Gambela (city): History
Gambela was founded because of its location on the Baro, a tributary of the Nile, which was seen by both the British and the Ethiopians as an excellent highway for exporting coffee and other goods from the fertile Ethiopian Highlands to Sudan and Egypt.
Emperor Menelik II granted Britain use of a port along the Baro on 15 May 1902, and in 1907 the port and a customs station were founded at Gambela.
A shipping service run by Sudan Railways linked Khartoum with Gambela, a distance of 1,366 kilometers. According to Richard Pankhurst, by the mid-1930s boats sailed twice a month during the rainy season, taking seven days downstream and eleven upstream.
According to Bahru Zewde, British interest in the concession was due in part to the attraction of "tapping the allegedly fabulous commercial potential of Western Ethiopia and drawing the whole region into the economic orbit of the Sudan", but also intended "to be a brilliant British countermove to avert the virtual commercial hegemony in Ethiopia that the Djibouti-Addis Ababa Railway seemed to promise the French." In fact, it benefitted the Abyssinians themselves not to have their economy in the control of a single European power, whether French, British or even Italian, and Menelik was playing a clever game of pitting his colonial neighbours against each other, to avoid any single one gaining a monopoly, whilst opening his country to the benefits of trade and technology, as part of a major modernisation drive. Although over 70% of Ethiopia's external trade passed through the port at Djibouti between 1911 and 1917, the share of goods passing through Gambela had the fastest rate of growth until the Italian conquest.
The British did have to cope with the Ethiopian governors of Sayo and Gore, who showed a keen interest in the money to be made in the cross-border trade. A small detachment of troops from the nominal condominium of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan was posted to Gambela to maintain order and security within the concession and defend it from outside interests in what was still a largely lawless country, following numerous Egyptian, Islamist, British and Italian interventions, and a consequent breakdown of civil authority, over the previous decades.
The Regent Ras Tafari (the later Emperor Haile Selassie), beginning on 9 July 1927, granted a number of concessions to T. Zervos and A. Danalis to construct a road 180 kilometers in length to connect Gambela with the towns of Metu and Gore.
The British Concession was not directly affected by the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 but when Italian East Africa was formally established in 1936, the Ethiopian concession was deemed to have lapsed. The shipping service suspended and the steamer, together with the British resident, left Gambela on 14 October. With the river traffic now gone, the Italians provided an alternative link for the town, by building a further road from Gambela, this one to Nekemte, between 1936 and 1940. Gambela was taken from the Italians by the 2/6 King's African Rifles on 3 February 1941. The property of the British buildings were reported to have been respected and left intact during the peacetime and wartime Italian administration. …