Ethiopia is the only African nation never colonised, and one battle in 1896 is why
The trap was a translation. In 1889 Ethiopia and Italy signed the Treaty of Wuchale, and article 17 said two different things in two languages. The Amharic version, the one Ethiopians read, described a diplomatic partnership between sovereign equals. The Italian version quietly turned Ethiopia into an Italian protectorate. Rome then announced to Europe that Ethiopia belonged to it. Empress Taytu Betul was the first to see the deceit for what it was, and the first to demand Ethiopia refuse it. Her name means sunshine. She told her husband and the men around him that dignity was not negotiable.
Emperor Menelik II tore up the treaty, and Italy came with an army. What followed was a masterclass. Menelik leaked false reports making his forces seem far smaller than they were, and spread rumours that his commanders were divided. He and Taytu marched their army nearly 600 miles north over five months, further than Napoleon marched into Russia. At the siege of Mekele, it was Taytu’s own strategy that broke the Italian fort, cutting off its water supply until the garrison surrendered. She commanded her own regiment in the field.
On 1 March 1896, near the town of Adwa, the Italians split their force into four columns and advanced through mountain terrain in darkness. They lost coordination and contact with one another. Waiting for them was an Ethiopian army of around 100,000 men and women, many carrying modern rifles. The Ethiopians surrounded the separated columns and destroyed them piece by piece. Italy lost roughly 6,000 to 7,000 dead and about 3,000 captured, close to half its invasion force in a single day.
It was the first time in the age of the Scramble for Africa that an African army decisively crushed a European colonial power. Italy signed the Treaty of Addis Ababa that October, cancelling the fraudulent treaty and recognising Ethiopian sovereignty without conditions. Europe was stunned. The whole ideology of empire rested on the claim that Africans could not organise, could not command, could not win. Adwa was proof, in the open, that the claim was a lie.
That is why Ethiopia’s flag became the template for so many African flags, and why Black people from Kingston to Harlem to Accra looked to Ethiopia as the proof of what was possible.
They told the world Africans could not defeat a European army. An African emperor and an African empress marched 600 miles and disproved it in one morning. Every African who has been told their people never won should be handed the name Adwa.