In 1944, her world opened up. Travelling by air for the first time in her life, she flew to British-administered Eritrea, then on to Addis, where a grateful Haile Selassie, who had already named a street in the capital after her, awarded her a Patriot’s medal and the Order of the Queen of Sheba, an honour usually reserved for foreign queens. After so many years spent writing about an imagined country, she found the reality of what she dubbed ‘fairyland’ exhilarating and overwhelming: ‘I was enchanted and bewildered; I seem to be living in a dream.’15 The Eritrean leg of her trip outraged the Foreign Office, which sniped at her failure to show proper respect for British administrators on the ground. Real anxiety ran below their complaints, for while Sylvia was in Asmara she met prominent Eritreans campaigning for unification with Ethiopia–encounters London deemed too dangerous to be repeated. Sylvia’s hatred of British imperialism had, ironically, turned her into an enthusiastic campaigner for an African empire: Greater Ethiopia, encompassing the entire Horn. She had swallowed the myth of the Queen of Sheba in one enthusiastic gulp, touting a vision of the future in her newspaper editorials that London had little wish to see take shape. ‘I beg you to believe that we here had no desire whatever to promote the lady’s journey,’ a sorrowing Foreign Office employee assured a former diplomat who raged against Sylvia being granted a visa. ‘She is in fact one of our most persistent and unscrupulous persecutors.’16 In light of her ‘egregious behaviour and scurrilous attacks on HMG’, the Foreign Office briefly played with the idea of using the Order of Sheba episode as an opportunity for delivering ‘a sharp rebuff’–British subjects could supposedly only accept foreign decorations with the King’s prior approval. ‘The lady is a blister, and deserves a rap,’ fulminated one official. But the suggestion was pursued no further.
Sylvia’s worst suspicions were confirmed in April 1946, when Britain, without consulting Haile Selassie, publicly unveiled its plans for a United Somalia at a Foreign Ministers’ meeting in Paris. Her denunciations so infuriated the British legation in Addis Ababa, they called for legal action. Cooler heads prevailed in London, which could all too easily imagine to what effective propaganda use Sylvia would put a court case. ‘Infamous as her slanders are, it is a fact…that public probing into our record since 1941 in the Ogaden would produce quite a lot that would embarrass us,’ warned one Foreign Office man. Nonetheless, he assured the legation, his colleagues agreed ‘wholeheartedly with you in your evident wish that this horrid old harridan should be choked to death with her own pamphlets’.17 The partition plan met with such intense international opposition it had to be abandoned, but the British would only withdraw from the Ogaden a full 13 years after Addis was liberated.
Reading the Foreign Office files, one savours Sylvia’s ability to rub the British government up the wrong way. The voice of the establishment comes across clearly, and it is not a pleasant one: sexist, patrician, pompous, utterly convinced of its own superiority–it’s hard to say whether the men airing these views held Sylvia or the ‘local natives’ they constantly refer to in greater contempt. Either way, they knew they were right. But setting aside a certain instinctive empathy for a woman content to play the role of establishment scourge, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Sylvia, at this stage in her life, had lost her political way. The woman who had spent her career battling Western imperialism was, it seems, blind to the dangers of African colonialism. The radical who had challenged the bourgeoisie was now accepting honours from a monarch claiming a direct link with God. Perhaps her biggest mistake was the failure to recognize the ethnic loyalties and historical experiences that differentiated Moslem lowlander from Christian highlander, Eritrean from Ethiopian, Amhara from Somali.18 To her they were all HIM’s rightful subjects, longing to return to the Motherland after years of Fascist exploitation. These were easy mistakes to make when she was tracking events from the distance of Woodford Green, harder to justify once she began visiting the Horn and saw for herself the complex realities on the ground.
