A
Tour of Italian Archives on Ethiopia
By Professor Richard
Pankhurst
Today, dear Reader, I will take you on a tour
of some Italian and Ethiopian archives.
Let us start in perhaps the easiest way by
looking at the UNESCO-sponsored Guide to the Sources of the History of
Africa, more especially the volume on Italian-sources: the Guida delle
Fonti per la Storia dell’ Africa a Sud del Sahara
esistenti in Italia.
It was edited by my old friend Professor Carlo
Giglio, once a Fascist, but by my day far less committed –and a great
conversationalist. The volume was published in 1973 by the Inter Documentation
Company, of Zug, in Switzerland, and is in itself an
important source.
* * *
Turn first to the section on the Italian
Ministry of Foreign Affairs – the Ministero degli Afffari Esteri, as it is
called.
This Ministry’s archives start on page 104,
and the entries, you will see, are arranged more or less chronologically, by
their position, or Posizione in the Archive [abbreviated as Posiz.].
They are arranged within such sections by Fascicolo, i.e. Folder or
Dossier, which is abbreviated as Fasc.
If you don’t have access to the Guida you
can find exactly the same information by looking through the official
catalogue, the Inventario dell’ Archivio Storico del’ Ministero del Africa Italiana, issued in Rome in 1975.
Turn now to page 185 of the Guida – or
page 130 of the Inventario - and what do we see?
Fasc. 21 bis
The sequence of entries in Posiz. 36/2,
covering the years from 1882 to 1907, comes to an end with Fasc. 21 –
but is immediately followed by an additional Fascicolo, or dossier
inexplicably entitled Fasc. 21 bis – in other words
Fascicolo 21 repeated.
Ho, Ho, you may say,
or ask, dear Reader: What is this Additional Fascicolo?
Why,
you may also ask, Why, is “repeated”?
* * *
The first of these questions is clearly
answered in both the Guida and the Inventario, but as for the second
question “mum’s the word”.
The Dossier Fasc. 21 bis, according to
page 185 of the Guida, and page 130 of the Inventario, deals with
a clearly important subject: the exchange of correspondence, and credentials,
between Kings Umberto I and Vittorio Emanuele III of Italy on the one hand and
King, later Emperor, Menilek II of Ethiopia on the other, as well
as correspondence “between their respective Ministers and
dignitaries”.
The Letters
And now dear Reader, let us turn from the Guida
or the Inventario, and let us look at the letters in the dossier
themselves.
* * *
The Dossier 21 bis contains a five-page
list of no less than seventy-nine royal and other letters included in the file
– but, strange to say, this list is headed with an effigy of the Ethiopian
Lion of Judah rather than any Italian royal or fascist insignia; and is
written, no less surprisingly, not in Italian, as would be normal in an
Italian archive, but in Amharic. Ho, ho, you may repeat!
No less remarkably the Dossier truly contains
letters from the Italian kings Umberto and Vittorio Emanuele – as the Guida
and the Inventario both note. But these are not file copies–
as one would expect in a normal Italian archive, but rather the original
signed and sealed letters themselves. (Ho.Ho).
Menilek’s letters to the Italian monarchs, by
contrast, are not originals, as would have been expected in an Italian
archive, but copies, more likely to be found in an Ethiopian archive.
Clearly, you will say, dear Reader, something
fishy has taken place.
You will be reinforced in this view by taking
a look at the letters themselves: They reveal that the librarians, or
archivists, responsible for filing them did not use Italian – as one
would have expected in a normal Italian archive, but, strange to say, they used
exclusively Amharic, which you will appreciate, dear Reader, is not a
language of Italian librarianship – however advanced.
The letters are thus annotated with Amharic
library directions, instructing the secretarial staff to:
“Send to the Weld-Bet [i.e, Archive]”
‘Keep this with care”
Other annotations in Amharic read as follows:
“Genbot [i.e. the Ethiopian month] 14 1875.
From Ankobar. Written by the Italian Government”
and:
“Krispi”- i.e. written by the sometime Italian
Prime Minister Francesco Crispi.
It should by now be evident that the above
annotations were not the work of Italian librarians, however linguistically
skilled – but that “something fishy” had in fact occurred.
* * *
Fasc. 21 bis – and the
Italian Peace Treaty
The Dossier Fasc. 21 bis, it is clear,
formed part of the Ethiopian Ministry of the Pen archives, preserved in the Emperor’s
Palace in Addis Ababa until the Italian Fascist invasion of 1935-6
– and then taken to Rome.
The looting of this Archive was well known to Ethiopia’s post-Liberation
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, headed by the late Foreign Minister Ato Aklilu
Habtewold, which insisted that the Ministry of Pen Archives be returned.
Article 37 of the Italian Peace Treaty with the United
Nations,
which was drafted at Ethiopia’s formal request – and was signed by Italy as well as all
the Allied Powers - thus specifies that:
“within eighteen months of the coming into
force of the present treaty Italy shall restore all works of art,
religious objects, archives and objects of historical value belonging to Ethiopia or its nationals and
removed from Ethiopia to Italy since October 1936
[the date of the Italian Fascist invasion].
The Article, you will perceive, dear Reader,
thus specifically, and indisputably, covers the Dossier Fasc. 21 bis,
with its 79 historical letters here discussed.
* * *
This being Ethiopia’s Millennium Year we
wonder, on our side of the world, whether our Ethiopian Millennium Committee
has been able to arrange for the repatriation to Ethiopia of Dossier Fasc.
21 bis – which should have taken place in 1947-8 - or whether the question
of the seventy-nine missing royal and related letters will continue to stick up
the noses of friends of Ethiopia for further decades to come.
Maybe, as staunch protagonists of the rule of
law, the Allied signatories to the Treaty - the UK, France, the USA, Russia,
etc. etc. - and all the other Allies, should be asking about Dossier Fasc. 21
bis too.