Could the Ethiopians link up with the anti soviet forces in the balkans?
The Continent's Destiny
Excerpt from A History of African Radicalism [1] by Paul Gilroy
The Second Italo-Ethiopian War had inflamed anti-colonial sentiment across the African Continent, Egypt having been reminded of the British dominance and 6,000 South African Blacks gathering in Cape Town to organize amongst themselves a mercenary force that was to go fight in Ethiopia. There were widespread hopes that, despite her countless hurdles, Ethiopia could replicate the victory she'd gotten in 1896 as Italian columns pushed further into Tigray and these hopes were falsely raised with Haile Selassie's Christmas Offensive. Owing to Italy's overwhelming advantage in firepower and manpower, it was inevitable that the Ethiopians would've eventually collapse, although some entertain the notion that Ethiopia would've become "Finlandized" if Badoglio had made the decision to retreat in the face of the Ethiopian attacks and abandoned large quantities of Italian equipment in doing so. The fall of Ethiopia certainly crushed these hopes but ironically enough, led to a wave of radicalism sweeping the Continent and Garvey's Liberia was at the center of it.
On charges of mail fraud, Marcus Garvey had been deported in 1927 and made the fateful decision to not emigrate back to his Jamaican homeland, but to Liberia where he set up shop in Monrovia. The upper echelons of the Universal Negro Improvement Association joined him and so did the several thousand African-Americans that had been selected in the UNIA's Back-to-Africa program. The deportation had only radicalized Garvey, the man now fervently advocating for African repatriation and seeing Africa as the only place where the Negro race could prosper. It was in Liberia where Garvey gained ground against the hegemonic True Whigs Party by promising to the various tribes equity alongside their American brethren and delivering on said promise by establishing multiple national development programs. This earned the UNIA a near-universal support base that horrified the already-wary Americo-Liberian elite, guaranteeing the former an astounding victory in the 1931 Liberian general election and allowed Marcus Garvey to become the President of the Republic of Liberia.
Marcus Garvey and UNIA leaders observing the marching soldiers of the Universal African Legion, 1931.
Monrovia soon became a flurry of activity, especially in the UNIA's headquarters which was described by some as an army's camp where strategies were hashed out and reports constantly coming in. The UNIA had already established their own network that stretched to encompass West Africa [2] but was particularly influential in the Sierra Leone and Gold Coast colonies. Liberian nationalism also influenced the UNIA in the hopes that the former territories which had been a part of the newborn Liberia in the 1850s and '60s could be reclaimed under the guise of a Pan-Africanist movement. Marcus Garvey also entertained the notions of a West African Empire, one that was likely to be dominated by an Americo-Liberian aristocracy, built on the foundations of his Ideal State [3] and Black/African nationalism, but he was concerned with looking to the nations of East Africa. Primarily, that was to be Ethiopia.
The ascendance of Tafari Makonnen to the Ethiopian throne had been met with much fanfare in Liberia, especially by Marcus Garvey, where he had been viewed as the saving grace of Ethiopia. Haile Selassie's modernization programs had garnered him much favor amongst the Universal Negro Improvement Association, particularly the Emperor's decision to attract African-American immigration [4] to Ethiopia. This led to the formal establishment of relations with Liberia and attempts by the UNIA to establish an arm in Ethiopia, although this failed due to Addis Ababa banning any sort of political parties. Compensation was offered to the Garveyite government by providing the Negro Factories Corporation with economic concessions that would give Ethiopia the opportunity to overhaul its agricultural sector and form an industrial backbone as had been done in Liberia. The Italian invasion of Ethiopia was to put a sudden halt to this, the Ethiopian government shifting its attention to the war effort and preventing Ethiopia from collapsing.
Garvey responded to the Italian invasion by denouncing Mussolini and organizing a volunteer expeditionary force to be sent to Ethiopia to fight for Africa's last independent Empire, whipping up pro-Ethiopia sentiments throughout West Africa and even in the Americas where the UNIA still maintained its links. The Black Star Regiment was sent to Ethiopia via the Black Star Line, consisting of the experienced officers of the Universal African Corps and the radical Black nationalists that had enlisted in the Liberian Frontier Force who were reminiscent of men like Charles Young. This was a convenient way of sacking those who were just a bit too radical and outspoken for the Garveyite government's taste, the future Liberian President Carlos Cooks having been a veteran of the war in Ethiopia. With the assistance of Nazi Germany in bribing French officials in the Somaliland colony, the BSR made its way to Addis Ababa on the Addis-Djibouti Railway and after its officers met with Haile Selassie himself, was dispatched to the frontlines on the beginning of the Christmas Offensive.
The Black Star Regiment arrives in Addis Ababa, November 1935.
