Horn of Africa Leftists by Horn of Africa Leftists

July 08, 2021 How the Ethiopian mythology is a counter-ideological resistance to the Haitian Revolution

How the late 1800s crated Ethiopian mythology is a counter-ideological resistance to the Haitian Revolution

Haitian Revolution from 1791-1804 vs Abyssinia Adwa in 1896

The Haitian revolution put fear & nightmare in European colonial powers not Abyssinia

Ask yourself why was Haiti penalize after its revolution & trapped into debts to the French for decades while Abysinnia after Battle of Adwa got support in nation building from European powers?

I always said the Haitian revolution should have been the only symbol of black resistance from the 1800s for the Black diaspora & Africa not Abyssinia

Haiti is a narrative of slaves revolting

Abysinnia is a feudal monarch who enrich themselves from slavery in 1800s

Ethiopia is a creation of European colonialism & Battle of Adwa was a proxy war between France & Britain

Hati was the real deal not Abyssinia

Truly a black nation & an African resistance realized

Haiti narrative is not centered compared to the promotion of Ethiopia and there is a reason for it

The Haitian Revolution has often been described as the largest and most successful slave rebellion in the Western Hemisphere. Slaves initiated the rebellion in 1791 and by 1803 they had succeeded in ending not just slavery but French control over the colony.

Haiti had a history of slave rebellions;there were slave rebellions before 1791. poisoning of masters.

Before the fighting ended 100,000 of the 500,000 Africans and 24,000 of the 40,000 whites were killed.

former slaves managed to stave off both the French forces and the British who arrived in 1793 to conquer the colony, and who withdrew in 1798 after a series of defeats by l’Overture’s forces.

By 1801 Hait abolished slavery

Haitian Revolution had outlasted the French Revolution which ….Napoleon Bonaparte, dispatched 43,000 French troops to capture restore both French rule and slavery. on November 18, 1803the French forces were defeated. On January 1, 1804, Dessalines declared the nation independent and renamed it Haiti. France became the first nation to recognize its independence. Haiti thus emerged as the first black republic in the world, and the second nation in the western hemisphere (after the United States) to win its independence from a European power.

The war on Haiti never ended after 1804 but continued in various forms via intervention, coup attempts and continues the management of the Haitian state by disregarding the people demands--compared that with Ethiopia in which from the beggin Europe help create Ethiopia and turn into the first African neo-colonial state with Abyssian as their local administrators and mangaers..Below is the counter narrrative that challanges the mytoolgy around Battle of Adwa being the symbol of restiance

Mekuria Bulcha, PhD, Professor

The circumstances, under which the peoples of the south, such as the Oromo, who were conquered in the 1880s, and the Walaita, who were conquered by Menelik two years before the battle of Adwa, were made to march north and participate in the Battle of Adwa must be noted

It was after Adwa that Menelik imposed the notorious gabbar system on the conquered south. Slavery and the slave trade became even more rampant thereafter with the conquest of the rest of the south and southwest which became hunting grounds for captives and ivory.[29] Ironically, it was the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1936 which brought the outrageous institution and evil trade in human beings to an end.

“The united country called Ethiopia, which according to Larebo and Borago existed centuries before Adwa, is a myth. The fact is that when he turned north to meet the Italians at Adwa, Menelik was in the midst of the conquest of the south. The entire Macha region – the Gibe and Leeqa states – was annexed only in 1886. Arsi was conquered in 1886 and Hararge in 1887. As indicated above, Walaita was conquered in 1894. The sores inflicted by the atrocities committed against the Oromo at Anole and Calanqoo in 1886 and 1887 by the conquering Abyssinian forces were still bleeding. Even Wallo’s conquest in the north was completed in 1878 after years of fierce battles between Menelik (then King of Shawa) and Emperor Yohannes IV on one side and the Wallo Oromo on the other. “

“. While the Abyssinians were defending their freedom, the Oromo had no freedom to defend against the Italians. They had lost it to the Abyssinians during the preceding decade. Their land was an Abyssinian colony. The “contribution” they were forced to make to the war effort saved the Abyssinians from European colonialism, but it did not help them to regain their own independence.”

“ the Oromo did not fight at Adwa as ethnic Abyssinians or citizens of Abyssinia as Borago and other commentators try to suggest. They fought for their colonizers. They were not the first people to fight a war for their enemies.”

In his Ethiopia: The Last Frontiers, John Markakis writes that Abyssinia “competed successfully in the imperialist partition of the region [Horn of Africa]. Not a victim but a participant in the ‘scramble’, Ethiopia doubled its territory and population in a burst of expansionist energy, and thereafter proudly styled itself the ‘Ethiopian Empire’. He notes that “the title [‘Empire’] is not a misnomer, since Ethiopia’s rulers governed their new possessions more or less the same way and for similar ends as other imperial powers were doing. The people who took the pride in calling themselves Ethiopians were known also as Abyssinians (Habesha).”

