In 1889, after Emperor Yohannes had been killed by the Mahdists, Menelik, claiming direct male descent from Solomon and Sheba, finally became emperor. A mix of regal grandeur and accessible geniality, he ‘showed great intelligence’ and ‘boyish curiosity’, especially about western weaponry: ‘very friendly’, noted an Italian visitor, ‘a fanatic for weapons’. Fast-talking and laconic, he answered all petitioners with ‘Yes maybe.’ Having trained his troops to use French, British and Russian artillery and rifles, some captured, some purchased, he expanded from the Amhara region in the centre, in ten years of conquest, incorporating Tigray and other northern provinces, but also smiting the southern kingdom of Kaffa and others, massacring enemies and enslaving thousands. Headquartered in a new capital, Addis Ababa, founded by his wife, Menelik created an Ethiopian empire which endured, with notable interludes, until the 1970s. Those wars and the introduction of Italian cattle brought rinderpest and a famine that may have been Africa’s worst ever, killing ten million people.
Menelik was happy to leave Eritrea to the Italians, but now Crispi ordered the annexation of Ethiopia, trying to trick Menelik. ‘This country is mine,’ he declared, ‘and no other nation can have it.’ Crispi boasted that Italy would rout the African ‘barbarians’ and bring the emperor to Rome ‘in a cage’.
‘An enemy has crossed the sea,’ declared Menelik, ‘burrowing under our territories like a mole … I negotiated with these people,’ but ‘Enough! I’ll repel the invader.’ The Italian general Oreste Baratieri underestimated Menelik, who quickly defeated one Italian unit and then, mustering a huge army, marched north, riding on a scarlet saddle, clad in white robes and sheltering under a golden parasol. Crispi reprimanded Baratieri for being defeated by African ‘monkeys’: ‘This is military phthisis, not a war … We’re ready for any sacrifice whatever the cost to save the honour of the army and the prestige of the monarchy.’ Baratieri with his 20,000 men, including his Eritrean allies, attempted a surprise assault on the heights at Adowa, sending three brigades up mountain paths in darkness and hoping to draw Menelik into battle. Commanding from a mountain top with Empress Taytu, the emperor defeated each Italian brigade separately. Suddenly Empress Taytu jumped up. ‘Courage!’ she said. ‘Victory is ours! Strike!’ She sent in her men and Menelik followed with 25,000 reserves, killing 43 per cent of the Italians and three out of five generals, an African triumph unprecedented in colonial history. Crispi fell from power. Menelik continued his conquests as he played the Europeans against each other. He now backed construction of a railway from Addis to the French port of Djibouti, granting the franchise to his powerful Guadeloupian doctor, Vitale.* As the Italians dreamed of ‘the vengeance of Adowa’, in neighbouring Sudan the British were avenging General Gordon.
On 2 September 1898, at Omdurman, outside Khartoum in Sudan, a young cavalryman with his regiment, the 2nd Lancers, prepared to charge the khalifal army, an intimidating force of 50,000 spearmen and cavalry, waving banners, wearing jibbahs and chainmail. Earlier he had scanned the enemy ranks through his binoculars. ‘Never shall I see such a sight again,’ wrote the twenty-three-year-old Winston Churchill, a brash, bumptious Old Harrovian journalist, descendant of John Churchill, duke of Marlborough, and son of a maverick politician Lord Randolph, who had died of syphilis.
Herbert Kitchener,
Ice-cold, solitary and obsessional, Kitchener, six foot two, blond, with pewter eyes (and a cast in one of them) and a face like a mask, was a self-made Anglo-Irish officer, a celibate, probably a repressed homosexual, who combined steely acumen, vindictive ambition and porcelain collecting. Now this meticulous operation would win him the nickname the Sudan Machine. When the British Lancers charged, Churchill rode with them.
GANDHI, CHURCHILL AND THE SUDAN MACHINE
‘The event seemed to pass in absolute silence,’ remembered Churchill of one of the last cavalry charges. ‘The yells of the enemy, the shouts of the soldiers, the firing of many shots, the clashing of sword and spear were … unregistered by the brain.’ As he fought, ‘Men, clinging to their saddles, lurched helplessly about, covered with blood from perhaps a dozen wounds. Horses, streaming from tremendous gashes, limped and staggered …’ When the Mahdists charged, the Maxim guns scythed through them, before the troops advanced shouting, ‘Remember Gordon!’
