constant challenge to Alula’s authority on the Massawa coast until his submission in 1888. Walda-Mikael himself did not easily acquiesce in the withdrawal of what he considered as his legitimate rights as governor. From his refuge in Bogos, encouraged and supported by his patrons, the Egyptians, he engaged in constant raids into Hamasen. Finally, in 1879, as Egyptian enthusiasm for his activities waned, Walda-Mikael made his peace with Alula and Yohannes, only to be imprisoned soon after.

Yohannes’s policy of unification had also a religious dimension. In many ways, his religious policy lacked the liberalism and spirit of tolerance that he had shown in the political field. Here again, 1878 was the crucial year. The Leche Agreement in March, marking the apogee of the emperor’s power, was immediately followed by the Council of Boru Meda, which brought to an end the doctrinal controversies that had rent the Orthodox Church since the seventeenth century. At a stroke, therefore, the ideological wings of the Zamana Masafent may be said to have been clipped. In a meeting presided over by the emperor himself, the Tawahedo doctrine was declared as the only doctrine, and adherents of other sects were told to conform. Those who still persisted in their old doctrines were persecuted; one man had his tongue cut out.

Apart from such methods of enforcing orthodoxy, the Council of Boru Meda was generally regarded as a positive measure restoring the unity of the church. The emperor’s prestige accordingly grew. It grew even further when, for the first time in Ethiopian history, he succeeded in bringing four bishops from Egypt. The harsher aspects of Boru Meda in any case soon paled into insignificance in comparison with the intolerance, verging on fanaticism, that Yohannes showed towards Islam: it emerged that he was aiming not only at unity of doctrine, but also at unity of faith. There was no room for Islam in his ideological world. The thrust of his repression was directed against Wallo, the same province which had earlier been the main target of Tewodros’s fury.

The Muslims of Wallo were told to renounce their faith and embrace Christianity or face confiscation of their land and property. The reactions were varied. The political leaders generally acquiesced. Thus, two prominent converts were Muhammad Ali, baptized into the Ethiopian Orthodox Church as Mikael, and Abba Wataw, who became Hayla-Maryam. Others conformed outwardly, praying to the Christian God in the daytime and to the Muslim Allah at night – thereby reinforcing the unique juxtaposition of Islam and Christianity that we find to this day in Wallo. Still others preferred exile, supporting or spreading Islam in such faraway places as Gurageland and Arsi, respectively south-west and south-east of central Shawa. But a large number of the inhabitants resisted, led by such sheikhs as Talha of Argobba. The repressive rule of Yohannes’s son Araya-Sellase, to whom his father had entrusted the governorship of Wallo after 1882, helped to fan the flames of rebellion. The rebellion was finally suppressed by the intervention of both Yohannes and Menilek, and after a campaign characterized by devastation and massacre. Ras Mikael, who had made his political calculations and joined the campaign on the side of the emperor, emerged as the undisputed ruler of the whole of Wallo.

3. Intensification of the external challenge

After Maqdala, the British seemed to have washed their hands of Ethiopia. Their policy of disengagement was almost scrupulously observed. Overtures from their former ally, Kasa Mercha, for closer co-operation left them unimpressed. His request for military advisers was turned down. For the procurement of arms from England, he could manage to obtain the services of only a private firm, Messrs Henry S. King & Co. An Ethiopian mission sent with the objective of recruiting instructors in skilled crafts was left stranded in Alexandria, on orders from London. Even Kasa’s seizure of the throne as Emperor Yohannes IV, after his victory over Emperor Takla-Giyorgis, Tewodros’s immediate successor, could not move the British. They deigned to respond to Kasa’s initial letter and gifts only two years after they had received his – with accompanying instructions to the British consul in Aden to inform Kasa that they were not interested in any future exchange of presents.

