Written by 101 years ago this week, Ethiopia formally joined the League of Nations, the precursor to the modern-day United Nations.
Ethiopia is famously the only country in Africa that was never colonised. It defeated Italy’s first excursions in 1896, and was occupied during World War II because regaining Italy’s standing as a colonial power was important for Benito Mussolini’s goals.
The 1896 victory over Rome was important for Ethiopia in many ways, because it created a sovereign state centred around Addis Ababa, which had become the capital just two years before the war.
Now thrust into global politics, Ethiopia was interested in joining the post World War I formation called the League of Nations. There were two other members from the continent -the Union of South Africa, and Liberia, but both were colonies.
After Ras Tafari, also known as Haile Selassie, applied for membership, something interesting happened. Of the five permanent members -Britain, Italy, Japan, US, and France- each played different politics. Italy was surprisingly in support of the application, after some early hesitation, while France supported it as a play against Britain and Italy.
To Addis Ababa, at the time formally known as Abyssinia, joining the League of Nations was a strategic move. Italy was still in Eritrea, and Ethiopia was surrounded by competing colonial powers. It also redefined the League- when Haile Selassie demanded its intervention against Italy a decade and a half later, invoking a Trojan horse of a founding article that provided for military punishment that had never been used before.
But Why Did Britain Oppose Ethiopia’s Membership
Racism and well, colonialism. And the thorny issues of slavery and arms.
To most League of Nations scholars, Britain’s opposition to Ethiopia’s (Abyssinia’s) membership was because the nation was not “sufficiently westernized or politically cohesive.”
One of its delegates said that the British were “genuinely shocked at the wickedness of an outrage upon decency” which is macabrely hilarious when you think about the things Britain itself was doing across Africa.
Britain had not hidden its colonial aspirations for Ethiopia, particularly as Menelik II’s health began to fail in the early 20th Century. The reason was simple, or as simple as colonial motives go, that Ethiopia was the one country the Nile crossed that Britain did not control. Productivity in both Sudan and Egypt was greatly dependent on the Nile, as it had been for centuries, and the British already controlled the source of the river (Uganda).
In December 1906, Britain, France, and Italy signed a treaty that was pretty much a Scramble for Ethiopia, as it was expected that Menelik’s death would plunge the nation in chaos. Britain was primarily interested, as it would be for decades, for a concession to build a dam on Lake Tsana, which would help it control the flow of water downstream especially during the hot summers.
After World War I though, Britain and France turned down many of Italy’s colonial dreams and aspirations, which had been all but promised in a secret 1915 treaty. Soon, there were also articles across the Atlantic about rampant slavery in Ethiopia, triggered first by an article by Dr. Sharp, a member of the British legation in Addis Ababa.
The slavery issue was the main problem for Britain, at least at home, but the actual issue was that any solution beyond Ethiopia’s admission to the League would give the Italians leverage to carve out the Western parts of the country. Here, the fear was that admitting Ethiopia would lead to its being forced to abolish slavery, which would be the first step to its losing independence.
The arms question was connected, because the British and the French (and the Americans) had been secretly-and against a 1919 treaty-supplying Ethiopia with arms. The British did it so Addis Ababa could control shiftas-a derogatory name for guerrilla groups still used in the region today-and the French did it for the sake of building Djibouti’s economy-since Ethiopia was, as it is today, landlocked.
Before the September 1923 vote, Ethiopia agreed to work to abolish slavery and keep to the terms of the 1919 treaty-dissolving the only obvious political opposition Britain had to its membership.
To oppose the vote that far in would be to find itself in the same position Italy had before, where it found that it had so little support that a vote against Ethiopia would lose. And with this stroke of genius, Abyssinia/Ethiopia’s sovereignty became an international issue, not that it mattered much when the next war came.
Owaahh, 2024
One Story is good,
till Another is told.
Africa Ethiopia History League of Nations
Last modified: September 22, 2024
