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History of Gambela


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Gambela was founded because of its location on the Baro, a tributary of the Nile, which was seen by both the British and Ethiopia as an excellent highway for exporting coffee and other goods from the fertile Ethiopian Highlands to Sudan and Egypt. Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia granted Britain use of a port along the Baro May 15, 1902, and in 1907 the port and a customs station were founded at Gambela. A shipping service run by Sudanese Railways Corporation 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 Jibouti-Addis Ababa Railway seemed to promise the French." 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. And the British had to further cope with the Ethiopian governors of Sayo and Gore, who showed a vicious interest in the money to be made in the cross-border trade.

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.

Gambela became part of Italian East Africa in 1936, and the shipping service suspended when the steamer, and the British resident, left Gambela on 14 October. During their occupation, the Italians built a road from Gambela to Nekemte between 1936 and 1940. Gambela was
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