History Ethiopia

Simultaneously during the second half of the nineteenth century, the Ethiopians undertook the double tasks of national defence and reunification against the forces of aggression and imperialism.

This double fronted national policy was visible during the successive reigns of Tewodros II (1855-1868), Yohannis IV (1868-1889), and Menelik II (1889-1913).

The young and energetic frontier governor Dejazmatch Kasa Hailu of Quara in northwestern Ethiopia confronted the Turco-Egyptian incursions against his country during the second half of the 1840s.

In his response to these frontier challenges, between 1845 and 1868, he developed and implemented his two national policies of reunification and frontier defence of Ethiopia.
Between 1845 and 1855, in the implementation of this two-front national policy, Dej. Kasa managed to subjugate the regional chiefs and feudal warlords and, in 1855, he declared himself Haste Tewodros II of Ethiopia.

Before his death in 1868, Tewodros II successfully united the nation’s northwestern and northern regions of Quara, Dembia, Begamidir, Agew-Midir, Damot, Gojam, Lasta, Wag, Semen, Welkait, Metemma, Yeju, Wollo, Tigrai, Akaleguzay, Seraye, and Hamasen with its districts of Keren (Bogs), Asgade (Haba), Galab (Mensa), Samhar, and Halhal with the southern Kingdom of Shewa under his central Hatse government in Gondar.

According to his British friend and adviser Plowden, Tewodros II “is persuaded that he is destined to restore the glories of the Ethiopian Empire” and “his personal and moral daring are boundless…he possesses a perfect self-command. Indefatigable in business, he takes little repose night or day: his ideas and language are clear and precise; hesitation is not known to him, and he has neither counsellors nor go-betweens”.

As first steps in the process of modern state-building, Tewodros II took action to subdue regional feudal chiefs, to introduce land, tax, military, legal, administrative, to promulgate marriage reforms, to suppress the slave-trade, to substitute letters for verbal message, to introduce modern technology and industrial arts from Europe, and to produce military weapons in the country.

Concerning Tewodros II’s foreign policy, Plowden says that the former “wishes, in a short time, to send embassies to the great European powers to treat with them on equal terms”. In his letter of November, 1862, to the British Queen, concerning the Turco-Egyptian presence in the Nile Valley and on the Red Sea frontiers, Tewodros II writes that” I have told them to leave the land of my ancestors. They refuse. I am now going to wrestle with them”.

All this is known about Tewodors II, but, in the final analysis, his programmes of nation-building were aborted due to the strong local opposition of the National Church and regional chiefs, his conflicts with European missionary and diplomatic agents, and the 1868 British invasion of Ethiopia to rescue the latter from the former’s prison in Mekdala.

Yohannes IV followed, and strengthened Tewodros II’s twin policy objectives of national defence and reunification. He fought and repulsed the successive Turco-Egyptian and Sudanese waves of frontier aggression at the Battles of Gondet (1875), Gura (1876), and Metemma (1889).

During his Hatse Reign, the process of national reunification, under the leadership of his powerful regional rulers King Menelik of Shewa, King Tekle Haymanot of Gojam, and Ras Alula of the Northern Maritime Region of Hamasen, greatly advanced and expanded in all directions.

Concerning the country’s natural and historical frontiers, in his letter of February 17, 1881 to the German Emperor, Yohannes IV stated Ethiopia’s ancient frontiers as being “The Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Aden, the Red Sea, and in the west Swakin, Berber, Nubia, Khartoum, and Sinnar.”

When he crowned Menelik as the Regional King of Shewa in March, 1878, Hatse Yohannes IV gave him mandate to consolidate Ethiopia’s vast, diverse, and dispersed provinces and peoples of the central, eastern, southern and the mid-western regions under the central Hatse Government.

Accordingly, King Menelik left his former northern towns of Wereilu, Liche, Debre Berhan, Ankober, and Angola behind him, and turned his military and territorial campaigns from the north to the south.

Within a distance of forty-five kilometres, he established three new and successive headquarters of Holata, Entoto, and Addis Ababa in 1878, 1882, and 1886, respectively, in the strategic mid-south region to undertake his territorial and commercial campaigns in the west, south and east.

Between 1878 and 1889, after despatching a series of expeditions from his Holata, Entoto, and Addis Ababa headquarters, King Menelik successfully managed to consolidated, under the central Hatse Government, the regions and peoples of Mecha, Gudru, Limmu-Enariya, Gumma, Gomma, Gera, Jimma, Leka, etc. in the west; Tulama, Sodo, Mareka, Gurage, and Kabena in the south, and Arsi and Harer in the southeast.

