THE BAREFOOT EMPEROR

An Ethiopian Tragedy

PHILIP MARSDEN

To Clio

CONTENTS

Maps: Ethiopia at the time of Tewodros II |
Meqdela |
Author’s Note |
Glossary |
Prologue |
THE BAREFOOT EMPEROR |
Notes |
Bibliography |

AUTHOR’S NOTE

For the purposes of the story, the names ‘Ethiopia’ and ‘Abyssinia’ can be seen as interchangeable. I have used Ethiopia in the text, but have not changed Abyssinia where it appears in quoted material. A degree of revisionist spelling has been necessary to rid Ethiopian places and people of their Eurocentric tarnish – thus Magdala becomes Meqdela, Theodore, Tewodros (pronounced with a silent ‘w’– Te-odros).

Over the years, many hundreds of people have contributed to my own understanding of Ethiopia, its people and its past – monks and farmers, scholars and patriots, politicians and painters, all too numerous to mention. But for the Tewodros story particular thanks are due to: Professor Richard Pankhurst, for his encouragement, for digging out references and notes; the historian Shiferaw Bekele of Addis Ababa University, for his time and his clear-sighted view of Tewodros and his legacy; Dr Mandefro Belayneh for his enthusiasm; Hiluf Berhe, as always a tireless walker and perfect companion, for his help in Bahir Dar, Debre Tabor, Meqdela, and for translating the Chronicles of Zeneb; Kidame of the town of Kon, who came with us to Meqdela with his donkeys, for his fighting off of the hyenas that night in the valley of Wurq-Waha; Tony Hickey, for equipment; Sandy Holt-Wilson, an eye surgeon who has gathered together an archive of Tewodros’s son, Alemayehu Tewodros, and lectures about him to raise money for an eye unit at Gondar University (www. Gondar Eye Site. com); Jean Southon, great-niece of Captain Speedy, who allowed me to see family papers; Colonel Damtew Kassa and his cousins, direct descendants of Tewodros; HE Bob Dewar, British Ambassador to Ethiopia; the Scholarship Committee of the Harold Hyam Wingate Foundation; Susi Rech for translation of the German of Flad and Waldmeier; Will Hobson for his multilingual skills; Roland Chambers for help with Ransome references; Dr Iain Robertson Smith, Colin Thubron, Gillon Aitken, Mike Fishwick, Richard Johnson and Robert Lacey for their support; and Charlotte, whose judgements have greatly improved what follows and whose tireless enthusiasm made producing it so enjoyable.

GLOSSARY

abet – a greeting call, used to attract attention, or to acknowledge such a call

abun, abune – the head of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, at this time always a Copt

adarash – meeting hall

afe-negus – literally ‘mouth of the king’, royal spokesman

aleqa – chief or head

alga – bed, wooden-framed and sprung with a lattice of leather straps; also means throne

amba – a flat-topped mountain peak, often surrounded by cliffs, a natural fortress or isolated site for a monastic community

ato – Mister

Ayzore! – ‘Be strong!’ Comradely call of encouragement in battle, travel or labour

azmari – minstrel, composer and singer of witty verses, accompanied by masenqo, single-stringed fiddle

balderada – a chaperon and translator appointed to assist foreign visitors at the Ethiopian court

basha – from the Turkish ‘pasha’, used for high officials, and with irony in the case of Captain Speedy (‘Basha Felika’)

belg – the ‘small’ rains, usually occurring between late January and early March

bitwedded – ‘favourite’, court title, used often as qualifier to other titles like ras

debtera – a non-ordained rank of the Ethiopian Church, responsible for singing and dancing, and often possessed of peripheral religious powers, as herbalist and spell-maker

dejazmach – literally ‘commander of the gate’, a military and noble rank just below ras

doomfata –the recital of heroic deeds

falasha –an Ethiopian Jew

farenj –foreigner (adjectival form – farenji)

Fekkare Iyesus –The Interpretation of Jesus, Ethiopian sacred text

Fetha Negest – ‘laws of the kings’, the book of Ethiopian law

fitawrari – ‘commander of the front’or ‘vanguard’

Galla –former name of the Oromo people, originally pastoralists from the southern and eastern highlands

giraf –hippo-hide whip

godjo –stone-built hut typical of Tigray and the north of Ethiopia

grazmach –literally ‘leader of the left’, military and noble rank below dejazmach

gugs –a game of mock combat, involving two teams of horsemen charging each other: beautiful to watch, hazardous to play

Habesh –the name Ethiopians often use for themselves, from the Arabic ‘mixed’, and the basis of the name ‘Abyssinia’

hakim –doctor

hudaddie –Lenten fast, fifty-six days long

ichege –head monk of Ethiopia, and being native often more powerful than the Coptic abun

ika-bet – ‘thing house’, repository of church treasures

injera – flat bread

isshi – ubiquitous Amharic expression, meaning OK/of course/ very well

itege – empress or queen

Jan Hoi –Your Majesty

kebbero – large church drum

Kebre Negest – ‘the glory of the kings’, Ethiopia’s mythical charter dating to about the thirteenth century, drawing together many myths including the story of Solomon, Sheba and Menelik their son, and the Ethiopian inheritance of Mosaic law and the Ark of the Covenant

kegnazmach – literally ‘leader of the right’, military and noble rank below dejazmach

kentiba – mayor

kiddus – saint or holy man

kinkob – ceremonial robe

koso – a purgative against intestinal worms, used regularly by Ethiopian highlanders

lemd – cape or tunic

lij – ‘son’ or ‘child’, used as title for young noble males

liqemekwas – high court official

margaf – cotton scarf or small shawl

mekdes – the sanctuary of a church, the section in which is housed the tabot

mesob – free-standing flat-topped basket, on which is spread injera

naib – a Turkish name for the local rulers of the coastal region around Massawa

negarit – war drum, used to call men to arms, as well as acting as a symbol of authority

negus – king

shamma – large cotton shawl

shifta – bandit

shum – regional ruler, military chief

tabot – the sacred object at the heart of each Ethiopian church, never seen by laymen, representing both the Ark of the Covenant and the church’s given saint

tankwa – boat of lashed-together papyrus, used on Lake Tana

teff – indigenous Ethiopian wheat used to make injera

tej – mead

tella bet – beer house

thaler – the Maria Theresa thaler, common currency of the highlands, minted without alloy, and equivalent to about six shillings at this time

Tigrigna – the language of Tigray, northern Ethiopia, derived as Amharic from Ge’ez and the Semitic family of languages

timtim – white turban worn by priests

wat – sauce

weyzero – Mrs

PROLOGUE
I

‘Yetewodros menged.’ The monk’s finger pushed out from the folds of his shawl, far out into the morning, to a shadowy line on the opposite slope. ‘Tewodros’s road.’

After the easy undulations of the plateau, the main road here drops to a place they call the ‘natural bridge’. It’s one of those sudden sights in the Ethiopian highlands that pull you up short, as if the earth’s skin has been ripped aside to expose the skeletal frame of chasms beneath. At the natural bridge itself, beyond the clifftop monastery, the road runs the length of a ridge of rock so narrow that on each side you look down to a shingle bed some 3,000 feet below. To the north is the Tekeze basin, to the south the Abbai, the Blue Nile. The two rivers do not merge until seven hundred miles to the north-west, in the yellowy heat of the Sahara desert.

After the bridge is a new cutting. Within the last few years, as part of the government’s ambitious transport programme, it has been bulldozed and blasted through the hill. To one side, forgotten and unused, is an old grassy track – Tewodros’s road.