What made the Napier expedition something more than an episode was its indirect bearing on the internal power struggle in Ethiopia, and on the evolution of Ethiopia’s foreign relations. In recognition of his services, the departing British had rewarded Kasa with 6 cannon, 850 muskets and rifles and a considerable supply of ammunition. In addition, although the British had refused any official secondment of military advisers, a member of the expedition, a certain J.C. Kirkham, had volunteered to help train Kasa’s army along modern lines. It was the combination of British arms and Kirkham’s rudimentary training which is generally believed to have been decisive for Kasa’s victory over Emperor Takla-Giyorgis at the Battle of Assam in 1871.

Externally, the ease with which the British penetrated to the heart of Ethiopia and accomplished their mission helped to create a false idea as to Ethiopia’s capability to withstand foreign aggression. Forgetting or unaware of the internal factors which had facilitated the British victory, other countries came to feel that the experience of the Napier expedition could easily be repeated. At this early stage, it was Egypt which showed the tendency to underestimate Ethiopia’s strength to the greatest degree. In March 1871, the Swiss-born J.A. Werner Munzinger (then still French consul at Massawa), who in the future was to launch Egyptian expansion into Ethiopia, threatened Kasa Mercha with the fate of Tewodros unless he showed greater leniency towards the Catholic missionaries. The attempt to carry out this threat ultimately led to the Battles of Gundat and Gura, which ended with the crushing defeat of the invading Egyptian troops.

Munzinger’s patron was Khedive Ismail. A man who, to all intents and purposes, considered himself a European, Ismail at the same time saw Egypt’s destiny in Africa. Even more ambitious than his great predecessor, the Albanian Muhammad Ali, who, side by side with his expansions up the Nile in the early nineteenth century, had entertained territorial ambitions in the direction of the Middle East, Ismail pursued a policy of vigorous penetration of the African interior, more particularly of the Nile valley. With the help of such European explorers as Samuel Baker, he extended his sway to the equatorial regions of Sudan. The whole exercise was given the character of a crusade, as Ismail justified his expansion in terms of eradication of the slave-trade. It was the same abolitionist argument, so sweet to European ears, that Ismail evoked in his expansion into Ethiopian territory.

Ismail went about the job of realizing his dream of a north-east African empire systematically, combining military and diplomatic initiatives. He proceeded to encircle the newly crowned Emperor Yohannes territorially and to isolate him diplomatically. First to be occupied by the Egyptians was the northern territory of Bogos. The architect of this initial thrust was none other than Munzinger. The pretext was the alleged raids of a nearby Ethiopian governor into ‘Egyptian’ territory. Yohannes reacted immediately by sending a letter of protest to Ismail, and launching his first comprehensive diplomatic initiative in Europe. Kirkham, the military expert now doubling as the emperor’s roving ambassador, was sent with letters to the monarchs of Britain, Austria, Germany and Russia, and to the President of France. The requests were identical: Christian solidarity with Ethiopia, who found herself under the threat of Islamization and enslavement by Ismail. The letter to Queen Victoria, however, in whom Yohannes was to continue to place so much trust, contained additional details about Munzinger’s occupation of Bogos.

Yohannes’s plea fell on deaf ears. Kirkham was greeted with a complete lack of interest in Russia, Germany and France. The British even took it upon themselves to vouch for Ismail’s good intentions. Baffling as their reactions must have appeared to Yohannes, the European powers did not find the theme of Christian solidarity very convincing. To them, Muslim though it was, Egypt offered more opportunities for trade and investment than Ethiopia did, for in economic terms Ethiopia was a relatively unknown quantity. Particularly after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the strategic as well as economic value of Egypt had risen considerably, and a fair amount of European finance had come to be invested in Egypt. It was therefore inconceivable that the Europeans would do anything to antagonize a country which offered them so many economic opportunities, for the sake of another which was still very much on the periphery of the international economic scene.

