Three claims from one interview, and the documents that answer them.
The watercolours that open the canon in 1926 came from the office of a Belgian clerk who also took in the head tax. On the painters’ own tapes, the freedom of the Élisabethville studio meant painting what its French director painted and selling to nobody. The curator who calls all of this a miracle bought close to ten thousand of the results.
Italy lost an army at Adwa on 1 March 1896. The New York Times found the winners Caucasian by April; Britain, France and Italy divided Ethiopia into spheres of influence by 1906; Italy came back with mustard gas in 1935.
Malagasy envoys reached London in 1837 to end an alliance, and the Foreign Office answered by setting their queen’s conduct against the heir to the British throne. Two centuries on, the encyclopedias still file the two reigns in different grammar.
In Lagos, Lyon, and Lahore the syllabus carries the same five great names, and somewhere years past the seminar the student finds what it left out: the sentence where the great mind ranked him. The racism has an address, footnote or foundation, and the reply to it is older than the excuse.
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Play: Why Ethiopia Won the Battle of Adwa | Anatomy of an Imperial Upset (1896)
