Marcus Garvey, Ethiopia and the Founding of the OAU

Editor’s note: This essay is available in our print issue, Pan-African Dreams. Buy the issue here.

But it wasn’t until the aftermath of the Battle of Adwa in 1896 (in which Ethiopia successfully defended itself against Italian invasion) that Ethiopia began opening channels of comradery with the Atlantic diaspora. By then, the African diaspora had experienced several decades of freedom from enslavement. The potential for prosperity after abolition in the Black Atlantic demonstrated by Reconstruction in the United States, for example, was in contrast with the status of the African continent, which had just undergone critical colonial division at the Berlin Conference of 1884-5. In his 2012 essay, ‘From Adwa to OAU: Ethiopia and the Politics of Pan-Africanism’, historian, Fikru Gebrekidan, discusses how despite Ethiopia’s ‘sense of isolation’ resulting from their unique position of sovereignty during the colonial period in Africa, the Ethiopian empire was able to forge nascent connections with the Atlantic African diaspora. Gebrekidan writes of diasporan visits Ethiopia at the turn of the century, looking to catalyse political and economic ties; such visitors, Gebrekidan notes, included ‘Benito Sylvian of Haiti, William Henry Ellis and Daniel Alexander of the United States, and Joseph Vitalien of Guadeloupe.’

Perhaps no other diasporan has been better able to embody the symbolic and political currency of Ethiopia and Ethiopianism than Marcus Garvey. Garvey was born on 17 August 1887 in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. After a brief tour of Central America and studying in London, Garvey travelled to the United States in 1916 and established his influential Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) with its base in Harlem, New York. In many ways, UNIA rivalled W.E.B. Du Bois’ National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and his Pan-African congresses. Whilst the NAACP typically drew from elite and Western-educated circles and took a middle-ground position, the UNIA appealed to a wider Black audience which embraced ideas radical for its time: Black supremacy and racial separatism. Garvey envisioned a unified, decolonized Africa to which the diaspora could repatriate and set up satellite communities across the world; he believed each Black person should consider their actions relative to the building of an economically, politically and culturally strong Africa that could compete on the global stage, fulfilling the prophecy foretold in Psalms.

To Garvey, Ethiopia was Africa—as Garvey often conflated the two—and Ethiopia was divinely protected through its status as one of the oldest Christian nations in the world. On 31 August 1920, on the heels of Du Bois’ 1919 Pan-African Congress in Paris, Garvey presented the pan-African flag of red, black and green, as well as his ‘Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World,’ a proto-pan-African constitution, in which the final resolution declares that ‘the anthem, “Ethiopia, Thou Land of our Fathers”… shall be the anthem of the Negro race.’ Ethiopia as the centre of Garvey’s pan-African vision remained critical years later. In a 1923 issue of the UNIA’s flagship publication, The Negro World, Garvey wrote that ‘We see a new Ethiopia, a new Africa, stretching her hands of influence throughout the world, teaching man the way of life and peace, the way to God,’ another nod to his philosophical roots in Ethiopianism.

Garvey’s legacy would be solidified for decades to come with a mysterious, unidentified quote, in which he is rumoured to have declared, ‘Look to Africa where a Black king shall be crowned, for the day of deliverance is near.’ Some might argue that if Garvey indeed said this, he might have been indicating his aspirations as the ‘Provisional President of Africa,’ a title he designated for himself and approved by his followers during the same 1920 UNIA convention. However, on 2 November 1930, Ras Tafari Makonnen was crowned Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, leading to the belief in Garvey as a prophet who prophesied the event. It equally led to Selassie’s divine status particularly among Rastafarians, an Afro-Judeo-Christian religious sect developed in Jamaica, whose title pays homage to the emperor’s former name and title.

Despite the cultural and religious symbolism that initially delineated Ethiopia’s role in Pan-Africanism, Garvey and the UNIA were instrumental in moving pan-Africanism from a theoretical exercise in the diaspora to practical implementation in Africa. Though mostly unsuccessful, Garvey promoted economy and industry across the Black world, most famously through his Black Starliner, a fleet of cargo ships that were also rumoured to be the vessels which would facilitate the repatriation of diasporans to Africa. But just as Ethiopia’s rise to the forefront of pan-Africanism was arguably unlikely as a never-colonized African nation, historian, John Henrik Clarke, described the irony of Garvey’s pan-African pre-eminence despite never being ‘allowed to set foot on African soil,’ and ‘[speaking] no African language.’ This was as opposed to W.E.B. Du Bois who died in Ghana after establishing long-term, critical links with influential African leaders from Kwame Nkrumah to Jomo Kenyatta. However, Clarke continues, it was Garvey’s ability ‘to convey to African people everywhere (and to the rest of the world) his passionate belief that Africa was home of a civilization which had once been great and would be great again.’ Garvey’s appeal to wider Black audiences meant that his Ethiopia-centric message also permeated further and deeper. Gebrekidan writes that in the early 1930s, out of ‘150 or so US Citizens in Ethiopia…two-thirds were Black immigrants.’ By the time of Italy’s Benito Mussolini’s invasion in 1935, seeking vengeance for Italy’s defeat at Adwa, the UNIA created the condition for large swaths of diasporans to sign up to defend Ethiopia’s sovereignty.