7
‘He who seeks to strike terror in others is himself more in fear.’
Claudius Claudianus, Latin poet, AD 370–404
In December 1936 a group of Ethiopian government officials in the emperor’s entourage in exile in England were seeking activists to publicly strike against the occupying forces.1 The position of Emperor Haile Selassie in the League of Nations was precarious, for, as noted earlier, several countries were beginning to recognise the Italian military occupation as annexation. Indeed, the sovereign’s men expected a public attack on the Italian High Command to convince wavering members of the League that the war was not over, and that the Italians were not in control of Ethiopia.
Three of the exiles were at the heart of the plot: Lorenzo Ta’izaz, an Eritrean lawyer who was the emperor’s right-hand man; his foreign minister, Hiruy Welde-Sillassé; and Blattén Géta Éfrém Tewelde-Medhin, who had previously served as consul in London, and had been relocated to Paris after the arrival of the emperor in London. Bejirond Letyibelu Gebré, a wealthy and well-connected former courtier and military commander who had fought at the Battle of Maychew, and who had remained in Ethiopia, was chosen to be the local coordinator.
Simi’on Adefris, a young Catholic Ethiopian businessman in Addis Ababa, played a critical role in introducing to Letyibelu a small group of young radicals who had been plotting for some time to strike against the Governo Generale. This group of urban intellectuals—a Catholic, an Orthodox Christian, a Protestant and a Baha’i, most likely assisted by an Armenian who had fought in the resistance against the Turks during the Armenian genocide—typified the small but increasingly well-educated sector of Ethiopian society sponsored and encouraged by the emperor, who believed that his programme of modernisation could be achieved only by bringing into the civil service meritocrats to offset the power of the feudal lords.
Years ahead of their time, the multi-cultural group of Simi’on Adefris and his friends were shocked by the apartheid system being introduced into Ethiopia, and the barbaric behaviour of the Italian military, which was so gross that even young Ethiopians who might otherwise have attempted to come to terms with the invaders often ended up joining the resistance.
Two Eritrean members of the group, named Moges Asgedom and Abriha Deboch, were recruited by Letyibelu to lead the attack on the High Command. As Italian colonial subjects, they were working for Graziani at the Governo Generale, but Moges was actually an Ethiopian loyalist, and Abriha was a disgruntled employee who, owing to Rome’s increasingly harsh racial policies, had turned against his employers. Unbeknown to them, he had become a double agent.
The Massacre of Addis Ababa
The opportunity for the plotters to make the strike came on Friday, 19 February 1937 (Yekatit 12 in the Ethiopian calendar), at a public alms-giving ceremony conducted by Graziani to commemorate the birth of the Prince of Naples. The event, to which Ethiopians deemed to be poor and deserving were invited, was held at the seat of the Governo Generale: the former emperor’s palace in the Sidist Kilo area of Addis Ababa.
During the ceremony, while Graziani was addressing the crowd, the two young Eritreans, who were on duty as members of Graziani’s entourage, left the dais and threw several hand grenades at their Italian employers, with the support of a number of accomplices. No senior officials of the Governo Generale died, although a few, including Graziani, were seriously injured. Despite his injuries, which triggered the temporary appointment of his deputy, Graziani remained as viceroy. But the Italians slaughtered almost all of the 3,000 Ethiopians at the ceremony, including many clergymen.2 Shortly afterwards the Fascist Party authorised further reprisals in which thousands more innocent Ethiopians died, including a substantial proportion of the most highly educated Ethiopians, and thousands more were injured, or died in prison. In the evening of 19 February, the Fascist Party federal secretary, Guido Cortese, unleashed the Blackshirts of the 6th ‘Tevere’ Division, joined by Italian civilians, for a repeat performance of the three-day massacre of Tripoli, which they carried out with a terrible zeal. They were given carte blanche—the medieval three days of unrestricted murder and pillage—and were even told which areas of the city they should destroy. Over several days more than 4,000 houses were looted and burned, while those residents fortunate enough not to be locked inside were hunted through the streets and beaten, shot, bayoneted or clubbed to death, thrown over bridges or dragged to their deaths behind vehicles. It is estimated that a total of around 19,000 Ethiopian civilians died in the massacre of Addis Ababa, an event known thereafter as Yekatit 12.3
No families, regardless of their religion, were allowed to bury, or even attend to, their dead; most of the bodies were incinerated by the Italians in public; others were thrown into rivers or drinking-water wells. Thousands more civilians were rounded up and held in detention camps and prisons in and around the city, in which many died.
