Ethiopia's history: an African state never colonised and itself an empire

How far back the written record goes

The territory carries a continuous record running back to the second millennium BC, and the early part of it is contested at every stage.

Egyptian traders from around 3000 BC referred to lands south of Nubia as Punt and Yam. Isotope analysis of mummified Egyptian baboons points to an origin area covering modern Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia, which is the strongest physical evidence that Punt lay in the Horn. The most documented expedition was Queen Hatshepsut's, around 1495 BC, recorded in reliefs at Deir el-Bahri showing myrrh trees, ivory, incense and gold brought back. The Egyptians called it God's-Land.

Excavations at Mai Adrasha, near Shire in the north, have uncovered a settlement dating to around 1250 BC, with large-scale metalworking and stone-walled buildings.

The first kingdom known from inscriptions is Dʿmt, which rose around 980 BC with its capital at Yeha, where a temple in Sabaean style was built around 700 BC. The old reading of Dʿmt as a Sabaean colony has been abandoned; the current view holds Yemeni influence to have been minor, local and short-lived.

Why Aksum counted as a world power

The Kingdom of Aksum rose in the first century AD and became the first verifiable great power in the region. The Persian religious figure Mani listed it alongside Rome, Persia and China as one of the four great powers of his time, which is the single most useful measure of what it was.

Its reach was commercial and military. Aksum controlled Red Sea trade running as far as India and Ceylon, subjugated South Arabia and Meroe, and minted its own coinage under King Endybis from the late third century. Around 525 the Aksumite king Kaleb invaded Yemen at the request of the Eastern Roman emperor Justin I and defeated the Himyarite ruler Dhu Nuwas. That expedition was the last time an Ethiopian army left Africa until the Korean War.

The decision that outlasted the kingdom was religious. Christianity arrived through Frumentius, consecrated first bishop of Ethiopia by Athanasius of Alexandria around 330, who converted King Ezana. Ezana's coins record the shift, moving from a disc and crescent to a cross. Toward the end of the fifth century a group of monks known as the Nine Saints established monasticism, which has been a power in the country ever since.

Aksum declined as Islam rose in Arabia and trade shifted away from a Christian Red Sea power. The causes given include drought, overgrazing, deforestation, plague and the trade shift, and the sources are thin enough that historians list them together rather than choosing. The last king known to have minted coins was Armah, whose coinage refers to the Persian conquest of Jerusalem in 614.

What the rock churches were built for

Around 1000 a female ruler remembered as Yodit overthrew the Aksumite royal house, and a century or so later her successors were displaced by an Agaw lord who founded the Zagwe dynasty.

The Zagwe ruled a smaller territory than either the Aksumites before them or the Solomonids after, with its core in Lasta, and by the standards of Ethiopian history they ruled it peacefully. David Buxton described their achievement as a degree of stability and technical advancement seldom equalled in Abyssinian history. Three Zagwe kings were canonised as saints.

What they built at their capital of Roha is the reason they are remembered. Eleven churches cut downward into solid volcanic rock, monolithic rather than constructed, traditionally ascribed to King Gebre Mesqel Lalibela, after whom the town was renamed. Rock-hewn church building had begun in the late Aksumite period and continued afterwards, but it reached its peak here.

The Zagwe were isolated from other Christian states and maintained contact mainly through Jerusalem and Cairo, where the Ethiopian church held chapels and an annex at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. After retaking Jerusalem in 1187, Saladin expressly invited the Ethiopian monks back and exempted their pilgrims from the pilgrim tax.

How the Solomonic dynasty claimed its right to rule

Around 1270 Yekuno Amlak deposed the last Zagwe king and founded the dynasty that would rule, with interruptions, until 1974.

Its claim was genealogical and it was written down after the fact. The Kebra Negast, composed in the fourteenth century, traced the line to a union between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, making the Ethiopian monarchy a continuation of the biblical royal house. The claim did the work required of it for seven centuries, and success in practice owed more to armies than to lineage.

