Abstract
The first American of whom we have record in the Horn of Africa was George Bethune English, an artillery officer in Egyptian service who served with the Turco-Egyptian forces that advanced into northern Sudan in 1820–21.1 The next is the famous reporter, Henry M. Stanley, who accompanied the British Napier Expedition to Ethiopia in 1867–68 from the time it landed to the capture of the fortress of Magdala. He served as a special correspondent for the New York Herald and subsequently published a book dealing with British exploits in Ghana as well as Ethiopia.2
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Notes
Henry M. Stanley, Coomassie and Magdala, London, 1874
William McE. Dye, Moslem Egypt and Christian Abyssinia or, Military Service under the Khedive, in his Provinces and beyond their Borders, as experienced by the American Staff, reprinted by Negro Universities Press, New York, 1968, p. 1.
The best brief summary of the experiences of Americans in the service of Egypt is the final chapter, “The Khedive’s Egypt,” of James A. Field, Jr., America and the Mediterranean World, 1776–1882, Princeton University Press, 1969.
A complete account is provided by Bierre Grabitès Americans in the Egyptian Army, Routledge, London, 1938.
Statistics are from David Shinn, “A Survey of American-Ethiopian Relations prior to the Italian Occupation of Ethiopia,” Ethiopia Observer, XIV/4, 1971.
P.H.G. Powell-Cotton, A Sporting Trip through Abyssinia, London, 1902.
Robert P. Skinner, Abyssinia of Today, London/New York, 1906, p. ix.
G. L. Steer, Caesar in Abyssinia, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1936, p. 28.
Patrick Balfour (later Lord Kinross), “Fiasco in Addis Ababa,” in Ladislas Farago (ed.), Abyssinian Stop Press, Hale, London, 1936, p. 66.
In fact, he at times displays considerable animus toward the U.S. Government. His memoirs are a valuable, but not necessarily infallible, historical source for the period during which the author remained in Ethiopia, i.e. up to 1960: John H. Spencer, Ethiopia at Bay, a Personal Account of the Haile Selassie Years, Reference Publications, Inc., Algonac, MI, 1984.
Joseph E. Harris, “Afro-Americans and Ethiopians,” colloquium paper, Wilson Center, Smithsonian Institution, 1982.
See Richard Pankhurst, “The Foundations of Education, Printing, Newspapers, Book Production, Libraries and Literacy in Ethiopia,” in Ethiopia Observer, VI/3, 1962.
E. Alexander Powell, Beyond the Utmost Purple Rim, New York, 1925, p. 88.
Many of Suydam Cutting’s photographs were published in The Fire Ox and Other Years, Collins, London, 1947, the last two chapters of which are devoted to the Field Museum Abyssinian Expedition.
James E. Baum, Unknown Abyssinia, New Light on Darkest Abyssinia, Grosset & Dunlap, New York, 1927.
Herbert L. Matthews, Eyewitness in Abyssinia, with Marshal Badoglio’ s Forces to Addis Ababa, London, 1937.
The same author’s Two Wars and More to Come, New York, 1938, deals with both the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the civil war in Spain.
Brice Harris, Jr., The United States and the Italo-Ethiopian Crisis, Stanford University Press, 1964, p. 30.
For a discussion of the position of Italian Americans in the Ethiopian crisis, see James Dugan and Lawrence Lafore, Days of Emperor and Clown, Doubleday, New York, 1973, pp. 190–91.
The fact that South African troops accounted for a major portion of Commonwealth forces is seldom acknowledged. The official South African history of these campaigns, with photographs and detailed maps, is the most authoritative source available on them: Neil Orpen, East African and Abyssinian Campaigns, Purnell, Capetown, 1968.
The distinguished historian W. E. D. Allen, who served as a captain in Gideon Force, published a firsthand account of his experience two years later: Guerrilla War in Abyssinia, Penguin Books, 1943.
