Читать книгу The Barefoot Emperor: An Ethiopian Tragedy - Philip Marsden - Страница 9

I first heard about Ethiopia and Tewodros at the same time. My grandmother had a companion known simply as ‘Pillio’, who had tutored my uncle and father as boys and, so the story went, was the daughter of an Ethiopian princess from the days of ‘mad King Theodore’. From that time on, her high-necked beauty, her mysterious silence and this mad King Theodore took up lodgings together in some quiet suburb of my mind.

Much later, in the early 1980s, I went to Ethiopia for the first time. One evening, after curfew, I read Alan Moorehead’s sketch of Tewodros and the Meqdela campaign in The Blue Nile: ‘It has always been accepted that the Emperor Theodore was a mad dog let loose, a sort of black reincarnation of Ivan the Terrible.’ Clements Markham likened him to Peter the Great. During the bloody days of the Derg regime, with its random killings and its merciless war in Tigray and Eritrea, I saw parallels much closer to hand – with Colonel Mengistu and his ‘Red Terror’.

When I next visited Ethiopia some fifteen years later, Mengistu had gone. The paralysing fear had disappeared, replaced by a lurching and chaotic openness. Self-expression was no longer a subversive act. The iconography of globalised culture had shunted aside Soviet agitprop. On T-shirts and posters were stencilled the images of Leonardo DiCaprio, Tupac Shakur, Madonna and David Beckham. Emperor Haile Selassie’s regal figure had reappeared both in its local form and in the much-travelled Rastafarian version. In internet cafés, the most commonly consulted website was for US immigration and the Green Card Lottery.

I was surprised to find Tewodros among all this. But he was everywhere – on the walls of bars and on locally-printed T-shirts. I watched a teenager idly chalk his image on a rock. Market stalls sold Tewodros badges and Tewodros cotton tunics. In a government office, I spotted his fierce glare above an anti-corruption slogan: ‘Governing Self Behaviour is Best Skill of All’. At political rallies, I was told, a mention of his name was guaranteed to win the crowd. Everyone had an opinion of him, from taxi-drivers to suited businessmen, and it was universally positive. ‘Tewodros was our greatest patriot, a hero.’

‘But he was a monster!’ I spluttered.

‘So much Tewodros loved his country – I’m sorry, only to think of him makes me cry.’

I went to see an old friend. Teshome and I had travelled together years earlier, in the dark days of Colonel Mengistu. Teshome had always been a convincing and witty sceptic – sceptical about Mengistu and his Soviet backers, sceptical about Emperor Haile Selassie before them. Several years at an American law school had only made his suspicion of all power more articulate. The current regime was just as bad. But when it came to Tewodros, the scepticism vanished. ‘Tewodros?’ He paused, steepling his fingers in a courtroom gesture of reasoned thought. ‘What you have to understand, Philip, is that without him there would be no modern Ethiopia. Period.’

At the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, I thumbed through the library’s card index. It was all there – the Tewodros dramas, the Tewodros novels, the poems and the doctoral theses. One or two voices spoke out against him, but the predominant tone was hagiographic. Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin, who wrote a play called Tewodros in 1962, said that the ‘heroification’ of the emperor was necessary in part because foreign authors had so tarnished his image. He in turn accused the critical Ethiopian scholars of ‘meqegna’, jealousy, or needless iconoclasm.

Somewhere between the cult of Tewodros and its bloodless deconstruction lay the story itself. Only by reading the accounts of contemporary witnesses do the raw impressions of the time emerge. The European hostages left between them a mass of memoirs and letters. The Ethiopian side is less well represented, but there are a good number of contemporary Amharic letters, including those from Tewodros himself. Several Amharic chronicles too survive. Scholars have dismissed these for their eccentric chronology and distortions, but like the letters their viewpoint and language (even in translation) are wonderfully evocative. With the European accounts they conjure up a remarkable moment in history.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the world was an archipelago of loosely connected peoples. All over Africa and Asia, a pushy Europe was coming face to face with long-isolated nations. It is a process that has, in little more than a century, accelerated into a global frenzy of connectivity – skies criss-crossed by vapour trails, overhead cables pulsing with hypertext. In few instances were the initial meetings so bright and hopeful, or so swiftly shadowed, as they were in the 1850s and 1860s in Ethiopia.

For the ancient empire, tracing its roots to the reign of King Solomon nearly 3,000 years earlier, the episode was a bracing and too-sudden encounter with the modern age. For the British, reaching the height of imperial power, what began as an irksome diversion required in the end one of the most bizarre and elaborate military campaigns ever undertaken.

Yet for all its historical interest, the story belongs to the individuals – the European envoys, the adventurers and missionaries drawn into Tewodros’s thrilling and perilous world; the Ethiopians who followed him with such passion; and the emperor himself with his messianic appeal, his capricious brutality.

Few images survive of Tewodros and many of those that do are fanciful. The one that is pinned to my wall as I write this comes from the frontispiece of Hormuzd Rassam’s two-volume Narrative of the British Mission to Theodore, King of Abyssinia (1869). Said to have been a fair likeness, the lithograph shows him on a high rock on the edge of the Blue Nile. He is dressed simply, in cotton shamma and loose cotton trousers. His feet are bare. Gripped in his right hand is a slender seven-foot spear; his left wrist rests on the stock of one of two pistols thrust into his belt. He is looking to one side, at a group of his followers struggling to follow him up the slope. In his stance and expression is a tense ambiguity, between impatience and concern, compassion and anger.

In Addis Ababa, just before I returned in 2003, the cult of Tewodros had found physical expression on one of the most prominent roundabouts in the city. Squatting on a high stony plinth, on the back of a vast wooden wagon, was a reproduction of Sevastopol. The installation had been encouraged by the country’s president, Girma Welde Giyorgis – a fan of Tewodros – and instigated by the mayor of Addis Ababa and Professor Richard Pankhurst. I’d known Richard for over twenty years, and when I went to see him and his wife Rita in their leafy villa, he told me the story in his own dry and ironic way. But he too recognised Tewodros’s stature.

‘We flew up in an old Soviet helicopter, landed on Meqdela. We were back in Addis by teatime.’ They took measurements of the gun where it lay. On the roundabout halfway down Churchill Avenue, looking at the dimensions and the traffic island, Richard began to have doubts. In Tewodros’s day, on its wagon, Sevastopol may have been an impressive sight, but now, on a busy interchange, dwarfed by Isuzu trucks and Toyota Land Cruisers, the seven-ton mortar would look tiny.

‘What did you have in mind?’ the mayor asked Richard.

‘Something bigger, about the size of a Volkswagen.’

So the mayor brought a small crane and they hoisted a V W Beetle on the back of a minibus, and they all agreed that that was much more like it. They multiplied the measurements and commissioned a metal-worker to forge it. A ramp was built, and the gun placed at the sort of angle at which it had rolled up to Zebit, or from the Jidda and Beshilo rivers, or for the final ascent of Meqdela itself.

The metal-worker also made a smaller model. Richard reached out and took it down from his mantelpiece. He handed it to me. I held it in my palm, a mini-Sevastopol to match the exaggerated one on Churchill Avenue. I marvelled once again at Tewodros’s gargantuan will, and at the strange distortions of scale that he had undergone since his death.