On 19 February 1937 (12 Yekatit 1929 by the Ethiopian calendar), Ethiopian nationalists in Addis Ababa attempted to assassinate Rodolfo Graziani, the Italian Viceroy known for his brutality in the Italian empire. In heart-breaking and grisly detail, Ian Campbell tells the story of the three days of unbridled retaliation that followed. Based on a rich combination of memoirs, personal interviews, and photographic evidence, Campbell dispels any effort to dismiss the ruthless mass murder of Ethiopian civilians in February 1937 as random acts of a handful of overzealous black-shirted thugs; Campbell proves that the reprisals involved Italians in every sector of the settler society and at every level of the Italian colonial apparatus. This book serves as a damning catalogue of events and a demand for an apology from the Italian government for the over 19,000 Ethiopian civilians who, according to Campbell's careful calculations, died during the massacre.
Campbell begins with a background chapter that provides a broad history of Italian imperialism. The core of the book consists of seven chapters with an hour-by-hour account of the Addis Ababa massacre starting with the attempt on Graziani's life that instigated the horrifying reprisals. Through a series of personal accounts and detailed maps, Campbell shows how terror spread from the seat of the Italian government to an area known as the Circle of Death in the afternoon of 19 February 1937. Perhaps most damning to the Italian high command is Chapter Five on the declaration of ‘Carta Bianca’, or carte blanche, by the Fascist Party secretary Guido Cortese. In a public announcement, he encouraged Italian citizens to seek reprisals and extended to them the tacit support of the Italian military. The book continues to detail the height of violence against Ethiopian civilians over the following two days. Mass arson, summary execution on the streets, and a round-up of Ethiopian elites left Addis Ababa decimated by 22 February. In Chapter Nine, Campbell examines military tribunals established in Addis Ababa and surrounding areas in the aftermath of the massacre, ostensibly to punish perpetrators of the attempted assassination. Campbell argues that the true motivation behind these trials was the elimination of the Ethiopian intelligentsia, whom Italian authorities viewed as a threat to their control. The penultimate chapter of the book, entitled ‘The Reckoning’, analyzes the number and identities of both victims and perpetrators of the massacre. Finally, Chapter Eleven, ‘The Cover-Up’, explains how the international context of the Cold War informed a wilful forgetting of Italy's crimes against Ethiopian civilians after World War II.
This book excels in its efforts to provide a granular account of these devastating events. The extensive use of photographs and maps transports the reader to the streets of Addis Ababa. More importantly, Campbell shows admirable respect for the experiences of the city's inhabitants. He traces the personal biographies of his interviewees in loving detail and steps aside to give space to their voices. Campbell has spent much of his career dedicated to the history of Ethiopia and its people. A foreword by Richard Pankhurst (the historian and son of Sylvia Pankhurst — the British suffragette, writer, and activist supporter of Ethiopian independence — who features prominently in the book) as well as a long list of acknowledgements that includes luminaries in the world of Ethiopian academia confirm Campbell's status as a leading figure among scholars exploring Ethiopia's history beyond the colonial archives.
Despite the raw emotion in the book, however, Campbell missed an opportunity to appeal to a broader audience. The book lacks a strong narrative structure and has a repetitive quality that could prove to be a stumbling block for non-specialists. Another missed opportunity relates to women's experiences. Thanks to a mass arrest of men, a disproportionate number of the victims of the massacre were women and children. Rape, however, draws barely a mention. Campbell acknowledges the existence of accounts of ‘sexual abuse of women’, but he contends that these experiences are ‘difficult to substantiate, since few, if any, Ethiopian witnesses of these atrocities survived’ (298). Yet the entire purpose of this book is to establish that mass violence took place, despite the lack of easy evidence. Campbell manages to make fulsome use of scant documents, personal accounts, memoirs, photographs, demographic data, and even artistic representations to provide compelling proof of the extent of the massacre. He conveys details about Italians dismembering victims, cutting off their faces, and throwing small children into burning buildings when they tried to escape. Does not the incidence of rape as a tool of torture merit the same level of detailed analysis? At the very least, the prevalence of women as victims demands more than two short paragraphs on the topic.
Despite these omissions, Campbell's painstaking efforts to chronicle the events of the Addis Ababa massacre constitute a crucial contribution to the growing literature on the history and legacies of Italian imperialism. This book makes the violence of Italian imperialism and the international cover-up of Italy's crimes impossible to ignore.