The BSR was attached to Ras Imru Haile Selassie's Gojjame troops who spearheaded the Christmas Offensive, valiantly fighting at Dembeguina Pass and Shire. They too were subject to the mustard gas attacks and relentless aerial bombardments from the Italian Air Force but fought a rearguard action to assist the northern Ethiopian withdrawal toward Addis Ababa. The Black Star Regiment was also ferried to Djibouti, being picked up by the BSL to be shipped back to Liberia where they were well-received by Marcus Garvey himself for their efforts in fighting for Ethiopian independence. The experiences that they brought back with them were recorded by the UNIA, Monrovia exploiting this opportunity to not just exemplify what happens when an African nation fails to modernize but in Geneva where the Liberian delegates supported their Ethiopian counterparts in protesting the League's failure to react to the use of chemical warfare. To Garvey and the UNIA government, it showed exactly how much the Europeans cared about international diplomacy and the small nations of the world as well as their kowtowing to countries like Italy who threatened to begin another World War.
It is then not surprising that a wave of radicalism swept the entire Continent after the fall of Ethiopia and subsequent failures of the League of Nations to seriously punish Rome. In Egypt, the Young Egypt Party won an overwhelming victory in the May 1936 general elections due to the Wafd Party's inability to adequately deal with the Great Depression, failure to mobilize the discontent youth and the signing of the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty that displayed the Wafd Party's complacency with its parliamentary predominance and willingness to collaborate with the British. In Tanganyika, the Tanganyika African Association begun advocating for further independence and the promotion to a Class A Mandate, exploiting its countrywide branches in both the countryside and urban areas to apply pressure on British officials. To up the ante, the Nazi German government had turned its eye to its former colonial empire in the Near East and dispatched a man by the name of Fritz Delfs to organize a base there, National Socialist ideals finding an ear amongst the White settler community and educated Tanganyikans. In occupied Ethiopia, the Black Lions movement combined influences from Japanese Fascist, National Socialist and Garveyist thought. The same was happening in the educated circles of Black Africans in the Union of South Africa, Belgian Congo and Cameroon as well.
Members of Young Egypt's Green Shirts on drill, May 1936.
Monrovia and Berlin were not the only ones covertly supported African independence movements - Tokyo was also privy to supporting such movements as well. Japanese support for nationalist movements was not necessarily restricted to Asia or Africa and this showed with the growth of pro-Japan Black nationalist organizations [5] in the USA. This can be seen in organizations such as the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World, Nation of Islam and Peace Movement of Ethiopia who were directly supported by Satokata Takahashi who funneled financial support from the Black Dragons Society to these movements. The Ikki Kita administration also maintained close links with the Garvey government in Monrovia who resembled the Black Dragons Society and was similar in that it possessed an extensive network of agents pushing a pan-racial narrative. Quite a few in the UNIA liked the Hakko Ichiu ideal and sought to mimic it in the Pan-Negro Empire that Marcus Garvey had often spoke of in the early to mid-twenties. This call for an African Imperium was also a tenet of Imru's Black Lions Party and their foremost proponent was Malaku Bayan [6], a fervent Black nationalist and Pan-Africanist who would also become a close friend of Marcus Garvey, who was the representative of the Ethiopian government-in-exile in the affairs of Pan-Africanism.
Speaking of the exiled Ethiopians, Haile Selassie had been lobbying for the Japanese government to help train a force of Ethiopians to partake in the reclamation of Ethiopia and former lands from Italian rule. It was only answered with the Japanese invasion of China in July 1937, several thousand men from the Ethiopian emigre community being mobilized and organized into the Sheba Legion. They were to be sent to the Chinese front for the purpose of "gaining experience" and "any means of practice," according to Sadao Araki but the Provisional Ethiopian Government knew - they were rapidly becoming puppets of Japan's new government and integrated into the new totalitarian system that the Japanese intellectuals of the Shōwa Restoration had imagined.
A young Ethiopian receives training under the eye of the Imperial Japanese Army, early 1937.
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[1] Based off of OurSacredWar's Black Fascism TL and Paul Gilroy's Black Fascism. ITTL, it's instead a comprehensive book on radical ideology in Africa and this particular chapter focuses on African Fascism.
[2] The Universal Negro Improvement Association had firmly entrenched itself in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and to a lesser extent, the British Gold Coast. See The Garvey Movement in British West Africa by R.L. Okonkwo for more.
[3] In pg. 74-76 of The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, Marcus Garvey describes the Ideal State as a model to replace the failed ideologies of the 1920s and '30s. In essence, it was intended to be a nationalistic and authoritarian state with proto-Fascist characteristics. For more, see the link.
[4] IOTL, Haile Selassie focused on attracting African-American immigration to Ethiopia in the hopes of gaining some skilled labor for modernization. See Ethiopia and Afro-Americans: Some Historical Notes, 1920-1970 by William A. Shack for more.
[5] IOTL, many African-Americans and Black nationalists looked on the Japanese modernization and nation as something to be admired as well as the Empire of Japan as something to emulate. For more, see Facing the Rising Sun: African-Americans, Japan and the rise of Afro-Asian Solidarity by Gerald Horne, When Japan Was "Champion of the Darker Races": Satokata Takahashi and the Flowering of Black Messianic Nationalism by Ernest Allen Jr. and "Champions of the Darker Races" - The African-American View of Japan (1905-1941) by Omri Reis and Under Cover: My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld of America by John Roy Carlson for more.
[6] See Ethiopia & Black America: The Forgotten Story of Malaku and Robinson by Ayalew Bekerie for more.