The early Solomonic period brought military reform and imperial expansion that left Ethiopia dominant in the Horn of Africa, particularly under Amda Seyon I. It also brought a peculiar administrative fact: the emperors kept no fixed capital, moving instead between mobile camps, which caused urbanisation to decline even as art and literature advanced.

Between 1528 and 1543 the Adal Sultanate under Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi came close to ending the whole arrangement, driving the emperor into mountain refuges. Portuguese musketeers under Cristóvão da Gama arrived in 1541; da Gama was captured and executed after the defeat at Wofla in 1542, and the surviving 120 regrouped with imperial forces. Al-Ghazi was shot dead at Wayna Daga on 21 February 1543.

The Oromo expansion through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reshaped the country's demography permanently, moving north from the south and concluding around 1710. Later, Emperor Susenyos relied on Oromo support to take power and married an Oromo woman.

Jesuit missionaries converted Susenyos, and the backlash was decisive: on his death in 1633 his son Fasilides expelled the Jesuits, restored the national church, and founded Gondar as the third long-term capital after Aksum and Lalibela. Ethiopian philosophy flourished in the same period, and the treatise Hatata by Zera Yacob is its central text.

Why the Era of the Princes broke the monarchy

The Zemene Mesafint, the Era of the Princes, ran from the later eighteenth century to 1855 and hollowed out the throne without abolishing it.

The mechanism was straightforward. Regional warlords made and unmade emperors, and the succession passed out of the dynasty's control. The turning point came on 7 May 1769, when Ras Mikael Sehul deposed Emperor Iyoas and had him killed a week later, the first time an Ethiopian emperor had lost the throne other than by natural death, death in battle or abdication.

Underneath the palace politics sat a religious and ethnic contest, between Christian and Muslim populations and between the Amhara, Agaw, Tigrayan and Oromo groups the empire contained. The hostility toward foreign Christians it generated kept Ethiopia largely closed until the first British mission of 1805.

Tewodros II ended the era. Born Lij Kassa in Qwara in 1818, he led a bandit army before deposing the last Gondarine puppet emperor and being crowned on 11 February 1855. He set about centralising the legal and administrative system against his own governors, and he ended badly: after imprisoning British subjects, he faced an army of 12,000 sent from Bombay under Sir Robert Napier, and on 13 April 1868, when Magdala fell, he shot himself rather than surrender.

How Ethiopia beat an invading European army

The defining event of modern Ethiopian history took a single day.

On 2 May 1889 Menelik II signed the Treaty of Wuchale with Italy, ceding the territory that became Eritrea in exchange for 30,000 rifles, ammunition and cannon. Italy then told the European powers that the treaty made Ethiopia an Italian protectorate. Menelik protested that the Amharic text said nothing of the kind. The two versions of the treaty did not match, and the protest was ignored.

On 1 March 1896 the Italian army was completely defeated at the Battle of Adwa. The provisional peace concluded at Addis Ababa on 26 October 1896 acknowledged Ethiopian independence. No other African state defeated a European colonial army and kept its sovereignty, and Adwa became a reference point for anti-colonial movements across the continent and the diaspora.

What Menelik conquered to draw the modern borders

The same emperor built the country's present shape by force, and the record is explicit about the cost.

From the 1880s Menelik expanded from the central province of Shoa to incorporate the lands and peoples of the south, east and west: the western Oromo, the Sidama, Gurage, Wolayta and others. The Ethiopian army carried out mass atrocities during the conquest of the Oromo, including mass mutilation, mass killing and large-scale enslavement, with some estimates of the dead running into the millions. Large-scale atrocities were also committed against the Dizi and against the Kaficho kingdom.

Slavery was ancient in Ethiopia and was widely practised in the new territories, tolerated by authorities who often owned slaves themselves. It was abolished only under Haile Selassie, with final success achieved in 1942 under international pressure and as a condition of League of Nations membership.

This is the half of the story that the phrase never colonised obscures, and it is the half that Ethiopian federal politics has been contesting since 1991.

