Modern Italy

ISSN: 1353-2944 (Print) 1469-9877 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cmit20

Adwa: From monument to document

Alessandro Triulzi

To cite this article: Alessandro Triulzi (2003) Adwa: From monument to document, Modern
Italy, 8:1, 95-108, DOI: 10.1080/1353294032000074106

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1353294032000074106

Published online: 19 Aug 2010.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 131

View related articles

Citing articles: 3 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cmit20

Download by: [University of Nebraska, Lincoln] Date: 26 September 2015, At: 20:52
 Modern Italy (2003), 8(1), 95–108

Adwa: from monument to document

ALESSANDRO TRIULZI

Summary
To the Italian historian the Battle of Adwa in March 1896 has offered a
Downloaded by [University of Nebraska, Lincoln] at 20:52 26 September 2015

field of interpretation which has been heavily marked by the events that
occurred between (and within) the two countries—Ethiopia and Italy—be-
fore and after the battle. Adwa has been variously depicted by Italian
historiography of the liberal period as a major military defeat, a political
mistake by Crispi’s expansionist government and the result of deep con-
trasts within the newly born state over the ‘colonial burden’. Fascist
historiography painted Adwa as proof of liberal decay and political
inefficiency. Adwa’s name could be avenged only in the battlefield, which
was done during Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935–36. From the
Ethiopian point of view, Adwa’s image changes no less. Until recently, the
Battle of Adwa was painted as the landmark for Ethiopian unification and
independence during the colonial era. Menelik’s momentous victory at
Adwa crowned his bid for power in the national arena, while his successful
ability to stave off external colonial pressure appeared to cancel, or rather
conceal, the internal policy of expansion and consolidation of his country’s
rule in the region. Today’s insistence on Adwa as an African victory
appears to be the dominant historiographical representation. The different
interpretations all contain elements of truth, yet all, if frozen into historio-
graphical truths, become embarrassing to the historian who needs docu-
ments, rather than monuments, as tools of analysis. To many historians
both in Italy and Ethiopia, Adwa’s respective symbolism of victory/defeat
has been transformed into an icon, an historiographical monument, unas-
sailable and immovable. The centenary of Adwa allows us to reconsider
historical events of a shared past as critical documents and biased
representations reflecting their own culture and time. This article attempts
to deconstruct the historiographical monument of Adwa in Italian society
so as to transmit such a heavily coded event to the critical examination of
future historians in both Italy and Ethiopia.

On 2 March 1996, Ethiopia celebrated the centenary of its greatest military

victory in modern times and its most cherished national epic: the Battle of Adwa.
After initial hesitations, the new Tigrayan-led coalition government decided to
give the ceremony a pan-African character: Adwa, an African victory (Adwa:
ya-Afrika dil) was the official motto of the Ethiopian celebrations. By so doing,
Alessandro Triulzi, Istituto Universitario Orientale, Naples, Italy. E-mail: [email protected]

ISSN 1353-2944 print/ISSN 1469-9877 online/03/010095-14  2003 Association for the Study of Modern Italy
DOI: 10.1080/1353294032000074106
 96 A. TRIULZI

the coalition government attempted to achieve several conflicting aims in the

newly inclusive national memory: to bypass the Amhara myth of national
unification without hurting the Oromo and southern peoples’ feelings of collec-
tive subjugation; to vindicate the all-Ethiopian aspect of the battle in anticipation
of the federal coalition which presided over the commemoration; and finally, to
play the African card of anti-colonialism without hurting the Western allies and
particularly the donor countries of which Italy was and still is a prominent
member. Hence the openly revisionist vein of the Ethiopian celebrations and the
future-oriented approach to the country’s past.1 The ensuing historiographical
consequences (reducing the role of Emperor Menelik, and particularly of the
Amhara leadership, in the independence of the country; playing down the
internal unification theme which had been the core element of most Adwa
Downloaded by [University of Nebraska, Lincoln] at 20:52 26 September 2015

historiography until the 1990s; emphasizing the African side of the victory
achieved over European encroachments) marked the 1996 centenary and laid the
basis for the new Adwa historiographic monument of post-Derg Ethiopia.
In Italy, a no less ambiguous mood accompanied the Ethiopian celebrations.
The Adwa anniversary clearly upset the Italian government of the time led by
Prime Minister Lamberto Dini and signalled, or rather confirmed, the persistent
institutional embarrassment in acknowledging the country’s colonial past. The
‘disaster’of Adwa—as the event was read by two generations of Italians—was
complicated from the start by a further failure of successive Italian governments
to fulfil the formal agreement, sanctioned by Italy’s signing of the Peace Treaty
of 1947, to give back all looted property which had been taken away from
ex-occupied territories (art. 37). In the case of Ethiopia this meant primarily the
return of the Aksum obelisk which Mussolini had ordered to be sent to Rome
to adorn the façade of what was going to be the Ministry of Italian Africa and
is now standing in front of the FAO building in Rome.2
As the Adwa celebrations approached in Italy, the historiographical monument
of national ‘shame’ appeared to obscure an open policy of reconciliation
between the two countries, while the yet unfulfilled Italian pledge to return the
sacred Aksum monument to Ethiopia on the basis of a firm policy of restitution
severely limited Italy’s participation in the Adwa anniversary celebrations. This
being the case, it is no wonder that Italian preparations to address Adwa Day
both nationally and internationally were far from convincing in spite of some
individual and institutional attempts,3 while the last-minute joint offering of a
wreath on the site to all those who had died in the battle by representatives of
both Ethiopian and Italian parliaments was seen as merely symbolic.4
Thus Italy and Ethiopia were forced, through the symbolic recurrence of a
centenary, to renew or re-address historical categories and interpretations of
what had become for both an unwieldy historiographical monument: in one
country, a somewhat outdated monument of national ‘shame’, in the other a far
from unanimous monument of nationalist glory. In this article, I will attempt to
analyse how the Adwa historiographical ‘monument’ was built in Italy by
subsequent layers of official myth-making, collective denials and institutional
acts of remembering. I will also argue that the time has come when historians
in both countries will have to deconstruct existing historiographical monuments
and approach them, as well as their intended reconstructions, as mere documents,
in order to re-contextualize a troubled past and make it open to new and more
inclusive interpretations.
 ADWA: FROM MONUMENT TO DOCUMENT 97

