Roberts A.D. The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 7: from 1905 to 1940
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ETHIOPIA, 192O-I93O
Zawditu and by the remaining conservative leaders. Early in 1928
Tafari put his authority as regent to the test by summoning the
veteran General Balcha from Sidamo to the capital. Balcha
responded by marching his numerous troops to Addis Ababa; he
made his obeisances to the empress but snubbed Tafari. The latter,
however, contrived with the aid of Nasibu's police and gifts of
cash to disperse Balcha's men, and Balcha himself was gaoled. In
September, the empress's party made one more bid for supremacy:
the commander of her bodyguard sought to detain Tafari on the
pretext that he had betrayed the country by negotiating with Italy
for a motor road through Wallo to Assab. Once more, the city
police (with timely help from Tafari's wife Menen) saved the
regent. His supremacy was acknowledged when at the end of the
month Zawditu was obliged to crown Tafari
negus,
or king.
Tafari was now in a much stronger position to pursue a
programme of innovation. In 1929-30 he obtained aeroplanes
from France; the pilots who brought them instructed Ethiopians
how to fly them. More than the telegraph and telephone, the tiny
imperial airforce exposed the provinces to close supervision.
During 1929, trucks were driven for the first time from Addis
Ababa as far as the great coffee market in Jimma, across the Gibe,
and to those in Wollega. Companies were already being formed
to build motor roads for conveying export crops both to the
railway and to Gambela. In the same year, Tafari opened the first
of two government agricultural stations. In 1929—30, the regent's
press published the first book in Amharic on modern agriculture,
by Tekle Hawaryat Tekle Maryam, who had studied in Russia
before 1917 and in France and, like Tafari
himself,
was one of
Ethiopia's few improving farmers.
Such concern for the principal economic activity of nearly all
Ethiopians reflected a fundamental shift in outlook; and the
regent's determination, as king, to exercise power in new ways
provoked a final reaction from the old guard. The initiative was
taken by Ras Gugsa Wele, who had been Zawditu's husband until
her coronation in 1917. Tafari and the Shoan commanders had
then rusticated him to the governorship of Amhara country
between the Tekeze and Lake Tana. Under pressure from his
followers, Ras Gugsa finally rebelled in 1929. He called for help
from the
ras
of Gojjam, Hailu Tekle Haymanot, whose ruthless
taxation and speculation in town property had earned him the
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ETHIOPIA AND THE HORN
nickname 'Dollars' Hailu.
17
Hailu encouraged other northern
leaders to join Gugsa, but himself made ready to go to the capital.
In March 1930, not far to the east of his own capital at Debre
Tabor, Gugsa joined battle near Mt Anchim with imperial forces
from Wallo and Addis Ababa, who were aided by Gugsa's
ambitious nephew Ayalew Berru.
18
The regent's one serviceable
aircraft observed the rebels deploying and prevented the govern-
ment forces from being surprised. The French pilot also bombed
the enemy camp, causing great damage. At the end of five hours'
bitter fighting on the ground, Gugsa Wele and many of his men
were dead; government losses were comparatively modest. Their
artillery had proved unwieldy, but deadly use was made of a
special corps of the regent's bodyguard armed with heavy
machine-guns. The battle of Anchim, together with that of
Segelle in 1916, signalled the end of a military balance which, since
the seventeenth century, had permitted provincial leaders in the
Christian empire to wear down the monarchy by civil war.
Two days after the battle of Anchim, the ailing Empress
Zawditu died. Tafari was proclaimed emperor on 3 April 1930
with the throne-name Haile Sellassie I. He was crowned on 30
October, in elaborate ceremonies calculated to impress the special
envoys of the European powers, the USA, Egypt and Japan and
the great number of foreign journalists who were also invited to
attend.
THE COASTAL TERRITORIES
Eritrea and Italian Somaliland,
Italy's first colony, Eritrea, was not in itself of much significance.
