1/4 Gersh - Menelik II

1896 was the year of Adwa, where Ethiopian forces under Menelik II decisively defeated the Italian army — the first time a European colonial power had been repelled by an African nation in a pitched battle. This coin was struck the same year, part of Menelik's deliberate modernization of Ethiopian currency as a signal of sovereign economic administration at the precise moment his military credibility reached its peak.

The Gersh denominations of this series were minted at the Paris Mint under contract, an arrangement that itself carried a pointed irony given the European colonial ambitions Ethiopia had just turned back.