On the Scale of the World by Musab Younis;

Author:Musab Younis;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520389168
Publisher: University of California Press

“HANDS OFF ABYSSINIA”

No single event was more significant for the interwar Black Atlantic than Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia on October 3, 1935.46 The invasion was met with unparalleled mobilization. In Paris, Black, anticolonial, and left-wing organizations set aside their differences and created a popular front in defense of Ethiopia. In London, the George Padmore and C. L. R. James–led International African Friends of Abyssinia was formed, the League of Coloured Peoples entered a newly radical phase, and Sylvia Pankhurst’s influential New Times and Ethiopian News was established.47 Across West Africa, Hands Off Abyssinia committees were set up, relief funds were collected, and mass demonstrations held. In Cape Town and Durban, Black dockworkers refused to handle Italian goods.48 In the Caribbean, there were mass petitions, vocal public meetings and riots, alongside the birth of the Rastafari movement in the United States, the Pan-African Reconstruction Association began trying to raise volunteers for Ethiopia, while African American groups in Harlem organized the Provisional Committee for the Defense of Ethiopia, drawing thousands to their rallies.49 “Almost overnight,” wrote one prominent African American historian, “even the most provincial among the American Negroes became international-minded.”50 For Kwame Nkrumah, recalling the moment he heard of the invasion as a young student in London: “At that moment it was almost as if the whole of London had suddenly declared war on me personally.”51 For W. E. B. Du Bois, writing at the time: “Black men and brown men have indeed been aroused as seldom before.”52

It is easy to forget, in light of the strength of feeling generated by these oppositional defenses of Ethiopia, that Italy’s invasion was marked not just by silent complicity but by active and powerful support. Anticolonial engagements with Ethiopia—whose occupation began soon after Haiti’s ended—were forced to contend with the claims of those sympathetic to the occupation. When border skirmishes, provoked by Italy, erupted at Wal Wal in December 1934, Ethiopia had appealed to the League of Nations for assistance. But Britain and France, then concerned with the threat of German rearmament, showed little interest. A secret British report in June 1935, which found scant reason to defend Ethiopian sovereignty, was conveniently leaked to the Italian government.53 And the agreements signed between Mussolini and the French foreign minister, Pierre Laval, in January 1935, included a surreptitious recognition of Italian primacy in Ethiopia.54 The long-planned Italian invasion came on October 3, 1935, without a declaration of war. Ethiopia was incorporated into the short-lived Africa Orientale Italiana from 1936 to 1941.

If Haiti was imagined in atavistic terms as having regressed after the end of French rule, then Ethiopia during the Italian invasion was the subject of a temporal discourse that represented the country in settler-colonial terms: an ancient but dying civilization that was being dragged into the modern world through an act of violent colonial replenishment. This language was distinctly fascist in its focus on modernization, speed, power, and will. But it also drew extensively upon the “extinction discourse” that had long accompanied settler-colonial projects.55 A deep sympathy for the

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