The total population was estimated in 1935 to be 600,000, of
whom about half were Christian farmers and half were Muslim
pastoralists. The Christians mostly lived in the highlands which
projected north from the Ethiopian plateau. They shared a
language with Ethiopians in Tigre, across the Mareb river, and
17
Tekle Eyesus (Alcqa),
'
Ye-Gojjam Tarike Nagast', IES, Amharic Ms. no. 254, fol.
148;
State Dept. 884.00/2J9, Addis Ababa, July 1952, quoting Heruy Walde Sellassie,
the foreign minister, on the value of Hailu's confiscated properties.
18
Asfew Tesemma
(Gra^macb),
'Ye-Ras Gugsa Wele ye-acher Tarik', IES Amharic
Ms.
no. 849;
Berbane-na
Stlam (10 April 1950) repeated in L<
Cottrritr
iFEthiopic.
State
Dept. 884.00/205, Addis Ababa, May 19)0.
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THE COASTAL TERRITORIES
throughout the colonial period a sense of continuing attachment
to Ethiopia was kept alive both by Orthodox clergy and by
European missions. There was also much continuity in land
tenure and local government: many families who had been
prominent in the nineteenth century were still powerful in 1941.
Some, however, were displaced by former
askari
and local rivals
who enjoyed Italian favour; and in general the Italians gave no
support to the claims of older families against those of more recent
settlers. Muslim and other pastoralists were subjected to more
fundamental changes. Italian administrators imposed a peace
which weakened the hold of noble herdsman clans over their serfs;
the latter increasingly refused to milk for noble patrons, to render
labour services or make gifts of livestock and cash. It was, indeed,
the pastoralists who were drawn most fully into the cash economy
in the earlier twentieth century, though Eritrea's own exports of
hides and butter counted for less than its re-export trade. Massawa
had been eclipsed by 1910 as an outlet for Ethiopian exports, but
the total value of Eritrea's foreign trade continued to rise, due
to re-exports such as coffee from the Yemen or Djibouti. As yet,
the highlands contributed relatively little to the colonial economy,
and for many years Eritrea had to import grain from northern
Ethiopia. But the basis for further change was laid in 1908, when
a railway was opened from Massawa to the highland capital,
Asmara, whose population was then around 10,000.
In 1922 the Fascist leader Benito Mussolini became prime
minister of Italy. This did not cause any abrupt change of policy
in Eritrea. Already, men from both Eritrea and Ethiopia were
being recruited to help Italian armies reconquer the hinterland of
Libya. In the course of the 1920s the Fascist regime extended the
railway westwards from Asmara to Keren and Agordat; the aim
was primarily strategic, but there were hopes that it would
encourage the cultivation of cotton and coffee along the lower
Mareb, on land which had already been irrigated and attracted
immigrants from Ethiopia. By 1930, groups of pastoralists were
adopting agriculture near the Sudan border. From 1928 to 1933
the port of Massawa was improved, and from 1929 some of the
better agricultural land was confiscated to facilitate Italian
settlement. Few white farmers arrived, however, and exports still
failed to match the rising volume of imports. The colony
depended heavily on subsidies from Italy. The administration was
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ETHIOPIA AND THE HORN
needlessly expensive,
for at
all levels
it
was staffed mainly
by
Italians. African education, which was fostered
in
the 1920s by
mission-state co-operation, was sharply curbed
in
1931, when
Africans were excluded from government secondary schools.
From 1932, Swedish and American missionaries were refused
entry, and the remaining Swedes were expelled
in
1935. By this
time,
there were some 2,000 Eritreans in state elementary schools
and another 950
in
Catholic schools
or
seminaries. Those who
wished to continue their education, or to seek careers other than
as interpreters or junior clerks, looked to Addis Ababa.
The advent
of
Fascism made
a
more immediate impact
on
Italian Somaliland.