Why the Italian occupation lasted five years

Italy returned on 3 October 1935, took Addis Ababa on 5 May 1936, and annexed the country on 9 May. Haile Selassie appealed to the League of Nations for collective security and got nothing; every member except the Soviet Union eventually recognised the annexation, Britain and France included.

The occupation was violent on a scale the casualty figures still dispute. The emperor claimed more than 275,000 Ethiopian fighters killed against 1,537 Italians; Italian sources put it at 16,000 Ethiopians and 2,700 Italians. Beyond the fighting, at least 78,500 patriots were killed in the resistance, 17,800 civilians died under aerial bombardment and around 35,000 in concentration camps. Italian forces used roughly 300 tons of mustard gas against fighters and civilians in violation of the Geneva Conventions, and bombed Red Cross hospitals and ambulances. The Yekatit 12 massacre in Addis Ababa in 1937 killed as many as 30,000 civilians in reprisal for an assassination attempt on the viceroy Rodolfo Graziani.

Italy intended to settle 500,000 colonists and had placed about 35,000 by 1939. Ethiopian educational institutions were dismantled and replaced by a two-tier system in which schools for Ethiopians were designed to instil obedience.

British and Allied forces with Ethiopian resistance fighters defeated the Italians in spring 1941, and Haile Selassie returned to Addis Ababa on 5 May 1941, five years to the day after losing it. Full sovereignty was restored in 1944.

How a hidden famine ended the monarchy

Haile Selassie modernised, and the modernisation ran out of time. He founded University College of Addis Ababa in 1950, replaced the 1931 constitution in 1955, helped found the Organisation of African Unity in 1963, and survived a coup attempt in 1960. He also dissolved the Eritrean federation and closed its parliament in 1961, starting a thirty-year independence war, and declared Eritrea a province in 1962.

What finished him was concealment. A famine in Welo and Tigray was hidden from the outside world while inflation and corruption rose, and the unrest that began in January 1974 became a revolution. On 12 September 1974 a committee of soldiers, the Derg, seized power. It executed 59 members of the former government, including two former prime ministers. Haile Selassie died on 27 August 1975, apparently killed in his own palace.

Mengistu Haile Mariam took power after killing his two predecessors. The regime nationalised land and church property, aligned with the Soviet Union and Cuba, and between 1977 and early 1978 tortured and killed thousands of suspected opponents in the purge known as Qey Shibir, the Red Terror. Soviet arms and 17,000 Cuban troops turned back the Somali invasion of the Ogaden in 1977 and 1978.

The end came the way the beginning had. Drought and famine affected around 8 million people and killed a million, while insurgencies in Tigray and Eritrea gained ground. The TPLF merged with other movements into the EPRDF in 1989, and in May 1991 EPRDF forces took Addis Ababa. Mengistu fled to Zimbabwe and was convicted of genocide in absentia in 2006.

Where the federation stands now

The 1994 constitution created a federal parliamentary republic organised on ethnic lines, and Eritrea became independent in April 1993 after a referendum. Relations soured fast: a border dispute became the Eritrean-Ethiopian War from May 1998 to June 2000, costing an estimated one million dollars a day, with skirmishes continuing until 2018.

The EPRDF, dominated by the TPLF, governed until protests that began on 5 August 2016 and the resignation of Hailemariam Desalegn in February 2018. Hailemariam was the first Ethiopian ruler in modern history to step down; his predecessors died in office or were overthrown.

Abiy Ahmed became prime minister on 2 April 2018, released over 13,000 political prisoners, unblocked censored websites, and made peace with Eritrea, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019. Sahle-Work Zewde became the first woman to hold the presidency.

What followed was war. Ethnic violence had been rising through the 2010s: Oromo-Somali clashes displaced up to 400,000 people in 2017, and Gedeo-Oromo clashes left 1.4 million people newly displaced in 2018. Elections were postponed in 2020 over COVID-19; the TPLF held its own regional vote in Tigray anyway on 9 September 2020, and the Tigray War followed.

The question the country has been unable to settle is the one Menelik created. A federation organised by ethnicity inside borders drawn by conquest has to decide what the conquest was, and every faction answers differently.