Geography and Empire
Mussolini’s Invasion of Ethiopia (1935-1936)
Mussolini’s war against Ethiopia began with the crossing of the Magreb River that separates Italian Eritrea from the Abyssinian Empire of Haile Selassie on October 3, 1935. The maps displayed here offer an overview of the rhetorical and military unfolding of Fascist Italy’s last brutal quest for a colonial empire. As the charts of the nineteenth century explorations attests, the Italian mapping (a penetration in its own right) of the Abyssinian territory began quite early. After the establishment of the Eritrean colony in 1890, the first military push on the part of the young Italian state into the Abyssinian territory was squelched in 1896 at Adwa by the army of Emperor Menelik. Mussolini’s long planned campaign in Ethiopia (some suggest his plans started as early as 1925) represented a revanchist act to erase the shame of Adwa. Through the Second Italo-Ethiopian war, Mussolini wanted to firmly establish the Italian presence in Africa with an Empire that would both literally and figuratively put Italy on the map alongside the other European colonial powers. If England had a long established modern colonial history, Mussolini claimed for his enterprise a more ancient and illustrious precedent: the Roman Empire. With words closely echoing the rhetoric of the Duce, a volunteer soldier crossing the Magreb in 1935 wrote: “A new cycle for Italy opens up, it is Rome on the march once again. This narrow, dusty path, surrounded by thorny bushes is the road to the Empire.”
The Fascist rhetoric of mapping, marching and road building found an apparently seamless translation into the language of the maps as a physical and imaginary projection of a wishful gesture of domination: in one map Mussolini literally looms over and almost steps onto the land. But as the physical maps of the Horn of Africa reveal, the march on Addis Ababa through a rugged, mountainous territory was no easy undertaking. Topography had thus far preserved the independence of Ethiopia in an African continent otherwise entirely subjugated to European domination.
In Italy, the war of aggression on Ethiopia was greeted with enthusiastic popular support, while internationally it generated an unprecedented protest movement in solidarity with Haile Selassie. The League of Nations on November 2, 1935 condemned the act and imposed economic sanctions on Italy. Historians agree that these sanctions were never truly applied: throughout the war, Mussolini would continue undisturbed with his shipments of men, materials and armaments through the Suez Canal.
The campaign developed on two fronts. In the North, it was initially lead by General Emilio De Bono, who was succeeded by the ruthless General Pietro Badoglio, and in the South by General Rodolfo Graziani. However, the advance was not as swift as Mussolini had envisioned and desired. The better-equipped and modernized Italian army was seriously challenged in their first engagement with the Abyssinian forces because of the valor of their opponents and the Italians’ unfamiliarity with the terrain. November to February of 1936 was privately referred to among Mussolini’s inner circles as “the dark phase.” The first deployment of mustard gas and blister agent by General Badoglio on December 22 and 25 of 1935 broke the military stand-off, giving an edge to the Italian forces. The dropping of chemical bombs on the Abyssinians shattered their morale and indiscriminately ravaged the hinterland, unleashing terror on the civilian population while breaking down the military supply lines. This covert operation, denied for a long time by the Italian postwar governments, sealed the fate of the war. On May 5, Badoglio entered Addis Ababa, and on May 9 Mussolini declared Italy an Empire. Notwithstanding the impassioned plea of the exiled Haile Selassie, the League of Nations ended up recognizing Mussolini’s victory and on July 15 the sanctions against Italy were lifted. Yet, despite the regime’s rhetoric, Abyssinia was never truly “conquered.” A guerrilla war continued for the duration of the Italian occupation and the “colonial policing” gave way under Rodolfo Graziani, the first Viceroy of Abyssinia, to brutal acts of repression.
While roads were indeed built as well as important yet limited works of infrastructure (hospitals, power stations, and schools), Italy’s presence in Ethiopia remained what has been referred to as “a paper empire” and an empire that from the start enacted a rigid racist legislation envisioning the new colonial space as an apartheid society. On May 5, 1941, exactly five years after Badoglio victoriously entered Addis Ababa, Haile Selassie returned to the city with the support of the English army.
