The intellectual as partisan: Sylvia Pankhurst and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia

ABSTRACT

This article examines the feminist, communist and antifascist campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst as a postcolonial intellectual for our times. A forgotten figure in the history of anticolonialism, Pankhurst was active in the suffragette movement and then the communist movement, before devoting her political energies to supporting Ethiopia against the Italian invasion led by Mussolini in 1935. Pankhurst’s broadsheet New Times and Ethiopia News published articles denouncing the Italian occupation as well as writing by prominent African and Asian anticolonial voices. Through the analysis of Pankhurst, this article argues for an understanding of the postcolonial intellectual as a partisan who cuts across civilizational divides, bringing together metropolitan and colonial networks of resistance. I draw on Carl Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan in which he describes the partisan, exemplified in the political combatant of the wars of decolonization, as the emblematic figure of twentieth-century warfare. I adapt Schmitt’s theory to read Pankhurst’s militancy in favour of Ethiopia in order to argue that the partisan is not only an insurgent fighter but an individual who takes sides in the interconnected struggles against colonialism and fascism. I thus gesture to the possibility of a global theory of resistance.

KEYWORDS:

• Sylvia Pankhurst
• postcolonial intellectual
• partisan
• Italo-Ethiopian war
• anticolonial resistance
• Italian imperialism

On 2 October 1935, the Italian fascist regime organized its most spectacular public demonstration yet. It called twenty million Italians to city centres and squares with sirens and church bells, and then proceeded to convey, via loudspeaker, a speech by Mussolini, which he delivered from a balcony overlooking a huge crowd assembled in Piazza Venezia, Rome. Italy was to wage war on Ethiopia so as to obtain its long-awaited ‘place in the sun’ and take back for itself part of the ‘rich colonial loot’ it had been unjustly denied by the Allied powers in the 1919 Versailles Peace Treaty.¹

The Italian invasion of Ethiopia was among the top ten leading news stories of 1935, according to the British publication World’s Press News.² In the run-up to the invasion, Addis Ababa was overrun with foreign journalists anxious to get the ‘scoop’ on the most exciting international event of the year. As Evelyn Waugh, who covered the war for the Daily Mail, remarked, ‘Abyssinia was News. Everyone with any claim to African experience was cashing in’.³ The significant impact of the war on public consciousness was largely due to the key role played by print culture in shaping interpretations of and debates around the war.

Italy’s invasion and conquest of Ethiopia, which began in October 1935 and concluded in May 1936 with the declaration of Italy’s ‘Roman empire’, was to mark the highest point of Mussolini’s popularity and established new forms of colonial policy such as the racial laws of 1937 and 1938.⁴ Ethiopia was the only Italian colony constituted after the advent of fascism; Somalia, Eritrea and Libya had been established in previous decades under liberal governments. But, as many already argued at the time, the conflict also marked the beginning of a series of fascist aggressions against independent sovereign states that would culminate in the Second World War.⁵

For scholars of anticolonialism, Mussolini’s illegal act (Ethiopia was a member of the League of Nations) takes on a wider significance. Italy was attempting to build up its empire at a time when colonialism was beginning its decline, anti-imperialist movements were developing in various parts of the European empires, and Western public opinion was beginning seriously to question the values underpinning the imperial project. In particular, the debates that arose around Mussolini’s war of aggression against Ethiopia in 1935 provoked profound reactions among intellectuals and activists in terms of Italy’s ‘right to conquest’ vis-à-vis other European colonial powers such as Britain and France. The event of the Ethiopian war further questioned and destabilized beliefs in empire and Europe’s civilizing mission.

Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, and later the Spanish Civil War, contributed to a deepening sense of crisis. This was linked, arguably, to a growing sense that if European civilization, with all its high promises, had led to fascism in Spain and Italy, then perhaps it was nearing its terminal end-point. This battle over the meaning of civilization was primarily mediated through the press, which assumed an increasingly partisan role in these tense years before the Second World War.

It is also due to its timing, then, that the Italo-Ethiopian war had such a global impact, and that it acted as a catalyst for antifascist and anticolonial resistance movements everywhere. In an era of internationalist solidarities against fascism, such as those that were mobilized during the Spanish Civil War, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia provoked waves of support from a staggering variety of groups. These included Black communities from both sides of the Atlantic – from Harlem and Chicago’s South Side to West Africa, the Caribbean plantations in Jamaica and British Guiana to those communities in Paris and London.⁶ But the Ethiopian war also sparked solidarity among citizens of imperial nations such as Britain; the sympathy for this ‘victim country’ cut across racial, class and colonizer/colonized divides.

The European country that at the level of popular consciousness displayed the most opposition to the war was Britain, which of course is paradoxical given it possessed one of the largest colonial empires at the time.⁷ On 5 May 1936, the day the Italian army victoriously rode into Addis Ababa, the Times Leader carried a wholehearted endorsement of Haile Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia: ‘The world today sees in the Emperor – frail but indomitable, firing a machine-gun while the bombs dropped around him in the heat of the day – a worthier representative of humanity than his conqueror – mouthing self-praise in the Roman limelight’.⁸

Across the British press, common-sense understandings of empire’s civilizing mission curiously jostled with an emerging human rights discourse that manifested itself in various articles and letters in the ‘print war’ that took place over the morality of Mussolini’s act. Newspapers with high circulation numbers like the Times and the Daily Mail, as well as more niche outlets like the British-Italian Bulletin and L’Italia Nostra, which essentially served as mouthpieces for fascist propaganda in Britain, fought it out on the pages of their publications.⁹ Supporters of the Duce included George Bernard Shaw and Evelyn Waugh. But his detractors were much more numerous. Sylvia Pankhurst (1882–1960), erstwhile suffragette, co-founder of the British Communist Party and a staunch antifascist, became a leading opponent of the invasion, though her role in this conflict has been largely forgotten.¹⁰ She began by writing to newspapers such as the Manchester Guardian urging the British government to intervene to save Ethiopia and to stop secret accords with Italy that threatened to jeopardize the African country’s sovereignty.¹¹ These included the Hoare-Laval Pact between Britain, France and Italy that proposed a partition of Ethiopia, thus effectively sanctioning the legality of the invasion.¹²