Having said this, let me clarify what I mean by historiographic ‘monuments’

and how they differ from historical ‘documents’. According to the French
medieval historian Jacques Le Goff, the term ‘monument’ derives from the Latin
monumentum, a word connected both to the Latin terms for human mind (mens)
and memory (memini, from the verb monere, ‘to make remember, enlighten,
instruct’), while the term ‘document’, itself deriving from the Latin docere, ‘to
teach’, has been used in the sense of ‘proof, testimony, text’, which is of course
the modern sense we historians give to our sources. Thus, the term ‘monumen-
tum’ was applied to the massive nineteenth century collections of documents
such as the German Monumenta Germaniae Historica or the Italian Monumenta
historiae patriae.5
The last example is expressive enough of the historiographc conception
Downloaded by [University of Nebraska, Lincoln] at 20:52 26 September 2015

which, in nineteenth-century positivist ideology, lay behind the term ‘monu-

ment’, i.e., the notion of preserving in one material construction or site the sense
of one’s own national past (historia patria) as a visible sign of the historical
identity of a given people. Thus monuments have the aim of perpetuating
through time the memory of events as they were perceived at the time and to
transmit them to the living: the statues, the stelae, or the funeral monuments of
today, are all sites of memory as received from, and perceived by, past societies,
symbolic ‘lieux de mémoire’6 and textual ‘structures of identity’7 for their
respective countries and peoples. Historical ‘documents’, on the contrary, reflect
not so much the ‘heritage of the past’ but the historians’ own choice in the
selection of past events for their reconstructions or representations of the past to
be enquired into and narrated, an act of free choice and interpretation rather than
one of mechanical transmission. Whenever this act of selection and interpret-
ation of the past is moulded into any form of renewed ‘Great Tale’, i.e. when
the document itself is transformed into a monument, writes Le Goff, ‘it is due
to the determinate effort made by any historical society to impose on the future,
whether consciously or not, the image it wants to project of itself.’8
When I went to Ethiopia in February 1996 as an external member of the
Department of History at Addis Ababa University, and tried to coordinate Italian
scholarly efforts to support the International Adwa Conference which was hastily
being organized by the Institute of Ethiopian Studies the following month, I was
taken aback by the strong emotions Adwa was still able to evoke among friends
and colleagues. I knew full well that to remember collectively a ‘painful’9
historical event such as the Battle of Adwa meant, for my own compatriots,
reviving a sense of grief, and exposing a major wound in national memory; to
do it together with the old contenders, i.e. in the presence of the old ‘enemy’ on
the very ‘site of memory’ of the battlefield, was seen by many to be a senseless,
not to say sadistic, exercise. Yet, together with other friends and colleagues,
Italian and Ethiopian, we firmly believed that to do so was to try to reflect
together on how collective memory—the official representation of the nation’s
past—had been selectively moulded, constructed and transmitted in our respect-
ive countries and, more generally, how unwieldy historiographical monuments
may encumber rather than liberate a healthy growth of collective identities. As
the process of remembering Adwa undoubtedly involved some awkward ques-
tions for both, we thought that the celebratory tone of the event should not stop
us from probing the past, each one of us addressing in his/her own way the
historiographical monument we were called on to glorify or to mourn.
 98 A. TRIULZI

In the past, the problem was simply avoided. The victors and the defeated
rarely joined hands in attending meetings and commemorations such as the one
under study. A look at Adwa’s symbolic imagery in both countries shows, if
seen jointly, just how much this has been the case. As an Italian historian, my
aim in participating in the Ethiopian celebrations was not so much to elaborate
individually a national grief which I felt distant and unwarranted, but to try to
rationalize and explain the very sense of that ‘national grief’, and attempt to
explicate just how much a collective memory can be treated as a ‘document’ or
a ‘source’, itself affected by the flow of time and historical contingencies.
Whether this source—which I call here an ‘historiographical monument’—can
be properly used as a faithful testimony of the past is another matter altogether,
which challenges all historians and their critical abilities. In a way, it was the
Downloaded by [University of Nebraska, Lincoln] at 20:52 26 September 2015

revisionist tone of Ethiopian official celebrations, coupled with the persisting

institutional embarrassment of the Italian State representatives, which forced me
to go back to the ‘complex’ of Adwa. My attempt here as an Italian historian is
to attempt to deconstruct its historiographical monument, to free the event from
its cumbersome ideological scaffolding, to visit Adwa simply as a ‘document’.
What then, I asked myself, as an Italian éthiopisant, was I to do with Adwa?
Could one avoid the wound, opt out of it, delegate the task to ‘colonial’
historians as I had done in the past, busying myself with other research topics,
other queries? Could one forget Adwa? Should one be still ‘offended’ by its
memory? Or, more precisely, which and whose memory was offended by this
battle? As I could not find simple answers to these questions, I further asked
myself what our respective countries should retain and transmit regarding Adwa
and, more generally, what should remain and what should go in the shaping of
our own collective memories. I do not think these are idle queries, as I am fully
aware that every memory, be it individual or collective, contains an element of
forgetting; in fact memory itself is an active process of remembering and
forgetting.10 The point is just how much forgetting may we allow in our official
remembering, and how much ‘national’ weight is to be placed in the re-construc-
tion or representation of an historic event such as the Battle of Adwa? Is Adwa
to be once and for all the same historiographical ‘monument’ to all members of
society, in Ethiopia or in Italy, and can we not accept it as representing different
memories to different people, a set of historical ‘documents’ to be preserved and
interpreted in such a way that future generations in both our countries may learn
to read it and accept it, or reject it, as an act of inclusive ‘re-memory’ as is done
elsewhere in the so-called postmodern/postcolonial world?11
Again, in the past things were or appeared to be more straightforward. We are
reminded by oral historians that the very making of oral traditions is a selective
process, i.e. in oral societies traditions choose to record mainly those aspects of
the past which expose no ill feelings or divided memories, as traditions tend to
retain what is considered to be of importance in any given society.12 But we also
know, from the Greek ‘practice of historical memory’, that another way of
coping with a fractured memory is to remove it from active remembering. The
‘democratic reconciliation’of 403 BC which in ancient Greece followed the
bloody oligarchy of the so-called ‘Thirty Tyrants’, proscribed the act of remem-
bering the recent past through a state edict which forbade its public memory: me
mnesikakein, ‘it is forbidden to remember evil’. To remember publicly the
Tyrants’ rule was considered then ‘to remember against’, an ‘act of vengence’
 ADWA: FROM MONUMENT TO DOCUMENT 99

