Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

ed but went far beyond immediate economic issues.
Nothing proved this more clearly than the spontaneous
mass movement to support Ethiopia in its war against
Italian imperialism.
In October 1935 the Italian Empire invaded
Ethiopia in a drive to expand its North Afrikan colonies
(which at that time included Somali, Eritrea and Libya).
Italian imperialists were especially glad at that new invasion
since it gave them a chance to avenge their humiliating
defeat at Adowa in 1896. Ethiopia was then, however
feudalistic its society, the only actually independent nation
left in Afrika. It had remained independent for the only
possible reason, because it had repeatedly maintained its
national integrity and had militarily repulsed European intrusions.
The early Portuguese slavers had been driven off.
Even when the Italian Army, 40,000 soldiers armed
with rifle and artillery, invaded Ethiopia in 1896, the
Ethiopian nation defeated them. These Italian divisions
were surrounded and wiped out at Adowa by Emperor
Menelik's 250,000 Ethiopian soldiers. The humbled Italian
Empire was forced after Adowa to publicly recognize the
Ethiopian borders and even to pay the Ethiopian government
heavy cash reparations. So in 1935, after some years
of preparatory border incidents, the Mussolini regime
eagerly sent its tank divisions and airplane squadrons slicing
into Ethiopia.
If you had a government in the South - they'd
give you the right of self-determination in the Black Belt -
you got whites there. What would you do with the whites?
We say the whites would be recognized on the basis of their
percentage, represented on all bodies and all committees.
But the Negroes at all times would be in the
majority ..."( 27)
It's revealing that at that time - when Afrikan
communism had easily as much strength and numbers in
the South a5 it did in the 1970s - they had a nationalist
program. The goal of national independence very clearly
made sense to the grass roots. And at that time in the early
1930s the overwhelming majority of Afrikan communists
in the South were proletarians.
As we put back together some of the pieces of the
New Afrikan story, we see even in incomplete outline that
this struggle had indeed renewed itself and entered the
modern period. The Afrikan proletariat had stood up, particularly
in the South, and had spear-headed new industrial
unionism campaigns (with or without the alliances with
white workers). On the plantations the masses were starting
to organize. Spontaneous resistance to the settlercolonial
occupation was breaking out. The most politically
conscious of all these were becoming communists, with
Afrikan communism rapidly growing and taking on its
vanguard role. Thousands of Afrikans stepped forward in
those years to commit themselves to armed revolution,
self-government through independence for the Afrikan
Nation, and socialism. This was a program that had won
respect amongst Afrikan people, particularly in the South.
The political horizons for Afrikans had opened
wide in those years. It is especially important to understand
that masses of Afrikans viewed themselves as part of
a world struggle, that their aims and concerns encompass-
Afrikans within the U.S. Empire reacted instantly
in a great uproar of anger and solidarity. Journalist Roi
Ottley pointed out that there had been "no event in recent
times that stirred the rank-and-file of Negroes more than
the Ztalo-Ethiopian War. " It is important to grasp the full
and exact significance of this political upheaval. All over
the Afrikan continent and in the "New World" Afrikans
were being oppressed by the European colonial powers.
Why then did this one case call forth such special attention
from Afrikans in the U.S. Empire? Because it involved the
principle of national rights for Afrikans, the defense of
Afrikan nationhood.
Even the moderate political forces rallied around
this most basic issue to the nationally oppressed.(28) Even
someone such as Walter White, the executive secretary of
the NAACP. could angrily write: "Italy, brazenly, has set
fire under the powder keg of white arrogance and greed
which seems destined to become an act of suicide for the
so-called white world. "At its 1935 national convention the
NAACP assailed "the imperialistic selfishness of all nations
in their shameless aggression upon the sovereignty of
other nations.. ."
The defense of Afrikan nationhood was primary
in everyone's mind. Dr. L.K. Williams, President of the
National Baptist Convention, told a mass rally: "We do
not want to see the last black empire in Afrika lose its independence
and culture ..." The Fraternal Council of
Negro Churches, representing the major Afrikan
denominations, issued an official resolution saying:
"Americans of African descent are deeply stirred in their
attitudes and sympathies for Ethiopia, a Negroid people,
who represent almost the only remaining example of independent
government by the black race on the continent
of Africa ..." So the concern was broadly shared by the
Afrikan Nation as a whole - not just by some strata or
107 some political sectors.