Modern Eritreans find it hard to forgive her these failings. They hold a particular grudge against Sylvia for the aggressive role her newspaper played in trumpeting union with Ethiopia. When the suffragette’s name comes up in conversation, it is usually with a nudge and a wink, the suggestion being that her relationship with Haile Selassie was more than merely platonic. Nonetheless, Eritreans know they owe her a reluctant debt of gratitude. Were it not for the campaign she launched after her second trip to the Horn, a key episode in the moulding of the Eritrean psyche would have passed unrecorded. On the issue of British asset-stripping, this True Believer, however inadvertently, was to prove a real Friend of Eritrea.
According to Sylvia’s own account, she came across the destruction ordered by the British authorities in Asmara–by then in its final phases–on a 1952 trip to Massawa with an Ethiopian acquaintance and an Eritrean merchant. ‘The port was in the process of being dismantled; all its installations were being systematically destroyed or removed,’ she wrote in Eritrea on the Eve, the book she rushed into publication. ‘It is a disgrace to British civilisation,’ the merchant told her, and she felt ashamed. ‘His words affected me painfully, like blows, so just they were in my opinion. I was grieved and downhearted.’ Her book was illustrated with the same photographs Count Cornaggia had handed to the Foreign Office two years earlier–how they ended up in Sylvia’s possession is not clear. But the damage she logged was far more extensive than that the Italian aristocrat had cited, and she made a new, embarrassing allegation: dismantled industrial equipment and stripped wood, iron and steel had gone to benefit British-run territories in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
In Massawa itself, apart from the levelled naval base and hospital, a cement factory had been removed and sent to Sudan, an aerodrome had been sold to Egypt for demolition, the only dredger working the Red Sea had been sold and a floating dock and two giant cranes had been dispatched to Pakistan, Egypt and Malta, while 500 oil reservoirs had been razed and 20 radio stations dismantled. ‘As a result of the demolitions in the port its capacity has been reduced by three-fourths,’ she reported. Further along the coast at the town of Zulla, 400 Italian officers’ houses had been demolished, in Fatma Dari a potash factory sold. In Assab, she claimed, a radio station had been transported to Kenya, a salt factory dispatched to Aden and the motors of scuttled ships removed for sale. Three hundred railway wagons, plus rail construction material imported by the Italians to connect Agordat in Eritrea’s lowlands with the Ethiopian town of Gonder, had been sold off, as had the motors running Eritrea’s remarkable ropeway. In Gura, the American aerodrome had been demolished and exported to India. While some of this property had certainly been brought to Eritrea by the Allies as part of the war effort, the lion’s share, she alleged, had originally been erected by Italy.
In railing against what she described as an act of ‘hideous sabotage’, Sylvia’s concern was never for the Italians, effectively robbed of a sizeable state investment, or for the Eritreans most directly affected. She was outraged that her beloved Ethiopian government, whose right to the coastline she took as read, had been deprived of a priceless industrial resource just as it was seeking to rebuild and modernize. Leaving the Italian installations intact, she argued, would have served as ‘essential, though scanty reparation’ for the wrongs suffered by the occupied Ethiopian people–wrongs experienced, she for once refrained from mentioning, during a Fascist invasion the West had not lifted a finger to prevent. Keeping the Allied hardware in place ‘would have been a gracious act’. Astutely, she questioned whether Britain had acted legally. Appointed by the UN temporary ‘caretaker’ of Eritrea, the British Administration had a duty to ‘preserve and cherish’ assets in situ. It seemed it had abused that trust. ‘The right of the British Administration to destroy or dismantle installations in Eritrea is exceedingly doubtful.’ And she poured appropriate scorn on the ludicrous Foreign Office claim that the buildings had been flattened because they represented a potential thre
at to life and limb. Left unguarded, the buildings might conceivably have been stripped of their roofs by looters, but ‘the strong reinforced concrete structures erected by the Italians would have weathered the test’, she said. Querying whether Britain’s secret agenda had been to render Ethiopia militarily defenceless, she went on to raise another interesting possibility as to the motives behind the asset-stripping: ‘Americans who have viewed the demolitions declare the British have effected them in order to handicap an economic rival.’