Of its
million
or so
inhabitants, perhaps
one-tenth were cultivators, and these were concentrated near the
Benadir coast.
In
1920 Italian administration was still largely
confined to this region; two-thirds of the colony, including the
northern sultanates, was virtually independent. The first Fascist
governor, Cesare de Vecchi, arrived at the end of
1923,
determined
to bring the whole territory under direct rule. He armed
the
colonial police with machine-guns and artillery, and brought
in
Etittean
askari
officered by Italians. In 1925 the sultanate of Obbia
was surrounded and quickly subdued; the sultan himself was
deposed and sent
to
Mogadishu. Further west, Hawiyya clans,
who
had
fought. against Sayyid 'Abdallah's dervishes, vainly
proclaimed, 'All Muslims are one'.
19
The sultan
of
Majerteyn
offered fierce resistance
and
held
out
until
the end of
1927.
Meanwhile, in July 1925, Britain had transferred to Italy the port
of Kismayu together with its hinterland west of the Juba river.
The whole territory was divided into seven provinces. Selected
chiefs and local notables became minor salaried officials, but their
authority was undermined by government-appointed judges who
administered customary as well as Islamic law.
De Vecchi's ruthless energy was also applied
to
agriculture.
Here he was encouraged by the success of
a
concession company
founded
in
1920 by the Duke
of
the Abruzzi, which produced
cotton, sugar, bananas, oil and soap along the Shebele river. De
Vecchi irrigated
a
large area further down the river, near Merca,
and issued concessions
to
Italian firms
and
settlers.
In
both
schemes, labour was employed on
a
sharecropping basis; local
cultivators had little incentive to take part, and forced recruitment
" R.
Hess, Italian colonialism
in
Somalia (Chicago, 1966), IJI.
726
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THE COASTAL TERRITORIES
was common. By 1932, the value of cotton and banana exports
exceeded that of hides and skins, while salt was exported on a large
scale from an extraction plant at Ras Hafun. Even so, as in Eritrea,
total exports fell far short of imports, which included much cloth
from Italy and grain from Kenya. Banana cultivators had to be
rescued in
193 5
by the creation of an Italian monopoly: consumers
in Italy had to buy Somali bananas, which cost twice what other
Europeans paid for bananas from Central America or the
Caribbean. Even after de Vecchi's departure in 1928, and the
conclusion of his costly campaigns, annual government expend-
iture (around 100m lire a year: j£im in 1928) was three times local
revenue. Part of this went on medical services and on aid to
mission schools, but as in Eritrea Africans were discouraged from
secondary education. Even in the elementary schools, there were
no more than 1,300 pupils in 1934.
British Somaliland, 1920-1940
Italy's portion of Somali territory was a major part of its
overseas empire; it was also a stage on which to advertise the
virtues of Fascism. British Somaliland was a very small part of
a far larger empire, and it attracted minimal attention or invest-
ment. Most of the population (350,000 in the mid-i93os) were
herdsmen, though by 1920 some clans of the 'Ise and Gadabursi
had adopted plough-cultivation from Sufi communities at Har-
geisa (who in turn had imitated Somali farmers on the Jigjiga
plain).
The imposition of peace from 1920 enabled both human
and animal populations to recover, and many herdsmen migrated
to Ethiopia in order to escape interference by the British. When
direct taxation was introduced in 1921, it met such resistance in
the camel corps and among officially backed clan elders that troops
had to be called in from Kenya and Nyasaland. Throughout the
1920s, military expenditure averaged £50,000 a year. Livestock
and hides supplied the bulk of domestic exports. The colonial
budget required annual grants-in-aid from the British Treasury;
this imposed stringent limits on expenditure, which was usually
less than £200,000
a
year. Harold Kittermaster, the governor from
1925 to
1931,
did what he could to channel funds into productive
investment. An agriculture department was set up; stock-dips
were built and groundnuts and cowpeas distributed to prospective
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ETHIOPIA AND THE HORN
farmers. But in 1927-8
a
terrible drought killed off herds; it was
followed by
a
locust invasion; and well into 1930 famine relief
was
a
first priority. Meanwhile
a
motor road was built from
Berbera through Hargeisa to the Ethiopian border, in an attempt
to divert traffic from the Djibouti railway, but in the early 1930s
only 5 per cent
of
Ethiopia's foreign trade passed through the
northern Somali ports. Geological surveys revealed no mineral
wealth. However, Kittermaster obtained money for well-boring
from the Colonial Development Fund, and water development
eventually insured the country against a recurrence of the natural
disasters of the 1920s.