Historian Angelo Del Boca wrote the following regarding the feelings underpinning the overwhelming national support for the Abyssinian war: “. . . pushing and enmeshing the hundreds of thousands of Italians who stationed in Ethiopia between 1935 and 1940 [there was] something that escaped the regime directives as well as the laws of geopolitics. It was the sense of adventure, the sense of finally possessing a “frontier” full of unknowns and of difficulties. [. . .] It is this desire for escape and adventure that brought together the expansionist designs of the regime with the aspirations of the Italians.”
Abyssinia and Italy
Luigi Padoan
Abyssinia in the East Africa Geography (L’Abissinia nella geografia dell’Africa orientale)
[Milano], Il mondo geografico, [1936]
“For many months the wheel of fate, under the impulse of our calm determination, has been moving toward its goal: at this time its pace has increased and is unstoppable…”
The opening words of the booklet, quoted above, are drawn from the famous speech that Mussolini delivered from his office balcony in the Piazza Venezia in Rome on October 2, 1935, when he explicitly declared war on Ethiopia.
This booklet is entirely focused on the Abyssinian territories in the Horn of Africa. It opens with a political map of the full continent, but goes on to focus primarily on East Africa, with geographical coordinates provided in order to distinguish the regions of Eritrea, Ethiopia and Italian Somalia, the French Somali coast, and the northern segment of English Kenya. The most striking aspect of this map is the insertion of a silhouetted image of the Italian peninsula within the Ethiopian territory. This miniature representation of Italy suggests a mark of ownership of Ethiopia—a gesture very much in parallel with the rhetoric of the Fascist regime at the moment—but at the same time it reveals the vast difference in territorial scale between Italy, Abyssinia and Africa.
From XIX Century Explorations to Fascist Aspirations
A Map in Summary of Recent Italian Explorations in North-East Africa (Carta sommaria di recenti esplorazioni italiane nell’Africa del Nord-Est)[Rome] Società geografica italiana, April 1884.
This map represents the expeditions in North-East Africa that were undertaken by Italian explorers between 1872 and 1883. The most notable names on the list are without doubt Orazio Antinori and Pietro Sacconi. An expert in ornithology, Antinori was entranced by the lands of both Central and Eastern Africa. When in 1869 the Italian Geographical Society decided to financially invest in an uncertain expedition to equatorial lakes, Antinori wisely suggested that they direct their efforts toward scientific explorations of the Kingdom of Scioa (which is highlighted in yellow on the map). However, the Society did not accept his proposal. Lauded by Prince Umberto, the “Great Expedition” finally departed in March 1876 and, as Antinori had expected, it was a failure. He and his colleagues Chiarini and Martini lost their equipment on the road between Zeila and Scioa; Chiarini was later imprisoned by the Queen of Ghera and died. The same happened to another explorer, Pietro Sacconi, who was killed in an ambush in Harar in 1883. Neither he nor Antinori had colonial ambitions, but they were portrayed nevertheless as colonizers for propagandistic purposes.
* Sketch of the principal itineraries followed by the explorers in the Valley of Uabi-Uebi Scebeli (Schizzo dei principali itinerari seguiti dagli esploratori nell’alta e media valle del Uabi-Uebi Scebeli), ca. 1930.
This map represents the travel itineraries of several exploratory missions in the Valley of Uabi-Uebi Scebeli, from Pietro Sacconi’s unsuccessful journey in 1883 to the Duca degli Abruzzi’s in 1928-29. The name of the Valley comes from the river Uebi Scebeli: also known as the “river of the leopards,” it is etymologically based on the word “Wabì” (river). Stretching more than 2500 km, it is one of the longest rivers of Africa. The Uebi begins from Savanna of Hoghisò (South Ethiopia), and ends in the Indian Ocean. When the map was created, the Europeans used multiple terms to differentiate the regions of the river: Uabi for the part near springs, Uabi Sidamo for the middle part, and Uebi Scebeli for the Southern segment, which was at that time part of Italian Somalia. The map traces the never-ending search for the river’s source which was undertaken by several explorers, mostly Italians. Hoping to reach Ogaden, the so-called “Somalian Paradise,” Pietro Sacconi, who had traveled through Egypt, Ethiopia and Somalia, undertook in 1883 what would have been his last exploration, but he had no luck. Departing from Harrar, his caravan was caught in an ambush and he was killed in the village of Kora Nagott.