which was to be severely punished because it revived the collective sorrow of

the Athenians under the Oligarchs.13 Must we today, both Italians and Ethiopi-
ans, respectively forget/remember Adwa’s official ‘victory’ or ‘defeat’ as the
very remembering/forgetting can bring only renewed bitterness among us and
revive the memory of our divided societies?
As the present time witnesses a multiple explosion of ‘overlapping memories’
which contrast or threaten the long-enduring ‘Great Tale’ of national historiogra-
phies, it is precisely symbolic commemorations such as the one under study
which may allow historians to take full cognizance that the past, all past, is not
a neutral reality we simply have to dig out of the sand, but is part of present-day
conflicts, a past which, in Faulkner’s words, is ‘not even passed’. Let us not be
surprised then if a country’s past often becomes a contested terrain of overlap-
Downloaded by [University of Nebraska, Lincoln] at 20:52 26 September 2015

ping memories and let us rather attempt to understand just why this is so. The
implications for the present will clearly appear if we start analysing how, in both
countries, the ‘monument’ of Adwa was gradually constructed and consolidated
in a nationalist vein of state patriotism which excluded or cancelled other voices
or visions of the event. In this article I will limit myself to the nationalist reading
of the Battle of Adwa in my own country.
To most Italians, the name of Adwa, a small locality near Aksum in Tigray,
scarcely excites today any visible ‘return of memory’ within Italian society.
Nicola Labanca has claimed that the ‘loss of memory’ concerning Adwa
coincided with the collective ‘removal’ of Italy’s colonial past from national
memory following the loss of colonial possessions after the war: ‘Names and
toponyms like Galliano or Adwa, which had fascinated, mobilised or awed three
to four generations of Italians, hardly move any feelings among present-day
Italians’.14 Italians appear to have removed their colonial past, as the Greeks did
in the case of the ‘Thirty Tyrants’, to a place of non-memory, something which
can only be ‘remembered against’. Thus the same author claims that ‘civil
memory’ in Italy today is torn between two opposed ‘myths’, a ‘warrior’ one of
conquest and an ‘indulgent’ one of forgetting.15 I believe this is a pertinent place
to start analysing briefly the historiographical build-up of colonial memory in
Italy. In order to de-construct it, we must first understand how it was built.
As in most historiographic monuments, Italy’s colonial memory was not
created or ‘invented’ by any exclusive set of events or historical figures, but was
the product of time and of the unfolding of internal forces and international
events. The gradual development of an official memory of colonialism was
therefore winding and alternate: it was done by stages, some of which was
intentional, some spontaneous, and represented in general the weak economic
and political posture of Italy in Europe. In the colonial arena, in particular, Italy
was from the beginning perceived by the other colonial powers both as a
latecomer and a junior partner. As such, Italian colonial action and policies were
aimed first and foremost at demonstrating the country’s ‘maturity’ in the
international arena, and its entitlement to be considered part of the Great Powers’
tradition; they were less the result of a conscious and widespread belief in her
‘civilizing’ or imperial mission. It must be emphasized, also, that the building of
the colonial monument in Italy was highly controversial from its inception:
parliamentary opposition at first, and street demonstrations and protest in the
country at large, accompanied every single phase of Italy’s expansion in
Africa.16 Thus the landing of Italian troops at Massawa in 1885—the first
 100 A. TRIULZI

stepping-stone in the build-up of the Italian colonial monument—saw at the

same time the beginning of Italy’s expansion overseas and the birth in the Italian
Parliament of a consistent and highly vocal anti-colonial protest.17
Thus, the first foundation of the colonial monument in Italy was the ‘landing’
of its troops at Massawa. It is here that the full power of symbolic representation
was conveyed to the public at large in post-Risorgimento Italy: the Massawa
landing was presented to the public as a replica of Garibaldi’s landing of the
heroic Thousand (I Mille) at Marsala earlier in the century during the country’s
war of independence. The similar number of soldiers (800 bersaglieri), carried
by the same Rubattino Company who had led the Thousand to Marsala, the
secrecy of the mission (not even the Italian Commander of the Expedition, Col.
Tancredi Saletta, knew where the real landing was to take place), the peaceful
Downloaded by [University of Nebraska, Lincoln] at 20:52 26 September 2015

reception by the local inhabitants in the Egyptian-held port of the Red Sea, the
manifest ‘benevolence’ of the British, all seemed to conjure up an idea of a
peaceful expansion in direct line with the Risorgimento epic. The Italian public
was fed with an image of the ‘new’ Thousand who had volunteered to make the
country greater in the wake of the wars of independence. The glaring white
uniforms of the initial military administration, the strange oriental-sounding titles
of local troops (such as bashi-buzuk, or muntaz), the loyalty and valiant
behaviour of the faithful Eritrean ascari, the absence of serious conflict on the
ground in the initial period, all laid the foundations for the first layer of the
colonial monument: a poor peoples’ mission of peace among other poor folks
ruled by foreign despots.18
Parliamentary opposition at the beginning was vocal but ineffectual. It is
interesting to note that the very Risorgimento values which were openly recalled
by the Massawa operation were similarly invoked by the opposition who vainly
asked the government to withdraw the ‘Mille’ from Massawa: the Italian people
‘demand bread and work’ (p. 177), not colonial expansion, pleaded the Repub-
licans; both the industrialists from the north and the Catholics attacked the
ambiguous ‘civilization of the gun’ (p. 198) employed by the government; the
isolated socialist Andrea Costa, forcefully asked the government for public
engagement not in the colonial field but in finding ‘the solution of what is the
torment and the rightful burden of our century: the social question: the Italy that
works, I dare say, the true Italy, does not want colonial expansion … The Italy
that works is thirsty for justice, is thirsty for freedom, is thirsty for culture; and
as a basis for every intellectual, political and moral improvement, she demands
a bettering of her economic conditions’ (p. 203). The Risorgimento rhetoric of
the government led by Agostino Depretis put aside all criticism and managed to
win the day. Thus by 1885 the stepping-stone of the Italian colonial monument
had been symbolically laid down.
The second phase of the colonial build-up started, oddly enough, after two
uneventful years, with a military defeat, that of Dogali, which was followed by
an upsurge of nationalistic tribute to Italian military heroism. At Dogali, a
little-known locality along the Saati caravan route in Eritrea, 500 Italian soldiers
under the orders of Col. Tommaso De Cristoforis, the Commander of the Italian
fort at Monkullo, were ordered overnight to reinforce the Saati garrison being
pressed by the forces of ras Alula. Before reaching their destination, the Italian
reinforcements were caught and annihilated on 26 January 1887 after a violent
man-to-man clash with ras Alula’s soldiers. The Dogali dead were to be the
 ADWA: FROM MONUMENT TO DOCUMENT 101

