The Anglo-Ethiopian Treaty of 1897 (sometimes called the Anglo-Ethiopian Agreement of 1897) was an agreement negotiated between diplomat Sir Rennell Rodd of Great Britain and Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia primarily involving border issues between Ethiopia and colonial British Somaliland. It was signed on May 14, 1897 in order to, as the preamble to the treaty stated: to "strengthen and render more effective and profitable the friendship between the two kingdoms".
The treaty consisted of several articles, including:
This treaty was one of several concerning the borders of Ethiopia which were negotiated and signed in the ten years that followed the Ethiopian victory at the Battle of Adwa.[1]
The boundary defined in this treaty was not demarcated until 1932, in response to Ras Tafari Makonnen's desire, which he expressed during his visit to Europe in 1924, to demarcate all of the boundaries of Ethiopia. E.H.M. Clifford explains that "negotiations to this end proceeded slowly but on the whole surely, and at the end of 1930 reached the stage of definite preparations; but the Boundary Commission did not actually meet until 8 January 1932, at Berbera."[2] Clifford afterwards participated in the subsequent demarcation, which extended from the Italian-British boundary demarcated in 1929-1930 at , west to the trijunction point where the boundaries of French Somaliland met Ethiopia and British Somaliland. Clifford describes the terrain and work of demarcation, with a map, in a paper he presented to the Geographical Society in 1935, yet strangely he omits any mention of the most significant event of this project—the Walwal Incident.[3]