In Addis Ababa, no one could tell me what remained of the road. No account exists of it later than its building. I asked scholars at the university, and they were vague – those who had reached Tewodros’s mountaintop fortress of Meqdela had walked in from the south-east. At Bahir Dar University too they knew nothing, nor did a local historian at the school in the emperor’s old capital of Debre Tabor – a school named Tewodros II Secondary School, with the emperor’s spear-carrying image daubed on its classroom wall.

I stepped onto the old road. My boots crunched in its basalt dust. It wasn’t much to look at – a little wider than the mule paths and market routes that criss-cross the highlands. Sumach bushes dotted its course. The inner edge was sliced back well into the rock. A century and a half of rains had rounded its outer edges, washing loose soil and stones down gullies that plunged far into the gorge below.

Yet of all the moments of his extraordinary reign, Tewodros’s building of this road stands out as the most heroic and the most tragic. In October 1867, he burnt his capital at Debre Tabor and with 50,000 people left for the mountain at Meqdela. Week after week, led by the emperor himself, his half-starved army hacked at the ground with their spears, with mattocks, with their bare hands. They felled trees, banked up slopes, rubble-filled streams and smoothed off the rocks with soil. It was a journey of about 150 miles; a good messenger could do it in a few days. It would take Tewodros six months.

Little remained to him at that point, no territory and no support beyond his slow-moving camp. Untouchable on high cliffs, and from the shadows of thick forest, rebels followed his progress. They picked off water-carriers, the sick and the slow, the stragglers. They didn’t dare mount an attack. In part, Tewodros was protected by the strange air of invincibility that had surrounded him throughout his reign. But with him, on wooden wagons, was something more solid – dozens of pieces of artillery, and one in particular, the largest of all, cast in his own foundry a few months earlier, a seven-ton monster he had named Sevastopol. He was building the road for his guns.

Tewodros had another enemy. Years earlier he had chained up the British consul and the man was still in chains, with a number of other Europeans, high on the flat summit of Meqdela. Diplomacy had run its course. Now the British, irritated and affronted, had landed their forces on the Red Sea coast to try to release the hostages. Every week a few thousand more arrived. They were building a port in the desert, landing supplies in vast quantities. They were installing condensers to provide water, building a railway to the mountains. Soon they would be ready to march to Meqdela. All his life, the emperor had dreamed of bringing European technology to his people. Now it was coming.

So Tewodros was hurrying. He was desperate to reach Meqdela before the British, to line the clifftops with Sevastopol and his other big guns, to face the enemy. Hour by hour, his men flattened the ground so that the timber gun-carriages could creak forward over the rocks. If they managed two miles or more, it was a good day.

Here at the natural bridge, they paused for weeks in order to hack out the section across the broken ground, then up the slope towards Zebit. When it was ready, hundreds of men bent to the leather straps that fanned forward from the wagon of Sevastopol, and inch by inch hauled the gun up the slope. Many fell as they did so. From the cliffs the rebels hurled down rocks and spears.

Up on the high plateau again, the going was easier. Like some slow parade of votive statues, Sevastopol and the other guns slid across the plains towards Meqdela. Sometimes at day’s end, with the sun dropping over the short section of new road behind them, and as his men rested in the sudden chill of dusk, Tewodros would climb up and stretch his arms over Sevastopol’s great girth, as if its bulk might correct the fragility of his position. For years his followers had seen him as the incarnation of divine prophecy, a champion of their own Christian and Judaic inheritance. Now they gazed up at him on the gun-carriage and began to whisper of ‘yetewodros amlak’– ‘the idol of Tewodros’.

At Bet Hor, on the edge of the Jidda gorge, British forces reached Tewodros’s road shortly after he had passed. They were amazed. Travelling with them was the geographer Clements Markham, and he stood at the cliff-edge and conceded the determination of the enemy: ‘A most remarkable work –a monument of dogged and unconquerable resolution. Rocks were blasted, trees sawn down, revetment walls of loose stone mixed with earth and branches built up, and everywhere a strengthening hedge of branches at the outer sides, to prevent the earthwork from slipping.’

Later Markham gathered more information about how Tewodros had transported Sevastopol from Debre Tabor, and became convinced that the story ‘entitles his march to rank as one of the most remarkable in history’. Dr Blanc, at the time a prisoner on Meqdela, and no friend of Tewodros, echoed Markham’s words. It was, he wrote in his own account, ‘a march unequalled in the annals of history’.

From Bet Hor, the route to Meqdela drops several thousand feet to the Jidda gorge, up onto the Delanta plateau and down again to the Beshilo river. Tewodros’s road is still visible in places, chiselled into the side of cliffs, scored around the bulge of steep-sided bluffs, zigzagging up dusty slopes. It took him and his followers months to build this section. I walked it in a few days. At eleven o’clock one morning, five o’clock Ethiopian time,* I reached the Fala saddle and saw the peak of Meqdela ahead, half-hidden by scarves of cloud. As I crossed Selamge, the cloud blew away to reveal a shadowy row of cliffs. It was a grim sight. The mountain’s flat peak was edged on all sides by a sheer drop of black basalt.

At the northern end of the massif, below the peak of Selassie, the entire scene was spread out below. I looked back at the way I had come. In the haze was the far-off horizon of Delanta, the descent to the Beshilo, the snaking valley of Wurq-Waha – ‘golden water’– and the final ascent. When Tewodros began to haul Sevastopol across this section, the advance guard of the British were just twenty or thirty miles behind him.

A short way along the clifftop was a small settlement. Thatched huts stood beneath the silvery-leaved eucalyptus; stockades were ringed by pickets of giant euphorbia. A young boy was following a slow herd of cattle back towards the huts. To one side stood a crude canopy of corrugated iron. Lying beneath it, looking somewhat like a fallen bell, still lay the bronze mass of Sevastopol.

II

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.

III

In 1863, Emperor Tewodros wrote in a letter to the French vice-consul: ‘Having heard reports from the time I was born until I reached maturity, being told over and over again that, by the power of God, there are in Europe, in the countries of the Europeans, those whose governments do not fall, who lack nothing in terms of law and order, in whom there is no deceit, by the power of God, I was very happy.’

From the start, contacts between Ethiopia and Europe were characterised by impossible expectations. Europeans came to the country with their own lofty ideas. They thought the emperor was an all-conquering Christian potentate (Prester John and his seventy vassal kings), or they wanted to locate the source of the Nile (a certain bog to the south of Lake Tana), or they came to hunt wild beasts, collect exotic flowers or correct the religious delusions of the country’s Christians. The Ethiopian emperors had their own hopes of the visitors. They wanted Christian solidarity, support in their wars, and technology – in short, they wanted guns.

The very first official visit from Europe set the pattern. One night in 1520 a small band of Portuguese arrived at the hedge outside the camp of Emperor Lebne Dengel with a letter of friendship for ‘Prester John’. The emperor refused to admit them. In frustration, a couple of the Portuguese raised their guns to the stars, and fired.

At once a messenger appeared: ‘His Majesty asks, how many guns do you have for him?’

‘We have three or four muskets and those for our own use.’

The emperor still refused to see them.

A few years earlier, the Ottoman Turks, under Sultan Selim the Grim, had conquered Egypt, received the keys of Mecca and with money and weapons spread their influence on down the Red Sea. They encouraged the emirates of the coast to annex Christian Ethiopia. Having no port, the Ethiopians found it hard to obtain arms to defend themselves. Now these Christian foreigners had come to see the emperor, and all they brought him was a useless letter.