missing second stepping-stone for the strengthening of the new foundations of

the Italian colonial monument.
The news of the defeat reached Parliament on 1 February in the midst of a
budgetary discussion. The Italian Premier, Agostino Depretis, announced it to
the Assembly with a ‘mournful, dead, almost imperceptible’19 voice together
with a new budgetary request of 5 million lire for the sending of fresh troops.
A chain of demonstrations flared up in the country following the news of the
military defeat. Public opinion, through the major media of the day, unanimously
condemned the government while Parliament hotly discussed the announced
reinforcements and hastily approved the required budget for the African settle-
ment. The ‘legend’ of the Dogali heroes, which the reports of the day recorded
to have been found all ‘lined up’ as if presenting arms to their dead colleagues,
Downloaded by [University of Nebraska, Lincoln] at 20:52 26 September 2015

not only helped to consolidate the basis of the colonial foundation in the country,
being revived in endless mourning celebrations, but was directly aimed at
silencing the growing opposition in the country towards the government’s
overseas expansionism.
Roberto Battaglia was the first historian to analyse the build-up of the Dogali
legend which followed the news of the defeat.20 The Dogali battle was an
unexpected setback which risked putting the Eritrean military expedition in
danger; the nationalistic reaction which ensued allowed the African adventure to
proceed. The ‘legend of Dogali’21 was shaped mainly by popular newspapers
which gave different ‘versions’ of the battle slowly transforming the Dogali
event into a popular myth.22 The first version offered to public opinion was sheer
Abyssinian treachery: Alula’s forces had been monitoring the Italian troops and
attacked them by surprise while they were hastily eating their rations. Before
being decimated by the enemy, Col. De Cristoforis was reported to have ordered
blowing up the ammunitions, which his loyal soldiers did, blowing themselves
apart along with the vicious enemy.23 Soon a second version followed, possibly
influenced by military circles worried by the negative effects of the Dogali
setback. The second version was based on the report of Capt. Gennaro Tanturri,
the field officer who headed the Italian relief expedition and was the first to visit
the battlefield a few hours after the event. He described the bodies of the dead
Italian soldiers at Dogali in this way: ‘All laid in order as if they had been set
out in line.’24
More elaborate versions followed shortly. The most engaging one, which was
destined to create the core of Dogali’s legend, was based on an alleged report
given by an agonised survivor in the Massawa hospital a few hours after the
battle. Amidst the anonymous dying soldiers, the Italian Commander-General
Carlo Genè and his officers were told the story which was destined to mould the
collective memory of the event:

‘There were some ten of us still standing’, the soldier continued. ‘Colonel [De Cristo-
foris] was among us … Around us a cloud of Abyssinians attacked us rabidly with their
spears … All of a sudden the Colonel told us to stop … and we stopped’ … ‘And then?’
the General asked. ‘Then he said a few words to us I remember very well …’ ‘Do you
remember what the poor Colonel said at that point? … Say it again then, son’. ‘He said
this to us: “You are as sacred to death as your comrades who have fallen here. It is your
supreme duty to die with the name of your country on your lips …” Then we all shouted:
“Viva l’Italia!” … ’ The General and his officers were deeply moved; some had tears in
 102 A. TRIULZI

their eyes. ‘Then’, the soldier continued, ‘the Colonel shouted: “Let us honour our dead.
Present arms to your fallen comrades!” And we presented arms …’25

Oral tradition was not the only source. State bureaucracy stepped in to help
consolidate the build-up of the colonial revival in the country. The State version
was portrayed mainly through ‘spontaneous’ mass celebrations and official
commemorations which were enacted to highlight the national significance of the
event. Three such events may be recalled here: mass welcome in Naples for the
return of the Dogali survivors one month after the battle; the official commem-
oration the government organized on the third anniversary of the battle; and the
formal naming shortly afterwards in memory of the event of a Roman ‘Piazza
dei Cinquecento’ (‘The 500’).
Downloaded by [University of Nebraska, Lincoln] at 20:52 26 September 2015

The return of the wounded Dogali survivors to Naples, in February 1887, saw
a mass outburst of popular excitement. Some 300,000 people are said to have
amassed at Naples harbour and along the official route to cheer the wounded
soldiers and the survivors. From the compelling chronicles of the day we learn
that the Town Committee who had been asked to coordinate Naples’ celebrations
had given careful instructions to those watching from their windows along the
route only to throw flower petals, not bouquets or stems, as they might hurt the
wounded soldiers; so Neapolitan ladies, ‘to abide by the order’, allegedly
‘dropped on the heroes of Dogali just handfuls of petals.’26
In April 1890, the third anniversary of the battle was celebrated throughout the
country with careful preparations. For the first time since Italian Unification,
civilian and religious authorities sat side by side to sanctify the official State
mourning. For the first time since Independence, the national flag was taken into
Italian Churches while the religious blessings of State ceremonies anticipated ‘a
sort of truce between Church and State which was solemnly sanctioned in the
name of Dogali’. As a consequence of the new entente, the Catholic press soon
started modifying its attacks against the hated ‘lay’ Government and its overseas
policies.27
The meaning of such celebrations was obvious. The strengthening of the
colonial image needed popular support and a different institutional backing to
soothe and divert the strong opposition which was forcefully manifesting itself
in the country and for which the coercive apparatus of the State was simply not
enough.28 Particularly in central and northern Italy, the opposition to colonial
expansion manifested itself in numerous street demonstrations. Never before had
North and South been in such direct confrontation in Italy over the colonial
issue—the industrialized North opposed the exuberant colonial expenses; the
impoverished South, fed with visions of new lands of plenty, favoured the
expansion—while a new wave of protest crossed the entire country. At Terni, on
4 February 1887, a printed leaflet distributed in the street by one of the town’s
democratic societies succinctly reminded the population that ‘Italian indepen-
dence was achieved by ousting foreign domination. African lands are not made
independent through foreign occupation’.29
Yet again, while in Parliament the more vociferous socialist and radical
opposition renewed its bitter attacks on the government (for the colonial
adventure we shall give ‘neither a man nor a cent’, cried the socialist bard,
Andrea Costa), the ‘honour of the flag’ won the day. At the official naming of
‘Piazza dei Cinquecento’, the uncompromising poet-laureate Giosué Carducci,
 ADWA: FROM MONUMENT TO DOCUMENT 103