For Ismail to counter Yohannes’s protests, therefore, it was enough simply to argue that, in occupying Bogos, Egypt was merely subduing a rebellious province. The Egyptians consolidated their hold by building a formidable fort at Sanhit (Karan). In an effort to make Egyptian rule attractive to the local population, taxes were waived.

The Egyptians followed a potentially even more insidious policy of internal disaffection in the south. In Menilek, the Shawan ruler who had yet to acknowledge Yohannes’s suzerainty, they thought they had found the perfect internal ally against the emperor. Menilek himself had been putting out feelers for some kind of understanding with the Egyptians. But his interest did not seem to have gone to the extent of facilitating Egyptian invasion of northern Ethiopia, and even less of creating a southern front against the emperor. The Egyptians were more successful with Dajjach Walda-Mikael Solomon of Hamasen. After fighting them in the Battle of Gundat in 1875, he was persuaded to defect to their side.

In terms of Egyptian territorial occupation, Bogos was only the beginning. Eventually, the more serious menace to Ethiopia was to come, not from this inland foothold of Egyptian expansion, but from her coastal possessions. The transfer of Massawa and other Red Sea and Indian Ocean ports in the early years of the nineteenth century from the moribund Ottomans to the more energetic Egyptians foreboded trouble for Ethiopia. The Egyptians were not content with the kind of titular hold over the coast which was all the Ottomans could manage for centuries. From Zeila, an Egyptian force in the guise of a scientific expedition, led by Muhammad Rauf Pasha, penetrated the south-east Ethiopian interior and occupied Harar on 11 October 1875. Concurrently, Munzinger, the architect of Egyptian expansionism, led a force from Tajura, on the coast, in the direction of Shawa. His expedition came to grief on the sandy plains of Awsa, and Munzinger himself was killed in an ambush laid by the Afar. Earlier in the year, however, the Egyptians had begun to probe the northern interior from their coastal bases of Massawa, Zula and Anfilla. Starting with the limited objective of controlling the lucrative Taltal salt plains, the Egyptian thrust accelerated into full-blown aggression.

Gundat and Gura: victory without peace

In the history of the Ethio-Egyptian wars of the mid-1870s, a persistent theme was the audacity of the aggressor and the moderation and self-restraint of the invaded. Thus, as late as September 1875, after the Egyptians had already mobilized for the march into the interior, Emperor Yohannes continued to seek a peaceful resolution of the conflict. He even ordered the retreat of the governors of Hamasen and Saraye to Adwa. In addition to the emperor’s continuing hopes for European intervention, his retreat may have had behind it the objective of stretching the enemy’s line of supplies. At any rate, it was only on 23 October, after the Egyptians had already reached Hamasen, that he issued the call to arms.

Two weeks after the mobilization order was given, Yohannes found himself at the head of over 20,000 troops. Almost all the northern chiefs had rallied to his call, including Dajjach Walda-Mikael Solomon of Hamasen, who was to change sides in the next battle, as previously stated, and who created endless trouble for Yohannes in subsequent years. The Egyptian invading force numbered some 2,000 men, led by a Danish commander, Colonel Arendrup. The two forces met at Gundat (Gudagude), just to the north of the Marab river, in the early hours of 16 November.

The battle turned out to be one of the shortest yet militarily most decisive in Ethiopian history. Lured into the steep valley by the tactical manoeuvres of the Ethiopian troops, the Egyptian army was almost wiped out. The hopeless situation in which the invading troops found themselves is narrated in the vivid words of the American Colonel Dye, himself to take part in the next battle as member of the Egyptian general staff:

No cry of quarter, no supplication to the Son or the Prophet, could stay the bloody hand. In vain, appeals were made to the conquering foe by upright or prostrate forms transfixed by lance or spear, by men with armless bodies or nearly headless trunks, their life blood pouring from every gashing wound. Nothing could stay the bloody carnage. Doomed, – doomed, as they are taught, – mercilessly fated was this little band. They escaped the bullet only to feel the scimitar, or resisted the club only to be lanced.