On Kittermaster's departure, the Colonial Office asked
the
Committee
of
Imperial Defence
to
discuss
the
future
of
this
burdensome possession. The Foreign Office ruled
out
either
self-government or the transfer of the northern Somali to Italy.
The British government also rejected an Ethiopian scheme, first
proposed in 1919, whereby Ethiopia would receive a corridor to
the coast, including Zeila, in exchange for grazing lands
in
the
Ogaden used by clans who straddled the frontier. Instead, the new
governor was merely instructed to retrench. Somali clerks, some
of whom had been trained at Gordon College in Khartoum, began
to agitate against the lack of employment, the neglect of agriculture
and education, and the levying
of
fines and customs dues. This
unrest culminated in 1937 in the formation of the Somali Officials'
Union, which demanded better pay.
In
1934 the 'Ise protested
against British and Ethiopian boundary survey teams but were
swiftly crushed from both Zeila and Harar. After 1934, the transit
trade benefited from the Italians' desire to minimise their use of
the French railway for shipping goods to occupied Ethiopia. The
government was able to revive the veterinary service and in 1938
it opened a school, for teaching agricultural science, mathematics,
geography and Arabic. Shaykhs denounced the headmaster as
a
godless polluter, and urban riots in 1937 forced the government
to abandon plans both to introduce secular education in Koranic
schools and to use Roman script for teaching the Somali language.
French
Somaliland, ipoj—ipjo
The French territory comprising Djibouti
and its
immediate
hinterland was called the Cote Francaise des Somalis (CFS); in fact
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THE COASTAL TERRITORIES
most of it was inhabited by the 'Afar, though the port of Djibouti
(like Zeila) was in the country of
the
f
Ise Somali. In 1931 the total
population of the territory was around 70,000. The colony's only
important export was salt, but the railway
to
Ethiopia yielded
substantial revenues
in
customs and port fees:
by
1935, over
two-thirds
of
Ethiopia's foreign trade passed through Djibouti.
The port attracted
a
great variety of immigrants:
in
1913, when
its population numbered 17,000, there were only 3,500 'Ise Somali
and 1,500 'Afar from within
the
territory. There were
1,000
Europeans and Indians, about 2,000 Arabs working in suburban
market-gardens
or
on the railway, and
a
small number
of
rich
Arabs controlling much
of
the town's property and trade. The
other town-dwellers were 'Ise and Gadabursi Somali from British
Somaliland and Ethiopia. This pattern persisted, and communal
tensions were to inflame the first elections after the Second World
War. Little money was spent
on
either the administration
or
the welfare
of
the African population, though by the 1930s the
government subsidised Catholic mission schools which gave
primary education and craft training to a few hundred pupils.
It
was not till 1928 that the French established
a
police post in the
interior away from the railway. This was
at
Gobad, south-west
of the Bay of Tajura, and it had long been needed to stop the 'Afar
being dispossessed by 'Ise raiders of the best grazing land in the
colony. 'Afar raiding across
the
unmarked Franco-Ethiopian
frontier went unchecked. The 'Afar ports on the northern shore
of the Bay
of
Tajura, opposite Djibouti, were unpoliced and
attracted the slave-trade when other outlets were being blocked:
until about 1930,
at
least 300 or 400 slaves were exported each
year to Arabia by this route. As late
as
1925,
the coastal slave-trade
was
in
the hands
of
descendants
of
the notorious nineteenth-
century slave-trader and French protege, Abu Bakr
of
Zeila.
