In March 1896, an Italian colonial army was defeated near the town of Adwa in northern Ethiopia. It was not the first reverse suffered by a European army in Africa, but it was the first decisive African victory. A decade later its earliest historian, Captain George Berkeley, wondered whether Adwa was ‘the first revolt of the Dark Continent against domineering Europe’. In The Battle of Adwa Raymond Jonas goes a step further. Adwa, he claims, not only ensured that Ethiopia would remain the only independent state in Africa but marked a turning point in global history: ‘We can readily imagine the world – our world – taking a different path had events gone differently.’ It ‘determined the colour of Africa’ and cut against the supremacist logic of European imperialism and American manifest destiny, opening a breach that would lead to the rolling back of European rule in Africa fifty years later.

LRB 24 May 2012 | PDF Download