Kindeneh Endeg, writing on 22 June 2019, argued that the Battle of Adwa and the 1974 revolution stand as opposites, and that Ethiopia’s political argument that year could be read through the split. He dated the decisive fight to 1 March 1896, when the forces of Emperor Menelik II met Italy at Adwa. In his view the clash was more than a one-day battle. He tied it to the Treaty of Wuchale, especially Article 17, which he said became the main dispute, which Menelik set aside before the war, and which the peace treaty after Adwa annulled.
Endeg’s claim is that Adwa carried a meaning beyond Ethiopia’s borders. He reads it as a refusal of the colonial scramble, and as a foundation for later African and black freedom movements, whose successes in the 1950s and 1960s he treats as consequences rather than separate stories. He rejects the charge, common among Menelik’s critics, that the victory was too narrow because it did not free Eritrea. He says that charge has turned the 1 March commemoration, for some, into a day of grievance. His own conclusion is that Menelik delivered on a wider promise, and that accounts focused only on troop counts miss the point.
He sets the 1974 revolution on the other side of that story, calling the two a radical antithesis, and he writes that the tension between them was already visible in the national crisis of 2019. He hopes the Adwa tradition will prevail because, in his words, "the alternative is no alternative at all." The essay began, he said, as a hurried note for colleagues at Addis Ababa University. He chose a general audience over a scholarly journal so the comparison would enter debates outside campus. The piece is his argument, offered in the open. He wants Ethiopia to claim the inheritance of Adwa in 1896, and he treats the 1974 revolution as the path he hopes the country will leave behind.
Sources: Borkena