Oreste Baratieri

Oreste Baratieri commanded the Italian army destroyed at Adwa, the heaviest defeat any European power suffered in the colonisation of Africa. He had been one of Garibaldi's Thousand in 1860, sat in parliament, and governed the colony of Eritrea from 1892, where he beat the Mahdists at Agordat and took Kassala and returned to Italy in 1895 to a hero's reception. The war with Ethiopia came out of the treaty of Wuchale, whose Italian and Amharic texts differed: the Italian version made Ethiopia a protectorate and the Amharic did not, and Menelik II repudiated it. Baratieri advanced into Tigray with about 17,000 men and inadequate maps, ran short of supplies, and proposed to withdraw. Prime Minister Crispi cabled him accusing him of military phthisis and demanding a battle, and Baratieri attacked on 1 March 1896 in three columns moving at night over ground his maps described wrongly. The columns lost contact and were destroyed piecemeal by an Ethiopian army of perhaps 100,000, better armed than Rome believed and commanded by an emperor who had concentrated it deliberately. Around 7,000 Italians and Eritrean askari were killed and 3,000 captured. Crispi's government fell within days, Italy recognised Ethiopian independence, and Baratieri was court-martialled and acquitted of the charges while the verdict declared him wholly unfit for his command. He never held another and died five years later. Adwa made Ethiopia the one African state to keep its independence through the scramble, and it became a reference point for anti-colonial movements across the continent and for Black intellectuals far beyond it. Italy came back in 1935 with aircraft and mustard gas, explicitly to avenge it.

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