The map registers the alternative itineraries followed by his successors in this search for the source of the river. The most successful expedition was that of Luigi di Savoia, Duca degli Abruzzi. After a first journey in 1893, he returned to Somalia in 1918 and spent the rest of his life there. The map shows the “Villaggio Duca degli Abruzzi,” which he founded in 1920 as a center for the agricultural reclamation of the land. He finally discovered the mouth of the Uabi Scebeli in 1928-29; he brought this “exploratory dream,” which had begun in the nineteenth century, to its conclusion, and Fascism began to make its presence felt.
The Glorious Series (Collana Gloriosa) [Rome] Edizioni d’Arte e di Propaganda Coloniale, 1935.
This dense artifact presents a compendium of the present and past history of the Italian colonial presence in the Horn of Africa. Similar to the Italian flags placed along Ethiopian borders as if they were army tanks or soldiers, the images representing the pioneers of Italian colonial endeavors also surround this African country, suggesting the longstanding Italian desire to seize the land. The larger portraits are of men who have played key public roles in the history of Italy’s colonization of Africa. Located left and center is Francesco Crispi, who was the Prime Minister of Italy in the late nineteenth century and the mastermind behind the first Italo-Ethiopian War of 1895-96, which ended in Ethiopian victory in the Battle of Adwa. The two large figures on the bottom of the map are Emilio de Bono and Rodolfo Graziani, the two generals of the 1936 Italo-Ethiopian War. In the image on the upper right are leaders of the present political moment of 1935: Benito Mussolini, King Vittorio Emanuele III, and Galeazzo Ciano, the Foreign Minister. The smaller figures are pioneers of Italian colonialism, including missionaries such as Cardinal Guglielmo Massaia and explorers like Giovanni Chiarini and Orazio Antinori. All of these men spent time in Ethiopia, perhaps implying that they had prepared claims for a rightful seizure of the country. Along with their names are little biographical snippets, which are always sure to specify if they were killed while abroad, thus portraying them as martyrs for a noble cause. As a result of sacrifices such as theirs, as the six photographs of colonized Somalia and Eritrea seem to suggest, parts of Africa had already been subdued. On the verso of this map are more extensive and detailed photographs of local Somalians and Eritreans working dutifully for the advancement of the Italians’ economy. The time had now come, this collaged image argues, for the Ethiopians to be brought under Italian “guidance” as well.
Toward the Invasion: Mussolini’s War seen from Abroad
Map of Abyssinia (Mapa de Abisinia) [Barcelona] Chocolate San Fernando, ca. 1935.
Produced for advertising purposes by the chocolate factory San Fernando of Barcelona, this pictorial map represents the European colonial possessions in the Horn of Africa on the eve of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. The bright color illustrations show the Ethiopian Empire, with the green, yellow and red flag fluttering over Addis Ababa, and the threatening Italian military buildup on Ethiopia’s borders with Somalia and Eritrea. The image of Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974, enclosed in his armor and surrounded by a regal drape recalling the national flag, dominates the whole scene from the top right of the map. This legendary king, heir to a dynasty that traced its origins from King Solomon and Queen of Sheba, tried to prevent the Italian invasion by repeatedly bringing the Ethiopian cause to the attention of the League of Nations. When the Empire was conquered, he chose voluntary exile, which ended in 1941 with Ethiopia’s liberation by the British forces. The dignity and support this map gives to the Ethiopian Empire, recognizing its national identity and self-determination, bring us to mention the political and ideological context in which it was produced. For Spain, 1935 was the time of the Second Republic, which had banished the king, established a new constitution, and granted women the right to vote and divorce. In a Europe increasingly dominated by the aggressive politics of Italy and Germany, the Republican Spain represented an island of democratic progress, adverse to Mussolini’s militaristic adventure.