The deeper she delved, the more she found to fuel her fury. Many Eritrean assets, she claimed, had been dumped on the market at a fraction of their genuine value. Thousands of metres of armoured cable had been sold for as little as 5s 3d a metre, when the real market price was £2 10s. Not only had the Addis government never received a penny in compensation, the British government actually forced Ethiopia to hand over the sum of £950,000 (a hefty £15.6m at today’s prices) when it finally ceded control of Eritrea, on the grounds that Her Majesty’s Government had lost revenue during a decade spent running the territory. This last financial transaction was not one the government was eager to publicize. The Foreign Office noted in January 1954 that Peter Freeman, an MP who often posed awkward questions in the House of Commons at Sylvia’s prompting, might raise the issue of the £950,000 payment. ‘The Department recommend that as little as possible should be said about this separate matter.’19
Calling for a public inquiry, Sylvia pursued the British government over the episode for a relentless three years, firing off letter after letter to her usual targets: the Foreign Office, Churchill, Attlee and Eden. She sent details of the British dismantling to John Spencer, the Emperor’s American adviser, who used the information to block the removal of a consignment of rails the British proposed to sell as scrap–one small victory won from what was, overall, a crushing defeat.20 At her instigation, letters were published in The Times, the issue repeatedly raised during parliamentary Question Time. The official denials and dismissive slap-downs came thick and fast, the British government never wavering in its response: it had done nothing to be ashamed of.
The establishment denial has lasted to this day. Veteran historian Edward Ullendorff, who worked for the British Administration in Eritrea in his twenties, becomes apoplectic when Sylvia’s name comes up. ‘The British dismantling never happened. It is all a myth. Sylvia Pankhurst was a wonderful propagandist but she knew nothing about Eritrea,’ he told me over the phone. There was no point in our meeting up to discuss the matter, he said, implying that anyone who treated the allegations seriously was a fool.21
The conversation unnerved me enough to return to pore over the files at Kew with special attention. Just how accurate, I wondered, was Eritrea on the Eve?
Characteristically, Sylvia did herself no favours by overstating her case, slipping up on details which Foreign Office staffers then used to undermine her entire thesis. The Assab salt factory she had thought lost, for example, was still operating. The cement factory she mentioned had been requisitioned by the British, but returned to its owners, whose decision to sell to an Englishman who then moved it to Sudan could therefore be presented as a private matter. Gura’s aerodrome had been destroyed by the Americans, not the British, and the Italians had dismantled the radio station in Assab themselves to prevent it falling into enemy hands. Since some of her information was scrambled, the questions Freeman put were often muddled enough to allow the Secretary of State, by sticking rigidly to the literal terms of the MP’s inquiries, to say nothing of interest.
Nonetheless, leafing through the archives, the picture that emerges is hardly an honourable one. Perhaps the single most valuable document, never made public, is a four-page internal Foreign Office report written by an unnamed British official, probably based in Asmara, who had clearly been asked to assess each of Sylvia’s claims for accuracy.22 Dismissing her findings, his tone is lofty and contemptuous. ‘There is really no answer to this utterly ridiculous statement,’ he writes at one point, after gleefully highlighting her faulty spelling of local names. Yet even this least critical of employees cannot help but reveal that the British set to with a will in Eritrea.
The demolition of the naval base in Massawa is taken as read. A large dredger, he acknowledges, ‘various major vessels’ and a floating dock had been ‘condemned in prize’–ie, requisitioned by the British as war booty–and sold. Equipment salvaged from the bombed aerodrome had been sold, as had oil installations at Ras Dogan. In Zula, 5.7 km of rail track, 850 railway points, 3 tonnes of bolts, 20 turntables and 71 trucks had been classified as ‘wasting assets’ and sent to Kenya. Another 1,500 m of barbed wire, 3 small cranes, 1 steel jetty, 1 steel signal tower and 1 steel hut had also been sold back to Italy. At Assab, scuttled or sunk vessels had been requisitioned as war booty, as had oil surveying equipment on the Dahlak islands belonging to the Italian company Agip. At Otumlo, 45 km of railway line had been deemed ‘susceptible of military use’ and sent to the Middle East, a fate also allotted 77 railway wagons and 31 km of railway line the Italians had intended to lay between Agordat and Bisha. In addition, British administrators had ‘received’ 100 train wagons, 2 diesel locomotives and 2 motor trolleys ‘from other sources’.