In the end, Lebne Dengel did consent to see them and at once asked them ‘Do the Turks have good bombards?’

‘As good as ours,’ replied the ambassador. ‘We are not afraid of the Turks. We are valiant in the name of Jesus Christ.’

‘Who taught the Turks to make bombards?’

‘The Turks are men. They have skills and knowledge.’

And so it went on. The Portuguese ambassador wanted only to read out his letter from King Manuel I, and return home. But now he had admitted them, the emperor wouldn’t let them go (thereby establishing another pattern of the Ethiopian court – the detention of foreign visitors).

‘You have only just arrived,’ the emperor said. ‘You have seen only a fraction of my kingdom. Play your spinet for me. Dance.’ The ambassador danced.

A few days later Lebne Dengel asked for a musket demonstration. There were more requests, and as the days became weeks, the Portuguese grew uneasy. In the end it was six years before they were allowed to return to the coast. During that time the emperor gained from them just two swivel guns.

Three decades later in, 1557, the Turks finally occupied Massawa. Their plans to add Ethiopia to the Ottoman Empire were checked less by military means than by the Christians’ own natural defence, the highlands. For the next three hundred years, until the time of Tewodros, the Red Sea port of Massawa – Ethiopia’s gateway to the outside world – was governed by Muslims.

Meanwhile Spanish and Portuguese Jesuits had remained in Ethiopia, and early in the seventeenth century managed to persuade Emperor Susenyos to abandon fifteen hundred years of religious teaching, forsake the Christology of Alexandria and come over to Rome. Susenyos had underestimated the convictions of his subjects. The country collapsed into civil war. ‘How long,’ cried his people, ‘shall we thrust our swords into our own bowels?’ Susenyos abdicated and the Jesuits were expelled. There was great rejoicing: ‘At length the sheep of Ethiopia freed from the bad lions of the West!’ Disgust for Europeans was so intense that it drove the Ethiopians to arrange a treaty with the hated Muslims of Massawa: they agreed to prevent any European Christians from reaching the highlands. When the Ethiopian emperor received from the coast the stuffed heads of some French and Italian Capuchins, he knew he had found a reliable ally. Secure from both Turks and proselytising Christians, the Ethiopians remained isolated in the fortress of their mountains, free to pursue their own internal squabbles.

In 1798, Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt brought a new era of European power to the Middle East and introduced to Egypt the restless spirit of the Enlightenment. Twenty years later the Egyptian ruler, Muhammad Ali, pushed southwards down the Nile. For decades, pressing at the lowlands around Ethiopia, Egyptian forces made periodic forays into the mountains. Conquest by Egypt was the most persistent outside threat to Ethiopia during the nineteenth century.

The young Tewodros never forgot the encounter he had on the edge of the Sahara desert. In March 1848, as a warlord, he and his thousands of followers moved against the undermanned garrison at Dabarki. They were destroyed. The Egyptians had been well-drilled and well-armed. They also had two cannon. The guns turned Tewodros’s forces more effectively than 20,000 men and established in him a lifelong yearning for artillery.

At the same time, on the coast, France and Britain had shipped their perennial rivalry to the Red Sea. As Ottoman power declined and the port of Massawa grew sleepier, so the two European states found a new cause to fight over – access to India and the Far East. The existence of Christian Ethiopia just inland lured a new generation of European envoys and adventurers.

Two hundred years after the expulsion of the Jesuits, a young Englishman reached the highlands and conceived the idea of Anglo–Ethiopian contacts. It was the tentative start of a relationship that would stumble on through years of inertia, calamity and ignorance, grow stronger through expediency and expressions of mutual love, stumble again through bereavement, suspicion, muddle and imprisonment before entering the arena of its bloody dénouement, some twenty years later, amidst the dark basalt cliffs of Meqdela.

* Ethiopian time is measured from dawn: thus seven o’clock is one o’clock, midday and midnight are six o’clock.

I

Tewodros’s Order of the Cross and Solomon’s Seal. From Hormuzd Rassam, Narrative of the British Mission to Theodore, King of Abyssinia (1869)

1

Walter Plowden lay on deck. It was April 1847. A warm wind filled the great lateen sail above his head; beneath him the dhow pitched to the short swells of the Red Sea. Far astern, to the south, he could see the distant rise of the Ethiopian highlands. Four years he’d spent there among its mountains, its roving courts, shifting from fief to fief, from battle to battle. He drew on his pipe, leaned back against the alga, and was filled with the reckless joy of parting.

‘Once more on the free waves,’ he wrote, ‘my heart beat lightly.’

Plowden was on a mission. He had persuaded Ethiopia’s ruler, Ras Ali, that there was one thing a modern state could not be without, and that was a trade treaty with Britain. Ras Ali himself couldn’t see the point. How would a trade treaty keep Dejazmach Wube to heel? Or the peoples of Wag and Lasta? What use was it against Biru Goshu, who had made off with his wife and who every year slaughtered the governors he appointed in Gojjam?

But all right, isshi, he would send an envoy with the young Englishman.

And here he was, the envoy, a poor highlander who had never before laid eyes on the sea, squatting in wide-eyed terror in Plowden’s cabin. With him were the gifts Ras Ali had selected for Queen Victoria – some rusting lances, a few bolts of homespun cotton and three very rare gazelle calves. The gazelles were also strangers to the sea. Plowden had bought them a nanny-goat for milk, and whenever they heard her bleating they would tug at their halters, squeak and whinny, and the deck would tip-tap with the sound of their delicate little hooves. Such was Ethiopia’s first embassy to Britain – a menagerie of the terrified, the untamed and the hopeful, despatched in indifference by a war-weakened ruler.

Plowden passed the days in impatient idleness. He lay on deck. He smoked his pipe. He drank beakers of coffee. Stretching his long limbs over the alga, he closed his eyes and felt the desert wind warm on his face.

Four years earlier, in his early twenties, he had been sailing the same waters. Then too he had been heading for England, fleeing India and a death-in-life job at Carr Tagore & Co. of Calcutta. But in Suez he met John Bell, a Scottish sailor as footloose and impulsive as himself. According to his brother, Plowden’s ‘ardent and ambitious temperament induced him, on the spur of the moment, without preparation and with limited funds, to join that gentleman in an expedition’. To Plowden, Ethiopia was rich with classical and biblical associations, a mountain enclave of Christianity in a Muslim region. Bell’s plan also had the whiff of antiquity around it – they would hunt the source of the Nile, whose annual flood had spawned the great civilisation of ancient Egypt.

The two set off overland and entered Ethiopia posing as elephant hunters. Within weeks they had been sucked into the country’s dramas. They forgot about the Nile. With each battle, each tented court, each chief who wooed them, they found the outside world receding. John Bell married a local woman and became a general in Ras Ali’s army. Neither he nor Plowden ever escaped the strange spell of the upland kingdom.

Plowden in particular found a fascination in Ethiopia’s medieval pageantry, in the ‘foppish’ self-love of the warrior caste, the ‘strain of feudal glamour’. For him Ethiopia’s antiquity, isolation and uniqueness were counters to the unsightly spread of modernity: ‘there is no parallel to it in this steaming and telegraphing world’. He grew to love the troubadour traditions of the quick-witted azmari, the recital of battle deeds in the doomfata; he learned to play the battle-polo of gugs, a game as deadly as any skirmish. With an ethnographer’s eye he began to record his observations, ‘Notes on Peculiar Customs’– ‘the Galla find the eating of fish disgusting, as do the Shoho … On waking, Christians utter a prayer to stop the devil entering their mouth … the shadow of a man who has slept with a woman the previous night is considered harmful …’ In Tigray he heard a host of proverbs convincing people that ‘relatives were of no use till after death’. He noted the prevalence of female circumcision among the peoples of the north.