General Map of East Africa (Pianta panoramica dell’Africa Orientale)[Milano] Arti grafiche Pizzi e Pizio; [Roma] Riccardo Pacini; ca. 1936.
Among all the maps shown here, this is the only one that presents an actual topographic rendition. It is a cartographic representation of the Horn of Africa area which highlights all the orographic and hydrographic details by shading, colors and spot heights. This map was most likely published in 1936, when the Italian troops were penetrating the inlands of Abyssinia. The attention paid to the depiction of the mountain range underlines the difficult task facing the Italian army forced to pass through this difficult terrain. The insert of the Suez Canal highlights the logistic importance of the isthmus for the huge deployment of troops and materials in support of the invasion—the biggest war effort of an European nation in Africa.
This map also includes little inserts about the ethnography, the flora and fauna and the economic resources of this soon to be ‘Italian Africa.’ The animals, depicted in a cartoonish fashion, speak to the widespread exoticizing imagination of the African savannah. Also quite interesting is the little map on the upper right, in which all the internal divisions between the Ethiopian tribes are higlighted. The Fascist regime had emphasized the fractured state of Ethiopia in order to justify the necessity of their intervention. An odd assortment of fixed types (the chief of police, the elephant hunter, the Abyssinian priest) chosen to represent the Abyssinian society is also depicted on the left side. Finally, the map of Addis Ababa, with its little street plan on the lower left side, stresses the importance of the conquest of the capital.
Italy, Abyssinia (Italie, Abyssinie) [Antwerpen] Patria N.V., 1935. Map extending from Italy to the Horn of Africa, showing the political situation before Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia.
“‘The five continents shall tremble before the Fascist force. You shall conquer and possess Abyssinia!’ (with these words Mussolini ended his speech at Eboli near Naples).”
“Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Abyssinia: ‘I want peace and submit myself to the decision of the League of Nations.’”
This map of the contested portions of East Africa is flanked by images of Mussolini and Haile Selassie. As the world waited for the now inevitable invasion of Ethiopia, pacifists, socialists, and other opponents of fascism expressed their alarm. Among the many protests was this 1935 bilingual (Dutch and French) poster produced in Antwerp. Mussolini’s belligerent militaristic stance is contrasted with Haile Selassie, portrayed as a legitimate and enlightened monarch. Haile Selassie is appealing to the League of Nations to help prevent what would become an egregious breach of international law. Haile Selassie’s call upon the League of Nations led only to ineffectual sanctions, while chemical weapons dropped on Ethiopia’s poorly armed troops and on civilians. In his famous later appeal of June 1936, Haile Selassie demanded, “Placed by the aggressor face to face with the accomplished fact, are States going to set up the terrible precedent of bowing before force?” Encouraged by the success of Italy’s defiance of the international community, Mussolini would reach a rapprochement with Hitler and they went on to aid Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War.
A Short-lived Empire
Italian Africa: Historical Recollection of the Glorious African Epic
(Africa Italiana: Ricordo storico della gloriosa epopea africana)
[Rome] Visceglia Istituto Coloniale Italiano Toponomastica, 1936.
“This is the age in which one must be proud to be alive and to fight. This is the age in which a people, in the face of hostile forces, measure their capacity for resistance and victory.”
These words, featured beneath Mussolini’s arm that almost pierces into the Horn of Africa, were spoken by the Duce in 1935 as part of his message during the thirteenth annual March on Rome, but dated on this map to the fourteenth year of the Fascist regime, 1936. The exhortatory tone indicates that this map was published during the Italo-Ethiopian war, before May of 1936 when Addis Ababa was brought under Italian control. The geopolitical reality at this moment was not represented bythe red borders drawn on the primary map, but rather, by those rendered on the much smaller one located on the lower left-hand corner. Ethiopia was not yet under Italy, but this image suggests the conviction that it was only a brief matter of time before the Empire was a fait accompli.
This same image was reused after the Italian victory in Ethiopia with two major changes: an increased precision of the rendered borders, and a new set of quotes drawn from Mussolini’s speech on May 9, 1936. They read:
“The Italian people have created the Empire with their blood, they will fertilize it with their labor, and they will defend it from anyone with
their weapons. With this supreme assurance raise up, legionaries, your banners, your weapons, and your hearts, to salute after fifteen centuries the reappearance of the Empire on the Fatal Hills of Rome.”