who had refused to officiate the ceremony, was promptly substituted by the more
accommodating though less famous poet Ruggiero Bonghi. In his highly
nationalistic commemoration, Bonghi re-established the vacillating pedestal of
the colonial monument and hailed ‘the Honour, the Country, [and] the King’ for
whom ‘the poor and blessed dead of Dogali had sacrificed themselves’. At the
Quirinale, the Royal Palace in Rome, simple soldiers and wounded survivors
of a national battle were marshalled in for the first time to be saluted and
‘thanked’ by an obliging King Umberto and a ‘very simply dressed’ Queen
Margherita. Thus Dogali managed to unify the country: North and South, rich
and poor, Church and State, all lined up to ask for a proud and manly return to
Africa.30
Through these celebrations, another layer of the colonial monument was
Downloaded by [University of Nebraska, Lincoln] at 20:52 26 September 2015

carefully laid. At the popular level, the newly coined ‘Pizza Margherita’ with the
three colours of the Italian flag—the red tomatoes, the white mozzarella cheese
and the green leaves of basil—was the symbolic representation of the socially
reconciled country.31 Thus Dogali played a crucial role in the new colonial turn
and may be rightly seen, in the words of Roberto Battaglia, as a ‘dividing line’
in contemporary Italian history and an ‘ideological revanche’ for its expansionist
bourgeoisie.32 The March to Adwa had already started.
The aftermath of Dogali saw in effect the beginning of what was to be the
mood of future years. In the early 1890s, the moderate Prime Minister Depretis
strengthened his weak coalition by dismissing his own men and incorporating
some of his keen antagonists who now pleaded vociferously the new national
priorities: ‘The Country is not under discussion’, cried the new Minister of the
Interior, Francesco Crispi, in one of the first authoritarian actions against street
demonstrations he was to be famous for. And indeed Adwa was preceded by a
series of bloody repressions in the country, particularly in southern Italy, where
a vast movement of social protest (the ‘Fasci Siciliani’) was significantly
repressed with an iron fist by Crispi’s army. Indeed, Crispi’s handling of the
southern rebellion revealed just how closely linked were his government’s
policies of internal repression and external expansionism. Southern hunger for
land and economic betterment was played on by Crispi without any scruple to
justify colonial expansion: the hunger of the poor and the country’s international
prestige were cleverly put together to support Italy’s advance into the African
interior, and the Sicilian rebels were significantly compared to the ‘Abyssini-
ans’33: the equivocal Treaty of Wuchale (Uccialli) in 1889, the declaration of the
Eritrean colony (1890), the requisition of the highland lands (1893–95), or the
military incursions into Tigray (1895) were some of the major steps through
which Crispi gave the green light to the military to keep internal order in Italy
and ignite external expansion along the Red Sea coast.
The social cost of the military and authoritarian build-up which characterized
the various governments led by Crispi between 1893 and 1896 appeared to be
enormous. The colonial monument was but one of its manifestations: it carried
inevitably new forms of nationalism, militarism and expansionism with their
open culture of arrogance and violence. When Adwa arrived, it was in many
ways an ‘announced death’. From the point of view of Italian history, ‘Crispism’
meant the union of authoritarian forces coupled with governmental ambiguity
and parliamentary impotence. The only real support for Crispi’s African policies
came from the King, and it was the Crown, not Parliament, which upheld his
 104 A. TRIULZI

successive governments.34 The consequences for Italian society were no less

serious. It is in these years that the opposition was silenced, the honour of the
flag was transformed into the honour of the Italian people and class and racial
prejudices joined hands in a new and dubious alliance.
It is in these years that new slogans against the ‘primitive’ and ‘barbarian’
enemy were coined (‘a cruel, hypocritical, and bloody bandit’, so King Menelik
was defined by Piccinini), and value-ridden underestimations of the enemy’s
fighting abilities, physical endurance, and capacity to unite when threatened from
outside started undermining Italian judgement of the situation in the field. It is
significant of the sudden turn of events, for instance, that while in 1887 an Italian
expansionist deputy, Menotti Garibaldi, scornfully reminded the Assembly that
during the wars of independence ‘truly we were the Abyssinians when we faced
Downloaded by [University of Nebraska, Lincoln] at 20:52 26 September 2015