The massacre of Addis Ababa, which was authorised by the Italian administration, was the largest single crime against humanity committed by the Italians in Ethiopia, and would never be forgotten. Carried out with an almost total disregard for human life, it was also the deadliest onslaught by invaders under Catholic command on the capital city of an Orthodox Christian country since the sack of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade of 1204.
While the massacre of Addis Ababa was under way, the Italians killed unknown numbers of Ethiopians in parallel massacres in the nation’s secondary towns, wherever Blackshirts were garrisoned. They also interned several thousand men, women and children in concentration camps in Italian Somaliland and Eritrea.
The Burning of St George’s Cathedral
One of the most spectacular events during the massacre of Addis Ababa, which at the time was largely overshadowed by the scale and horror of the slaughter, was the attempt by the Italians to burn down St George’s Cathedral. The burning was organised by the Italian authorities and the aim was to destroy a symbol of the spirit of the nation and the very heart of the monarchy. The Orthodox cathedral was a magnificent edifice. Founded by Emperor Menelik and rebuilt by his daughter, the Empress Zewditu, St George’s was truly a royal church, for this was where Emperor Haile Selassie had been crowned in 1930 with great pomp and pageantry before representatives of several of the world’s heads of state.
In an act of homage to his revered predecessor, Emperor Haile Selassie had had an equestrian statue of Emperor Menelik cast and mounted on a plinth in the centre of the piazza in front of the cathedral, creating a magnificent focal point for the city centre.
The demolition of the statue, carried out by order of the Italian minister for the colonies, Alessandro Lessona, had already outraged the Ethiopians, but that desecration would pale beside the destruction of the cathedral, which would symbolise the end of the supremacy of the Ethiopian Church and its embodiment of the spirit of national resistance to the invaders. The Blackshirts of the 6th ‘Tevere’ Division, who had sailed from Italy with the great icon of the Mother of Christ, were determined to witness the end of St George’s. Thus, in the evening of Friday, 19 February 1937, at the height of the massacre of Addis Ababa, an eager and excited crowd of militiamen, regular soldiers, carabinieri and Italian civilians waited expectantly to witness the spectacle of Menelik’s great church being turned into a flaming torch.
There was, however, another reason for the hysteria of the Italians, and particularly for the older generation: defiling the cathedral and razing it to the ground would also help to bring closure to Italy’s open wound, for they knew that it had been built to give thanks for the Ethiopian victory against the previous unprovoked invasion by the Italian army four decades before, at the Battle of Adwa, in 1896. Whenever Italians passed Menelik Square, they were reminded of the shame of that battle—their bête noire.
Furthermore, the cathedral had been consecrated to St George, the patron saint of Ethiopian sovereigns, on whose commemoration day the battle had taken place. And the paintings adorning the interior included a depiction of the battle, overseen by the saint, together with portraits of Emperor Menelik and the Empress Taytu. Finally, and ironically, the engineer employed to oversee the construction had been an Italian, Sebastino Castagna, who had been taken prisoner after the battle, but liked Ethiopia so much that he chose to stay on in the service of the sovereign, and married into the Ethiopian royal family.