He also opened up two new lines of commercial contact between mid-southern Ethiopia and the outside world via the Afar-Aseb and Tajura caravan routes, through which the flow of firearms began to enter the region from Europe, in particular, from France and Italy.

While King Menilik was engaged in his campaigns of territorial consolidation in the country’s western, eastern, and southern fronts in the 1880s, the Sudanese Mahdists from the western frontier and the Italians, with British support from the northern frontier, simultaneously launched their 1885-1889 wars of aggression against Ethiopia.

These ended in 1889, in the death of Yohannes IV at the Battle of Metemma, and the colonial occupation of the country’s maritime and historic region of Bahrenegash by the Italians. This they renamed “Eritrea” in 1890. It also marked the seizure of the Hatse throne and crown of Ethiopia by Menilik II.

After he became the Hatse of Ethiopia in 1889, Menilik II intensified his eastern, southern, and western campaigns of territorial consolidation against the British, French, and the Italian imperialist incursions from the neighbouring countries of Sudan, Uganda, and Kenya, and from coastal regions of the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Indian ocean which they had seized in accordance with the Berlin Partition of Africa in 1884-85.

Furthermore, he made attempts to suppress the slave trade and undertook diplomatic and military preparations to face the challenge of the Italian colonial claim over the entire country of Ethiopia at the decisive battle of Adwa on March 2, 1986.

Moreover, five years before the battle of Adwa, in his rightly-famous circular letter of April 10, 1891 to the Heads of State of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Russia, Menilik II said that before the beginning of interference by foreign forces of aggression and imperialism in the subcontinent of North-East Africa, the ancient frontiers of the Hatse State of Ethiopia had no boundary lines of international demarkation since there had existed no other sovereign state in the subcontinent to share these boundary lines.

The people and the regional rulers of Ethiopia united under the policy and leadership of Menilik II. He and the various regional governors of the country managed to import some 110,000 guns of various brands and caliber, including more than 42 large guns, most by from France and Italy, in their national preparation to counteract the challenge of imperialism.

Finally on March 2, 1896 at the battle of Adwa, the Ethiopian Army, variously estimated at between 120,000 and 145,000 men under 13 commanders including Menilik II and his wife Queen Taitu, decisively encountered and routed the 22,000-man Italian Army of imperialist aggression under five generals.

After its defeat at Adwa the Italian Government in the Addis Ababa Peace Treaty of 1896 abandoned the dubious Wuchale Treaty in which it had claimed an Ethiopian protectorate. It also recognized the independence of Ethiopia.

The other great powers of the time including Great Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and Turkey also immediately established diplomatic relations with the victorious Ethiopia.

Before the four frontier regions, with their several ethnic groups all along the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean were separated from the Ethiopian Hatse State, and occupied by the British, French, and Italian imperialists under the new colonial names of “Eritrea”, “French Somaliland”, “British Somaliland”, and “Italian Somaliland” during the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Ethiopian Hatse State neither had, nor recognized, international boundary lines along its natural and historical frontiers.
Before the neighbouring Sudanese State of Funj was conquered and occupied in 1820 by the Turco-Egyptian invaders there was an open frontier between the former and the Ethiopian Hatse State in the Upper Nile Valley.

The Ethiopians never recognized the international legitimacy of such occupational rights and the presence of the Turco-Egyptians on their Red Sea and the Upper Nile Valley frontiers, including those over the former Funk State, until the invaders abandoned the frontiers after they had suffered crushing defeats at the hand of Ethiopians at the battled of Gundet and Gura in 1875 and 1876.

On the other hand, after the British intelligence agent Henry Salt arrived in northern Ethiopia in the 1800s during the Napoleonic Wars of 1793-1815, all European intelligence and consular agents, missionaries, commercial, diplomatic and military visitors, geographical, linguistic, ethnographical and anthropological researchers and students with their attachments to colonialism and imperialism invariably tried to divide the Ethiopians and the Ethiopian Hatse State into tribal, ethnic, linguistic, religious, regional, dynastic, political, and cultural groups as they sought ways to divide and rule. In doing so, they planted the seeds of the present regional and political problems in the Horn of Africa.

Against these various categories of European colonial and imperialist agents, the Ethiopian people and leaders of the last century, regardless of their regional and ethnic differences, took the same national stand that the regions and the different ethnic groups of the Horn of Africa, under the sovereignty of the historical Ethiopian Hatse State, with its natural and historical frontiers of the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Aden, the Red Sea, and the Upper Nile Valley, were one and the same multi-national country of Ethiopia. This was repeatedly stated by Tewodros II, Yohannes IV, Menilik II, Ras Alula, and Ras Mekonnen, some of the great leaders of Ethiopia.

(Source: National Atlas of Ethiopia)

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