During those early years he passed through the courts and camps of dozens of minor nobles, warlords and great regional chiefs. He rode with them, was captured by them, campaigned with them. He made many friends, and found himself offered horses, land and gifts. Some offered him their women ‘as one might offer the loan of a horse’. One ruler promised him his sister and two provinces. ‘For a moment I was tempted, having my full share (and a little more) of youthful folly, loving adventure, not being averse to war.’ But he moved on, to other valleys, other forested regions, other noble feuds.

War, he found, drove the ambition and passion of every Ethiopian highlander. War was a way of life, an end in itself. When the big rains finished in September, the month of Meskerem, and the rivers began to recede, the entire country stirred to the sound of the negarits, the recruiting drums. In tens of thousands, men then flocked to their shum, sitting astride his caparisoned mount in a thigh-length shirt of coloured silk, with a lion’s-mane cape over his shoulder.

Plowden’s enthusiasm for this world bubbles from every page of his writing. He was intrigued by its unseen codes and hierarchies. Followers outnumbered the fighting forces by as many as two to one. When Ras Ali moved to war, more than 150,000 people accompanied him. Eighty-eight drummers went before him, under a head drummer who enjoyed a host of enviable privileges because, if captured in battle, his life was never spared.

Apart from the soldiers (each possessing his own rank according to numbers of men killed) there were the keepers of the tent; the ‘mouth of the king’; the head of the advance guard; the chief of the night guards; the guard of the women’s quarters; the female providers of honey for the tej; the hundreds of tej-bearers, all women, with their own chief and their own hierarchy; the grass-cutters, wood-cutters, herdsmen, drummers and minstrels, butchers and maidservants. ‘So minute are the particulars of all these minor posts,’ Plowden wrote, ‘that they would fill a volume.’ When an ox was slaughtered in camp, he watched the meat being divided into a hundred pieces and distributed, each cut of the carcass corresponding to a different rank.

War was poetic and chivalric. Every year Ras Ali would march his tens of thousands to the province of Gojjam to do battle with its rogue ruler, Biru Goshu, who had taken the ras’s wife. Every year Biru would present Ras Ali with a cape to award to the governor the ras left behind. As soon as Ras Ali was gone, Biru killed the governor, took the cape and waited for Ras Ali to return again after the following rains. War was also brutal – the ‘warrior is bred to consider killing (geddai) as the great object of existence’. Musket stocks were hung with ‘disgusting trophies’, the leathery testicles of slaughtered enemies.

In good Victorian style, the young Plowden was both drawn to the wildness of Ethiopia and motivated by an urge to improve it. As the years passed, his enthusiasm began to veer away from the country’s medieval colour towards its worldly prospects. He wrote lovingly of a climate which could bear ‘comparison with any in the world’, a soil ‘fitted for every crop’, diversity of flora to amaze botanist and herbalist alike, green slopes for the tea-planter, gold, copper and saltpetre for prospectors. Ethiopia’s vineyards could challenge any in Bordeaux. It was India, on a smaller scale, but untouched. The country’s problem, Plowden said, was leadership. Calm and conciliatory diplomacy would unite its eternally squabbling chiefs, while those who resisted, who held out on the mountaintops, ‘would soon yield to the persuasion of some howitzers, or bombs of larger calibre’.

He puffed at his pipe, sipped his coffee, and shifted his legs on the alga’s leather grid. The breeze was good and the sails full. He was impatient to reach England, yet could not forget what he’d left behind. Sometimes during those languid days he thought he could ‘hear in fancy, the wild war-cry of the half-naked Galla … mingling with the murmur of the restless ocean’.

His mission soon ran into difficulty. The dhow’s captain proved to be an idiot. When the goat’s milk dried up, the first of the gazelles died. Another was killed leaping from a window in Jeddah, the third when the dhow was wrecked on a coral reef. Plowden alone struggled ashore from the wreck. For days he staggered through the Sinai desert, weakened by thirst, close to death, wondering whether ‘it were not better to die at once on my lance’. But after a week or so he reached Suez. There he found that the rest of the embassy had been rescued from the reef. All the presents had been lost or destroyed, and the envoy himself refused ever to go near a boat again. Plowden continued to London on his own.

2

A few weeks later, from a hotel room in Covent Garden, Walter Plowden wrote to the Foreign Office. He laid his plans before them in two detailed, handwritten reports. The Foreign Secretary at the time was Lord Palmerston, and by coincidence he had also been Foreign Secretary some fifteen years earlier when a similar letter was doing the rounds. That earlier letter came through a William Coffin, son of a yeoman farmer from Dorset who had been stuck in Ethiopia for so long he could barely speak English when he emerged. He had brought a letter of friendship from a Tigrayan noble to King George IV. The Foreign Office lost it. Coffin waited three years in London before they gave him the reply.

Plowden had more luck. This time Palmerston was immediately receptive. A foothold on the Red Sea was now of much more relevance, to protect the route to India from the French. He was convinced too of Plowden’s optimism about trade. Within a few weeks of landing in England (and after a little quiet investigation into the young man’s character), Plowden was appointed HM Consul to Massawa. He was to receive a salary of £500 a year, a gift budget for Ras Ali of £400, a letter signed by Queen Victoria herself and a nineteen-point treaty to lay before the ras.

Six months later, Plowden was back in Ethiopia. Thrilled to be among the mountains again, he took the road to Gondar. As it led higher into the Simiens, the air grew colder, the cliffs steeper, until at a high pass it pushed through a narrow doorway in the rock. With the great inland sea of Lake Tana on his right he entered land ruled by Ras Ali. Striding ahead of his baggage train, he reached the capital of Debre Tabor. There, outside the ras’s residence, he met his old friend John Bell. Pushing through the crowd, Plowden embraced ‘several old acquaintances’. In the semi-darkness of the court he found Ras Ali sitting on a cowhide on the ground, while workmen and courtiers, horses, flies and children milled around him.

‘He was much pleased to see me,’ wrote Plowden, ‘and immediately besieged me with questions as to what I had brought for him.’

After the initial meeting, Plowden retired. Several times that first day, messages arrived from the ras. Let me see the gifts. Have you brought guns?

Plowden gave no answer.

The next day he again entered the ras’s court, and read out the letter from Queen Victoria:

‘Your Highness will clearly perceive the great advantage to Abyssinia from intimate connection with the Sovereign of the British Empire whose dominions extend from the rising to the setting sun –’

Ras Ali looked up at the long-legged Plowden: Why does the farenj stand?

‘– and whose fleets are to be met with in every part of the seas which encompass the earth.’

Ras Ali knew nothing of the sea.

Plowden then spread the bulk of the gifts before him. The afe-negus – ‘mouth of the king’– whispered to Plowden, ‘One thing at a time is usually better.’

Plowden waved him away. His queen, he told him, did not mind. He gave a flamboyant bow, left the gifts, and stepped out again into the sunlight. Plowden was no longer the eager young traveller who had left the ras two years earlier. He was now Her Britannic Majesty’s Consul and he was playing the ras. As the days passed Ras Ali began to send requests to Plowden for more gifts.

‘It is needless to recall,’ boasted the consul, ‘all the childish messages with which I was bored every five minutes.’ With the ras primed, Plowden then subtly introduced the idea of signing the treaty.

