Country-wide protest action included the launch by the Communist Party of the “Hands off Abyssinia Campaign” as well as several prominent public demonstrations – in Johannesburg on the City Hall steps; in Cape Town on the Grand Parade; and in Durban near the tramway sheds – many of which involved tense stand-offs with local fascist groups (Bantu World 2 November 1935, p. 1). Protestors chanted Garveyist slogans, “Africa for the Africans” and “Africa must be returned to us!” and burnt Mussolini in effigy. Several spontaneous dockworkers’ strikes and protests in Durban, Cape Town and Luderitz in which workers refused to load Italian ships with frozen meat destined for Italian troops stationed in Ethiopia mirrored similar forms of protest action in other port cities around the world. In New Brighton township near Port Elizabeth, 2,000 residents describing themselves as “descendants of Ethiopians” declared themselves willing to enlist to fight and die for Ethiopia (Bantu World 12 October 1935, p. 1). In Johannesburg, a delegation of Africans applied to the Minister for Native Affairs on behalf of 6,000 Africans for permission to enlist in the Abyssinian army (Bantu World 24 August 1935, p. 1) and a group of white women protested against state-subsidisation of South African meat sent to Italian troops (Bantu World 12 October 1935, p. 1).

Interest in the crisis was not confined to the urban centres. A meeting of the Industrial Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU) in the small farming town of Heilbron, south of Johannesburg, issued a statement condemning Italy’s actions (Umsebenzi 9 April 1935, p. 1), in remoter areas of the Eastern Cape, daily inquiries were made at trading stations for the latest radio reports (Umteteli wa Bantu 9 November 1935, p. 5) and, in the town of Phokeng, a women’s sewing group turned the words of a popular Sesotho song “Morena Boloka Sechaba sa Rona” into a “prayer to God on behalf of Abyssinia” (Letter from W.D. Kgoadigoadi Bantu World 9 May 1936, p. 12).³ In Ladysmith, Natal, a meeting of chiefs and their counsellors resolved “to offer morning prayers daily immediately before sunrise for peace and for the cause of the helpless Africans whose territory has been invaded” (Bantu World 26 October 1935, p. 1). One of these same chiefs, Chief Walter Khumalo, offered to raise an impi of Zulu warriors for active service in Abyssinia (Bantu World 24 August 1935, p. 1).

The invasion provoked similar responses in the rest of the continent and the diaspora: “As one of the decisive moments in the articulation of diasporic thought and politics, the war galvanized black communities throughout the Atlantic hemisphere around a perceived racial solidarity and anti-imperial activism”, ushering in a “mass black internationalism” (Taketani, 2010, pp. 121, 122). The point is reinforced by Teshale Tibebu: “From London to Harlem, from Lagos to Kingston, Accra to Cairo, the Italian fascist invasion of Ethiopia became a rallying ground of pan-African nationalism” (1996, p. 426).⁴ Tales of the invasion “were told not only in British West Africa, but also in the neighbouring East African countries of Uganda, Kenya and Tanganyika, in the vast territory of Egypt, … in the West Indies as well as among the black communities in America, Britain and Europe” (Asante, 1977, p. 4). In West Africa, the invasion sparked the “keenest interest, particularly amongst educated groups” and was the subject of numerous debates in the press, pulpit and other platforms (Asante, 1977, p. 166; Matera, 2015, p. 67). West African anti-colonial activists, especially, “built on existing anti-imperialist sentiment to link calls for Ethiopia’s defence to demands for self-government” (Munro, 2008, p. 43; Asante, 1973, pp. 172–208). Taking the lead in what became a vigorous critique of both Franco Mussolini and the British Government were the Lagos-based newspapers The Comet and The West African Pilot (edited by Nnamdi Azikiwe); the Gold Coast newspapers The Gold Coast Spectator and Vox Populi and in Sierra Leone, the Sierra Leone Weekly News (Asante, 1977, 53).

Interest was also high in the “imperial metropolis” of 1930s London which saw the establishment of the International African Friends of Ethiopia (IAFE) by C.L.R. James, George Padmore and Amy Ashwood Garvey, large public demonstrations and protests as well as energetic debates in the meetings and publications of the West African Students’ Union and the League of Coloured Peoples (Matera, 2015, p. 65).⁵ For many commentators, the invasion offered unusual insight into “the real motives which move imperialism in its contact with Africa”, the “incredible savagery and duplicity of European Imperialism in its quest for markets and raw materials” (C.L.R. James cited in Robinson, 2000 [1983], p. 272). Reaction in the United States was equally vigorous: the invasion opened “a new chapter in the organizational history of anticolonialism” spurring the formation of numerous groups such as the Ethiopian World Federation (Von Eschen, 1997, p. 11), as well as a host of fund-raising and enlistment initiatives.⁶ The invasion “was the story of the year in the [African-American] press” (Munro, 2008, p. 47), with newspapers such as The Crisis, New Amsterdam and The Pittsburg Chronicle playing a central role in convening and provoking discussion.⁷

Given the political and symbolic importance of the Abyssinian crisis and Ethiopianist discourse more generally for anti-colonial and pan-Africanist thinking and politics, it is striking that so little work has been done on its impact and resonance in the South African context.⁸ In this chapter, I make a claim for the Ethiopian conflict as a hidden or overlooked revolutionary trope in South African politics and letters and trace its inscription across selected examples of black South African newspapers. Of special concern are the ways in which the invasion was read, written and debated in relation to developing anti-colonial perspectives and local political debates as well as the extent to which a much older Ethiopianist discourse, grounded in a heterodox, emancipatory exegesis, was re-activated in popular print arenas as an important focal point of political disruption and aesthetic engagement. As such, I make a claim for the popular, public mediations of the conflict as constituting a hitherto hidden history of political debate, aesthetic and cultural engagement and transnational connection. These debates – and the newspapers in which they were staged – played a significant role in clarifying political understanding, developing and refining existing anti-colonialist positions and goals, shaping new and more radical forms of political consciousness and redrawing or re-affirming existing pan-African, black Atlantic, Indian oceanic or other kinds of internationalist affiliations and imaginaries.

As in other contexts of pan-Africanist, anti-colonial engagement, the relatively inconspicuous form of the newspaper emerges as a primary site of public political dialogue and “diasporic practice” (Edwards, 2003) in relation to the Ethiopian scene. In this way, as Neelam Srivastava argues, “contemporary readers coproduced ideas of black liberation and race consciousness with their intense engagement with the coverage of the Ethiopian war, across national boundaries and social classes” (2018, p. 69). This history of Ethiopianist inscription in South Africa is accordingly focused on some of the most important multi-lingual, black-targeted newspapers of the mid-1930s period, namely the independent, Communist Party papers Umsebenzi and Umvikeli-Thebe; the politically moderate (white-owned, black-edited) commercial publications Bantu World and Ilanga lase Natal The Natal Sun; and Umteteli wa Bantu, a commercially-minded, pro-mining publication centred on the mitigation of black radicalism and published by the white-owned Chamber of Mines.⁹ As the following analysis will reflect, the conservative/radical schema employed here does not preclude the possibility of political elasticity and ideological variation within individual publications as various voices – and ne...