(Dye, 139)

Such a disaster called for either resignation or revenge. Ismail chose 52 the latter. Before the year 1875 was out, he sent a much larger force (estimated at about 15,000) under his commander-in-chief, Muhammad Ratib Pasha. Veterans of the American Civil War introduced the latest techniques in the science of warfare. One of them, General Loring, was in fact chief of staff and second-in-command. Colonel Dye, as we have seen, was destined to be the impassioned chronicler of the Egyptian débâcle. The better preparation of the Egyptians made the Battle of Gura a relatively more protracted affair: it lasted three days, from 7 to 9 March 1876. The Egyptians fought from well-fortified positions; disaster began to strike them only when they came out of their forts. Still, Gura was less of an unmitigated disaster for them than the Battle of Gundat. The Ethiopian losses were correspondingly higher. But the end result was the same – yet another blow to Egyptian expansion.

For sheer valour in face of a far better-armed enemy, the Ethiopian performance at Gundat and Gura has few parallels in modern Ethiopian history. Dye’s narrative gives an explicit picture of this valour:

Boom after boom was now heard along the entire line, and far over the plain went the echoing shell. Rockets, too, from the right and the centre, in awful concert, began their terrific flights. Battalion after battalion fired volley upon volley from right and left, sending death-dealing missiles at long range upon the swift-advancing foe. With steady tramp, the Abyssinians closed in upon the Egyptians. Riderless horses bolted their ranks in response to exploding shell; yet on the army came.

(Dye, 359)

In a way, the Gundat and Gura victories were even more remarkable than their famous successor, the Battle of Adwa, for, while Menilek was to lead a united Ethiopia against the Italians, Yohannes faced the Egyptians as the head of a divided house. For Egypt, the defeat had more deadly effects than was to be the case for Italy two decades later. The Ethiopian victory hastened Ismail’s downfall and the subsequent British occupation of Egypt. Yohannes, on the other hand, came out of the conflict with material and psychological gains. The modern arms, including some twenty cannon that he captured from the enemy, strengthened his military position vis-à-vis his internal rivals like Menilek. The victory itself enhanced his prestige as the defender of faith and motherland.

Yet, in the immediate aftermath, the Gundat and Gura victories were to remain hollow. Ethiopia gained little in practical terms. The Egyptian conditions for peace soon after their defeat leave us uncertain as to who was the victor and who the vanquished. Not only did they demand the repatriation of the Egyptian prisoners and guarantees of free trade, but they also required the restoration of their captured arms and the cessation of Ethiopian troop movements in the Hamasen.

Conversely, Yohannes persisted in his policy of restraint. He followed up his victory not with a march to Massawa, but with letters to Victoria and Ismail once again suing for peace. He renounced the military option either because his army was in no condition to continue the fighting, or because he feared further military action would antagonize the European governments. Thus began Yohannes’s diplomatic efforts to crown his victory with a peace treaty – something that was to elude him for almost a decade. He started by sending to Cairo a certain Blatta Gabra-Egziabher as envoy in the summer of 1876. His conditions for peace were basically two: restoration of occupied Ethiopian territory and free access to the sea. The detention of his envoy for over two months and his eventual return without any discussion of the issues did not augur well for the future of a negotiated settlement.

Early in 1877, Ismail in turn sent an envoy – the British governor-general of the Sudan, Colonel (later General) Charles Gordon. The conditions for peace that he brought with him were hardly acceptable to Yohannes. There were to be no changes in the boundary: Bogos was to remain in Egyptian hands. Although free trade and free passage of envoys and letters via Massawa were to be guaranteed, there was to be a limit on the vital import of arms and ammunition. Subsequent developments showed that the British, to whom Yohannes has repeatedly appealed for mediation, were not ready to give him the unrestricted access to the sea that was the corner-stone of his policy. Not even when he shifted his request from Massawa to Zula or Anfilla, minor ports to the south, were they ready to listen. The heart of the matter was that the British did not wish to see the consummation of the Ethiopian victory over the Egyptians. As early as 1879, they started grooming a power to replace the Egyptians on the Red Sea coast and at the same time serve as watch-dog of British interests. Gordon’s parting recommendation for the cession of Zula to the Italians, who had already occupied Assab to the south, was a prelude to their installation in Massawa in 1885, through the good offices of Britain.

