THE BATTLE OF ADOWA
MARCH 1ST 1896
This work, founded over several historic searches, Italian, Ethiopian and of other countries, is an attempt to recostruct those events, that seem today far away. It appears to me necessary also to understand the reasons that carried many young Italian soldiers to death in a country so distant from their mainland, following a colonial dream, never completely clear to its same supporters. The heavy defaet that made a great impression on the Europeans, because for the first time an european army had been defeated by indegenous troops, and this was a haevy shame never seen. Too much were the words on the newspapers eand in The Italian Parliament in those days, to support of the political choses, of economic right and wrong interests, of ideological prejudices and of the various advantages.
If today the Ethiopian nationalism remembers and extols this event, dyeing it with a helo of pride and holiness, in Italy the bad conscience of the Italian history has forgotten or hiden those events, that also were a justifacation of the African adventure of Fascism, of the war against the Ethiopia and of its conquest in the years before the World War Second.
In this web page there ar'nt ideas of support to the colonialism or of eurocentric justification, that in that time had been the base of the enterprise, but I'll try to understand why that battle has happened, what had been the previous events and what showed to political class and to Italian people same.
The Italian colonial imperialism, that Lenin called "ragamuffin imperialism", latest arrived to the conquest of Africa, seen with suspect, coldness or clear dislike by other European colonial imperialisms, whose africain pages, and not only, were sometimes also blacker, but whose nationalistic justificationism and the lack of the autolesionism tipically italian, don't show them in a way so cheeciky as has happened in Italy.
Clerly, it is very difficult, and I do'nt wish it, to justify in a etic way and also from the wiew of the national interest, the Italian spedition in the Africa Horn, but the colonialism has been a lasting aspect of the european policy, to whom also Italy has taken part at late and with its peculiar feature.
Nobody today, neither in Italy nor in Europe, looks back with regret or calls for the colonialism, and I less than others, on the contrary a free Africa, dignified and protagonist of own history and of that of all in the world, is a true and authentic exspectation.
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