The Photograph of the Ethiopian Soldier

The Day André Vltchek gave me a Leica

September 3 will be the eightieth anniversary of the defeat of fascism, when Japan surrendered and the war ended. I am thinking about the newsletter for Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research that I am going to write for the week before that date. It will be about the immense sacrifices of the Chinese and Soviet people - over forty million dead - in the wars against European fascism and Japanese militarism. To that end, I have been reading a number of books about the wars of the 1930s, particularly the wars in Asia. But I have also been looking closely at the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. In that reading, I was struck by one photograph that bears some thought:

Alfred Eisenstaedt took this picture in Ethiopia during the Italian invasion in 1935. It was published in both Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung and in Life magazine. Eisenstaedt is known as the photographer of celebrities and of the sailor kissing the nurse in New York on VJ Day. But - in my opinion - his most powerful photos were taken on assignment in Ethiopia. This is of a barefoot Ethiopian soldier, killed by the Italian invaders. He has no shoes. His feet are cracked. He must have walked for kilometres in the hot sun. He would have been shot by a Breda 37, the Italian light machine gun of that era manufactured in Milan. Look at the guns in the photograph below used by the Ethiopians. They look like Fusil Gras, the 19th century rifles of the French military with black powder cartridges. This was two eras of industrial war facing each other, the slaughter obvious.

In reading about the Italian colonisation of Ethiopia, I came upon something that I did not know about. On 19 February 1937, two young men (Moges Asgedom and Abraham Deboch) tried to assassinate Marshall Rodolfo Graziani, Viceroy of Italian East Africa, at a parade in Addis Ababa. Graziani survived. But his assistant Guido Cortese gave the order:

Today is the day when we should show our devotion to our Viceroy by reacting and destroying the Ethiopians for three days. For three days I give you carte blanche to destroy and kill and do what you want to the Ethiopians.

The Italians opened fire on crowds of Ethiopians. It is said that between 30,000 and 20,000 Ethiopians were killed - at least 20% of the population of Addis Ababa. The Ethiopians remember this as Yekatit 12 (የካቲት ፲፪). They killed everyone they could find. It was a hideous massacre.

Ladislas Sava, a Hungarian doctor, saw what was happening and wrote it down:

No one escaped from the attack among the crowd in palace compound. Within short period of time, over three hundred people were killed many of whom were old, visually impaired, disabled, beggars, children, and poor mothers— the killing was so indiscriminate, coldblooded, haphazard, foolish…Rivers were contaminated by blood; dead bodies were seen around Ras Mekonnen Bridge. I could not control myself; my legs trembled. Though I experienced fatal diseases as a medical doctor and I used to work in battlefield ambulances during First World War, I could not endure my emotions and withstand what I saw during Yekatit 12. I could not bear the massacre of those Ethiopians.

The colonial attitude here is unmistakable. Reading all this makes me sick. Italy has never apologised for this hideous massacre - instead, as Ian Campbell shows in his masterful book The Addis Ababa Massacre (2017), the Italians continue to try and cover it up.

There is a straight line from that massacre to Gaza today.

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I am glad that Eisenstaedt photographed the war. That is him with the Leica 35mm that he used for all his remarkable photographs.

Several years ago, the journalist André Vltchek (1963-2020) arrived in Delhi and invited Sudhanva Deshpande and I to have dinner with him in his hotel room at Le Méridien. Sudhu and I went up to his room, where he had a table of cameras. I picked up the Leica 35mm and said, this is just lovely. André said, ‘take it. No, I mean it. Take it. I bought it in Istanbul for nothing. You can have it’. I did. It was with me for many years. André died five years ago in Istanbul. When I saw this photograph of Eisenstaedt, I thought of André and the Leica. And André’s visceral hatred of colonial violence. The last email I sent André was from Burkina Faso. I had mentioned to him that there was unrest in the Sahel region and that something was going to happen. It did. You can read about it next week in our dossier: