Having abandoned
a promising career in letters, Arthur Rimbaud (1854—1891)
started, among other activities, running guns to Africa.
He sold ancient,
obsolete rifles—that’s what he told his mother,
anyway—to the Emperor of Ethiopia, Menelik II.
We don’t know if
his mother was worried. Maybe she should have been.
Ten years later
Rimbaud was dead, and Menelik’s troops crushed the advance of the Italian army.
In the battle of Adwa, the local militia slaughtered 6,000—7,000 invaders in a single day.
That’s how the Ethiopians
became “the only African nation to thwart
European colonialism.”
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