In the months that followed the invasion, Pankhurst became the main protagonist of the ‘print activism’ around the war. Almost single-handedly, she created the broadsheet New Times and Ethiopia News, partly to counteract fascist propaganda that justified the invasion. On 5 May 1936, the first issue of the broadsheet went to press, the same day the Italian army entered Addis. Pankhurst regarded Ethiopia as the first victim of fascism, after Italy itself.¹³ According to her son, the historian Richard Pankhurst, the circulation of New Times and Ethiopia News was of 10,000 copies weekly and eventually achieved a peak of 40,000 copies, with widespread distribution across Africa and the Caribbean, and was even banned in some British colonies (such as the Crown Colony of Freetown) as it was deemed seditious.¹⁴ Letters contained in the Pankhurst Papers at the British Library suggest that there was great demand for the broadsheet in many African colonies, such as Nigeria and the Gold Coast.¹⁵ The broadsheet carried detailed, up-to-date news about the Italian occupation and about the fascist threat more broadly. It also became one of the most important interwar print vehicles for expressions of African and Asian anticolonial nationalism, a point I will return to later.

Pankhurst’s campaign in favour of Ethiopia, which lasted throughout the Italian occupation and well into the postwar period, shows that the Ethiopian war allowed strategic alliances to emerge between antifascists such as Pankhurst and anticolonialists who agitated for national independence; groups that otherwise may not have seen their struggles as commensurate, precisely because the modes of conducting and justifying this war explicitly linked together Mussolini’s fascist ideology with imperialism. Indeed, for Mussolini ‘realizing fully the fascist state meant realizing the Empire’.¹⁶

In what follows, I focus on Pankhurst’s antifascist and anticolonial activism in her writing and politics on Ethiopia. Through my analysis of Pankhurst, I rethink the idea of the postcolonial intellectual by situating her within a wider history of a global resistance to empire that was sustained by a network of anticolonial activists both in the metropole and in the colonies. My understanding of the term ‘postcolonial intellectual’ might seem far-fetched in the case of someone like Pankhurst, who was British. But I argue that she is an example of reciprocal solidarities between antifascists and anticolonialists who share the same ideal: a will to transform the nation from within, and a conception of democracy that rejects fascism and imperialism as parts of a single system. Thus, for Pankhurst, being antifascist translated easily into her being anticolonialist. She is an avowedly partisan figure, like a number of other intellectuals in the twentieth century who articulated a similarly intertwined antifascist and anticolonialist position.

My analysis proposes that the essence of twentieth-century transnational partisanship is anchored in a form of internationalism that breaches the colonial divide. In this coming together of metropolitan and colonial energies that recognized the dangers of the ‘European disorder’ represented by fascism and imperialism, Western and non-Western actors shared a common ground, what Leela Gandhi calls an ‘ethics specific to transnational and collaborative anti- or postcolonial endeavours’.¹⁷ Antonio Gramsci, writing in 1932, just a few years before the invasion, reflected on Italian imperialism along lines that grasped fascism's and imperialism’s identical provenance: ‘Must the national movement that brought about the unification of the Italian state necessarily result in nationalism and in nationalistic and military imperialism?’¹⁸

The answer for Gramsci, of course, was no, as it was for many communist and left intellectuals at the time. Rather, a truly emancipatory and revolutionary nationalism could only be internationalist. The motto of Pankhurst’s New Times and Ethiopia News was initially ‘for international justice’.¹⁹ Pankhurst spent many years of her life lobbying the British government to support Ethiopia against the Italian invasion, continuing a practice of political advocacy that dated back to her suffragette days. She wrote so many letters to the Foreign Office that at one point a Conservative Member of Parliament complained she was ‘plus fuzzy wuzzie que les fuzzy wuzzies’.²⁰ The term was coined by British colonial soldiers as a nickname for the Hadendoa tribe that fought with the Sudanese Mahdis against the British army, and given the context of this letter, it suggests that the MP considered Pankhurst to be more militantly anticolonial than the Ethiopians themselves.²¹

Here I use the term ‘partisan’ – with its strong connection to resistance fighting – to describe journalism and activism like Pankhurst’s that sought to influence European public opinion towards an antifascist position by denouncing the atrocities of Italian imperialism in Ethiopia. In my reading, the partisan is not only a figure to be found in history, ‘reconstructed’ retrospectively, but is also what we might call a ‘heuristic figure’, a theoretical position that we can use to make sense of a shared ‘common cause’, to use Leela Gandhi’s terminology regarding internationalist activism.²² In other words, the idea of the partisan is a political metaphor, a trope of transnational resistance that re-configures anticolonialism and antifascism as a shared practice of solidarity. My analysis shares insights with the work of Gandhi and Priyamvada Gopal, who have examined anticolonialism as an ethical and political enterprise in which the writing and activism of colonial subjects exerted a strong influence on metropolitan dissidents.²³ As I discuss further below, Pankhurst’s broadsheet was a collaborative enterprise on which Pankhurst worked with the numerous contributions of African, Caribbean and Asian nationalists.

Pankhurst both took part in and led the way for major intellectual and political movements of the twentieth century: feminism, communism and anti-colonialism. She was a postcolonial intellectual in the sense that she was able to create an anticolonial and antifascist public sphere through her publication New Times and Ethiopia News, a ‘counterpublic’ for the expression of engaged debates around national self-determination and anti-imperialism.

