Haile Sellassie and Italians, 1941–1943

On his return to Addis Ababa on 5 May 1941, six years to the day after his flight, Haile Sellassie went to his palace, where he raised the Ethiopian flag and addressed the nation. He talked of fresh starts, new eras, the vagaries of history, and, of course, the five-year struggle against the fascists. He attributed Ethiopia's victory to Ethiopians' faith in God and to their bravery and fighting skills, but he stressed the long-standing Ethiopian tradition of mercy toward adversaries and admonished his subjects to rejoice "in the spirit of Christ. Do not return evil for evil. Do not indulge in the atrocities which the enemy has been practicing in his usual way, to the last."¹

The British authorities had taken Addis Ababa a month before but were not prepared to allow Haile Sellassie to return until they had secured the city. They believed that the emperor's appearance might lead to a massacre of the city's 24,000 Italians.² They also considered that Haile Sellassie must accept British guidance and control under an authority called the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration (OETA). The leadership of OETA was afraid that the emperor would react sharply to its policy of confiscation of Italian capital goods, including whole factories and war materials, and therefore wanted as much time as possible to present the Ethiopians with faits accomplis. Moreover, OETA officers, largely seconded from the Colonial Office or British East African dependencies, were unilaterally negotiating political arrangements with politically suspect Ethiopians, continuing such fascist racial policies as banning Ethiopians from hotels and other public places, organizing courts and police forces, and introducing the East African shilling as legal tender. To the Ethiopian eye, the British were acting more like looters and colonialists than liberators. To the emperor, OETA was a grave insult, since he considered Ethiopia once again free and therefore sovereign territory.³

He also abhorred the British view, which the BBC aired on 25 April 1941, that unless the emperor's return to his capital was tightly controlled, his subjects might celebrate the event by massacring Italian civilians.⁴ Firmly rejecting the idea that his people were lawless barbarians and racists—putting them in the same camp as the fascists—the emperor complained to Lt. Gen. Alan Cunningham, the British commander: "The facts are that my soldiers and people have in accordance with my wishes remained calm and have behaved in an exemplary manner. I fail to understand why these facts are suppressed and a false impression allowed to be conveyed of the character and conduct of my soldiers and people." He therefore questioned the need the British felt to organize an Ethiopian police force under British officers and to move the Italians into four easily secured zones in the southern part of the city of Addis Ababa, far away from the arrival ceremonies.⁵

Early in the morning of 5 May 1941, the emperor motored to the town of Entotto north of Addis Ababa, where he stopped to pray at the Church of Mary. As he entered the capital's northern suburbs, he could not help but notice the rows of fascist soldiers and police, who stood along the road, "smart and armed, saluting as we passed." The emperor's Ethiopian escort—elements of the Gideon force under Col. Orde Wingate—by contrast "was a collection of battered, dusty vehicles, containing a number of khaki-clad figures, rankless and ribbonless . . . and not a weapon or a flag amongst it." As this odd agglomeration proceeded, the Italians gave way to a densely packed guard of "delighted" Patriots, whose wives and daughters ululated a soprano welcome to the victors.⁶ In the crowd around the palace, there were no Italians to be seen, as they had been ordered to not to leave their homes for any reason. An Italian officer wrote that the Ethiopians had been very excited by the emperor's imminence: "For the last three days we have heard nothing but the tam-tam of the [Ethiopian] drums."⁷

Haile Sellassie's return was a bitter-sweet occasion: he...