However, before the ritual destruction, the Italians had business to conduct: pillage. This was normal Italian practice before destroying churches, and the procedure was well established. They had discovered that in addition to the artefacts to be seen in the cathedral itself, in the crypt below was a collection of valuable works of art, codices and other treasures.4 That night was carta bianca, so, surging forward, the mob crossed the portals to run amok inside, seizing whatever they could get their hands on, while others organised military trucks to transport the plunder. The loot was enormous; Dr Shashka reported that they needed seven or eight trucks ‘to carry the silver and gold vessels, the precious crosses, the prelate’s staves and the valuable religious paintings and manuscripts’.5
Meanwhile, other trucks arrived loaded with drums of petrol. Some were carried into the church and stacked up against the walls; the soldiers opened the others and splashed the contents over the inner and outer walls. Finally, the crowd made way for the most important dignitary to arrive: the Fascist Party federal secretary, who swept into the scene in an open car with his entourage. It was time for the fire to be ceremoniously lit. The signal was given, as testified by Ciro Poggiali, ‘by the order, and in the presence, of Federale Cortese’,6 and a group of Blackshirts standing by with incendiary bombs hurled them at the edifice.7
Whether any of the Italians present, who were overwhelmingly Catholic, felt a tinge of regret or shame at what they were doing, we will probably never know, but it seems unlikely, for the crowd was ecstatic. Yelling and cheering, they watched the roaring flames leap upwards, lighting the night sky. The temple of the ‘schismatics and heretics’ was about to fall.
Across the road from the cathedral of St George was the city’s Municipality Building, situated in a large compound which the Italian authorities had turned into a detention camp earlier in the day. Full of Ethiopians who had been rounded up after the announcement of a curfew in the afternoon, it afforded a clear view of the conflagration at the cathedral. For the inmates, the desecration heightened their feeling that something unimaginable was happening. One of the detainees, who later became a well-known newspaper editor, wrote that the burning cathedral ‘looked like a sunset in the west’.8
Inside St George’s the flames were fierce, and one by one, the great windows burst outwards from the intense heat. However, as the petrol burned itself out, the flames died down, and the cheering stopped. The Italians fell silent; the attempt had failed. The sacred wall paintings were destroyed, the interior fittings were damaged, and parts of the outer walls were blackened by the flames. However, the building survived, structurally unscathed.
Guido Cortese’s reaction to the fiasco at the cathedral is not on record, but we can be sure that he was driven off in a fury at the incompetence of his Blackshirts—fury that was to be exacerbated by the humiliation of seeing the job of destroying the edifice being assigned the next day to a more competent arm of the military: the Regia Aeronautica.
Did anyone die in the flames? Ciro Poggiali, who was well connected with both the Italian civil administration and the military, noted in his diary that a colonel of the Grenadiers saved the lives of fifty deacons who had been tied up with the intention of burning them alive inside the building. Whether the colonel managed to persuade the Blackshirts to release them, or ordered his regulars to do so, Poggiali does not say, but this was one of the few occasions on which a regular commander reportedly intervened to counter the actions of the Blackshirts.9 The 65th Infantry Division of the regular army, known as the Grenadiers of Savoy, was unusual in having attached to it a Blackshirt unit—the 11th Blackshirt Battalion—so this could explain how a Grenadier colonel was in a position to restrain a Blackshirt company.
There are unconfirmed reports that during the attack on the cathedral some of the clergy of St George’s were burned to death. The British acting consul general, who seemed to be satisfied that the story came from a credible source, informed London that he had heard from ‘an Italian officer of standing’ that some priests ‘were left to burn in St George’s Cathedral’.10 We cannot, however, be certain that clergymen died in the fire, for the British envoy’s report might refer to the deacons who actually received a last-minute reprieve, as reported by Poggiali.
Presumably concerned that news of the massacre of Addis Ababa was reaching the world’s press, thus giving the impression that the Italians were not actually in control of Ethiopia, and thereby revealing that the war had not yet come to an end, Mussolini ordered the massacre to be terminated before the three days of carta bianca had run their course. Instructions were thus received from Rome that the ‘reprisals that had been authorised’ should be brought to an end at midday on Sunday, 21 February, which was 24 hours earlier than planned.11 By that time the Regia Aeronautica had not yet carried out the previous day’s orders to bomb the cathedral, and the orders were cancelled before the bombers had taken off. Although the Blackshirts continued their rampage unofficially for several more days, the Air Force obeyed the termination order, and St George’s Cathedral survived.12 Nonetheless, the Ethiopian clergy continued to be hunted down; on Sunday, 21 February, the day he ordered termination of the massacre, Mussolini instructed Graziani to make sure that ‘all civil and religious suspects’ were shot ‘without delay’.13
Other City Churches: Desecration and Abuse
While control of the rural areas largely eluded the Italian military during the five years of its presence in Ethiopia, the principal urban centres—Addis Ababa and secondary towns such as Dire Dawa, Gondar and Jimma—were for the most part under Italian control. For Graziani tight security in Addis Ababa was essential, as there were thousands of Italians now based there, and the numbers were increasing. He was always nervous about the armed Patriots in the hills around the city, and attempted to maintain the fragile peace in the capital with spies and informers. The incident of Yekatit 12 took the Italians by surprise, and the massacre that followed demonstrated not only the barbarity of the occupiers, but also how nervous they were, behind the mask of Fascist implacability.
