The Introduction

The story begins. There was postal history in Ethiopia before the 1890s, of course, most famously with respect to the Napier expedition, the little-known war waged by the British Empire against Emperor Tewodros II in the 1860s. But 1894 is the date that the Ethiopian postal service proper considers their foundation.

The origins of the Ethiopian postal service were with Emperor Menelik II. He had established some degree of stability in the country after a long struggle against internal and external powers. He was trying to set up structures and institutions that would give Ethiopia a status amongst other “modern” nations, and allow a route to trade and development.

One of the elements he wanted put in place was a postal system. Communications would be a vital component of both trade and diplomacy.

So Menelik welcomed foreign advisors who had vision, expertise and (hopefully) the means to invest in his new institutions. Central to this group of foreigners was the Swiss engineer Alfred Ilg. He was given a concession to set up and run a postal service. So from the start, the enterprise was a private postal service . Menelik did not fund this himself because it would be mostly foreigners who would use the posts initially.