Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 07/12/2007
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Nicholas Shakespeare reviews The Barefoot Emperor by Philip Marsden Philip Marsden's 1993 travel book The Crossing Place - now scandalously out of print - confirmed him as a writer in the tradition of Colin Thubron: curious, empathetic, lyrical, trustworthy. He also declared his fascination with upland Christian kingdoms encircled by hostile Muslim forces - and anyone who doubts Turkish culpability in the deaths of up to one-and-a-half million Armenians in 1915 need only read that book or Franz Werfel's novel The Forty Days. The remote mountain plateau of Armenia was the site of the first Christian state, in 301AD. Nudging the southern fringes of the Ottoman Empire, in Ethiopia, was another mountainous plateau ruled by Bible-quoting kings, who claimed direct descent from Solomon. Of these "Elect of God", perhaps the most striking was Emperor Tewodros II, the deranged potentate who is the subject of Marsden's compelling new biography. advertisement Tewodros was a camel-raider who seized power in 1855. His ambition: to build a modern country, Christian, without slavery but with up-to-date weapons. He was a prototype for those African leaders - Mugabe, Mengistu, Amin, Taylor, Bokassa - who begin as progressive nationalists and finish in thrall to paranoia, surrounded by corpses and the stink of scorched earth. Tewodros put faith in the willingness of European powers - particularly England - to help him secure a modern arsenal. His weakness for the English was planted in him by a strange figure. This was John Bell, his "guardian angel", who acted as the Emperor's decoy on the battlefield and was rewarded with his own detachment of cavalry. When Bell died in battle, Tewodros, inconsolable, decapitated 500 prisoners. Against this improbable yardstick - "my best friend, my only friend!" - all other Englishmen seemed "asses". Beginning with Walter Plowden, a series of British consuls picked their way inland from the Ottoman port of Massawa. Plowden was the first to spot a potential foothold for his government on the Red Sea, safeguarding the trade route to India. Tewodros, who had yet to betray his insanity, seemed to offer a solution. To start with, Tewodros was amenable to a treaty - so long as there were guns in exchange. His grip was ebbing. "Only guns, large guns," in Marsden's words, "would give him the chance to restore his power." Encouraged by Plowden, whom he detained in his mountain fastness until he could see the results, Tewodros wrote to Queen Victoria as he would later write to Napoleon III, desiring "that you would look upon me as one of your relatives and that you would love me". (It can't have helped that his scribe, confusing the sex, flattered Victoria as "a great man"). The letter got lost in Whitehall and remained unanswered for two years. The eventual reply was accompanied by the gift of a single rifle but no ammunition, and so the disappointed Tewodros turned to a German missionary. "You are true and I love you," he told Theophilus Waldmeier, whom he ordered to cast a seven-ton cannon out of melted coins and scrap. He named it Sevastopol, after the victorious Russian battery. Plowden, meanwhile, was speared to death as he tried to leave Ethiopia, and another British consul, Charles Cameron, was kept in chains. "I thought all Europeans were like my beloved John Bell who always spoke the truth," Tewodros told Cameron, "but you are liars." To rescue Cameron, the Foreign Office dispatched the smallest possible diplomatic mission: one doctor, one soldier and an envoy, Hormuzd Rassam. They waited 18 months for an audience. Initially infatuated with Rassam, Tewodros banished him with Cameron to a prison hut on the cramped summit of Meqdela, or Magdala, the Ethiopian equivalent of Mount Ararat. Waldmeier realised that Tewodros "would rather cut all the Europeans into a thousand pieces than hand them over." In March 1867, a smuggled letter reached London: "only one thing remains, force." Marsden first visited Ethiopia in the 1980s; his understanding of the country is manifest on every page. His narrative - recast from first-hand accounts and Amharic sources - is beautifully paced, and his story is incredible: how the English sent at huge cost an expeditionary force under Sir Robert Napier; how Napier - with 8,000 mules, 44 elephants and 12,000 men - followed the road that Tewodros had built to trundle his Sisyphean gun up to Meqdela; and how Sevastopol proved useless against Napier's breech-loading Sniders. Only two English soldiers died as against 700 Ethiopians, including Tewodros, who shot himself rather than be taken. His parting words were to Waldmeier, his gun-maker: "Farewell my dear friend, I loved you as I loved John Bell." |