History & Diplomacy  ·  #sweeth80

Eighty Years, and the Eighty Before Them

The Swedish embassy has marked eight decades in the Addis Ababa house the Emperor gave away in 1946. But Sweden had already spent eighty years in Ethiopia before that — and the friendship now being commemorated was built long before there was a legation to house it.

By Endex  ·  Editor-in-Chief, The Ethiopian Tribune

This past weekend, on the 134th anniversary of the birth of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, the Embassy of Sweden gathered at the National Archives in Addis Ababa — a near neighbour of its own compound — to mark a round number: eighty. A daughter of the late Crown Prince Asfaw Wossen rose to address the gathering; among the guests sat two of the Emperor’s grandsons, Prince Michael Mekonnen and his younger brother Prince Beede Mariam Mekonnen. The tag beneath the embassy’s announcement, #sweeth80, counts the years since 1946, when Haile Selassie gave the residence that Sweden’s ambassadors have occupied ever since — first as a gift to King Gustav V, and then, without ceremony, as the beginning of permanent diplomatic relations between the two countries.

It is a graceful anniversary, and an accurate one. But it marks the shorter half of the story. Sweden did not arrive in Ethiopia in 1946. It had, by then, already been there for eighty years.

The first Swedes came not with credentials but with scripture. The Swedish Evangelical Mission reached the northern highlands in 1866, and the presence it established would run, in one form or another, for a century and a half. Long before there was a flag over a gate in Addis Ababa, there were Swedish schools, printing presses and clinics across the highlands — and a slow accumulation of the mundane, durable familiarity out of which real relationships, as opposed to treaties, are actually made.

The soldiers came next, and their story is the one the anniversary tends to leave out. In 1934 the Emperor invited a delegation of five Swedish officers, led by Colonel Viking Tamm, to open his new military academy at Holeta — the Genet school — and to make officers of the young men who would command his guard. They had barely begun when Italy invaded in October 1935. The cadets they had trained were thrown into a war their teachers could not win; some of those same young men carried out the night raid at Lechemti in 1936 that annihilated an Italian column. The Swedish officers had come to build an army in peacetime and instead watched it march, half-formed, into catastrophe. It is not a triumphant chapter. It is, however, a true measure of how early and how deeply Sweden had been woven into Ethiopia’s fate.

No figure embodies that weave more completely than Count Carl Gustaf von Rosen. He first flew into Ethiopia in 1935 as a pilot for the Swedish Red Cross ambulance, lifting casualties out of the fighting under Italian aircraft and witnessing, at close range, the mustard gas Mussolini’s forces rained on villages and field hospitals. He never really left the country’s orbit. When liberation came, the Emperor asked him back — and from 1945 von Rosen built the Imperial Ethiopian Air Force almost from nothing, with Swedish instructors and Saab aircraft, earning the rank of colonel in the service of a foreign crown. He returned again in old age to fly famine relief, and he died at Gode in July 1977, killed during the Ogaden war in the country he had served for more than forty years. An airborne knight-errant, his biographer called him. Ethiopia was the cause he kept coming back to until it took his life.

Sweden was the European power that came to teach, heal, train and fly — and never once to rule.

Set against that history, the gift of 1946 reads differently. A house is a modest thing beside a war. But the Emperor’s gesture — handing a residence and its compound to the King of Sweden, and with it establishing a permanent Swedish mission — was the formal recognition of something that had been true in fact for two generations. Ethiopia opened its own mission in Stockholm the following year. The relationship carried for so long by missionaries, teachers and one stubborn count was, at last, given an address.

What followed was less dramatic and, in its way, more intimate. Sweden became one of the first countries in the world to make development cooperation a matter of state policy, and Ethiopia one of its earliest partners; the Ethio-Swedish Paediatric Clinic opened at the university in 1958. And in 1947 the Ethiopian government hired a Finnish-born Swede named Onni Niskanen to organise its physical education. Niskanen went looking for runners in the Imperial Guard and found a shepherd’s son named Abebe Bikila. In 1960, barefoot on the cobbles of Rome, Bikila became the first Black African to win an Olympic gold medal, and repeated the feat in Tokyo four years later in world-record time. The most celebrated pair of feet in African athletics were trained by a Swede in the Emperor’s service.

This is the thread worth pulling, because it is nearly unique. Almost every relationship Ethiopia had with a European power in this period was, at bottom, a relationship about conquest — resisting Italy, managing Britain, balancing France. Sweden was the exception: a European kingdom that arrived to teach, heal, train and fly, and never once to rule. That is the light in which to read the house on the archive’s doorstep. It was not tribute paid upward to a great power. It was a gift exchanged between equals — one small proud nation to another — and it is the reason the anniversary feels warm rather than merely diplomatic.

Eighty years on, in a hall beside the house the Emperor gave away, one of his granddaughters rose to speak and two of his grandsons sat listening, while a European embassy laid its wreath for the man whose gift began it all. The number on the banner was eighty. The truer number is a hundred and sixty — and it was never really about the building at all.

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