But, before that eventuality came about, developments took place which appeared to facilitate the realization of Yohannes’s objectives. In 1881, the Mahdist movement, combining Muslim revivalism and nationalism, broke out in Sudan. In the following two or three years, it engulfed the northern and central parts of the country, and effectively cut off the Egyptian garrisons in the east. It therefore fell to the British, who with their unilateral occupation of Egypt in 1882 had assumed responsibility for her possessions, to try and extricate the imperilled Egyptian troops. It was then that they were forced to abandon their policy of indifference bordering on arrogance vis-à-vis Ethiopia and to start an assiduous soliciting of Ethiopian assistance. That was the setting for what has come to be known as the Hewett or 54 Adwa Peace Treaty, named respectively after the British negotiator Rear Admiral Sir William Hewett or the place where the treaty was signed on 3 June 1884.

On the surface, Yohannes obtained more or less what he had sought in vain for the preceding eight years. Free import of goods, ‘including arms and ammunition’, was guaranteed. Bogos was restored to Ethiopia. There were in addition clauses for the reciprocal extradition of offenders, and Egyptian facilitation of the appointment of bishops (abun) for Ethiopia. In real terms and in the long run, the peace treaty did Yohannes more harm than good. The retrocession of Bogos, which relatively speaking was the only positive gain, might well have been achieved without British intercession, as the Egyptian hold over the territory was becoming tenuous; Yohannes’s governor of the Marab Melash, Ras Alula, had already been levying tribute in the region. The reciprocal extradition clause became meaningless when Dajjach Dabbab Araya, who had rebelled against his cousin the emperor, was given asylum in Massawa. As for the free transit of goods through Massawa, it failed to pass its first test when the Egyptians delayed delivery of a church bell ordered by Yohannes, on the grounds that duty had to be paid on it. More significantly, about three months after ratifying the treaty, the British entrusted Massawa to the Italians, who occupied it on 5 February 1885. It was a move which can be said to have been presaged by the ominous clause of the Hewett Treaty, that Massawa was to remain ‘under British protection’. The British disposed of their responsibility the way it suited them best.

On the other hand, Yohannes was bound by Article III of the treaty to facilitate the evacuation of Egyptian troops from their posts at Kasala, Amideb and Sanhit, respectively in Sudan, near the Sudan border, and well within Bogos. This obligation Yohannes carried out with a faithfulness which provided a contrast to British duplicity. In the process, Ras Alula, who had been given the task of carrying out the relief operation, came into direct conflict with the Mahdists, inaugurating a period of bloody confrontation between Ethiopia and Mahdist Sudan that, in the end, was to consume the emperor himself. Ultimately, therefore, what Yohannes managed to achieve after two brilliant military victories and a belated peace treaty was, in the words of Sven Rubenson, to trade ‘one weak enemy [Egypt] for two strong ones, the Mahdist state and Italy’ (Rubenson, Survival, 362).

4. The road to Matamma

The years 1876-1878 might be said to have marked the apogee of Yohannes’s power. Externally he had dealt a telling blow to Egyptian expansion. Internally, he had obtained the submission of his main rival. This double victory at the same time appeared to have resolved both the external and internal challenges that Ethiopia faced in the nineteenth century. Yet it was a victory which did not last. By 1885, we can say that Yohannes had reached the turning-point in his career, which was to end with his death at the Battle of Matamma. In that year the Italians occupied Massawa. In the same year, Ethiopian forces clashed with the Mahdists (or the Ansar, as they preferred to call themselves), initiating a period of hostility which was to reach its climax in 1889. Also after 1885, the latent insubordination of Menilek began to simmer until it burst out into the open in 1888. It was in that year that the triangular tension in which Yohannes had lived reached its ultimate limits. The following year, it was resolved, with his tragic death.