the Germans or the French’,35 in 1894 General Roberto Morra di Lavriano, after
the military repression he had just carried out in Sicily, was able to compare his
successful mopping up operations against southern peasants to ‘the victory of
Agordat’.36 In between these two dates, and these two symbolic analogies, the
Italian colonial monument had reached its full momentum: in the aftermath of
Dogali, the Ethiopian resistance fighters were compared to Risorgimento patri-
ots; on the eve of Adwa, Sicilian peasants were equalled to rioting Africans to
be easily ‘pacified’ and brutally put down.
Not even the siege of Amba Alagi in October 1895, and the untimely death
of Major Pietro Toselli, one of the best Italian officers on the ground who had
been ordered by Baratieri to maintain the fortified position in Tigray, held
the government back. For the second time, isolated Italian troops, left out
of reach without effective coordination or military cover, were to meet their
fateful destiny on the battlefield. Again, the reaction within Italian society was
one of outrage and disillusionment, and a vehement but weak opposition
attacked the ‘indecent comedy of the flag and its honour’ (‘a nation today
does not lose its honour because of a lost fight in a far away country; rather
it loses it when it invades without reason a territory not its own’, wrote Il
Secolo on 12 December 1895). Yet Crispi and his majority, contrary to Andrea
Costa’s pledge, managed again to push the Italian Parliament to vote yet more
funds and more soldiers for the African campaign. The Italian bourgeoisie
appeared to be more able to celebrate its dead than to renounce its vision of
national prestige.
The confrontation in the country and in Parliament after the defeat of Amba
Alagi which preceded the Adwa disaster was tense: the request for a parliamen-
tary debate was commented on by Edoardo Scarfoglio, Director of Il Mattino:
‘Vote? What vote? Politics again? Now we must make war. Italians want to
make war in Africa, that is all.’37 In January 1896 the socialist spokesman
Filippo Turati went to the extent of wishing publicly a ‘severe and resolute
defeat’ for the nation so that its government may at last ‘put a stop to the shame
of our arms brought against the independence of another people’.38 It is in this
climate that, starting first within the student protest movement in Rome after
Amba Alagi and then extending well beyond it, the cry of ‘Viva Menelik’ started
being increasingly used in public demonstrations, thus anticipating and forecast-
ing the impending defeat. On the eve of the battle of Adwa, the building of the
colonial monument had again found its controversial origins. In Italian popular
imagery, the figure of the ruthless Ethiopian ruler had thus become a contro-
 ADWA: FROM MONUMENT TO DOCUMENT 105

versial symbol of protest for which the Italian working class ‘turned the “myth
of Africa” upside down and turned it to its own advantage’.39
It is no wonder then that the Battle of Adwa, which was celebrated in Ethiopia
in 1996 as ‘an African victory’, was and is still perceived in Italy—at least by
those who did and do not share their country’s colonial ambition or heritage—as
a ‘strange defeat’, the inevitable consequence of military misjudgement and poor
colonial policies, coupled with ambiguous feelings of collective guilt and
national humiliation.
No one was more aware of Adwa’s ambiguous implications for the burgeon-
ing imperial mission of the country than the Fascist regime which ruled Italy
between the two wars. Right from the start, Adwa was not seen as a simple
military defeat but a major political and psychological setback which gave rise
Downloaded by [University of Nebraska, Lincoln] at 20:52 26 September 2015

to a dangerous defeatist syndrome in Italian society. This is why the Battle of

Adwa was in a way hidden from public memory, and no state celebrations or
commemorations of its dead were officially organized or ritually officiated for
some forty years. Yet, when Fascism took power, Adwa started again being
‘remembered’, though in a reverse way: the defeat of Adwa could be avenged
only through an equal if not greater enemy defeat. Ironically, it was Fascism
which revived the ‘shame’ of Adwa and turned it to its own advantage: thus the
name of Adwa, and even its shame, was used to nurture in the early 1930s a
nationalistic feeling of revenge within Italian society that was sadly, and
successfully, accomplished by the Fascist aggression of Ethiopia in 1936.
It was then, and only then, that the last stage of the Italian colonial monument
was built through the deadly revenge of Adwa on the battlefield. Other new dead
soldiers were used to suppress the old ones. The new memory of Adwa, which
included the 1896 defeat only to extol the victory of 1936, was ritually laid down
in the solemn mourning organized by the regime on 1 March 1936 in front of
the country’s Monument to the Unknown Soldier in Piazza Venezia in Rome. On
that day, forty years after the event, Fascist Italy officially commemorated ‘the
avenged dead’ in a major state ritual which was officiated in front of the Duce,
the Monarchy and a representation of all the military corps. Adwa’s survivors,
though included in the meticulously scheduled official parade, were in fact
‘studiously excluded from participation in the rite’ as their presence would have
revived ‘the burning spectrum of defeat’.40 Thus Italy’s historiographical monu-
ment of her colonial memory was completed more than fifty years after the first
landing at Massawa.41
It did not last long. Between 1941 and 1943 Italy lost all her colonies to the
enemy, and officially ‘renounced’ them in the 1947 Peace Treaty. Since then,
another half-century has elapsed, yet the Adwa ‘complex’—with its acrimonious
mixture of self-pride and defeat—has remained a stumbling block in Italy’s
perception of its African past. The fall of Fascism and the abrupt loss of Italy’s
African Empire signalled the downplaying of the colonial past in the collective
conscience of the country. In the post-war period, Adwa became a synonym of
Italian colonialism and of its failure, something too painful to revive or
remember.42 The visible signs of Italy’s colonial past were quickly erased from
public memory and institutions: the Ministry of Italian Africa was abolished in
1953, teaching of colonial history at university level had disappeared by 1960.
The colonial past was silenced: it could only be remembered against, or put aside
as non-memory. While the African continent slowly decolonized, the absence in
 106 A. TRIULZI

Italy of a public debate concerning the country’s colonial past permitted new
waves of ideological recriminations and ambiguous forms of nostalgia which
further nurtured the Adwa ‘complex’.
To put this battle in its historical context, to present it as a revealing and
multi-faceted document and not just as an immovable monument of glory or
shame, does not imply today a desire to forget, or to remember against, the deeds
of the past, but to try to go back to some of the roots of such a formidable chain
of events, and study their consequences and their very making—including their
ideological representations—in both societies. In Italy, some of the wounds
inflicted at Adwa, by Adwa, are still open, as reflected, 100 years after the event,
both by the Italian government’s open embarrassment in front of the Adwa
centenary, and by the lingering within Italy’s ‘civil memory’ of the contrasting
Downloaded by [University of Nebraska, Lincoln] at 20:52 26 September 2015

myths of conquest and forgetting.

Overlapping and divided memories thus haunt a ‘tense’ past both in Italy and
Ethiopia. Others may want to go back and examine how, in Ethiopia, too, a no
less nationalistic monument was built around the Adwa event to protect it from
other voices and visions claiming recognition and redress of historic wrongs
within the country.43 To re-contextualize such memories today appears to be a
first step in the right direction. Tense memories may become divisive if we fail
to see them or to recognize their request for public acknowledgement. To
recognize their existence is perhaps a sign of a healthy ‘return of memory’ in
both countries which must necessarily be neither vindictive nor forgetful.

