Emperor of Ethiopia who did what no other African ruler of his age managed, crushing an invading Italian army at Adwa in 1896 and keeping Ethiopia free — with Liberia, one of only two African states to escape the European Scramble, and the only one to do so by defeating a European invasion outright, while at the same time he roughly doubled his empire through southern and western conquests that brought modernization to the center and dispossession, killing, enslavement, and famine to the Oromo, Sidama, and other peoples he absorbed, making him at once the great African anti-colonial victor and a conquering emperor in his own right.
In 1889 an Italian envoy and an Ethiopian king signed a treaty in two languages. In Amharic, one clause said Ethiopia could use Italy to handle its foreign affairs if it chose. In Italian, the same clause said Ethiopia must. On that single word turned a claim that Ethiopia had become an Italian protectorate, just another piece in Europe's carving-up of Africa. The king was Menelik II, and he refused the Italian reading. Seven years later his army destroyed an Italian one in the mountains near Adwa, and Ethiopia stayed free while a continent fell under European rule. Yet the same emperor who beat the colonizers was, in the same years, marching armies south and west to conquer peoples of his own region. He saved one empire from Europe by building another over Africans. Both things are true, and any honest account must hold them together.