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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.
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