Pankhurst allows us to link the idea of the postcolonial intellectual to that of the transnational partisan, where ‘postcolonial’ delineates a terrain of struggle that is simultaneously that of the colony and that of the totalitarian state. In such a way, colonial and metropolitan revolutions appear as interrelated. Pankhurst forms part of a counter-tradition of modern intellectuals who created connections across colony and metropole in terms of identifying shared conditions of oppression and opportunities for resistance. Pankhurst’s fellow travellers and contemporaries include George Padmore, C.L.R. James and Antonio Gramsci, all of whom shared with her an opposition to imperialism and to fascism together.²⁴ Pankhurst contributed a regular column to Gramsci’s publication L’Ordine Nuovo between 1919 and 1920. Padmore’s activism in favour of Ethiopia put him into frequent contact with Pankhurst; moreover, they were both based in London during those years.²⁵

Carl Schmitt argues that modern partisan warfare articulates a new global space of resistance that transcends national territoriality:

In partisan battle a complexly structured new space of action emerges, because the partisan does not fight on an open field of battle nor on the same plane of open frontal war. Rather, he forces his enemy into another space.²⁶

To read Pankhurst as a transnational partisan suggests that she was able to delineate a new space for anticolonial sympathies and solidarities to articulate themselves through the medium of print, as represented by the invaluable archive for international resistance represented by New Times and Ethiopia News.

This postcolonial idea of resistance posits the partisan as the protagonist of a ‘global civil war’ against fascism, imperialism and capitalism. The specific conjunction of antifascism with anticolonialism that is so key to interwar human rights discourse is embodied in the transnational partisan. The partisan is halfway between an ethical and a political figure, fighting battles on the ‘newly politicized terrain of the ethical’ that distinguishes anti-imperialist practices from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards, and which gestures towards the possibility of a global ethics.²⁷ It is useful to remember in this context that the postwar Universal Declaration of Human Rights had a very diverse authorship, drawn from European and postcolonial nations; the ethics underpinning this document emerged out of the struggles for decolonization and postulated the ‘recognition of national self-determination as the basis of fundamental human rights’.²⁸ In the concluding part of this article, I return to Schmitt’s emblematic figure of twentieth-century warfare, the partisan, an ethical-political combatant who fights for an ideal, rather than a conscript in a regular army involved in a conflict between states. Schmitt’s notion, read against its authoritarian grain, is a useful heuristic for grasping the profound connections between antitotalitarianism and anti-imperialism that so animated Pankhurst’s thinking and that make her a postcolonial intellectual for our times.

Pankhurst’s partisan press

Pankhurst developed a distinctively anticolonial and antifascist method of struggle through her strategic use of the press and her position as political journalist. New Times and Ethiopia News aimed to keep Britain informed of the atrocities being committed by the Italians. Pankhurst is best known for her feminist and socialist politics, but she spent more than twenty years of her life devoting herself to the Ethiopian cause, eventually dying in Ethiopia, where she received a state funeral. She was very close to the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, and indeed to the entire imperial family. Pankhurst realized early on that British public opinion needed to be kept up to date about the conflict if it were to sway in any significant way the decisions of government. Her publication, while devoted mainly to the Ethiopian war, often ran news about other fascist conflicts, and from August 1936 it began to carry articles about the Civil War in Spain and the murders committed by the Francoist troops there. Photographs of Spanish fascist and Italian colonialist atrocities aimed to suggest links between the two conflicts – and in the process create a sympathetic equivalence between the Spanish and Ethiopian victims of these wars – among the British public.²⁹

Pankhurst’s family background and early campaigns had prepared her well for ‘a life-long cause’. Sylvia was the daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst and sister of Christabel Pankhurst, both founders of the suffragette movement, into which Sylvia threw herself wholeheartedly for many years. Pankhurst’s dedication to the Ethiopian cause was viewed as strange and unfashionable by her contemporaries – mainly because it had a decidedly political antifascist slant rather than a purely humanitarian one – but then her political activism had always been of a type that ran against the grain, eschewing any regimentation within set parameters or Party lines. Her previous militancy in the suffragist and communist movements stood her in good stead when she embarked on her pro-Ethiopian campaign, which was to occupy most of the second half of her life. The shift in focus in her political causes, which moved from feminism to communism to antifascism and anticolonialism, was not due to a whim. On the contrary, these issues were profoundly connected in her mind: she grasped that the struggles for gender, class and racial equality could not be separated from one another and needed to be tackled together. This may have also come to her from her father, Richard Pankhurst, a noted campaigner for women’s suffrage. Rachel Holmes, in her recent biography of Pankhurst, notes that Richard’s ‘insistence on the indivisibility of rights always influenced Sylvia’s thinking’.³⁰

While throwing herself wholeheartedly into each of these causes, she also was a strong critic of what she perceived to be the exclusionary boundaries of their agendas. For example, she was outraged at the increasingly middle-class dimensions of the struggle for women’s suffrage, some of whose female proponents, including her own sister Christabel, wanted to restrict the vote to propertied women. Pankhurst fought to keep the public eye on the terrible conditions of working-class women, arguing that they, out of all their gender, needed the vote most urgently.

Her depth of feeling and solidarity with the working class were inseparable from her feminism. She also had important experience in running a broadsheet prior to New Times and Ethiopia News. In 1914, she began to publish the Woman’s Dreadnought.³¹ Pankhurst used print to give a voice and a platform to the people whose rights she fought to defend: in this case, working-class women. Thus the newspaper was not merely a way to communicate ideological positions about working-class and feminist politics; it was also a way to allow the dispossessed to speak for themselves about their own struggle. This approach to newspaper editing informed her work for the later Workers’ Dreadnought, where she asked Black and Asian writers such as the Jamaican Claude McKay and the Indian communist activist M. N. Roy to write on the impact of socialism on the Pan-African movement and on Indian nationalism.

In 1917, Pankhurst changed the name of her broadsheet to the Workers’ Dreadnought to signal the impact of the Russian Revolution on her politics. In those few short years her outlook had changed quite radically. From campaigning for the right for women to vote for government, she came to adopt a hard-line anti-parliamentarian, anti-Labour Party position, advocating the formation of a communist party in Britain that should follow the example of the Russian one.³² The Workers’ Dreadnought was characterized by a distinctly internationalist viewpoint, open to the wider world.³³ Eventually, Pankhurst was expelled from the Party due to her radical left stance, after which she retired to private life for a period, before resuming her activism in antifascist campaigning, and eventually pro-Ethiopia work.