There is enough in this report alone to make the British stance of wounded innocence look decidedly suspect. For those who care to look further, tantalizing clues that something drastic took place in Eritrea lie scattered through the public archives and buried in the histories written by British colonial officers of the day.23 Perhaps the most damning statistic was published by a commission sent to the Horn by the Allied powers in 1947 to decide the fate of Italy’s colonies. Setting out to establish a detailed picture of Eritrea’s social, political and economic conditions, investigators asked a representative of the Eritrean Chamber of Commerce to explain what lay behind the country’s severe recession. To their obvious amazement, the man immediately cited the requisitioning of Eritrea’s best factory equipment–including machinery from its cotton, oil, Lancia and Fiat car plants–as a major factor. As the British Administration in Asmara refused to supply any information, the Four Powers Commission could probe this unexpected disclosure no further. ‘No indications are given by the Chamber of Commerce–and no confirmatory information is available–of the manner in which this vast material wealth has been disposed of,’ the investigators concluded.24 But they published the Chamber’s estimate of total lost assets anyway: 1,700m East African shillings, the equivalent of £1.85 billion today–a tidy sum for such a small territory.
The British public could not have cared less. Far more terrible things had happened in the war and by the 1950s more pressing domestic concerns–the end of rationing, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, the conquest of Everest–were filling the newspapers. The question of how Britain had behaved in an obscure African outpost, some sun-bleached leftover from a conflict everyone wanted to put behind them, seemed old news. The steady stream of official denials did its work. To Sylvia’s disappointment, the national press never got excited by the story, leaving her to do all the running–a fact commented on with relief by the Foreign Office. The story died a death, and so did the awareness that Sylvia Pankhurst’s life had ever involved more than chaining herself to railings in the suffragette cause.
Experienced journalist and seasoned headline-snatcher that she was, Sylvia had nonetheless missed the real story. She had caught only the scraggy tail of a far larger scandal. Looked at in isolation, the asset-stripping in Eritrea might seem a temporary aberration, unworthy of a once-great empire. The episode acquires a different shape, however, when viewed in the context of British policy in the Horn of Africa as a whole. It was to be left to another member of the Pankhurst family–Sylvia’s adored son Richard–to uncover a chapter in British history that makes what was done in Eritrea look not just logical, but utterly inevitable.
Richard Pankhurst came to Addis in 1956, a young man of 29 accompanying his mother in the last upheaval of a life that ha
d already seen its share of fresh lodgings and career switches. Haile Selassie, who never forgot the debt he owed his most ardent Western supporter, had invited Sylvia to rebase in the Ethiopian capital. Bearing what many a British spinster would regard as the two essentials of life–a paintbox and a white Persian cat–she installed herself in a one-storey villa in a green glade of garden, looking south-west across the Wuchacha mountains.
To the outsider it might seem extraordinary that a woman who had already suffered one near-fatal heart attack should choose to move so far from home at the age of 73. To Sylvia, not prone to dwelling on the past or looking too far into the future, there was nothing puzzling about it. She was not the kind to campaign from a distance, only to blanch on contact with reality. As a long-term supporter of the Emperor, she was ready to savour life in his country, amongst her fellow fuzzy-wuzzies. One by one, her ties with Britain were fraying. Corio, who would never have agreed to quit the environs of the British Library, had died two years before. Many of her friends from the suffragette days had passed away. Her latest big project, raising funds in London for a modern hospital in Addis, christened after Ethiopia’s Princess Tsahai, had been completed. It was time for a new start, and she was confident she would find much to do.
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