But Ras Ali was also playing Plowden. At each meeting, Plowden was forced again to go back to the beginning. What exactly is this treaty? What use is it to me? And each time Plowden had to explain that it offered friendship between sovereigns, and that his own sovereign whose fleets etc. Each time, Plowden had to part with a gift. He began to dig into his own supplies. First the matchlocks brought from Egypt. Then his own private armoury, the guns and pistols kept for his protection. And still Ras Ali put off signing the treaty.

Then Plowden heard a familiar sound. From the tented city, from the plains around Debre Tabor came the beating of the ras’s negarits. Tens of thousands of souls stirred, packed up their tents, rounded up their sheep and cattle. The chiefs took down their slash-sleeved shirts, men left their homes to join the southbound flood. The ras was going to war. He was leaving for his annual fight with Biru Goshu. Plowden had no option but to take his treaty and follow him.

They dropped down into the gorge of the Blue Nile, and crossed into Gojjam, the land of Biru Goshu. In time the campaign reached the stage it always reached. Biru sat safe in his mountain stronghold, Ali was camped below. The rains came, the ground turned to mud. The rains ended and then Ras Ali’s hordes began to pack up and leave.

It was at that moment that Ras Ali summoned Consul Plowden. He was ready to sign the treaty.

Ras Ali was on a divan in his tent discussing a horse with one of his men. The horse stood beside them. His scribe began to read out the Amharic text.

‘There shall be a firm, mutually cordial and lasting friendship between the king of Abyssinia and Victoria, the queen of England …’

Ras Ali continued talking about the horse.

‘Please, master – listen!’

He nodded.

‘The king of Abyssinia shall receive and protect the envoys or consuls of the queen of England … Likewise the queen of England shall receive and protect the envoys or officials of Abyssinia …’

When all nineteen clauses had been heard, everyone looked to the ras. The ras looked up at the horse, admiring its sleek sides and strong legs.

‘I see no harm in this treaty, but it seems useless. The country as it is now is of no use to merchants. No English merchant will be able to reach it for ten years or more.’

But he signed. Plowden prepared to leave for the coast.

Ras Ali would not let him go. He told Plowden to give him his best rifle. Plowden refused. The days passed. His food ran low, his patience thin, and like the Portuguese delegation so many years before, the British envoy had the growing sense that he was a prisoner in these remote highlands. He gave in. He handed the ras his best rifle and left for Massawa. There he would wait for peace to spread through the troubled kingdom so that he could attract traders and artisans, and prove Ras Ali wrong.

3

Ethiopia’s Christians suffered not only from the endless round of civil war, but from the collective grief of former glory. In their eyes, Ras Ali was a usurper. He was an Oromo, and the Oromo did not share the same blessings as themselves, the high destiny bestowed on them, centuries earlier, by God. The Oromo were a pastoralist people, mainly Muslim, who had pushed up into the central highlands in the eighteenth century. They proved fearless in battle and were used as warriors first by the emperors’ rivals against the emperor, then by the emperor himself against his rivals. As the Christian regime weakened, the Oromo grew more powerful. In 1803, Ras Gugsa – grandfather of Ras Ali – became the country’s ruler, and converted from Islam to the Christianity of most of his subjects (though they all knew that really a hyena cannot become a goat).

Ras Gugsa ruled for twenty-two years, and according to Zeneb, the Christian chronicler, those men who refused to submit to him had their penises cut off, while women lost their breasts.

In the 1830s, at the age of twelve, Ras Ali became head of the dynasty. During his regency his mother Menen ruled in his stead. Reports describe her variously as capricious, flirtatious, wanton and shameless. She governed from the half-ruined palaces of the city of Gondar. In their rough stone interiors she listened unseen to the affairs of the court, sending judgements and orders through her eunuchs. Outside stood crowds of farmers and soldiers, noblemen and shield-bearers, priests and beggars: ‘suppliants’, wrote Plowden, ‘who cannot obtain admittance, loudly crying their tale of woe … and perchance some man, once great – whose eyes have been extinguished by the order of her at whose door he is now sitting’.

The traditional rulers of Ethiopia, from the line that had embraced Christianity in the year AD330 but who traced their origins back to the union of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, had been in decline for years. King-makers and regional rulers plucked princes from the mountaintop prisons where they were kept from birth. They rarely lasted long on the throne. Soon Gondar was full of toppled emperors, living in penury. Many were crowned and ousted and crowned again – Tekle Giyorgis was enthroned six times. Menen herself took one in 1840 and placed him on the throne as King of Kings Yohannis III. He was sixteen at the time, and she married him in order to become itege or empress. He was on and off the throne for years, and grew into a drinker and rarely left his harem. He became known as Yohannis the Fool.

The people of the highlands, the Christian farmers whose land and stores were forever being plundered by shifting hordes of rebels and regional armies, sought solace in the traditions of their faith. The priests reminded them that from the death of Joshua until the rise of King David, the children of Israel suffered a period known as the Zemene Mesafint, the Time of Judges, and because there is nothing that happens that has not already happened in the Old Testament, the Christians of Ethiopia realised that they too were living in the Zemene Mesafint. Their trials were a punishment for their sins: ‘The children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord and served Baalim … And the anger of the Lord was hot against Israel, and he delivered them into the hands of spoilers who spoiled them, and he sold them into the hands of their enemies.’

The Ethiopian chronicles gave voice to the humiliation felt in the heart of every Christian highlander: ‘How is it that the kingdom is a laughing stock to the uncircumcised from the very beginning? How is it that the kingdom is the image of a worthless flower that children pluck in the autumn rains?’

Yet just as God had sent the Mesafint to punish his errant children, so one day he would end it. It had long been prophesied that in Ethiopia a great ruler would rise and restore the glory of the Christian kingdom. The longer the Mesafint went on, the more people remembered the words of the Fekkare Iyesus, stating clearly that a ruler would emerge to resurrect Ethiopia, banish her enemies and herald an era of peace, and that this ruler would be called Tewodros. In the 1830s a whisper began to be heard in the highlands. It reached the shores of Lake Tana, the villages of Begemder, and the stony streets of Gondar. He is come! Tewodros is come!

Outside a convent on the banks of the River Qaha, the saviour himself raised a horn to his lips:

‘I am the king whose name is Tewodros!’

In Gondar, the puppet emperor Sahle Dengel, ruling for the first of his four reigns, heard like Herod of the coming of the new king. He rose and sought him out. Within days, haloed by flies, the severed head of this Tewodros was hanging in the main square of Gondar.

Ras Ali and Menen remained in power. The wars raged on. The Zemene Mesafint continued.

4

On the coast, Walter Plowden was living a few miles inland from the unbearable heat of Massawa. In the village of Monculu, only a little less hot, he had built himself a house from palm matting and crude timbers. From his well he dug irrigation channels so that water could flow to the roots of vegetables and fruit bushes. He nurtured shrubs for shade.

Ten years in these regions had drained a little of his old energy. He was often ill. He spent days lying on his alga, bored and feverish, while shards of sunlight pierced the fibrous walls. His treaty had yielded nothing – no exports, no imports, none of the hoped-for traffic of skills. Ras Ali had been right.

Plowden performed his consular tasks as best he could. He wrote to London with reports on slavery, on the activities of the French, on missionaries. Every quarter he drew his salary: ‘I have the honour to state that I have been at my post, and in the execution of my duties …’

But it wasn’t much. ‘I am consul in name only,’ he wrote, ‘having no consular powers, no foreign commerce, no mercantile interests, and no British subjects to protect.’

