“Ethiopia’s Cause Is Our Cause”: Black Internationalism and the Italian Invasion of Ethiopia

Abstract

The repercussions and significance in Italy of the Ethiopian war as a “critical event” have been discussed in the previous chapter. In this chapter, and in Chap. 4, I focus on the generic variety of black-authored representations that sought to appropriate this event for the development of an Afrocentric historical narrative of liberation. Even more than the event itself, it was its deployment by black writers in the service of an emancipatory ideal that conferred upon it its critical status. This chapter is divided into several sections and moves from a general discussion of Ethiopia’s significance for black internationalism to a more specific one on anti-colonial thinkers, in order to illustrate how Pan-Africanism had its germination in the unprecedented impact of the Ethiopian war on black communities around the globe. In the first part of the chapter, I argue that by triggering a shared solidarity among diasporic Africans the Ethiopian war offered the occasion for articulating a transnational discourse of black liberation. This built on much older religious narratives of Ethiopia as an ancestral homeland prevalent among diasporic groups (most notably African Americans and African Caribbeans). Having set up the wider context of African diasporic sympathy for Ethiopia, the chapter then moves on to analyze the writings of two major Caribbean thinkers, Padmore and James, in relation to the Ethiopian war. This event had a galvanizing effect on their own political development by prompting them to form the International African Friends of Abyssinia (IAFA; later the IASB), forerunner of the Pan-African Association. In response to the war, Padmore developed an in-depth critique of the Communist International, given its manifest failure in supporting Ethiopia’s sovereignty at an international level against the Italian invasion, and he thoroughly questioned the Comintern’s ideological stranglehold over black liberation struggles. In his 1956 book Pan-Africanism or Communism?, he proposed to his readers an autonomous political programme for African nationalism that sought to distance itself from European and Soviet-sponsored communism. James was to elaborate his major works of black historiography in the wake of the Ethiopian war, namely The Black Jacobins and A History of Pan-African Revolt, both published in 1938. Christian Hogsbjerg evokes the expression “class struggle Pan-Africanism” to describe James’s political ideology in this period.