Pankhurst’s politics could be said to be characterized by a form of gendered resistance, in the sense that her gender often made her maverick stance against the party line, the government, fascists, and other opponents even more unpopular. Judging from the turn her militancy took in the 1930s, it was her deep involvement in the women’s suffragist movement and her commitment to class struggle that allowed her to have empathy with the victims of colonial fascism, as was the case of Ethiopia. In her imagination, the subaltern had the multiple connected dimensions that Gramsci would later describe: oppression came from class, gender and race. Politically, she was a true independent; she took a critical perspective on ideologies and movements, even ones she was heavily involved in, such as feminism and communism. In this she may have been influenced by the anarchist ideals of her partner Silvio Corio.

As mentioned earlier, Pankhurst partly founded the broadsheet to counter the pervasive fascist propaganda about the war. Mussolini’s main justification for the invasion of Ethiopia, and for the consolidation of the Italian empire, was that Italians needed their ‘place in the sun’ just like all the other European nations. Pankhurst rebutted Italy’s claims that it needed an empire for its surplus population; she said that Italians had no desire to settle in Africa and had always flocked to the United States, not to the colony of Eritrea.³⁴

Although it has been remarkably under- studied, it is difficult to overstate the importance of New Times and Ethiopia News for the development of an internationalist antiracist and anticolonial discourse in the 1930s. It became a vehicle for African nationalist politics in the late 1930s and, to some extent, for Caribbean self-determination as well.³⁵ The importance of New Times and Ethiopia News for anticolonial Africans is attested by the many letters the newspaper received from readers from all over the African continent and further abroad, such as from the Caribbean and Asia.³⁶ Letters poured in from colonial West Africa in particular: Nigeria, the Gold Coast and Sierra Leone. One twenty-year-old reader from Southern Nigeria, Mrs Selina Obiorah, wrote a passionate letter of thanks to Pankhurst for her efforts in favour of Ethiopia, recalling her mother Emmeline, ‘who suffered in Prison and nearly died in the cause of the British Women when they were fighting for the vote and so qualify to sit in Parliament and help Government to rule the country’. Obiorah mentions that she has named her new-born son ‘Donald Haile-Selassie Nnamdi’, and asks Pankhurst to send copies of the newspaper so she can distribute it among her networks.³⁷ Another reader, C.O.A. Davies from Freetown in Sierra Leone, thanks her for her efforts on behalf of Ethiopia and seizes the opportunity to contrast colonial Australia and Sierra Leone in terms of access to political representation and socio-economic development of the territories. He asks: ‘Is Africa destined to have its numerous kinds of wealth exploited and its people left like […] dumb-driven cattle?’³⁸

In addition to readers’ letters in the archive, the paper’s published articles attest to the very wide range of voices opposed to the war, which came from every corner of the British Empire (and not only). African nationalists, including, of course, Ethiopians, Jawaharlal Nehru, African Americans, as well as white activists such as Nancy Cunard, all contributed pieces to the broadsheet.³⁹ The Sierra Leonean nationalist I.T.A. Wallace Johnson published several pieces in the paper. In conveying the outrage felt by Africans towards the invasion, he observed that ‘this rape of Ethiopia by Italy at a period when Western civilization is said to be at its height, should serve as a warning to the African’.⁴⁰

Much space was given to the Ethiopian royal family, which was in exile in Bath during the entire period of the Italian occupation, guests of the British government. The issue of 27 June 1936 carried an interview with Lawrence Taezaz, Haile Selassie’s diplomatic representative in Britain, who clarified that the Ethiopian government still existed and hence Italy had no legal right to occupy it. He also explained the reasons for the Emperor deciding to go into exile, and mentioned the use of yperite on the part of the Italians, which had made the Ethiopian defence difficult.⁴¹ Azaj Warkneh Martin, Ethiopian Minister in London, who wrote several editorials for the paper, remarked that ‘The League [of Nations] has condemned the victim and helped the aggressor’.⁴² These statements offered important counter-information to a British public that otherwise would never have heard the Ethiopian point of view on the conflict, and they emphasized the illegality of the invasion. Thus in many ways the paper functioned as a mouthpiece for the official declarations of the Ethiopian government in exile.

The analysis of racism and colonialism contained in these pages is extraordinary for its prescience, and for the way it pre-dated many contemporary theorisations of these concepts. For example, Nancy Cunard’s ‘An Algerian Speaks Out’ reported the opinions of an Algerian who noted that the Spanish fascist rebellion first broke out in Spanish Morocco. Moroccans would have sided with the Spanish government and ‘they would have been able to make quick work of the Spanish insurgents’. But the Popular Front failed to engage the good-will of colonial subjects kept in abject poverty and subjection, and so the fascists gained a foothold. The article demonstrated how ingrained race and colonial prejudices were even among the Left.⁴³ The paper also published a letter by Marcus Garvey decrying the ‘injurious misrepresentation’ of Blacks in films such as The Song of Freedom and Emperor Jones.⁴⁴

To counteract Italian propaganda that portrayed Ethiopians as barbaric and as practising both feudalism and slavery, Pankhurst’s broadsheet sought to portray Ethiopia as a country with a modernizing agenda and an enlightened despotism represented by the figure of Haile Selassie.⁴⁵ ‘Civilization’ in the context of Italian colonialism acquired a range of contradictory meanings, which brought to the fore the deep ambivalence around Empire in those years. For Pankhurst, Italy’s imperialist tendencies emphasized even more strongly the evils of fascism and the importance of upholding the value of democracy in the West. For her, anticolonial struggle was as much about liberating Ethiopia as it was about refashioning a more ‘civilized’ version of Europe, and of Britain in particular, by learning from movements of resistance to imperialism.⁴⁶

Pankhurst’s paper kept her international readership up to date about the wars, battles and news in Ethiopia and readers had first-hand information from the Ethiopian royal family. According to Sylvia, hers was the only British newspaper to offer the public objective, first-hand information about the Ethiopian situation: ‘ … all the great newspapers of Britain get their news of Ethiopia from official Italian sources in Rome. Not one has a correspondent in Ethiopia’.⁴⁷ It provided an important corrective to the fascist propaganda about the war that often dominated public perception, and minimized the Italian atrocities while constantly highlighting the ‘great civilization’ Italy was bringing to Ethiopia.