As Lessona discovered when Graziani had earlier resisted his instructions to demolish symbols of Ethiopian national sovereignty such as the statue of Emperor Menelik opposite St George’s Cathedral, the viceroy was concerned not to do anything to trigger an uprising in Addis Ababa. He feared that he had insufficient troops to contain such a situation, which could result in extensive loss of Italian lives.
Principally for these reasons, Graziani’s policy was to maintain tight control, law and order in the city, which generally precluded aerial bombing, the use of artillery within the city perimeter, and anything likely to provoke mass insurrection. This policy reflected the fact that the Ethiopians were still living in areas scattered throughout the city; the geographic aspect of the Italian apartheid policy, which would soon drive all Ethiopians to the west of their capital city, had not yet come into force.
However, although the churches of Addis Ababa were generally spared aerial attack and machine-gunning during the occupation, they suffered in a variety of ways, for political, military or historical reasons. For example, the attempt by the Blackshirts to burn down the cathedral of St George arose from its association with the Ethiopian monarchy and with the Ethiopian victory at the Battle of Adwa, and the pillage of the same edifice was part of the general looting of the city carried out by the Italians under the three days of carta bianca.
In fact, most, if not all, of Addis Ababa’s churches, numbering approximately 25, were affected to some extent during the massacre of February 1937. Many were looted and also lost clergy to the slaughter at the palace or the pogrom that followed. A typical example is that of the church of Kidane Mihret (‘Covenant of Mercy’), which adjoined the royal church of Ta’eka Negest Be’ata LeMaryam (‘Seat of the King: The Entry of Mary’), commonly shortened to Be’ata Maryam, but also known as the Menelik Mausoleum, because the crypt contained the tomb of Emperor Menelik. The 23-year-old Dyakon Dawit (David) Gebre-Mesqel was serving both churches, which were situated within the periphery of Emperor Menelik’s original palace compound, now taken over as the headquarters of the Italian regular army. Thus David, who lived in a nearby church house, was dwelling on the perimeter of a sensitive area exempted from attack.
Dyakon David was also fortunate in that not only was his church located outside the area earmarked later in the day for destruction; he had also decided not to go to the alms-giving ceremony at the Governo Generale. The clergy had been invited, and being attached to one of the most important churches of the city, he and his colleagues were expected to attend. However, David, who related his story in detail to the present author while still in the same house he lived in during the Italian occupation, was due to lead Holy Mass beginning at noon, together with two other deacons. The decision not to go to the Governo Generale saved his life.14
Mass was actually to be conducted at the adjoining church of Kidane Mihret, for during the invasion the emperor had arranged for the church of Be’ata Maryam to be surrounded and reinforced with stones or concrete to help protect it against possible attack, so it was not in regular use.
At the church of Kidane Mihret, David and his fellow deacons went ahead with the Mass, and David was not aware that there were disturbances in the city until he heard the sound of gunshots, at around 2 pm. The slaughter had not yet reached as far south as the Menelik palace, but unbeknown to David, the Italians had announced a curfew and were closing down shops, churches and other institutions across the city.
While Mass was in progress, David was suddenly aware of a disturbance, and watched in horror as a squadron of Blackshirts burst into the church. Brandishing guns and daggers, they started evicting the congregation, while one group forced their way into the sanctuary and ordered out the three senior priests. In the pandemonium David and his two fellow deacons were chased out at gunpoint, and ordered to stand in a corner of the churchyard.15
David and his colleagues stood in the compound as ordered, until half past three. Then they were told to walk across to David’s house, which was a distance of about a hundred metres. It was only on leaving the compound that David learned that people were being attacked: ‘On Friday afternoon there were massacres in the streets. Vehicles were driven deliberately over people, and there was shooting.’16 The priests in the sanctuary, who had been told to stay there when the soldiers invaded the church, were sent home. Among them was Father Welde Samiyat, the highly respected head priest of Be’ata Maryam.
