Menelik II

Menelik II was born in 1844, claimed descent from the Solomonic dynasty of Ethiopia, and ascended the imperial throne in 1889. He ruled until 1913. His reign coincided exactly with the European Scramble for Africa, and Ethiopia was the only African nation he ruled that survived it as a sovereign state.

The defining episode is the Battle of Adwa, fought on the first of March 1896 between Menelik's Ethiopian army and the Italian colonial expeditionary force under General Oreste Baratieri. The Italians attempted to incorporate Ethiopia into their Eritrean colony through the disputed Treaty of Wuchale, which the Italian-language version represented as imposing an Italian protectorate; the Ge'ez version, the only one Menelik had signed, contained no such clause. War followed.

At Adwa, the Ethiopian army of approximately one hundred thousand — including the contingent organized by Empress Taytu Betul, his consort and military strategist — defeated the Italian force of approximately twenty thousand decisively. Roughly seven thousand Italian soldiers were killed and three thousand captured. The Italian invasion ended; the Treaty of Addis Ababa, signed the same year, formally recognized Ethiopian sovereignty.

Adwa was the first decisive defeat of a European colonial army by an African one in the modern era. The news travelled. For African and African-diaspora intellectuals of the next generation — Du Bois, Garvey, James — Adwa became the political reference point against which African capacity was measured. Marcus Garvey would name his shipping line the Black Star Line in homage to the Ethiopian imperial standard. The Pan-African movement, beginning the next year at Henry Sylvester Williams' London conference, drew its initial energy from the demonstration at Adwa that European colonial expansion was reversible.

Menelik continued for seventeen more years to expand Ethiopian territorial control, modernize the imperial administration, introduce telegraphy and railway, and establish Addis Ababa as the imperial capital. He suffered a series of strokes in his last years and died on the twelfth of December 1913.

He is honored here as the emperor in whose reign Africa decisively defeated Europe at arms.