He hated Massawa. He hated its climate, its humidity and haze. He called it the ‘slave depot of Turkey’. Successive Ottoman governors had tied him down with petty restrictions, hoping to drive him and other Europeans away. The last pasha was a particular menace to the consul, who complained frequently of his ‘misgovernment, bribery and oppression’. When Plowden wanted to repair his well, the pasha told him not one stone could be moved without permission from Constantinople. Within days the leaves of his shrubs and vegetables crunched to dust between his fingers.

Whenever he was able during those years, Plowden travelled up into Ethiopia. There he breathed the mountain air, climbed beneath a puff-clouded sky to ridges where you could gaze for a hundred miles or more. He bathed in bracing streams, slept easily in the cool nights. He visited John Bell, hoping to hear that the rebels were on the run, that Ras Ali was victorious and that he might at last take up residence in the highlands.

In 1850, Ras Ali suddenly made headway. Two of his greatest enemies – Dejazmaches Kasa and Wube – fell into line behind him. When he called them to campaign on his behalf, they came running. They brought their thousands of followers. A strange peace began to settle over the country, and many believed that the years of the Mesafint might just be over.

But in January 1853 Plowden wrote to his masters in the Foreign Office: ‘One of the great vassals of Ras Ali named Dejazmach Kasa … has rebelled.’ He reassured them that ‘at present the position and power of the Ras will be in no wise endangered’.

Four months later, he reported: ‘This rebel chief has gained another decisive victory over the combined forces of Ras Ali and Dejazmach Wube.’

Two months later: ‘Dejazmach Kasa is increasing in force.’

Three days later: ‘Dejazmach Kasa has completely defeated Ras Ali.’

The tufty-cheeked mandarins of the Foreign Office were not impressed. All they’d ever heard from their consul to Ethiopia was bad news from the interior and endless squabbles with the Turkish pasha.

‘Her Majesty’s government,’ wrote the permanent secretary, ‘were led by the representations made by you to expect that advantage would result to British interests from the conclusion of a treaty with the Rulers of Abyssinia … It appears however with your reports now before me, that there is little reason to expect such will be the case.’

Plowden was forced to agree. On 10 July 1854, six years after his original appointment as consul, he asked for his first leave.

Yet even as he was waiting, a new possibility emerged. As more news came in about Kasa, Plowden began the same volte-face that others had already performed in the highlands. Dejazmach Kasa, the wrecker of peace, was becoming the bringer of peace. Plowden delayed his departure.

On 3 March 1855 he wrote to tell Lord Clarendon that Dejazmach Kasa had defeated his last enemy, Dejazmach Wube. ‘There is at last some chance that Abyssinia may be united under one Sovereign, and such an one as shall merit the support and friendship of Her Majesty’s Government.’ The more Plowden heard of the new ruler, the more excited he became. Dejazmach Kasa had already abolished the slave trade, spoken out against battlefield mutilations. He had written to Plowden himself expressing his interest in ‘a sincere friendship with Europeans, more especially the English government’. When news reached him that Kasa had been crowned, Plowden was elated. He cancelled his leave and prepared to travel inland. He had waited nearly a decade for an opportunity like this. The Ethiopians had waited rather longer, and the promise of liberal reforms and foreign relations meant less to them than Kasa’s choice of name. He had been crowned Tewodros II.

5

How Kasa Haylu rose to become Tewodros II is a tale so often told in the villages and highlands of Ethiopia that the details have become stretched, added to and reshaped to make them fit a grander pattern. Even during his own lifetime they began to take on the form of more familiar tales, those of ancient folk heroes, of saints or the giants of the Old Testament. In particular his chronicles tell a story similar in many ways to the early life of the greatest of all kings, the father of Solomon – King David.

It was King David who had achieved what Ethiopian Christians longed for: he brought to an end the Zemene Mesafint. His story and the psalms attributed to him were a touchstone for educated Ethiopians who had all learnt by heart their ‘Dawit’, the psalms of David. As a boy Kasa completed his Dawit with great speed. In later years it was the story of David and the beauty of his psalms that he turned to in times of reflection and need. Those who met him said he carried a copy of the psalms wherever he went, and were struck by his command of them. Henry Dufton, who came to Ethiopia in the early 1860s, concluded that ‘he took for a standard – a model to which he could conform himself – his illustrious progenitor, King David’.

The strange thing is that many of the confirmed facts of Kasa’s early life really do fit with the young David, as did the physical prowess, the military skills and the intensely human virtues and flaws that shaped each of their reigns.

Like David, Kasa emerged not from the royal court, but from provincial obscurity. He was born in about 1820. His father was Dejazmach Haylu Welde Giyorgis, who died when Kasa was young. The truth about his mother troubled him all his life. His enemies taunted him with accusations that she was a camp-follower, a woman who had simply slipped into Haylu’s tent. They said she sold koso, a much-used purgative, on the street corners of Gondar. To others she was a noblewoman of astonishing beauty. Either way, it was she, Atitegeb, who ensured that he received many years of Church schooling. In biblical matters he could outquote many of the European missionaries who came to the country. He became proficient in Arabic.

He was still a boy, studying at the monastery of Mahbere Selassie when it was attacked by a warlord. The novices were slaughtered or castrated, but Kasa fled unharmed. He joined that nameless tribe of outlaws who haunted the remoter hills of the kingdom. He lived in caves, off the berries of the forest.

Then David departed and came into the forest of Hareth.

His strength with the spear, his skills as horseman, his courage and luck attracted others around him. He was little more than twelve years old. Sometimes he and his band would rob a caravan, or ambush the soldiers of the hated Oromo, and then he divided the spoils as David had divided the spoils of the Amalekites.

And when David came to Ziklag he sent of the spoil unto the elders of Judah, even to his friends, saying, Behold a present for you the spoil of the enemies of the Lord.

The years passed. Kasa fought in the lowlands to the west. The number of his victories grew so quickly and with such mysterious ease that Kasa began to see them as part of a plan devised by God. Then a great drought came and famine swept through the highlands, and Ras Ali and his mother Empress Menen could do nothing for the people. Out of the wilderness rode Kasa and his men with looted grain. Kasa gave the people money to buy tools, and he himself helped cut back the forest to plant grain. He showed them how to make the wild places green.

And every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented, gathered themselves unto him; and he became a captain over them.

In Gondar, Ras Ali’s mother, Empress Menen, saw the rise of Kasa and despatched an army to defeat him. It was too late. When her men came upon him, such was his reputation that they fled with hardly a fight.

Then Menen and Ras Ali and the Oromo chiefs became angry. Kasa’s support among the people was greater than theirs. They summoned him, that he might make an alliance with them.

And the princes of the Philistines were wroth with him; and the princes of the Philistines said unto him, make this fellow return, that he may go again to his place which thou hast appointed him, and let him not go down to battle, lest in the battle he be an adversary to us.

Menen and Ras Ali said to him: We will forgive all that you have done against us, if you will join us.

Kasa refused. So they offered him the hand of Tewabach, the daughter of Ras Ali.

And Saul said to David, Behold my elder daughter Merab, her will I give thee to wife; only be thou valiant for me.

Kasa was astonished; the daughter of Ras Ali was celebrated for her beauty. He accepted their offer.

And David said, Who am I? and what is my life, or my father’s family in Israel, that I should be son-in-law to the king?