Italian colonialism in the Horn of Africa combined the vigour of youth with the desperation of the late-comer. This distinctive feature arose from the late arrival of Italy on the colonial scene: Italy became a unified state only in 1871. Italy’s thrust was abetted by the British, who, themselves unwilling to get involved in Ethiopia, wanted someone to guard their interests in the region against their ancestral rivals, the French.

Nevertheless, Italy’s first territorial acquisition antedated the completion of its unification. In 1869, the port of Assab, south of Massawa, was acquired for Italy by a team which symbolically included a missionary, Giuseppe Sapeto, and a navigational enterprise, Rubattino Company. But it was Massawa which provided Italy with the base for its penetration of the Ethiopian interior. And Massawa, as we have seen, was secured through the good offices of Britain in the wake of Egyptian evacuation from the Red Sea and Indian Ocean coasts. That evacuation had also secured Zeila and Berbera for the British and Tajura for the French. But while the British and French acquisitions were to terminate with narrow coastal colonies – British and French Somaliland – the Italians, from Massawa, were to make a bid for the whole of Ethiopia. Massawa, in short, led to Adwa.

With remarkable foresight, Yohannes recognized the connection. ‘With the help of God,’ he wrote to Menilek in late 1886, ‘they will depart again, humiliated and disgraced in the eyes of the whole world’ (Zewde, 199). When he wrote this, the Italians had already pushed further inland and occupied Saati, about 15 miles (24 km) west of Massawa, and Wia, 20 miles (32 km) to the south of the port. It had thus become evident that Yohannes’s earlier hopes of containing the Italians within the coast were futile. Protests from Ras Alula, the governor of the Marab Melash, that the Italians should abandon their advance posts were ignored. It was in such circumstances that Alula opted to obtain by force of arms what he had failed to achieve through correspondence. On 25 January 1887, he attacked the Italian fort at Saati. He was repulsed, incurring considerable losses. The following day, at Dogali, between Saati and Massawa, Alula’s force intercepted some 500 Italians sent to relieve the Saati garrison. The relief force was virtually destroyed.

News of the Battle of Dogali provoked a frenzied reaction in Italy. The call for revenge was heard in the streets as well as in the government chambers. Parliament voted for an appropriation of 20 million lire for the defence of Massawa and its environs. A special force of 5,000 men was organized to reinforce the existing troops. Roads and bridges were built and repaired in an effort to strengthen the infrastructure for future military action. Simultaneously, the policy of instigating Menilek to act against Yohannes was intensified.

In an initial attempt to solve the problem through diplomatic intervention, both Yohannes and the Italians turned to the British. Yohannes wrote to Queen Victoria complaining about the violation of the Hewett Treaty. The Queen’s reply contained an implicit justification of Italian actions and a warning to Yohannes, suggesting that it was a pity that he was in disagreement with the Italians, who were powerful, though well intentioned. To the Italians, on the other hand, the British were once again obliging. A mission headed by Sir Gerald Portal was sent to Ethiopia, ostensibly to mediate between the belligerents, but in reality hoping to gain for the Italians what Dogali had denied them. Portal’s proposals for peace included a public apology by Yohannes for the Dogali incident as well as Italian occupation of Saati, Wia, Karan and the territory of the Assaorta and the Habab peoples on the Red Sea coast. The ‘mediator’ was rebuffed, bluntly by Alula, diplomatically by Yohannes.