Conflict researcher Christian Scherrer notes that “European and Abyssinian colonialism occurred simultaneously, pursued similar interests, albeit from differing socio-economic bases, and this was reinforced by comparable colonial ideologies of the idea of empire and notion of ‘civilizing mission’ and the exploitation of the subjugated peoples.”

Menelik’s colonial conquests, Gebru Tareke, a historian from the north, has also stated that the Abyssinian ruling elite acted like the white colonial rulers in the rest of Africa. The language they used when describing their colonial subjects did not differ from the language the European colonialists were using. It was a language which was infused with stereotypes, prejudices and paternalism. He adds, “They [the Abyssinian elite] tried much like the European colonisers of their time, to justify the exploitability, and moral validity of occupation.” They “looked upon and treated the indigenous people as backward.”[17] One can add here that stereotypes and ethnic slurs about the Oromo, popular in Habesha discourse are the product of this colonial ideology.

Margery Perham notes “The speed with which this great extension of the empire was made ….is explained by the …firearms which the emperor [Menelik] was obtaining from France... This same superiority was carrying the European powers at the same speed at the same time from the coast into the heart of Africa.”[18] The Swedish historian Norberg also says that “using the same military technology as the European powers”,[19] Menelik managed not only to conquer the neighbouring African territories, but was also able to garrison them with large forces called naftanya who controlled and lived on the conquered populations. As suggested by Richard Caulk, “the system of near serfdom imposed on wide areas of the south by the end of the nineteenth century could have not been maintained had the newcomers not been so differently armed.[20] The historian Darkwah notes that “Menelik succeeded in keeping the arms out of the reach of the [Oromo] enemy. He did this by imposing a strict control over the movement of firearms into his tributary territories and the lands beyond his frontiers.”[21]

Darkwah notes that “in 1877 a Frenchman named Pottier was employed in training a group of Shewan youths in European military techniques. Another Frenchman, Pino, was a regular officer in the army which was commanded by Ras Gobana. Swiss engineers, Alfred Ilg and Zemmerman were employed on, among other things, building bridges across the Awash and other rivers to facilitate movement.”[24]According to Chris Prouty, Colonel Artamonov together with other Europeans was attached to the forces commanded by Ras Tasamma Nadew in Ilu Abbabor. He adds that even Count Nicholas Leontiev, a colonel in the Russian army, was a commander of a force which was sent to conquer the southwest in the 1890s. Another Russian officer, Baron Chedeuvre was Leontiev’s second-in-command during the expedition. Several French and Russian medical officers were also attached to the Abyssinian forces, particularly those which were led by Menelik and European commanders. The Russian Cossack Captain Alexander Bulatovich wrote that with him, there were Lieutenants Davydov, Kokhovskiy and Arnoldi along with a command of Cossacks who had finished their term of service” and who were received in audience by Menelik and took leave from him and returned to Russia in June 1898.

Genocide was committed not only on the Kaficho. It was also the fate of many of the indigenous peoples in the Omo River Valley, Lake Rudolf region and of the south-western lowlands who were conquered by the Abyssinians in the aftermath of the Adwa victory. Bulatovich, who followed Ras Wolde Giyorgis during his conquest of the territories south of Kafa, writes in his diary-based With the Armies of Menelik II that “By order of the emperor, a fifteen-thousand-man corps, set out on a campaign to annex to the realm of Ethiopia vast lands which lie to the south of it, which no one before this had explored, and which were completely unknown.”

although the actual conquest was completed in 1900, the atrocities against the conquered populations did not cease; by and large, slavery and the slave trade continued until the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1936. As an Ethiopian historian has stated, Menelik’s extension of Ethiopia’s frontiers and the incorporation of new areas accentuated “the predatory tendencies of the ruling class and the soldiery. South-western Ethiopia became a hunting-ground for humans as well as animals. Ivory and slaves became the two precious commodities with which traders and adventurers returned from the region.”

He wrote that “Members of upper nobility came to have thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of slaves at their disposal.”[9] Giving examples of some of the largest slave owners, the celebrated historian Pankhurst notes that Menelik and Taytu owned 70,000 slaves and Ras Wolde Giyorgis owned 20,000 slaves at the beginning of the twentieth century

In 1936, forty years after the Battle of Adwa, the British journalist and author wrote that the “peoples of the south and west were treated with wanton brutality unequalled even in the Belgian Congo. Some areas were depopulated by slavers.”[12] Comparing the harms inflicted by Belgian colonialists in Congo and Abyssinian colonialists in the south, he argued that “The significance of the Congo atrocities is not so much that they were committed as that they were exposed and suppressed.”

Haiti is there to remind us the danger of western intervention & management

Haiti is there to remind us the danger of NGO-AID intervention & management over the state

Haiti is there to reminds us the power of the masses

Haiti is truly the symbol of African resistance now

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