It was a marriage that should not have worked – a bride from the dynasty Kasa was determined to destroy. But in the years to come, though they were often apart, the two developed an understanding that survived the desperate turbulence of their times, the wilder fringes of his personality, even, when it came, his decisive rebellion against her own father and grandmother, Ras Ali and Menen. She remained loyal to him, and he to her. She was probably the only figure in his adult life he ever learned to trust.

6

Nothing but the chronicles and legend survives of Kasa’s early rise to power – except four brief letters. They were written during his years in the lowlands of the west. They are all in Arabic and all addressed to local rulers in the borderless land between Ethiopia and Sudan. A boisterous confidence gushes from them. They were clearly dictated from the centre of a camp that never knew defeat, in which a powerful aura had already gathered around its leader.

In the letters Kasa refers to himself as ‘His Excellency, the honoured, the bravest of the brave and the greatest of horsemen, the mighty, the exalted, the praiseworthy, the owner of all the land, that is Shaykh Kasa …’ Demanding tribute from the Muslim rulers, he threatened: ‘Now, if you bring it, well and good. But if I come, then you’d better crawl back into whatever space is left in your mother’s womb … I am Kasa. No man can face me.’

At about this time, towards the end of 1846, Kasa made his boldest move. When Empress Menen left the old capital of Gondar with her troops, he marched in and claimed the city for himself. Kasa was now in control not only of the imperial capital but also of all the land to Lake Tana and beyond. On 18 June 1847, Menen met Kasa in battle. Kasa was victorious. He captured Empress Menen and her husband, the King of Kings, the Solomonic ruler, Yohannis the Fool.

In 1852, Ras Ali sent an army against Kasa. It was commanded by the great Ras Goshu, father of Biru Goshu. The two forces assembled on the plains of Gur Amba. Goshu’s men were pleased to find the rebel Kasa in such open country, so outgunned and so outnumbered. Goshu’s azmari, Tewfech, stood before the troops and sang a scurrilous song about Kasa to encourage them further:

Have you seen this scatterbrain

Coming down to Gur Amba, escorted by five hussies,

Fondling them

And followed by his usual band of loose women?

Kasa was again victorious. Goshu was killed, his men fled. Many were captured – including the azmari Tewfech.

‘Please,’ asked Kasa, ‘recite for me this rhyme of yours.’

When the azmari had finished, Kasa had him flogged to death.

Ras Ali then summoned all the military force of his kingdom. From Wollo to Gojjam, Lasta to Begemder, the negarits sounded. He asked Wube too to send an army. He placed them all under the lucky command of Biru Aligaz. They marched against Kasa, and in April 1853 met at Takusa. In the ranks there was great confidence. ‘This man of the lowlands,’ scoffed Ras Ali’s men, ‘this grower of red pepper – at last he’s come to fight us!’

‘How does he dare? We are ten to his one!’

‘Shush! How can you know what the Lord has decided?’

The Lord had decided on triumph for Kasa.

Kasa then began to move more quickly. He marched south. In May he burned Ras Ali’s capital at Debre Tabor. On 29 June 1853, Kasa finally clashed with Ras Ali himself, his own father-in-law, on the flat land around Ayshal. The chronicle tells of terrible bloodshed. Ras Ali’s troops fell like leaves from a wind-shaken tree. Those who were wounded and were unable to move perished from cold. Ras Ali fled the battlefield. He never recovered his power. The Zemene Mesafint was over.

Kasa still had some regional problems to sort out. A lightning march on Tigray wrong-footed its ruler and secured for Kasa the transfer to his camp of Abune Selama, the most senior cleric in the country. Kasa moved south, against Biru Goshu in Gojjam. For years Biru’s men had resisted Ras Ali’s vast army. But now the enemy was not led by the Oromo. Biru’s men refused to fight the invincible Kasa, with the figure of the abun behind him. Biru was captured without a shot being fired. He was dragged in before Kasa, a penitential stone pressing down on his shoulders.

‘If it had been me before you,’ asked Kasa, ‘what would you have done?’

‘Executed you,’ he murmured.

Kasa’s men wanted his blood, but he spared Biru. The rebel chief remained in chains for the next fourteen years. In the meantime Dejazmach Wube, said to be the wiliest man in the whole of Ethiopia, still ruled in the north. His regime had begun even before that of Ras Ali. Kasa sent a messenger to Wube, demanding tribute. ‘Who are you,’ responded Wube, ‘that I should pay you tribute?’

‘You shall see, great Goliath.’

In January 1855, Kasa marched north. He moved rapidly into the Simien mountains. Day after day, without rest, he drove his troops until they reached the great basin at Deresgie. High brown peaks ringed the skyline. A city of white tents was massed below them. Kasa turned to Yohannis, his liqemekwas, his chamberlain, and asked him to look at the tents through his glass.

Yohannis was the Englishman John Bell. With the defeat of Ras Ali, Bell had neatly swapped his allegiance and joined Kasa. Bell pressed the telescope to his eye and told Kasa – Yes, those are the tents of Wube.

Kasa’s men were exhausted. They were daunted by the prospect of battle against the great Wube. When Kasa ordered the advance they did not move. He rode out in front of them. ‘After all our victories, does this old man frighten you?’

The men did not budge.

‘Do his guns, charged with rags, chill your souls?’

Nothing.

Kasa made one final plea to them. ‘I will give you my name!’

Now one or two cheers rose from the ranks. Soon they spread and became a chorus, a battle cry. No highlander was immune to word-play, and Kasa had given them a pun. ‘My name’ in Amharic is ‘simien’– the name also of the native province of Wube.

The battle was not easy. It continued all day. Only when a group of Kasa’s men stumbled on a resting Wube and captured him was it decided. Kasa now controlled all of Tigray too – and from Wube’s treasury, safe on a high amba, he collected a great hoard of gold and silver. He handed out the money to his nobles, officers and soldiers according to rank. Such was the quantity that he continued to do so for months afterwards. The rifles he found were so numerous they were hard for his men to carry. There were also two cannon.

Two days later, in the presence of both Abune Selama and the ichege, the country’s chief monk, Kasa was crowned.

Dejazmach Kasa did not yet take at this stage the title King of Kings, or claim to be the heir of Solomon. He did better than that.

‘I will give you simien,’ he had promised his troops days earlier. ‘I will give you my name.’ He promised an end to generations of oppression, to centuries of waiting – Kasa became Tewodros.

‘At my birth,’ he wrote, with echoes of King David, ‘God picked me up from the dust, gave me strength, raised me up and by Divine power, I chased away the Galla.’

Tewodros’s success lay not just in an astonishing series of military victories. He had something of that curious mystique that gathers round certain men, the impression that just a little of God’s energy flows directly through them. Although it failed to convince many of the old nobility, Tewodros’s charisma was more effective than any number of big guns, and remained with him throughout all the heady years of his reign, surviving his caprices, his violence, his self-destructive manias, the eventual depletion of his forces, and even his death.

II

Jidda gorge

7

Down in the heat of the Jidda gorge, Walter Plowden waded across the thigh-deep river and began to climb. High above him, some 4,000 feet, were the cliffs of the Delanta plateau. Up there was Tewodros’s camp, with his 50,000 soldiers and 100,000 followers. As the slope steepened, so the paths filled. The British consul passed scouts and sutlers, fell into step with water-carriers, wood-carriers, mules laden with grain, shepherds and stockmen driving their beasts to feed the emperor’s troops. Once he reached the plateau a group of mounted generals came out to escort him in to camp. Flautists played beside them. Drummers beat their goatskin tympana. As the party approached the open ground at the heart of the camp, with its reception tent, a volley of muskets was fired.

