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...