I Didn't Do It for You (15 page)

Ironically, given her early Marxist convictions, Sylvia's own life defied the deterministic vision of history as a vast, economic process whose grinding wheels render free will a fantasy, reducing individuals to destiny's pawns. She always acted on the assumption that a single, driven person could exert a level of influence out of all proportion to their political backing or social standing. Her formal education might have been shaky, but she knew exactly how to go about drumming up international sympathy for Ethiopia. ‘To get your answer into the hands of people who count has been and remains terribly important, and should be done through the Press, by pamphlets, circularisation and so forth,' she lectured Ethiopia's representative to Britain. ‘I strongly urge propaganda in every possible way.'
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Her previous campaigns had taught her the value of headed notepaper. She knew the classic lobbyist's trick: that a letter sent from an ‘institute' or ‘international council' will always have more impact than the individual appeal, even when the institute is run from a front living room and its staff consists of a few relatives and friends. She set up the International Ethiopian Council, in whose name she wrote letters to
The Times
and impertinently peppered such notables as Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, the Archbishop of Canterbury, King George VI and President Franklin D Roosevelt with advice.
Her home in Woodford Green, a north-east London suburb, became a cosmopolitan gathering place for Italian anti-fascists, lonely Ethiopian students and African dissidents, where she arranged for friendly MPs to raise questions in parliament, organized bazaars to raise funds, and pulled together demonstrations.

The
New Times and Ethiopia News
, sent out to MPs, journalists, churches and ambassadors, had a weekly print run of only 10,000 copies, but its influence spread far further than this figure suggests. Around the world, black resentment of white rule was stirring. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's future president, was in Britain at the time of Mussolini's invasion and he later articulated the outrage of a generation of Africans who heard the news. ‘It was almost as if the whole of London had suddenly declared war on me personally,' Nkrumah recalled in his autobiography. ‘For the next few minutes I could do nothing but glare at each impassive face wondering if those people could possibly realise the wickedness of colonialism.'
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For an embryonic black consciousness movement in search of heroes, Ethiopia–hitherto untainted by European colonialism–served as an inspiration and rallying cause. Its beleaguered Emperor, nominated 1936 ‘Man of the Year' by
Time
magazine, seemed nothing short of a saint.
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Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Hastings Banda, ITA Wallace-Johnson: London in those years was a gathering place for the educated young Africans who would go on to become the continent's post-independence leaders. The
New Times and Ethiopia News
fed their appetite for news from Ethiopia and disseminated Pan-African notions to the restless colonies. It was sent to the West Indies, read as far afield as South Africa and Sierra Leone, and its articles were reproduced in Nigerian and Ghanaian newspapers.

While the uneven war in Ethiopia still raged, Sylvia published chilling accounts of the effects of mustard gas and shocking
photographs showing grinning Italian soldiers brandishing the severed heads of Ethiopian warriors. When Haile Selassie arrived in Britain to start a five-year exile in Bath, she organized a noisy welcome at Waterloo Station, knowing this would embarrass her government, then busied herself trying to find him a residence. At a time when British officials were assiduously avoiding contact with their unwelcome guest, the
New Times and Ethiopia News
published long, admiring interviews with HIM (His Imperial Majesty), who had the sense to recognize a valuable mouthpiece in this dowdy, garrulous Englishwoman. Hoovering up information from Ethiopians in London and informants in the Horn, Sylvia tracked the Ethiopian resistance movement as it made a mockery of Mussolini's conquest.

It made things decidedly awkward for the British government, which had already recognized Italy's Victor Emmanuel as King of Ethiopia. So awkward, that during the nine-month hiatus between the outbreak of the Second World War and Mussolini's entry on Hitler's side, Sylvia's newspaper was placed on a ‘Stop List' of publications whose export was deemed likely to damage Anglo–Italian relations. Then, in June 1940, everything changed. ‘There were a large number of Italian refugees at home and I remember that we were having pasta and someone turned the radio on,' recalls Richard Pankhurst.
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‘We heard a newscaster saying “Signor Mussolini, in his declaration of war…” There was great rejoicing.' As the diners knew, the keystone of Britain's hypocritical foreign policy–the need to placate Il Duce–had just been removed.

One argument–the threat Fascism posed to world peace–had been won, but new ones remained to be fought for someone fretting over Ethiopia's future status in the world. Despite the fact that Mussolini was now the enemy and British soldiers would soon be confronting Italian Alpini in the Horn, London
refused to rescind its recognition of the dictator's Ethiopian conquest. The RAF flew the Emperor to Sudan, but British generals proved strangely reluctant to use him as a rallying figure for Ethiopia's resistance, ensuring that when Addis was liberated on April 6, 1941, it was by South African troops, not Ethiopian warriors under imperial command.

The truth was that Britain still viewed Africa through colonialism's cold lens. Wars had always presented European powers with treasured opportunities for redrawing the world map and by spelling the
de jure
end of the Ethiopian nation-state, Mussolini's invasion had made a new carve-up possible. Looking at the Horn with the calculating eyes of a land surveyor, London sensed a chance to tie up some colonial loose ends to the benefit of its own African territories. The region, British policymakers suggested, would be more stable if the various areas inhabited by Somalis–including Ethiopia's eastern Ogaden–were merged to form a ‘Greater Somalia'. Borana, in Ethiopia's south, should go to Kenya and as for Eritrea, it could be sliced in two, with the Moslem west attached to Sudan and the Christian highlands and ports given to Ethiopia. No wonder the government was in no hurry to recognize Ethiopia as an ally, or grant the reinstated Emperor too long a leash. ‘We are free of any obligation not to disturb the existing legal position and have our hands free to make such settlement of the future of Abyssinia as we may think fit,' one Foreign Office official confidentially noted, when Sylvia sought clarification of Britain's stance. ‘Let us remember,' a colleague added, ‘that what we are doing in Abyssinia is for our own benefit, not for that of the Abyssinians, and it is possible to imagine circumstances in which it might suit us to throw them over.'
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In public, London insisted it had no intention of tinkering with Ethiopia's frontiers. But Sylvia had a nose for colonial machinations. Haile Selassie, she felt, had not in the past
been sufficiently alert to the possibility that Britain might simply replace Italy as his country's new master. ‘With all his ability and dignity, I often felt…as though I was talking to a sick child who did not know how to deal with the politicians about him,' she told a sympathetic member of the House of Lords.
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She herself wrote so many letters denouncing what she described as ‘the predatory subterranean policy of the Foreign Office', the ministry in question opened a special file labelled, ‘How to deal with letters from Miss Sylvia Pankhurst', whose entries log the increasing testiness of the officials assigned to answer her. ‘Unbalanced and fanatical', ‘Busybody Miss Pankhurst', the Foreign Office men called her in their internal correspondence, giving expression to a fury they could not voice in public. ‘Miss Pankhurst only wants to be tiresome,' one man has scrawled. ‘Does it matter what Miss P. thinks?' another asks. ‘She's a crashing bore who will deserve to be snubbed if in fact it were possible to snub her.'
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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.'
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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.'
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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'.
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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.
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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.