20
Officials paid little heed to Yemeni Arabs who imported, through
Tajura, Turkish rifles abandoned in 1918; these, and salt from the
northern 'Afar, were sold to Ethiopian slave-traders.
20
PRO FO 401/19, no. 67, enclosure, report of Philip Zaphiro on a visit to Djibouti,
September 1925; FO 401/21, no. 60, enclosure 1 and FO 401/27, no. 95.
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ETHIOPIA AND THE HORN
ETHIOPIA, I93O-I936
The limits of reform
Between 1928 and his coronation as emperor late in 1930, Haile
Sellassie made a series of crucial decisions designed to fortify the
monarchy. He took steps to introduce a written constitution, to
recruit instructors for the army from Europe's smaller states, and
to reform the empire's finances. Fiscal reform was an urgent
priority. In 1930 the emperor estimated that taxes were worth
altogether between 40 and 50 million silver dollars, but only
one-third were collected in cash. The exchange rate had fallen by
a third since the beginning of
1929,
and by 1932 the value of silver
dollars in US dollars was half what it had been in the 1920s.
Two-thirds of the cash revenue came from customs, but in 1929
the price of hides and skins fell, and that of coffee plummeted
during the next year. In 1931, with prices still falling, exports
earned half what had been fetched by the lesser quantities of 1928.
The fall of world prices for Ethiopia's exports, the extravagance
of the coronation, and the high salaries promised to foreign
advisers threw the government into dire
crisis.
Haile Sellassie had,
before his accession, decided to buy out the Bank of Abyssinia,
but late in 1930 bankers in New York and London refused a
short-term loan for this purpose. Instead, the money was raised
by selling off government stocks of trade-goods and cartridges
from state arsenals. Meanwhile, the emperor had recruited a
financial adviser in the USA, Everett Colson, who remained until
1935.
Colson was determined to free the Ethiopian government
from the rigid rates of duties prescribed by the Klobukowski
treaty of 1908; in 1931 he secured the introduction of
excise
taxes
which weighed most heavily on imported luxuries. Colson also
sought to deprive foreign business of consular jurisdiction. Under
his guidance, a special finance committee undertook reform of the
currency and drafted a code for the mixed court. Colson advised
this committee how to force the railway company to scale down
discriminatory freight rates, especially on imported petrol, and to
pay fully the Ethiopian government's annual dues; he also
proposed a variety of other self-financing schemes.
Colson was much helped on the finance committee by a former
assistant of Gebre Heywet's from the Dire Dawa customs, the
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ETHIOPIA, 1930-1936
Catholic-trained Tigrean, Gebre Egziabeher Francois (or Desta),
and by an Eritrean, Lorenzo Taezaz, whom Nasibu Zemanel had
induced
to
leave Asmara
ten
years earlier
to
escape racial
discrimination. At the time of the coronation, Lorenzo was called
back from France, where
he
was finishing
his
studies
in
law.
During
a
brief tenure
as
minister
of
finance from 1931, Tekle
Hawaryat also served on this committee. However, the indepen-
dence
of
mind shown by these three men, and their outspoken
attack
on
the personal manipulation
of
funds which underlay
imperial patronage, provoked the rise of younger conservatives,
men who were experienced
in
the bureaucracy and had some
knowledge
of
European languages but were wholly submissive
to the emperor. Tekle Hawaryat was shunted off to Geneva early
in 1933, by which time the illiberal Yegezu Behabte had returned
to full favour.