For a comprehensive account of the major phase of the British conquest of Italian East Africa (but which does not include the final phase of the fighting) see Anthony Mockler, Haile Selassie’s War, Oxford University Press, 1984.
The text is given in Lord Rennell of Rodd, British Military Administration of Occupied Territories in Africa, 1941–1947, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, London, 1948, pp. 539–58.
The most extensive available examination of this period utilizing declassified confidential official records is Harold Marcus, Ethiopia, Great Britain, and the United States, 1941–1974, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1983.
See John Drysdale, The Somali Dispute, Pall Mall, London, 1964, and The Earl of Lytton, The Stolen Desert, a Study of Uhuru in Northeast Africa, Macdonald, London, 1966.
Tekeste Negash, Italian Colonialism in Eritrea, 1882–1941, University of Uppsala, Sweden, 1987.
Stephen H. Longrigg, A Short History of Eritrea, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1945.
The distinguished British Ethiopianist Prof. Edward Ullendorff in The Two Zions, Reminiscences of Jerusalem and Ethiopia, Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 165–75, describes establishment and operation of the Eritrean press during the early period of British military administration, in which he served.
Mandatory reading for anyone concerned with the Eritrean issue in recent years is the account of the British Military Administration and transition to Federation G. H. K. Trevaskis, Eritrea, a Colony in Transition, OUP, London, 1960.
Haggai Erlich, “The Eritrean Autonomy, 1952–1962: Its Failure and its Contribution to Further Escalation,” in Y. Dinstein (ed.), Models of Autonomy, Transaction Press, New York, 1981.
These and subsequent such statistics in this chapter are taken from the U.S. Agency for International Development publication, U.S. Overseas Loans and Grants and Assistance from International Organizations, Obligations and Loan Authorizations, 1 July 1945 – 30 September 1981, Washington, DC, 1982.
Texts are available in U.S. Department of State, Treaties in Force …on 1 January 1975, USGPO, Washington, 1975.
Richard Greenfield, Ethiopia, a New Political History, Praeger, New York, 1965.
Examples of outstanding work by American scholars who worked in Ethiopia in the 1960s and early 1970s include: Dan F. Bauer, Household and Society in Ethiopia, Michigan State University Press (MSUP), 1977
Marvin Bender et al., Language in Ethiopia, Oxford University Press (OUP), 1976
John Cohen & Peter Koehn, Ethiopian Provincial and Municipal Government, MSUP, 1980
Alan Hoben, Land Tenure among the Amhara of Ethiopia, University of Chicago Press, 1973
Donald Levine, Wax and Gold, Tradition and Innovation in Ethiopian Culture, University of Chicago Press, 1965
Harold Marcus, The Life and Times of Menelik II, Ethiopia 1844–1913, OUP, 1975; and
William Shack, The Gurage, a People of the Ensete Culture, OUP, 1966
An American Peace Corps Volunteer, Joel Rasmussen, wrote the first comprehensive English-language guidebook to Ethiopia: Welcome to Ethiopia, Ethiopian Tourist Organization, Addis Ababa, 1968
A novel dealing with Ethiopian life and politics in the final period of imperial rule was published by an American who served several years as an adviser in the Ministry of Information: Edmund P. Murray, Kulubi, Crown, New York, 1973
By far the best study of the pre-revolutionary government was done by the young English scholar, Christopher Clapham: Haile Selassie’s Government, Praeger, New York, 1968.
Two books by an Englishman and a Greek, respectively, dealing with the final years of Haile Selassie’s rule, remain useful, but to a considerable degree reflect fashionable leftist biases of the time: Patrick Gilkes, The Dying Lion, Feudalism and Modernization in Ethiopia, New York, St. Martin’s, 1975; and
John Markakis, Ethiopia, Anatomy of a Traditional Polity, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1974
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© 1991 Paul B. Henze
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Henze, P.B. (1991). Americans in the Horn. In: The Horn of Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21456-3_3
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