Years of Hardship: Italian Colonialism in Ethiopia, 1935-1941

The mid-twentieth century was the apex of colonial rule in world history. In the 1930s, more than three quarters of the world was divided between the various European empires, and most Africans and Asians lived under some form of foreign domination.

A pivotal moment of this era was the Italian occupation of Ethiopia. In 1935, the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) launched the invasion of Ethiopia, then one of only two
independent countries in Africa, and the following year, he announced the establishment of a new colony called Africa Orientale Italiana (AOI), merging Ethiopia with the existing Italian colonies of Eritrea and Somalia. Meanwhile, Emperor Haylä Sellasé (1892-1975) and his government went into exile in Palestine and Britain, where they coordinated the international and guerilla anticolonial resistance until the liberation of Ethiopia in 1941. The events of these “Years of Hardship,” as they were later called in Ethiopia, shaped the lives of millions of people, and they continue to reverberate in our contemporary world.

This exhibit examines the rise and fall of Italian colonialism in the Horn of Africa through the lives of individual Ethiopians, Eritreans, and Italians, drawing upon the materials in Hess Special Collection.