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Today is Patriots' Day in Ethiopia. May 5th.
Five years to the day after Italian forces entered Addis Ababa, Emperor Haile Selassie chose this exact date to walk back in. He wanted the date to carry weight.
(Side note: this kind of date symmetry is unique in history. I'm reminded of the Civil War, which began in April 1861 and ended almost on the same day in April 1865.)
On May 5, 1936, Italian forces had marched into the same city and declared Ethiopia conquered. But outside the capital, the fighting didn’t stop.
Farmers, soldiers, local leaders — the Patriots, the Arbegnoch — carried on a quiet, grinding resistance. They fought in the hills and along the roads, often outmatched, but unwilling to accept defeat as final. (What Churchill eloquently said in his speech to parliament, the Ethiopians had to put into practice.)
Selassie spent those years in exile, far from home, trying to convince the world that what was happening in Ethiopia mattered. In 1936, he spoke before the League of Nations, and his warning was clear: “It is us today. It will be you tomorrow.” Three years later, Mussolini would join forces with Hitler and Japan. Germany would take over the Sudetenland, annex Austria, and invade Poland.
Through all of it, the Arbegnoch never stopped fighting. No air support. No centralized command. No guarantee anyone was coming to help. They ambushed convoys, blew up bridges, attacked garrisons, and kept the resistance alive for five full years while the world looked away. By 1941, the tide had turned. Allied forces, together with Ethiopian fighters, pushed into the country from the west.
(Trivia: Ethiopia is the first occupied territory to be liberated in WWII.)
When Selassie finally came back, the first words out of his mouth were: don't take revenge. After everything.
There's an officer in this story most people outside Ethiopia have never heard of: Orde Wingate. He called his unit Gideon Force, after the biblical figure who defeated a much larger army with a handful of men. On May 5, 1941, Wingate rode into Addis Ababa on a white horse, ahead of the emperor's car. He later wrote part of the speech Selassie gave to his people that day. The two had become that close. A school in Addis still carries his name.
Ethiopia remains the only African country never successfully colonized.
That didn't happen by accident. It happened because people refused, for five years, without enough weapons and without enough help, to accept that it was over.
Melkam Arbegnoch Qen!
Discussion (16)
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Thanks. I learned a lot.
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It became an example of how Italy just didn't have "the stuff" like the top European colonial powers. All of whom would come unwound in short order.
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I'd "like" this post if the option were available to me.
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Thank you. I was taught long ago that Italy's invasion (slaughter is a better word) of Ethiopia is considered the first action in what became the Second World War. I've always found it peculiar that after about one paragraph, in whatever history book I was reading, Ethiopia is never mentioned again.
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