Pankhurst’s special correspondent was Wazir Ali Baig, originally from the Punjab, and thus a British colonial subject, who had lived in Ethiopia for more than twenty-seven years. He worked for New Times and Ethiopia News from 1936 until 1941, the year of his death. His letters would often correct official reports of Italian victories. Far from being conquered, most of Ethiopia was ridden with uprisings and insurgencies.

The paper remains a key historical document for details about the Addis Ababa massacre of February 1937. This major instance of Italian brutality was occasioned by the attempt to assassinate Vice-Roy Rodolfo Graziani on 19 February 1937 by two Eritrean patriots. This attempt on Graziani’s life provoked a ferocious reprisal against the population of Addis – what historian Ian Campbell calls ‘the greatest single atrocity that Ethiopia has ever known’.⁴⁸ Many of the Italian civilian population gleefully took part in this massacre of innocent Ethiopians, torching local dwellings and knifing or shooting any natives they saw; an appalled European eye-witness dubbed it an ‘Abyssinian Guernica’.⁴⁹ Many Italians had never taken up arms in any situation whatsoever, but there was absolute impunity and they felt they could act as they wanted.⁵⁰

The paper collated a series of first-hand testimonies about the event in order to produce an undistorted picture for its readers. For example, it serialized Dr Ladislaz Shashka’s eye-witness testimony, ‘one of the most important and independent accounts of the events of February 1937’, which Campbell draws on for his authoritative history of the massacre.⁵¹ The paper also mentioned in detail the atrocities committed against the local population by Italian settlers and Blackshirts.

The paper refuted the official number of deaths given by the British press and the Italian propaganda machine; Wazir Ali Baig reported that certainly more than 14,000 men, women and children were killed, and that no native quarters were left standing, as all were gutted and burnt. Campbell, who compares Wazir Ali Baig’s figures with his own, arrives at a final number of 19,200 Ethiopians killed in the massacre, which is much closer to those reported by the New Times and Ethiopia News than by international media of the time, which put the figure between 3000 and 6000.⁵²

In the remainder of this article, I read Pankhurst through her contemporary, Carl Schmitt, and his theory of the modern partisan, in order to establish the link between the postcolonial intellectual and the partisan. Despite the fact that Schmitt sits at the opposite end of the political spectrum from Pankhurst, his theorization provides some illuminating insights into how struggles like Pankhurst’s are emblematic of today’s ethical and political conflicts between Right and Left.

A theory of the partisan

Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan, based on two lectures he delivered in 1962 at universities in Francoist Spain, examines the partisan as representative of a new global politics emerging out of third-world revolutionary struggles of the period, such as in Cuba, Algeria and China. For Schmitt, the end of the liberal order is exemplified by the guerrilla warfare that grew out of international communism and decolonization. Because the partisan is fighting in the name of an idea, rather than as a member of a regular army, he is ‘beyond all normative regulation’.⁵³

Schmitt defines the partisan as an ‘irregular combatant’ and the polar opposite to the enlisted soldier. The modern partisan is, essentially, a political combatant, and partisan warfare is different from inter-state war because it is a form of civil war, which is fought for a political cause, such as communist revolution or anticolonial struggle. To be a partisan, according to Schmitt, is ‘precisely to avoid carrying weapons openly, the partisan being the one who fights from ambushes, who wears the enemy uniform and whatever insignia serves his turn, as well as civilian clothing, as decoys’.⁵⁴

In emphasizing the political nature of partisan combat, Schmitt was drawing on Ernesto Che Guevara’s theorization of guerrilla warfare. Che emphasized that ‘The guerrillas cannot forget their function as vanguard of the people – their mandate – and as such they must create the necessary political conditions for the establishment of a revolutionary power based on the support of the masses’. In the revolution, the struggle was both political and military, and ‘it must be developed and understood as such’.⁵⁵

Schmitt highlights the difficulty in assigning a precise juridical status to the partisan because the partisan blurs the distinctions between friend and enemy as such are categorized in ordinary warfare between nation-states. Schmitt argues that Lenin first theorized that partisan warfare identifies an ‘absolute enemy’, namely the Western capitalist, as opposed to the conventional enemy of interstate conflicts.⁵⁶ According to Schmitt, the ‘irregularity’ of class struggle, exemplified by partisan warfare, provoked the destruction of the Eurocentric world, culminating in the 1960s with the wars of decolonization.

Particularly striking about Schmitt’s ‘irregular’ is that his examples of the modern partisan are third world communists (for example, Mao and Guevara) and the colonialist French general Raoul Salan. Salan fought to keep Algeria French and founded the right-wing terrorist organisation Organisation Armée Sécrète that attempted a coup against President De Gaulle. There is a ‘telluric’ or territorial element to Schmitt’s theory of partisan warfare, namely a devotion to one’s nation that becomes all the stronger once this nation is seen to be under threat; another word for a partisan could be a patriot, albeit without a regular army. Salan desired to prevent Algeria from becoming independent at all costs, to the point of instigating terrorist attacks against his own fellow citizens in France. Schmitt recalls with admiration how Salan recoded these acts as forms of extreme patriotism in defence of France’s national sovereignty, which extended to the colony.⁵⁷ Schmitt’s notion of the partisan is, needless to say, strongly masculine.

Salan was a right-wing partisan who had learned much from the third-world anticolonial combatants he had encountered in Indochina and Algeria. Unsurprisingly, given Schmitt’s fascist sympathies, Theory of the Partisan lacks any mention of antifascist resistance movements. Schmitt even omits details of Salan’s early experiences as a member of the French resistance.

Despite the radical differences in political outlook, Schmitt’s idea of the partisan as political combatant bears a connection to metropolitan anticolonialists such as Pankhurst, who fought for the ‘common cause’ of antifascism shared across nations and cultures, as I have been arguing. But my use of the term ‘partisan’ here departs from Schmitt’s because I assign positive values to camouflage and irregularity, which he considers key to the partisan warfare that transcends borders and poses a threat to regular armies. I suggest that these traits characterize transnational resistance in the interwar period. Resistance in Pankhurst emerges as a form of internal dissidence to empire that found expression in anticolonial solidarity and active collaboration with oppressed nationalities such as Ethiopia.