Notes
1. Not all were convinced. Several protests were made against the ‘Tigrayan government’ which was accused
by the Amhara on more than one occasion of twisting the country’s history. Bahru Zewde, in his Opening
Address to the Centenary Conference which was held in Addis Ababa on 26 February 1996, complained
that a commemoration which should have encompassed ‘supreme national consensus and single-minded-
ness’ was ‘attended by considerable ambivalence and confusion in some circles’ as well as by ‘doubt and
uncertainty.’See Abdussamed Ahmed and Richard Pankhurst, Adwa Victory Centenary Conference 26
February—2 March 1996, Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University, 1998, p. 8. On 2 March
1996, President Nagaso Gidada, in his official speech at the Adwa Centenary celebration which was held
at Masqal Square in Addis Ababa, defied the national ethos when he declared: ‘Emperor Menelik invaded
the peoples in southern, eastern and western Ethiopia and imposed upon them a brutal national
oppression.’ See Maimire Mennasemay, ‘Adwa: A Dialogue between the Past and the Present’, Northeast
African Studies, 42, 1997, p. 81. See also Sven Rubenson, ‘The Falsification of History: When, Who and
Why’, Ethiopian Register, 3, 3, 1996. On the weight of a future-oriented reading of the past see John
Lonsdale, ‘African Pasts in Africa’s Future’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 23, 1, 1989,
pp. 126–146. A first draft of this article was read at the Addis Ababa Conference but was not included in
the official Proceedings.
2. On the tortuous return of the Aksum obelisk to Ethiopia Richard Pankhurst has been a most tenacious
spokesman since early times. See R. Pankhurst, ‘Ethiopia and the Loot of the Italian Invasion: 1935–1936’,
Présence Africaine, 72, 1969, pp. 85–95. For a recent commentary in the Italian press, see the appeal
‘L’obelisco di Axum va restituito’, Il Sole-24 Ore, 30 September 2002. See also Andrea Semplici, ‘Il
fulmine di Axum’, Afriche e orienti, 42, 2002, pp. 57–63.
3. Among the individual contributions, one should mention Carlo Stella’s Adwa: a Bibliography, which was
prepared for the event and was distributed to the participants of the International Conference; the
documentary and photographic material prepared by a group of Italian University teachers and PhD
students in collaboration with their Ethiopian colleagues which was included in the successful Adwa
Exhibition shown in Addis Ababa and (partly) in Adwa; the financial contribution offered by the Italian
community in Ethiopia to participate in the expenses for the celebrations, etc. At an institutional level, one
should mention the logistical and scientific support to the Adwa commemoration granted by the Istituto
Italo-Africano (now IsIAO) in Rome which, however, was not able to convince the Italian Foreign
Ministry to support the Ethiopian celebrations or assist the Italian participants; the personal goodwill and
local collaboration shown at all levels by the Italian Embassy in Ethiopia and particularly by the Italian
Ambassador, Dr Maurizio Melani, who went out of his way to ensure the maximum ‘unofficial’
 ADWA: FROM MONUMENT TO DOCUMENT 107
collaboration to an initiative which the Italian Government did not openly support. The Italian authorities’
handling of the Adwa ‘affair’ was criticised by Angelo Del Boca at the opening of the International
Conference on Adwa which the Italian historian organized in Piacenza with local support in April 1996.
See Angelo Del Boca (ed.), Adua. Le ragioni di una sconfitta, Laterza, Bari, 1997, particularly pp. 3–21.
4. The wreath was laid, on the Ethiopian side, by Dawit Yohannes, President of the Senate, and on the Italian
side by Giangiacomo Migone, President of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. On the limits of Italian
participation in the Adwa commemoration, see ibid., pp. 3–11.
5. See Jacques Le Goff, Storia e memoria, Einaudi, Torino, 1982, pp. 443–455.
6. See Pierre Nora, Les lieux de mémoire, vol. I, Gallimard, Paris, 1984. The Italian historical landscape of
old and new sites of memory has been reconstructed by Mario Isnenghi (ed.), I luoghi della memoria, 3
vols. Bari, Laterza, 1996–1997.
7. See Bogumil Jewsiewicki and Jean Létourneau (eds), Constructions identitaires, Celat, Québec, 1992.
8. See Le Goff, Storia e memoria, p. 454.
9. See Nicola Labanca, In marcia verso Adua, Einaudi, Torino, 1993, p. 391. The year 1896 was to many
Italians the year of Adwa. Edoardo Scarfoglio, then Director of the Naples daily Il Mattino, wrote the
following epitaph for the year ending on 31 December 1896: ‘The year which just ended belongs to those
Downloaded by [University of Nebraska, Lincoln] at 20:52 26 September 2015