Under cover of this diplomatic ploy, however, the Italians had reoccupied Saati. Yohannes now took the field himself to resolve once and for all the Italian problem. At the head of a large army (80,000 troops), he went down to Saati in March 1888. Hope of an early victory vanished, however, when the Italians refused to come out of their fort. Faced with shortage of supplies, news of the Mahdist sacking of Gondar, and rumours of a conspiracy between Menilek and Negus Takla-Haymanot against him, Yohannes had no choice but to return without achieving anything. That was to be his last encounter with the Italians. One year later, he died on the battlefield at Matamma, and the Italians immediately marched on to the highlands.

Like the Italian occupation of Massawa, the bloody confrontation between Ethiopia and Mahdist Sudan was a legacy of Egyptian expansion. The Mahdist movement arose as a combination of religious revivalism and Sudanese nationalist opposition to Egyptian rule. As such it was primarily directed against Egypt, in Mahdist thinking regarded as both renegade and oppressor. But Yohannes’s faithful implementation of the Hewett Treaty had the effect of redirecting Mahdist fury against Ethiopia. By coming to the relief of the beleaguered Egyptian garrisons, Ethiopia identified herself with the hated enemy. Simultaneously, the Egyptian buffer between her and Mahdist Sudan was eliminated, and the two countries were brought into direct confrontation.

2.6 The port town of Massawa towards the end of the nineteenth century

The first battle was fought at Kufit (to the east of Kasala) on 23 September 1885. The Ethiopian troops were led by Ras Alula. The Mahdists or Ansar were commanded by a no less redoubtable general, Uthman Diqna. After two reverses, in the latter of which Alula himself was wounded, the Ethiopian side was victorious. About 3,000 Ansar lost their lives. The Ethiopian losses were about half that number killed, including Alula’s lieutenant, Blatta Gabru.

Another arena of Ethio-Mahdist confrontation was in the south, in the present-day Wallaga region. In the sheikhdoms of Asosa, Bela Shangul and Khomosha, the Ansar had stepped into the shoes of the Egyptians, who had exercised some sort of paramountcy characterized chiefly by annual tax-gathering raids. Islam and trans-frontier trade had also prepared the ground for Mahdist penetration, although this did not mean that the Ansar were universally welcomed in the region. All the same, gaining influence over even some of the Oromo rulers, they had penetrated as far as the Najjo area, deep inside Oromo territory. It was there, at the Battle of Gute Dili (14 October 1888), that Menilek’s general, Ras Gobana Dache, finally stopped them.

But the most decisive battles were undoubtedly fought on the Matamma front. Matamma, known as Gallabat to the Sudanese, had been historically the most important centre of contact, peaceful or hostile, between the two countries. It was therefore only fitting that the issue was finally resolved there. Significantly, too, trade continued even during the period of hostility, with traders often doubling as spies.

Mahdist forces occupied Matamma following the Egyptian evacuation, and initiated a period of border raids and counter-raids. It was in response to one such Ansar raid in Dambya, in the plains south-west of Gondar, that Negus Takla-Haymanot, Yohannes’s general on this front, attacked and sacked Matamma in January 1887. One year later, the Ansar, led by another of their famous generals, Abu Anja, defeated Takla-Haymanot’s troops at Sar Weha, in Dambya. They followed this up with the deepest incursion they had yet made in north-west Ethiopia, sacking the town of Gondar.

It was in the same year, 1888, that Yohannes’s relations with his vassals entered a critical phase. Suspicious of Menilek’s intentions, Yohannes had declined his offer of assistance during the Saati campaign. Instead, he had instructed him to position himself at Ambachara, to the south of Gondar, and watch the movements of the Mahdists. Menilek arrived too late to save Gondar from the Ansar attack. On his way back, he met Negus Takla-Haymanot of Gojjam, and the two vassals agreed to work together against the emperor. Hearing of the conspiracy, Yohannes opened a devastating punitive campaign against Gojjam soon after his return from his inconclusive Saati campaign.