Invested with profoundly symbolic connotations in the context of the encroaching fascisms and imperialisms in the interwar period, the idea of the partisan, and of partisanship, can help to make sense of the motivations behind her enduring support for the Ethiopian cause. To some extent, the story of Pankhurst’s involvement as a partisan for Ethiopia has been in camouflage, because she was of European origin and was thus hidden from view in retrospective narratives of anticolonialism, which always assumes its opponents to belong to the ‘other side’.

An understanding of motivations seems all the more necessary for white British political activists and ‘ordinary’ citizens of the then dominant global empire who expressed condemnation of the Italian aggression and sided, often quite viscerally, with the Ethiopians, as testified by the numerous letters sent in by readers to the Times and other major newspapers. To draw again on Leela Gandhi, the ‘affective communities’ forged by anti-imperialist internationalism created ‘a new politics of anti-imperialism, closely attentive to forms of transnational or affiliative solidarity between diffuse groups and individuals’.⁵⁸ An examination of the transnational networks between metropolitan and colonized anti-imperialists can serve to break down the imperial binarism of colonial versus colonized sensibilities that has structured much of the scholarship in postcolonial studies.

As mentioned earlier, my reading of Pankhurst as a transnational partisan builds on recent accounts of anticolonialism that avoid Manicheistic demarcations between Western and non-Western actors. Indeed, their aim is to retrieve the histories of a common anticolonial stance emerging out of allied practices between European, Indian, African and Caribbean activists: ‘Including Western and non-Western players, they struggled to embrace what was spiritually durable within colonial culture: their aim was to salvage the very best of Europe in the face of Europe’s descent into totalitarianism’.⁵⁹ I have drawn repeatedly on Gandhi’s work because it aims to ‘deprovincialize’ the history of democracy in order to assess the role of anticolonialism in its development throughout the twentieth century. In a related vein, Priyamvada Gopal, in her 2019 study of British dissidents and anticolonial resistance, argues these shared histories ‘enabled new associations between Europeans, Americans, and non-Europeans, transforming disciplines and giving voice to new ideas in the process’.⁶⁰

Gandhi and Gopal’s recent works offer compelling updates on the seemingly endless debate around the conflicting ethical claims of universalism and cultural difference that has so plagued (and nearly killed off) postcolonial studies. Gandhi outlines a ‘more hospitable universalism’ that anticolonial and antifascist activists opposed to fascism and imperialism.⁶¹ Gopal similarly talks of an ‘expansive universalism’, a struggle on behalf of anticolonial activists to challenge Eurocentric notions of the human subject by ‘enriching and reconstituting universality through multiple strands of experience and engagement’; far from claiming radical alterity, she argues, they embraced universalism. And ‘resistance often deliberately showed up the colonizer’s version of universalism to be anything but universal’.⁶²

There are differences in their approaches, of course. Gopal is critical of Gandhi’s notion of ‘affective communities’ for understanding how colonial and metropolitan dissidents were brought together. ‘It was a politics […] not so much of friendship (though that was not absent) as of difficult solidarities forged through dialogism’, rebuts Gopal, where each side had to modify its preconceptions of the other.⁶³ Despite these differences, however, it is fair to say that Gandhi’s idea of a ‘reverse civilizing mission’ and Gopal’s ‘reverse tutelage’ both focus on how anticolonial movements decisively shaped new ideas about democracy and human rights in the global public sphere. Gopal is particularly interested in ‘the specific impact of resistance that emerged from non-European contexts – of black and Asian subjects – on metropolitan dissent’.⁶⁴ Pankhurst’s entire campaign in favour of Ethiopia essentially acted as a mouthpiece for Ethiopian resistance to Mussolini; as well as for a host of other anticolonial voices originating from the colonies.

The postcolonial intellectual as partisan, then, is not intent on defending a territorial idea of nationhood but rather on promoting the utopian ideal of a non-fascist and non-imperialist society that has a profoundly affective dimension. In New Times and Ethiopia News, Pankhurst traced forms of empathy and connection with Ethiopians that aimed to test her readers’ own capacity for ‘self-othering’.⁶⁵ This is not to say that New Times did not display any of the cultural biases of the time, but it did attempt to forge cross-cultural solidarities. It did this, for example, by reporting extensively on the conflict, denouncing the brutality of Italian fascist aggression, questioning white activists’ own identity as ‘colonizers’ and, most importantly, offering a space for African, Asian and Caribbean nationalists to express their support of their Ethiopian friends while under Italian attack, all in order to evoke emotional identification in the reader.

On a broader level, the British public’s strong support for the Ethiopian side of the conflict was not experienced as an internal contradiction, despite the fact that the members of this public were subjects of a vast empire. On the contrary, readers' letters to newspapers such as the Times and the Birmingham Post protested against the use of poison gas and the deliberate bombing of Red Cross units by the Italians in Ethiopia, denouncing them as ‘inhuman’.⁶⁶ While readers did not often make the connection between their own empire and that of Mussolini’s, their emotions convey a faultline that was beginning to expose the hypocrisy of holding on to colonies while militating in favour of international justice and human rights.

Throughout my discussion of Pankhurst, I have aimed to present the transnational partisan as a crucial figure of the twentieth-century fight against fascism and colonialism. The partisan’s heuristic potential for joining up these diverse accounts of struggles across the colonial divide can allow us to produce a more interconnected narrative of global resistance. And engaged intellectuals like Pankhurst are partisans by definition. As Gramsci remarked in 1917: ‘I believe, like Federico Hebbel, that ‘to live means being a partisan’. […] Whoever truly lives cannot but be a citizen, and take sides’.⁶⁷ This statement symbolizes Pankhurst’s personality. Unlike Gramsci’s, Pankhurst’s writing is very rarely theoretical and is almost always focused on denouncing the immediate issue at hand, whether it is campaigning for the vote for working-class women, for antifascist organizations, or for occupied Ethiopia, so it is difficult to identify a key statement in her publications that might summarize her politics. However, Pankhurst’s very activism shows her grasp of the intersectional nature of subalternity. Just as she realized that the fight against gendered oppression had to be extended to fighting class oppression, true emancipation in the sense of a development of democratic politics could only take place if it included colonized populations within its remit; otherwise, it could not really be considered democracy.