On Saturday night the repression squads raided the neighbourhood east of the Menelik gibbi, not far from David’s house. There Father Welde Samiyat was upstairs in his two-storey residence when he heard a commotion outside. Opening the window, he was shocked to see that Italians had arrived and set his neighbour’s house on fire. But no sooner had the prelate shown his face than he was shot—for no reason—by an Italian soldier, and fell to the floor. So died the venerable head priest of Emperor Menelik’s imperial church of Be’ata Maryam. The atrocity affected Dyakon David deeply; seven decades later he recalled it with undiminished horror.
The massacre also had terrible impacts on the Orthodox church of St Peter and St Paul in the city’s northern suburb of Gulelé, for it was outside that church’s cemetery walls that thousands of corpses were unceremoniously incinerated over a period of many days, the remains being buried in mass graves. The Italians prohibited the burial of massacre victims inside the cemetery, for there were far too many bodies, and in any case part of the cemetery was used for the burial of Italian soldiers.
However, on the other side of the road was the church of St Peter and St Paul itself, and there, at the very gate of the church, the Italians were dumping dead and dying victims of the massacre, as well as regularly using the area as an execution site throughout the occupation. Burial rites were not allowed for those executed, or for massacre victims, and such policies by the Italians never ceased to shock the Ethiopians. In 1963, a clergyman who had begun serving the church in 1909/10, at the time of Emperor Menelik, and who was there during the Italian occupation, recalled how one evening during the massacre the Italians brought 26 bodies and threw them into the field around the church. The following day only 16 were found; the others had been consumed by hyenas.17
The church of St Rufael in Gulelé, founded at the time of Emperor Menelik, was also desecrated during the occupation.18 During the abortive attempt by a combination of defence forces and Patriots to retake the city at the end of July 1936, some of the attackers had by chance passed by the church on their way into the city. Following the attempt, in which the Italian military managed to rout the attackers, Italian soldiers went to the church and threw hand grenades at the unsuspecting clergy, killing several of them. The military then took over the church and secured it with armed guards, some of whom threw cigarette butts into the church store, burning it down.19
As in the case of the church of St Peter and St Paul, during the massacre of Addis Ababa the Italians brought truck-loads of corpses to the church of St Rufael, where they forced priests to dig mass graves, each accommodating ten bodies.20
The military surrounded the church of Lideta St Mary, in the south-western quadrant of Addis Ababa, and closed it down. They planned to demolish it, presumably to utilise the land for some other purpose. However, by the time of liberation in 1941 their plans had not materialised, and the church survived.21
The church of Yeka Mikaél (St Michael), to the north-east of the city, was also closed. One of Addis Ababa’s earliest churches, it was founded around the 15th century in the form of an underground rock-cut basilica.22 The present church nearby was constructed in octagonal ‘Menelik’ style in 1926–7 by Menelik’s daughter, the pious Empress Zewditu. During the occupation, the Italians closed the church and deported several of the priests to Mogadishu, Italian Somaliland, where they were imprisoned.23
The well-known church of Intotto Maryam (St Mary), where Emperor Menelik was crowned in 1889, and which is actually a few kilometres outside the city, was partially looted by the Italians, who stole Menelik’s coronation crown and also removed a large cannon that he had captured during the Battle of Adwa.24
Being a royal church, Be’ata Maryam also attracted the unwanted attention of the Italians, particularly as it housed the tombs of Emperor Menelik, Empress Taytu, Empress Zewditu and Archbishop Matéwos, who had crowned Emperor Menelik and remained a faithful ally of the royal family until his death in 1926.25 In addition, the wall paintings in the interior depicted not only Menelik’s coronation, but also, as in St George’s Cathedral, the Ethiopian victory at the Battle of Adwa.26
To avoid an urban uprising, Graziani did not destroy the church of Be’ata Maryam. However, he exercised tight control over it by appointing a collaborator as head of the church, which enabled the Italian authorities to neutralise its image as a symbol of the monarchy. This involved prohibiting its regular use as a church, removing the golden crown that capped the pinnacle of the dome, robbing the church of its treasures, and prohibiting visits to the royal tombs.27
