ABSTRACT
Other Italian soldiers in very different circumstances were instead making their way to Shewa in the highly unusual guise of European prisoners of war of an African power. In the entire history of European expansion in Africa had such a situation ever occurred? Single or small numbers of prisoners may have been taken in Europe’s peregrination of conquest in the Dark Continent, but close on 2,000 regularly captured soldiers subsequently used in the bargaining of peace terms between a defeated European and a victorious African power was an unprecedented situation, totally subverting the ‘normal’ in the colonial context. When traveller John Boyes arrived in Addis Ababa in May 1906 he was shocked to see ‘hundreds’ of Italians engaged in the city as builders. ‘It seemed very strange to me’, he wrote, ‘coming from East Africa to see an African ordering about a white man engaged in building his house.’ At least some of these Italians were ex-prisoners who had stayed on in the Ethiopian capital happy to have a job, testifying to the scale of poverty at home as well as the remarkably good treatment received during their imprisonment. Boyes also noted, with the understandable concern of a white settler in Kenya, that the ‘Abyssinians considered themselves better than the average white man, that is since they had beaten the Italians.’1