Acknowledgment

I would like to acknowledge Dr Helen Pankhurst's kind permission to reproduce brief quotations from letters contained in the Pankhurst Papers, held in the British Library.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Neelam Srivastava

Neelam Srivastava is Professor of Postcolonial and World Literature at Newcastle University, UK, and Associate Editor of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. She has co-convened Postcolonial Print Cultures International Network since 2016. She is the author of Italian Colonialism and Resistances to Empire, 1930–1970 (Palgrave, 2018). Her other publications include the co-edited volumes The Postcolonial Gramsci (Routledge, 2012) and Indian Literature and the World: Multilingualism, Translation and the Public Sphere (Palgrave, 2017). She has published widely on South Asian postcolonial literature and cinema, postcolonial theories of violence, and the Italian film director Gillo Pontecorvo.

Notes

1 See Benito Mussolini, ‘Adunata! Ottobre XIII mentre l'ora solenne sta per scoccare nella storia della patria, venti milioni di italiani ascoltano la parola del duce’, 2 October 1935. https://patrimonio.archivioluce.com/luce-web/detail/IL5000018624/2/adunata-ottobre-xiii-mentre-l-ora-solenne-sta-scoccare-nella-storia-della-patria-venti-milioni-italiani-ascoltano-parola-del-duce.html?startPage=400&jsonVal={%22jsonVal%22:{%22query%22:[%22*:*%22],%22fieldDate%22:%22dataNormal%22,%22_perPage%22:20,%22temi%22:[%22\%22manifestazioni%20del%20regime%20fascista\%22%22]}} (accessed 3 October 2020).

2 See Michael Salwen, Evelyn Waugh in Ethiopia: The Story Behind Scoop, Lewiston: Mellen, 2001, p 94.

3 Evelyn Waugh, Waugh in Abyssinia (1936), London: Penguin, 2000, p 39.

4 For a full account of how the racial laws in Italy came into being as a result of Italian imperialism, see Angelo Del Boca, Gli italiani in Africa Orientale. III. La caduta dell’impero, Milan: Mondadori, 1992, pp 237–239.

5 As I discuss further below, Sylvia Pankhurst also wrote profusely in the 1930s about the threat to world peace represented by Italian fascism. See, for example, her article ‘Challenge to the Dictators of the Peaceable World’, New Times and Ethiopia News, 18 December 1937, p 4.

6 I discuss these reactions in my book, Italian Colonialism and Resistances to Empire, 1930–1970, London: Palgrave, 2018 (see Chapters 3 and 4 in particular).

7 See Angelo Del Boca, Gli italiani in Africa Orientale. II. La conquista dell’impero, Milan: Mondadori, 2001, p 330.

8 Times Leader, 5 May 1936, reprinted in The Tragedy of Abyssinia: What Britain Feels and Thinks and Wants. A Selection of Some Recent Expressions of Feeling and Opinion by British Men and Women. Letters, Resolutions, Speeches, Cartoons, London: June 1936, League of Nations Union, p 45.

9 See Claudia Baldoli, Exporting Fascism: Italian Fascists and Britain’s Italians in the 1930s, Oxford: Berg, 2003, pp 68–71.

10 There are several excellent biographies of Pankhurst that cover her activism in favour of Ethiopia, including Barbara Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism, London: UCL Press, 1996, and Richard Pankhurst, Sylvia Pankhurst: Counsel for Ethiopia. A Biographical Essay on Ethiopian, Anti-fascist, and Anti-colonialist History, 1934–1960, Hollywood, CA: Tsehai Publications, 2003. The most recent and most comprehensive biography is Rachel Holmes’s Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel, London: Bloomsbury, 2020. I regret that due to the timing of this article I was not able to draw more fully on Holme’s outstanding book. Holmes has a very full section on New Times and Ethiopia News (see pp 673–702).

11 Pankhurst, Sylvia Pankhurst, p 9.

12 See Del Boca, Gli italiani in Africa Orientale. La conquista dell’impero, pp 460–465.

13 Pankhurst, Sylvia Pankhurst, p 2.

14 Pankhurst, Sylvia Pankhurst, pp 84–85.

15 A letter addressed to ‘Mr Sylvia Pankhurst’ from the business manager of a bookseller in Nigeria mentioned that the newspaper ‘is likely to find huge sales here. There will be no unsold. At present we want 100 copies every week. Italo-Abyssinian matter is of the highest interest here’. See Letter from O.A. Okon, 10 October 1936, ADD 88925/5/1: 1936–1938, General correspondence, etc., relating to the New Times and Ethiopia News, Pankhurst Papers, Western Manuscripts Collection, British Library.

16 Guido Bortolotto, Storia del fascismo, Milan: Hoepli, 1938, p 556, quoted in Del Boca, Gli italiani in Africa Orientale. La conquista dell’impero, p 291. 

17 Leela Gandhi, The Common Cause: Postcolonial Ethics and the Practice of Democracy, 1900–1955, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2014, p 102.

18 Antonio Gramsci, Notebook 9 § 127, Quaderni del carcere, Turin: Einaudi, 1975, p 1190.

19 The first few issues carried the subtitle ‘We stand for international law and justice’. This was later changed to ‘For the independence of Ethiopia’, possibly signalling a shift of focus from general to specific causes. The broadsheet was published from May 1936 until 1956 (after the Italian occupation ended in 1941, the broadsheet shifted its focus to the actions of the British Military Administration in the Horn of Africa, and later, it became a publication dedicated to happenings in Ethiopia, running several historical articles on the Italian invasion and the Ethiopian resistance).