Wilful attacks on Orthodox clergy with no conceivable military objective continued long after the massacre of Addis Ababa. Dr Shashka, the Hungarian physician, described the fate of an elderly priest who had survived the massacre, but ‘against whom Fascist daggers were aimed’:
When Italian authorities became aware that he [the elderly priest] was still alive, Cortese convoked the murderers [i.e. Blackshirts] to the seat of the Fascio. Order was given to Gallini, one of the most able dagger-men, to stab the Coptic [Ethiopian] prelate. The priest was surprised in his house where some twenty or twenty-five Abyssinians, mostly women, were assembled after the massacre to offer up a devout prayer … While the prelate was kneeling in prayer, Gallini stabbed him with the dagger from behind, and retired with the satisfaction of one who had done his job.28
The Vatican Reacts
News of the attack on Graziani at the Governo Generale on 19 February 1937 was reported in the Italian press within hours of the event, and on the same day Guido Cortese in Addis Ababa received authority from Rome for the reprisals. Soon, news of the carnage in Addis Ababa and the burning of St George’s Cathedral appeared in the world’s press, from New York to London, from Paris to Melbourne. However, international observers expecting a strong response from the Holy See to the shocking news were disappointed. The pope was silent on the issue. Indeed, his interest in Ethiopia at that time was focused on publicly recognising King Victor Emmanuel III as emperor of Ethiopia, despite the traditional papal policy of recognising such changes in wartime only after an international peace conference. Seemingly in a hurry demonstrate his loyalty, the pontiff was the second head of state to do so after Adolf Hitler, signalling that the Holy See considered Italy’s actions in Ethiopia legitimate.29
Confident now to plan for the future in Ethiopia, as if that nation was a sea of calm, the pontiff appointed a special commission to develop a strategy. The outcome was a two-pronged approach: the Congregation for the Oriental Churches would address the issue of the ‘schismatics’, while the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith would focus on converting the ‘pagans’.30
Another Christian Enemy
Although the Italian episcopate considered the Ethiopian Church the most significant obstacle hindering the expansion of the Catholic Church in Ethiopia, the Orthodox Ethiopians were not the only Christians to be persecuted by the Italian administration in Addis Ababa. During the 1930s there was a common belief among the Catholic hierarchy that the greatest dangers to the Catholic Church were Protestantism, Judaism, Freemasonry, democracy and individual freedom of expression and conscience. Pius XI was particularly concerned about the dangers to Catholicism posed by Protestants, despite the fact that they constituted only a tiny minority of the Italian population, and in 1928 he had actually forbidden Catholics to take part in groups that encouraged inter-faith dialogue. Thus, given the element of religious persecution embedded in the invasion and attempted annexation of Ethiopia, as well as the fear of any non-Italian influences, it is not altogether surprising that within a few months of the war of invasion becoming a war of occupation, the Governo Generale in Addis Ababa introduced a policy of closure of all non-Italian Protestant missions in Ethiopia (except for the German Hermannsburg Mission) and deportation of the missionaries.
Alfred Buxton, a well-known British Protestant missionary, was an unusual case. He had entered Ethiopia for the first time from Kenya in 1931, not long after the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie, and stayed for four months. During that visit he was impressed with the longevity, ubiquity and size of the Ethiopian Church, and was convinced that it had great potential for evangelisation throughout the nation. He saw a parallel between the Ethiopian Church and the Christendom of pre-Reformation Europe in the priestly adherence to the dead language of Gi’iz (which was incomprehensible to the majority of Ethiopians), and their disinclination to preach or evangelise. He was thus unique among the Protestant missionaries in Ethiopia in wanting to strengthen the Ethiopian Church rather than compete with it. He received support for his unusual plans from important dignitaries such as Ras Kassa; Foreign Minister Blattén Géta Hiruy; Dr Charles Martin, the future Ethiopian minister in London; and ultimately the emperor himself.
