Читать книгу Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer - Alexander Maitland - Страница 7

In 1901 an English traveller, Herbert Vivian, described his recent journey through Abyssinia in a book which included impressions of the capital Addis Ababa as he first saw it, less than a decade after the Emperor Menelik II had established the town. ‘I looked round incredulously, and saw nothing but a few summer-house huts and an occasional white tent, all very far from each other, scattered over a rough, hilly basin at the foot of steep hills. That this could be the capital of a great empire, the residence of the King of Kings, seemed monstrous and out of the question.’¹ More than twenty pages of Vivian’s book Through Lion Land to the Court of the Lion of Judah were devoted entirely to Addis Ababa, whose name in Amharic means ‘New Flower’.² Vivian described the remote setting; the tents and primitive thatched huts of the British Agency (as he called the Legation) in its mud-walled compound; tribesmen arrayed in striking costumes; the huge marketplace, trading in exotic spices and other varied produce, brass and silver ornaments, livestock and weapons, which reminded him of an Oriental bazaar or conjured up images of medieval England. ‘To appreciate Addis Ababa,’ he wrote, ‘it is necessary to realise that this strange capital covers some fifty square miles, and contains a very large population which has never been numbered. Streets there are none, and to go from one part of the town to the other you must simply bestride your mule and prepare to ride across country. Three-quarters of an hour at least are necessary for a pilgrimage from the British Agency to the Palace, and as much again to the market. On either of these journeys you must cross three or four deep ravines with stony, precipitous banks and a torrent-bed full of slippery boulders.’³

Lord and Lady Hindlip visited Addis Ababa in 1902, during their big game hunting expedition in Abyssinia and British East Africa. In his book Sport and Travel, Hindlip wrote: ‘The squalor of native African towns and villages is apparent everywhere…Menelik’s capital is nothing but a collection of huts…surrounded on nearly three sides by mountainous country.’⁴ Hindlip’s scathing remarks were echoed in 1905 by Augustus B. Wylde, a former Vice-Consul for the Red Sea: ‘The place cannot be called a town but a conglomeration of hamlets and huts with hardly a decent house to be seen anywhere. The whole area is nearly tree-less and very disappointing.’⁵

In his autobiography The Life of My Choice, published in 1987, Wilfred Thesiger conjured a rather more vivid and more sensual image of his birthplace, which had changed apparently very little by the time his father and mother arrived there, only a few years after Vivian, the Hindlips and Wylde, in December 1909. He did this very skilfully, introducing his parents and placing them at the centre of the stage, sketching the embryonic, sprawling township of Addis Ababa, its wild surroundings and multicultural population, and the social and political chaos into which Abyssinia had lapsed, from 1908, after Menelik had been incapacitated by the first of several strokes.

Thesiger wrote:

Addis Ababa consisted of a series of scattered villages grouped on hillsides with open, uncultivated spaces between. Menelik’s palace crowned the largest hill; nearby a jumble of thatched huts and some corrugated-iron-roofed shacks clustered round the large open market. Nowhere were there any proper roads. [In his north Abyssinia diary, dated 1960, Thesiger commented on 12 May: ‘Menelik’s gibbi [palace] was on a small isolated hill below the present town.’ And on 13 May: ‘[It occupied] a surprisingly small area on the top of the hill…He used to sit under a tree and watch his cattle being watered, with a telescope.’⁶ When Thesiger visited the site of Menelik’s palace in 1960, he had found ‘almost no sign of it’.⁷]

Abyssinians of any standing travelled everywhere on muleback, followed by an armed mob of slaves and retainers, varying in number according to the importance of their master. Galla, Somali, Gurage, people from the subject kingdom of Kaffa, negroes from the west, mingled on the streets with their Amhara and Tigrean overlords; but it was these latter who dominated the scene, imposed their stamp upon the town and gave it its unique character. Wrapped in white toga-like shammas worn over long white shirts and jodhpurs, they set a fashion which over the years was copied by an increasing number of their subjects.

The clothes, the buildings, the pitch and intonation of voices speaking Amharic; the smell of rancid butter, of red peppers and burning cow dung that permeated the town; the packs of savage dogs that roamed the streets and whose howling rose and fell through the night; an occasional corpse hanging on the gallows-tree; beggars who had lost a hand or foot for theft; debtors and creditors wandering round chained together; strings of donkeys bringing in firewood; caravans of mules; the crowded market where men and women squatted on the ground, selling earthen pots, lengths of cloths, skins, cartridges, bars of salt, silver ornaments, heaps of grain, vegetables, beer – all this combined to create a scene and an atmosphere unlike any other in the world…⁸

Almost certainly, Thesiger’s detailed descriptions of Addis Ababa were not based entirely on childhood memories, but on notes and recollections of visits he made later, between 1930 and 1966, no doubt clarified by reading his father’s correspondence and the many books about Abyssinia he had collected over the years. Having painted this colourful backdrop to his life story, Thesiger gave a perceptive résumé of the Abyssinians’ character: ‘Encircled by British, French and Italian territories, they were intensely proud of their age-old independence and very conscious that their forefathers had been among the earliest converts to Christianity. Consequently they were both arrogant and reactionary, while the past three hundred years had made them suspicious and obstructive in dealing with Europeans. As a race they had an inborn love of litigation and suffered from inherent avarice. Yet they were naturally courteous, often extremely intelligent, and always courageous and enduring.’⁹

A year after Menelik’s first, paralysing stroke, ‘Conditions in Addis Ababa and in the country as a whole were already chaotic…They were soon to become very much worse. In and around Addis Ababa murder, brigandage and highway robbery increased alarmingly; in restoring order, public hangings, floggings and mutilations had little effect. The town was filled with disbanded soldiery from Menelik’s army, and on the hills outside were camped the armies of the various contenders for power.’¹⁰

Here, at the heart of Menelik’s remote African empire, threatened by anarchy and bloodshed, Thesiger’s father took up his official duties at the British Legation in December 1909. He and his young bride, who was four months pregnant, adjusted to married life in these primitive surroundings as they waited anxiously and eagerly for the birth of their first child the following year.