There is contention among a few historians as to whether Ethiopia deserves the accolade as the only country on the continent that was never successfully colonized.

This is because Liberia, a country founded in 1847 as a home for freed enslaved African by abolitionists ulterior motives, was also technically never colonized, at least, not in any way close to how we would speak of the imperial annexation of other places in Africa.

The American Colonization Society, the private company that founded Liberia, referred to the nation as a colony but the Society was not committed to running it like one.

Whether Liberia falls in the ‘never-colonized category’ is a topic for another day. But Ethiopia is still in a special league of one – it was the only African territory that went to war as a nation to make sure it was never colonized.

But how did Ethiopia manage the politics of the times and navigate its way out of the imperial reach of Italy and Great Britain?