Buxton even went to the greatest seat of Orthodoxy in Ethiopia, the monastery of Debre Libanos, where, despite the Italian propaganda about barbaric heretics, he was pleasantly surprised to find friendly and supportive clergy. His companion on that occasion, the Swedish Protestant missionary Per Stjärne, who spoke Amharic, had been equally surprised: ‘Well, my impression of Debre Libanos is entirely altered. I thought it was full of bigoted monks where we could do nothing. But [now] I think it is quite otherwise.’31
Buxton received warm support from the emperor for a Bible school for the clergy that would lead to an Amharic translation of the Bible by the Ethiopians, and managed to recruit a number of students. By late 1934 he was back in Ethiopia again, by which time some Bible Churchmen’s Missionary Society (BCMS) missionaries had settled in missions there as a result of his earlier visit. His local protégés, whom he had recruited with assistance from the emperor, were four educated young Ethiopians who gave up well-paid employment to become preachers of the Gospel: Hayle-Gebriél (who had been deputy governor of the province of Harar), and Werqu, Abeba and Temesgen Gebré, the son of a priest from Gojjam. All four were devout and committed teachers. Hayle-Gebriél is said to have gained the distinction of being the first Ethiopian to read a passage of scripture in Amharic (rather than Gi’iz) in the cathedral in Addis Ababa, and in the following week Temesgen preached in Amharic to a congregation of three hundred in the cathedral compound.32 The year 1935 saw the four preachers going from strength to strength throughout the country, while Buxton remained in the background.33
But by May 1936 the invader was at the gates of the city, as Buxton’s biographer put it, and soon everything would unravel. Hayle-Gebriél found a compound suitable for the Ethiopian preachers, and Buxton—either astonishingly naive or trusting entirely in Providence—went to see Graziani to request clearance for their mission. The Englishman’s plans were, of course, totally unacceptable to the viceroy. A British Protestant asking permission to evangelise in Italian East Africa was bad enough, but supporting and strengthening the Ethiopian Church, the very institution that the Italians regarded as their enemy? The request was outrageous. Graziani’s hatred for both the Ethiopian clergy and erudite foreign-educated Ethiopians was well known, and the suggestion that the latter should infiltrate the former to strengthen the hold of the highly nationalistic Ethiopian Church on the population that he was trying to bring under Italian control was anathema to the viceroy. From that moment on, Hayle-Gebriél, Werqu, Abeba and Temesgen were in double jeopardy, for not only were they Protestants, but they had now been identified as posing a potential danger to the Italian administration. They were thus now living on borrowed time.
Needless to say, no sooner had Buxton been assured by Graziani that religious freedom had been proclaimed than Hayle-Gebriél, Werqu and Temesgen were arrested and imprisoned on trumped-up charges.34
Buxton returned to England, having bid three of his four protégés farewell in prison. Fortunately for them, despite being under suspicion, they were in due course released—most likely following intervention by the British legation. Although anti-Protestant feeling among the Italians was simmering for political reasons—mainly due to the British, French or Swedish nationalities of the missionaries, who were gradually being deported—it had not yet reached crisis levels, and the Ethiopian converts were not yet in Graziani’s sights.