20 Michela Wrong, I Didn’t Do It for You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation, London: Fourth Estate, 2005, p 118.

21 Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy’ (1890) celebrates the prowess of the Hadendoa tribe in fighting the British infantry; it is a sort of paean to the valour of anticolonial forces written in a ‘popular’ or demotic language, a ‘soldier’s song’. See http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_fuzzywuzzy.htm and http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_fuzzywuzzy1.htm.

22 See Gandhi, The Common Cause.

23 See Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-siècle Radicalism, and The Politics of Friendship, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006; and Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent, London: Verso, 2019.

24 See Srivastava, Italian Colonialism and Resistances to Empire, pp 187–188.

25 There is a letter from Padmore to Pankhurst in which he thanks her for her interest in his work; he had founded the International African Friends of Abyssinia, later the International African Service Bureau, that became an active anticolonial organization across the British African and Caribbean colonies. See Letter from George Padmore to Sylvia Pankhurst, 29 November 1938, ADD 88925/5/1: 1936–1938, General correspondence, etc., relating to the New Times and Ethiopia News, Pankhurst Papers, Western Manuscripts Collection, British Library.

26 Carl Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan: A Commentary/Remark on the Concept of the Political, A.C. Goodson (trans), East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2004, pp 48–49.

27 Gandhi, The Common Cause, p 16.

28 Gandhi, The Common Cause, p 106.

29 The first page of the New Times issue of 21 November 1936 showed photographs of murdered Spanish children, beneath the headline ‘Fascism at Work – Photographs of Children Killed by the Spanish Rebel Forces on 6th and 7th November 1936’, p 1. A few months earlier, in the issue of 25 July 1936, the paper carried a photo of an Ethiopian’s feet covered in blisters, an effect of mustard gas, and underneath the headline ‘The Symbol of Fascist Civilization’, a bitterly ironic reference to the Italians’ use of poison gas against Ethiopians during the invasion.

30 Holmes, Sylvia Pankhurst, p. 82.

31 The paper ran from 1914 until 1917, when it changed its name to The Workers’ Dreadnought. This was published until 1924.

32 Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst, p 105.

33 See Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst, pp 135–136.

34 Pankhurst, Sylvia Pankhurst, p 11.

35 See, for example, Harold Moody, ‘Universal Suffrage for Jamaica’, New Times and Ethiopia News, 29 March 1941, p 1.

36 See Richard Pankhurst, ‘A Continent Aroused: Africans Rally to Ethiopia’, New Times and Ethiopia News, 30 January 1954, pp 3–4.

37 Letter from Mrs Selina Obiorah to Sylvia Pankhurst, 3 November 1937, ADD 88925/5/1: 1936–1938, General correspondence, etc., relating to the New Times and Ethiopia News, Pankhurst Papers, Western Manuscripts Collection, British Library.

38 Letter from C.O.A. Davies to Sylvia Pankhurst, 6 June 1938, ADD 88925/5/1: 1936–1938, General correspondence, etc., relating to the New Times and Ethiopia News, Pankhurst Papers, Western Manuscripts Collection, British Library.

39 See, for example, the collection of letters from African American associations condemning the massacre of Ethiopians in Addis Abeba ordered by the Italian Vice-Roy Rodolfo Graziani in February 1937. ‘Protest from Americans of African Descent’, New Times and Ethiopia News, 13 March 1937, p 7. See also Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘Indian Opinion’, New Times and Ethiopia News, 9 October 1937, p 5.

40 Wallace Johnson, ‘Ethiopia Deceived: What Next?’, New Times and Ethiopia News, 3 April 1937, p 3.

41 ‘The Ethiopian Government Today: An Interview with Lawrence Taezaz’, New Times and Ethiopia News, 27 July 1936, p 3.

42 Azaj Warqneh C. Martin, ‘The League Has Failed: Help Us to Help Ourselves’, New Times and Ethiopia News, 11 July 1936, p 5.

43 Nancy Cunard, ‘An Algerian Speaks Out’, New Times and Ethiopia News, 2 April 1938, p 6.

44 Marcus Garvey, ‘Negro Life on the Films’, New Times and Ethiopia News, 7 October 1936, p 5.

45 See, for example, ‘What Modern Ethiopia Achieved for Herself’, New Times and Ethiopia News, 5 March 1938, p 1.

46 This is a point Gandhi makes when she glosses Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon’s writings to remark that anticolonialism can be understood as therapeutic for Europe as much as for the colonized (see Gandhi, The Common Cause, p 4).

47 New Times and Ethiopia News, 27 February 1937, p 5.

48 Ian Campbell, The Addis Ababa Massacre: Italy’s National Shame, London: Hurst, 2017, p 4.

49 Campbell, The Addis Ababa Massacre, p 137.

50 See Del Boca, La caduta dell’impero, p 85.

51 Campbell, The Addis Ababa Massacre, p 5.

52 Ian Campbell, The Addis Ababa Massacre, pp 328–329.

53 Jan-Werner Mueller, ‘“An Irregularity that Cannot be Regulated”: Carl Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan and the “War on Terror”’, https://www.princeton.edu/~jmueller/Schmitt-WarTerror-JWMueller-March2007.pdf.

54 Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan, p 26.

55 Ernesto Che Guevara, ‘Guerrilla Warfare: a Method’, September 1963, https://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1963/09/guerrilla-warfare.htm.

56 Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan, p 41.

57 Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan, 45.

58 Gandhi, Affective Communities, p 10.

59 Gandhi, The Common Cause, p 3.

60 Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent, London: Verso, 2019, p 31.

61 Gandhi, The Common Cause, p 3.

62 Gopal, Insurgent Empire, p 26.

63 Gopal, Insurgent Empire, p. 22.

64 Gopal, Insurgent Empire, p 36.

65 Gandhi, Affective Communities, p 7.

66 Letter to the Birmingham Post, 17 April 1936, The Tragedy of Abyssinia, p 18.

67 Gramsci, ‘Gli indifferenti’, La città futura, 11 February 1917, https://www.marxists.org/italiano/gramsci/17/cittafutura.htm#c (accessed 18 April 2020).