In July 1931 Haile Sellassie proclaimed
the
empire's first
constitution. In preparing for this, he had originally consulted Ras
Hailu of Gojjam, the two grandsons of Yohannes IV and other
Christian noblemen. They, however, had demanded hereditary
governorships
and
guarantees
of
their role
as
intermediaries
between the emperor and his subjects. Haile Sellassie ignored
these requests and instead commissioned Tekle Hawaryat to draft
a constitution. Tekle Hawaryat took that of Japan as his model,
while giving still further scope to imperial authority. He aimed
to bring representatives
of
the numerous lesser men
of
local
influence
to
Addis Ababa
to
co-operate with the emperor;
he
believed that this would ensure approval
in
the countryside for
new laws.
21
The
constitution provided
for a
two-chamber
parliament,
in
which senators were appointed
by
the emperor,
while deputies were nominated
by
local notables. When Haile
Sellassie opened parliament
in
November 1931,
he
urged
its
members
to
learn about each other's home districts and thus
enlarge their sense
of
Ethiopian nationality. The new deputies,
however, opposed plans for more stringent property-taxes and the
withdrawal
of
silver coinage.
In
1932
a
decree from the palace
cautiously tried
to
define the obligations of
gebbar,
but nothing
21
An interview with him
in
1963 is quoted by John Markakis, Ethiopia. Anatomy of
a
traditional polity
(.Oxford, 1974), 27m., 273. A long speech from 1931 is quoted
in
Edward Ullendorff (tr.), The
autobiography
of
Emperor
Haile
Sellassie
I.
' My Life and
Ethiopia's progress
iSfi-ifj?' (Oxford, 1976), 186-200.
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ETHIOPIA AND THE HORN
was done
to fix
precisely
how
much
the
peasantry
of
the older
Christian provinces owed
to
their officials.
Educational progress was very slow.
In
1934, 4,200 Ethiopians
attended state schools
in
Addis Ababa; only
a few
hundred had
advanced beyond elementary grades. Some went abroad
for
further study,
as did a few
pilots
and
officer-cadets; most went
to France or the USA. There were
a
dozen government elementary
schools in the provinces and some 2,000 pupils in mission schools.
Both state
and
mission schools introduced European languages
and
a
better knowledge
of
geography and mathematics. But
the
spread
of
literacy
in
Amharic and Arabic was mainly due
to the
tuition offered by monks, village priests and a few shaykhs. True,
Amharic literature flowered
in the
early 1930s: printing presses
in Addis Ababa, Dire Dawa
and
Asmara produced edifying
accounts of foreign travel, historical essays, practical manuals and
short didactic novels, including
one
about
the
conflict between
the older, tradition-bound generation
and the
younger people
returning from study abroad.
22
But
readership
for the new
literature must have been small:
the
joint circulation
of
the
two
leading Amharic papers was only 700, which wasalso that
of
the
most popular European-language newspaper,
Le
Courrier
d'
Ethiopie.
There were substantial improvements
in
transport. Between
1927
and
193
5,200
trucks were imported for commercial purposes,
and
by
the latter year more than 2,000 km
of
dry-weather motor
roads radiated from
the
capital; other roads linked
the
eastern
highlands
to the
railway, connected Harar
to the
Berbera trunk
road
and, for
strategic purposes, crossed
the
Ogaden.
All the
same, the cost
of
motor-transport remained
so
high that traders
not dealing
in
coffee often preferred mule caravans. This
was
partly
due to the
tolls and trucking monopolies
by
which road
construction was financed;
it
was also due
to
the very high cost
of petrol shipped
by
rail, despite Haile Sellassie's attempt
to
undercut
the
price
of
Anglo-American distributors
at
Aden
by
importing petroleum products from the Soviet Union.
A
further
factor was
the
high level
of
railway freight rates: from 1925
to
1935,
the railway company's receipts averaged twice its running
expenses, despite the world depression.
" Addisaliim (The new world) (Addis Ababa, 1951/2), by Heruy Walde Sellassie, who
was foreign minister,
19}
1-5.
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