But that was to change. Following expulsion of the foreign missionaries, Ethiopian Protestants had been allowed to continue to practise their faith and in some cases even to take over mission buildings. However, after the attempt on Graziani of 19 February 1937, the Italians had launched an anti-Protestant pogrom in which many Ethiopian Protestants were sent to concentration camps.35 In the security clampdown that accompanied the massacre of Addis Ababa, Italian security forces raided the BCMS Bible school, and arrested the entire community of some fifty teachers, evangelists and students, of whom one in three would die in prison in tropical Mogadishu, in ‘a beastly place below sea-level’.36
During the raid, the Italians found records of visits to the countryside by Hayle-Gebriél, Werqu, Temesgen and another preacher named Beyene. Hayle-Gebriél and Temesgen were not present in Addis Ababa, but Werqu and Beyene were arrested, together with a young man named Tageni, who was mistaken for Temesgen owing to the similarity of their names. That night the Italians killed the two evangelists Werqu and Beyene, as well as the unfortunate Tageni. Abeba, one of the original four preachers, was imprisoned. Graziani had the remaining BCMS missionaries deported, and Hayle-Gebriél disappeared.37
Buxton’s biographer thought that Temesgen was out of town, but he wasn’t. He was actually at the Governo Generale during the attempt on Graziani of Yekatit 12 when the grenades were thrown, and was one of the few to survive the machine-gunning of the crowd that followed. Arrested by the military immediately afterwards, he ended up in the squalid detention camp at the Municipality Building in the city’s Arada district, from where he was moved to the overcrowded Central Prison. Having been imprisoned by the Italians previously, he guessed, correctly, that his name would be on the ‘wanted’ list, and was astute enough to adopt a false name.38
Four days after his arrest, and still detained in brutal conditions in the compound of the Central Police Station, Temesgen, who survived the Italian occupation and after liberation became a well-respected newspaper editor and writer, described a disturbing incident he witnessed in which Italian Catholic clergy arrived at the prison with a list of Ethiopian Catholic prisoners to be freed: ‘Then Catholic clergymen who had come in with the officer started looking [among the prisoners] for fellow Catholics. They called out their names from a list and had them released.’39
But that was not all; the Italians started pulling out the Protestants pointed out by collaborators, following which they were taken away and shot: ‘Those suspected to be Protestants and identified as such by informants were taken and killed with a machine gun at the gate of the prison.’ The executions terrified the detainees, and from that moment onwards, no one wanted to be known as a Protestant:
For a few hours they asked [us] questions about religion. Then they asked each prisoner to name [his or her] religion. All the prisoners claimed to be either Catholic or Muslim. There was no-one who claimed to be Protestant, with the exception of Ato [Mr] Ar’aya, aleqa [head] of [the church of] Medhané Alem [‘Saviour of the World’], who was a courageous and devout Christian.40
Temesgen, with a history of close relations with non-Italian Protestants, was distraught, writing rhetorically, ‘The missionaries who were in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, knew Ato Ar’aya. What did they [the Italians] do to him? How did they kill him?’
Ar’aya refused to renounce his faith, and the clergymen watched as the innocent aleqa was dragged to a military truck: ‘After the three days of rampaging in the town, Fascist beasts who had returned from Holetta with a truck tied the legs of Ato Ar’aya to the back of the truck.’ Before the vehicle moved, Father Ar’aya sang a mission hymn: ‘Heaven is opening for me to enter; I will see Jesus there!’ The response from the Blackshirts was that it would be better for him to listen to their song, and they chanted their ‘war cry’: ‘Du-ce!Du-ce!’
Temesgen was horrified by the behaviour of the Catholic clergymen, who just watched:
They did not oppose the death-penalty … Each Italian Fascist behaved like a king, and the Catholic monks,41 with their ropes around their waist, were standing and watching when it was decided to kill Ato Ar’aya, and while he was being killed. [Their only reaction was that] they were not impressed with his singing, because Ato Ar’aya’s voice was weak from hunger and thirst.42
The truck sped away, dragging Father Ar’aya behind it. Meanwhile, the Catholic clergymen left the prison with their freed Catholic prisoners.
The Reverend Guy Playfair, a British field director for the Sudan Interior Mission, who was sent on a tour of inspection in Ethiopia after the 1941 liberation, was shocked to learn about the persecution of Protestants during the occupation. He reported that in one incident, apparently in 1940, infuriated that the Ethiopian Protestant community continued to flourish after the deportation of the foreign missionaries, the Italians arrested and imprisoned fifty Ethiopian Protestants. They were each given up to one hundred lashes, one unfortunate man receiving four hundred. For months afterwards the badly lacerated victims, described as looking like ‘raw meat’, could not lie on their backs, three of them died, and others remained incarcerated. While they were in prison, Italian Catholic priests came to visit them from time to time—not to bring them consolation or sustenance, but to try to persuade them to renounce their faith by kissing the crucifix in order to gain immediate freedom.43 Such accounts might be difficult to believe were it not for the fact that similar instances of ‘conversion by coercion’ on the part of Catholic priests were reported by former prisoners of the Ustashe in Croatia under the notorious clerico-Fascist regime of Ante Pavelicć.