* Battle of the Lake Ascianghi (Battaglia dell’Ascianghi)
[Florence] Istituto Geografico Militare, Mondadori, 1936.
This map represents the military operations of the Battle of Lake Ascianghi, which took place on April 2, 1936, a final act of the Ethiopian War. More than a battle, it was a cruel massacre carried out by Pietro Badoglio, the head of war operations on the north front, at the expense of Haile Selassie’s military forces. Both the Italian and Ethiopian armies had suffered significant losses during the battle of Mai Ceu, which took place between March 31 and April 2. After this horrific battle, Haile Selassie opted for military retreat, leading his troops toward the shores of Lake Ascianghi during the night. It was at that point that Badoglio decided to bomb a portion of the Ethiopian army. He not only strove to “alter geography through bombs” (to quote a line from the famous military song by Alessandro Pavolini), but he consented to the use of mustard and asphyxiating gases. Despite the documented analysis of historian Angelo Del Boca, the actors of this massacre refused to admit their crimes even many years after the end of the conflict, appealing to the cliché, “Italiani brava gente” (Italians are good people).
* Ethiopian Empire. The New Roads Traced by the Duce (Impero Etiopico. Le nuove strade tracciate dal Duce)
[Rome] General Italian Oil Company, ca. 1937.
Produced by the AGIP, Azienda Generale Italiana Petroli (General Italian Oil Company), this map is meant to show and to celebrate the roads already built and those planned by Mussolini, in the recently conquered Ethiopia. As a result of the initial engineering effort undertaken in order to further military operations, the Italian road network was extensive. Complying with the rhetoric of the Italian civilization over the colonies, the roads became a metaphorical representation of the greatness and the accessibility of the Empire. They also appear, within the map, bound to specific advertising interests. Established in 1926, AGIP had strong aspirations of commercial expansion over the newly acquired colonial markets. This justifies the ads at the bottom of the carto-graphic illustration, which are related to Robur (“our fuel”), Petrolina (“extremely fluid fuel oil”), Petrolio Sole (“petroleum for lighting and heating”) and to the gasoline produced by the Italians, significantly named Victoria: “Victory Gasoline: the Gasoline of the Italians.” The ideal user of the map is the driver, who might be passing through the Ethiopian territory not only for military purposes. The map has the features of a folded up automotive chart, suggesting a possible utilization in a touristic sense. The following year the first guide dedicated to Italian East Africa, issued by the Italian Touristic Association, would have come to light.
Our Sea (Mare nostro)
[Rome] Map of Europe and Mediterranean Countries. Supplement to the monthly magazine Guida toponomastica Visceglia, n. 24, August 1942.
“O young people in all the schools and worksites, let not the Motherland fall short of her bright future and let the twentieth century see Rome as the center of Latin civilization, the ruler of the Mediterranean, a beacon of light to all the nations.”
The quote by Mussolini printed under his image is a famous excerpt from a speech to the Italian youth first published in the journal Giovinezza (Youth) in December 1920 and then often posted in Fascist school buildings. The tone both of commandment and prayer suggests that the map was produced for the indoctrination of the youth. It was published in August 1942, at a time when the course of the war had turned against the Axis powers: first with the Italian and German defeat at El Alamain in North Africa and later that year at Stalingrad.
The change in the cartographical rhetoric of the Empire is quite striking in this map. First of all, we note the exclusion of the former territories of the Horn of Africa, lost in November 1941. At this point, the claims for a new Roman Empire had shifted toward control of the Mediterranean, the old Mare nostrum of the Romans, which was viewed as a unifier of Latin civilization against the expansion of the modern plutocracies (Britain and France above all). A second detail reveals the time of crisis: the figure of the Duce. Mussolini is shown pensively gazing upon the Mediterranean basin while wearing a heavy coat, as if defending himself against inclement weather, and holding binoculars. The imperial horizon so close at hand in 1936 now seems to have receded beyond the dictator’s grasp.
