Leon Chefneux (1853 – 1927) was a French trader and adventurer who helped Menelik II (q.v.) [reigned 1889 -1913] in some of his business and diplomatic dealings in Europe.
He was born in Piatra, Romania, in 1853. He came to Ethiopia in 1878, having been stranded at Obok, in what is now the Territory of the Afars and Issas, because of the failure of a plantation scheme on the Awash River organized by his compatriot, Pierre Arnoux. Chefneux next entered the service of a French merchant, Paul Soleillet, who was endeavouring to open up trade with central Ethiopia.
Soleillet’s principals hesitated over arms contracts, and thereafter Chefneux traded on his own, making frequent rapid trips by way of Tajurah Bay in what is now the Territory of the Afars and Issas. According to Henri Audon, he was already in 1885 “well in with Menilek”, (then the Negus of the Shawas”), as he had supplied him with his first machine-gun.
Chefneux also imported numerous mountain-guns in 1890, and introduced the Gras rifle (named after the artillery general who invented the French 1874-model rifle) early in 1893. In return he received, together with Alfred Ilg (q.v.), Menilek’s Swiss adviser, an ivory monopoly in 1889, and in 1891 a contract to exploit for export the salt works at Lake Assal, near the Bay of Tajurah.
Chefneux also helped Menilek in his policy of modernization. He was associated with Ilg from 1893 in the Jibuti railroad concession and later became chairman of the Compagnie Imperiale des Chemins de Fer Ethiopiens (“Imperial Ethiopian Railroad Company ”), founded in 1896. He was despatched to Paris in 1893 with Menilek‘s denunciation of the Treaty of Wechale, originally concluded in 18889, and obtained for him there the first Ethiopian postage stamps and coins bearing the effigy of the Ethiopian ruler. Chefneux was again sent to Europe during the Italo-Ethiopian war of 1895-96 to buy arms and to champion Menilek’s cause.
Described at the turn of the century as a sort of Ethiopian minister of commerce, Chefneux was, in fact, by 1897 the country’s chief trader and commercial adviser, and second only to Ilg among Menilek’s foreign counselors. In 1902, however, when the railroad got into financial difficulties, Chefneux signed with Adrien Bonhoure, the governor of French Somaliland, a discreditable agreement, which Menilek considered a threat to his sovereignty.
Nevertheless, Chefneux was placed in charge of the Addis Ababa cadastral survey initiated in 1909, and continued to trade in Ethiopia until his return to Europe in 1925. One of his contemporaries, the United States envoy Robert Skinner, described him as a man with an “unaffected simplicity of manner,” “resolutely determined,” and “assumingly business-like.”
RICHARD A. CAULK,
A. DETRY,
RICHARD PANKHURST