one cannot forget: an entire generation will carry its gloomy and sinister memory to its grave.’
10. See Yosef H. Yerushalmi, ‘Riflessioni sull’oblio’, in Yerushalmi et al., Usi dell’oblio, Einaudi, Torino,
1990, pp. 9–26.
11. See Catherine Hall, ‘Histories, Empires, and the Post-Colonial Moment’, in Ian Chambers and Lidia Curti
(eds), The Post-Colonial Question, Routledge, London, 1996, p. 66.
12. See J. C. Miller, ‘Introduction: Listening for the African Past’, in J.C. Miller (ed.), The African Past
Speaks. Essays in Oral Tradition and History, Dawson, Folkestone, Kent, 1980, pp. 11–59.
13. See Nicole Loraux, ‘Sull’amnistia e il suo contrario’, in Yerushalmi et al., Usi dell’oblio, Einaudi, Torino,
1990, pp. 30–32.
14. Labanca, In marcia verso Adua, p. xi.
15. Ibid., p. x. For an historical analysis of the dilemma, see also Nicola Labanca, ‘Riabilitare o vendicare
Adua? Storici militari nella preparazione della campagna d’Etiopia’, in Angelo Del Boca, Le guerre
coloniali del fascismo, Laterza, Bari, 1991, pp. 132–169.
16. The anti-colonial movement in Italy was probably the most important one in Europe at the time. This was
due to a series of internal events which saw the gradual mounting in the mid-1880s of a short-lived but
highly vocal joint opposition to Italy’s overseas expansion led by the Church, northern industry and the
Left. The strong opposition to colonial expansion by the Catholic Church and the Italian Catholic
movement was due to its steadfast resistance to the ‘lay’ State created through the wars of independence
in the 1860s. This explains the initial and forceful opposition by the Catholic movement to the Italian
government’s overseas expansion which was labelled as ‘barbarian’. A recent review of the Catholic
positions is to be found in A. Canavero, ‘I cattolici di fronte al colonialismo’, in Del Boca (ed.), Adua.
Le ragioni di una sconfitta, Laterza, Bari, pp. 91–114. The northern industrial and financial complex was
opposed initially to State expansionism because of the slow pace of the national economy and the lack of
internal progress. The Republican, Radical and Socialist movements which composed the heterogeneous
Italian Left of the time opposed the colonial ‘adventure’ on ethico-political grounds both in Parliament and
in the country at large. See in particular Giovanni Perticone, La politica coloniale dell’Italia negli atti,
documenti e discussioni parlamentari, Poligrafico dello Stato, Rome, 1965; Romain Rainero,
L’anticolonialismo italiano da Assab a Adua (1869–1896), ed. Comunità, Milano, 1971; Angelo Del Boca,
Gli italiani in Africa orientale, 4 vols, Laterza, Bari, 1976–84. A recent review of the socialist position
is in Renato Monteleone ‘L’anticolonialismo socialista in Italia tra la fine dell’Ottocento e l’inizio del
Novecento’, in Del Boca (ed.), Adua. Le ragioni di una sconfitta, Laterza, Bari, pp. 79–89.
17. See Roberto Battaglia, La prima guerra d’Africa, Einaudi, Torino, 1958, p. 242.
18. The best description of the landing and its symbolic implications is in Battaglia, La prima guerra,
pp. 170–206.
19. Battaglia, p. 242.
20. Ibid., in particular pp. 230–264.
21. According to Roberto Battaglia, the ‘springing up of the legend around the bare facts of Dogali extended
its dimensions and made it impossible to achieve the stark truth’. Ibid., p. 237.
22. The different versions of the Dogali battle, and a chronology of the 1887 events, are to be found in a serial
publication issued at the time of the events by the Roman popular publisher Edoardo Perino. See G.
Piccinini, La guerra d’Africa, Perino Ed., Rome, 1887. The series narrated in 150 instalments the ‘African
war’; it came out four times a week during the Eritrean expedition.
23. See Piccinini, La guerra d’Africa, pp. 23–26.
24. The report of Capt. Tanturri is in Ministero della Guerra, Comando del Corpo di Stato Maggiore, Ufficio
Storico, Storia militare della colonia Eritrea, vol. 1, 1935, pp. 110–115. See also Battaglia, La prima
guerra, pp. 236–237.
25. Piccinini, La guerra d’Africa, pp. 94–95. The story of the wounded soldier became part of the national epic
through endless accounts in popular literature. See for all Alfredo Oriani, Fino a Dogali, Laterza, Bari,
1918, pp. 280–290, and Battaglia, La prima guerra, pp. 239–241.
 108 A. TRIULZI

26. Piccinini, La guerra d’Africa, p. 156.

27. See Battaglia, La prima guerra, p. 255.
28. Ibid, particularly pp. 242–259. At a popular level, Piccinini’s La guerra d’Africa contributed to the
colonial revival by mixing fictional elements and private lives with the unfolding of colonial events. The
alleged ‘sympathy’ born between ras Alula’s daughter and Col. Piano’s twelve-year-old son Emanuele
after Dogali was not meant so much to ‘humanize’ the enemy as to dilute the explosive potential of a
bloody setback into a serialized love story to feed the yet uninvolved Italian public. After Emanuele Piano
left, the love story continued with a non existent but passionate Abyssinian Prince called Hebron, the
alleged son of Emperor Tewodros. Piccinini’s instalments had so much success that they were to be
reprinted soon into Gli amori della figlia di ras Alula in Affrica, Salani Ed., Florence, 1888.
29. Battaglia, La prima guerra, p. 250.
30. Ibid., pp. 259–263.
31. See Clara Gallini, ‘Il mangia maccheroni e la Regina Margherita’, in Giochi pericolosi. Frammenti di un
immaginario alquanto razzista, Manifestolibri, Roma, 1996, pp. 85–97.
32. Battaglia, La prima guerra, p. 262.
33. Ibid., pp. 566–567.
Downloaded by [University of Nebraska, Lincoln] at 20:52 26 September 2015

34. See Labanca, In marcia verso Adua, pp. 84, 310–311.

35. See Battaglia, La prima guerra, p. 285.
36. Ibid., p. 566. The sentence was uttered by General Morra di Lavriano, the ‘winner’ at Agordat, in Palermo
on 8 February 1894 during a public speech he made after he had led the Sicilian repression. See Napoleone
Colajanni, Gli avvenimenti di Sicilia e le loro cause, Sandron, Palermo, pp. 192–193.
37. See Labanca, In marcia verso Adua, p. 72.
38. See La critica sociale, 19 January 1896; Battaglia, La prima guerra, pp. 668–669.
39. Ibid., p. 669.
40. See Mimmo Franzinelli, ‘Clero militare e primo colonialismo italiano’, Studi Piacentini, 20, 1996, p. 171.
41. It is interesting to note that the Army’s official report on the Battle of Adwa came out in 1935 and that,
during the same year, General Baratieri was informally rehabilitated. See Labanca, ‘Riabilitare o
vendicare’, pp. 144–151, and Franzinelli, ‘Clero militare’, p. 174.
42. See N. Labanca, ‘Memorie e complessi di Adua. Appunti’, in Del Boca (ed.), Adua. Le ragioni di una
sconfitta, pp. 397–416.
43. See Mennasemay, ‘Adwa: A Dialogue’; see also Ivo Strecker, ‘Glories and Agonies of the Ethiopian Past’,
Social Anthropology, 2, 3, 1994, pp. 303–312.