Inside, the consul blinked in the sudden darkness. As his eyes adjusted, he saw the emperor for the first time.

Tewodros was sitting on a divan, dressed in gold-threaded robes. The imperial crown lay on a cushion beside him, hung with pendants of silver filigree. The sword of state was held above him. Abune Selama and the ichege sat on high chairs on either side. Standing in attendance were dozens of officers. Plowden lowered himself to the carpet.

The earlier portraits he gives of other nobles – Wube and Biru and Merso, even Ras Ali – make them all larger than life. But none was painted with the same fascination as that of Tewodros. Plowden was at once struck by his physique – his fitness, his poise and his youth. His face was powerful and handsome, with thin lips and hair running back down to his shoulders.

Plowden stayed two weeks in the Delanta camp, and afterwards wrote an extensive report for his impatient masters at the Foreign Office. It remains one of the most detailed portraits of Tewodros at any stage, but certainly in this moment, in the first months after his coronation, flushed with his own success.

Tewodros, wrote Plowden, ‘is young in years, vigorous in all manly exercises, of a striking countenance peculiarly polite and engaging when pleased, and mostly displaying great tact and delicacy’. Like most observers, Plowden noted his energy. ‘Indefatigable in business, he takes little repose night or day; his ideas are clear and precise; hesitation is not known to him.’

Plowden’s reception showed the value Tewodros placed on ceremony and form. Yet his personal instincts were towards simplicity and equality. ‘He salutes his meanest subjects with courtesy,’ the consul wrote, ‘he is generous to excess and free from all cupidity.’

Tewodros’s plans were common currency in the camp, and Plowden stressed to London how important he could become in the politics of the Red Sea. ‘Next year he will devote to the settlement of Tigray, including the tribes along the coast, and meditates upon the occupation of Massawa.’ He would reclaim Ethiopia’s northern and western borders, the territory annexed by Egypt. ‘Nor does his military ardour hesitate to dream of the conquest of Egypt, and a triumphant march to the Holy Sepulchre.’ In this, as in all his actions, the emperor believed he was merely fulfilling the course of divine will: ‘His faith is signal.’

Plowden’s assessment of Tewodros was not blind to his faults. ‘The worst points in his character are, his violent anger at times, his unyielding pride as regards his kingly and divine right, and his fanatical religious zeal.’ It was, wrote Plowden, ‘impossible for him yet to believe that so great a monarch as himself exists in the world’.

Plowden proposed again the establishment of official relations between the two countries. He offered Tewodros the chance to send an embassy to London, in return for recognition of himself as consul. The treaty signed by Ras Ali contained in it clauses for his successor. So now Tewodros too could claim its benefits: There shall be a firm, mutually cordial and lasting friendship between the king of Abyssinia and his successors and Victoria, the queen of England and her successors …

When Plowden began to talk of this treaty, Tewodros said he knew nothing of it. ‘I am young and inexperienced in public affairs,’ he explained coyly.

So Plowden sketched out the mechanics of a consulship, the rights it gave Tewodros to send his own representation to Queen Victoria, to the court of St James’s, and the principle of mutual exemption from local laws. He spoke of the benefits of such an arrangement, the military aid that would accrue, assistance, trade. Plowden recognised in Tewodros an openness, a yearning for new ideas and contacts. But the emperor’s generals were impatient to return to battle. Every minute Tewodros wasted with this foreigner gave the enemy an advantage.

It was John Bell who relayed the emperor’s reply: I cannot consent to a consul, said Tewodros. I cannot allow anyone in my territory, consul or not, to be free from my jurisdiction. Plowden was devastated – even Ras Ali had agreed to that.

‘For anything else you wish for,’ Tewodros assured him, ‘now and hereafter, for yourself or other English, I shall be happy to perform your pleasure.’

Plowden felt sure that Tewodros would relent in time. He was used to waiting – he would wait a little longer. He travelled to Gondar to sit out the rains.

Tewodros moved his army south, towards the Christian kingdom of Shoa. The king of Shoa died the night before he was due to fight. The arrival of Tewodros with Abune Selama combined with the sudden death of their king to persuade the Christians of Shoa that a new age lay before them, and that Tewodros was its fiery exponent. Shoa was added to Gojjam and Wollo, Begemder and Gondar, Simien and Tigray. The territory of Ethiopia was now larger than it had been for over a thousand years.

8

Tewodros signalled the start of his reign with a series of stirring proclamations.

‘Go now,’ he told his followers, ‘lay down your arms, return to the country of your fathers. Take up the tools of your former trade.’ The merchant will abide in his store, the farmer in his field. He himself – Tewodros, Elect of God – will keep an army and they will be trained matchlockmen, and he will drill them and train them in the use of their arms. Soldiers will be paid and they will buy food from the peasants and no longer plunder farm stores. All guns not in their hands will be smelted into plough-shares and sickle-blades, and in the markets across the land the price of the plough-ox will exceed that of the war horse. Seek out the habits of peace, said the new emperor, live with your family, continue your old peacetime occupation unless it was as a shifta in which case, like Adonibezek who was pursued from the city of Bezek, you will have your hands and feet chopped off.

There shall be no more slavery. Existing slaves must be sold, the money given to charity, and the slaves baptised. Tewodros himself showed the way by buying slaves from the Muslim traders and sending them to priests for baptism. He encouraged others to follow him in formalising their marriage before the priests and to remain faithful to their chosen partners. Women of the camps and of the towns and of tella bets must no longer sell themselves to men. Murderers will not be handed over to the bereaved families for retribution, but dealt with by his own executioners. Tewodros revived the right of all citizens to approach him as the point of final appeal. Long before dawn, the cries of the persecuted surrounded his tent: ‘Jan Hoi! Jan Hoi! Your Majesty! Give me justice!’

He wanted roads. He planned a transport system with Debre Tabor as its hub and spokes pushing out to Gondar, to Meqdela, south to Gojjam. ‘Hitherto,’ wrote one observer, ‘not a single road had ever been constructed.’ The first stages, of route-planning and blasting, were carried out by German missionaries.

Nor did he remain silent on matters of dress. Under the old regime, clothes for the upper body – for man or woman – were a privilege. ‘Childish customs,’ scoffed the emperor, and introduced the wearing of a loose cotton shirt for all. If it reached below the knee, or was of silk, or was brightly coloured and had slashed sleeves, it meant that the wearer had earned the garment in service to the state.

Tewodros’s vision for his country was undeniably a righteous one. Even a man like the Catholic missionary Mgr Justin de Jacobis, driven out of Gondar by Tewodros, recognised, as he fled, the heroic scope of his persecutor’s ambition. Tewodros is ‘extraordinary’, he admitted, the bringer of ‘laws and admirable ordinances of public prosperity and morality’.

Tewodros wanted national unity, and tackled the problem of regional power. During the Mesafint, the provincial rulers had become too powerful, corrupted both by the habit of rebellion and by their alliance with the Oromo rulers. Tewodros (who himself was innocent of neither) ousted these hereditary rulers, and many now shuffled harmlessly around the flat-topped mountains, their hands and legs in chains. Tewodros appointed his own governors.

He was one of the first Ethiopian rulers to take any notice at all of the world outside. He had felt the full force of Egyptian expansion in 1848 at Debarki when a few men had devastated his forces with their guns; Ottoman power in the Red Sea, far to the south of the Bosphorus, was on the wane, and the British and French made no secret of their desire to fill the gap. European politics intrigued him, and he developed a fascination for the war that broke out as he rose to power, that concerned the shrinking of the other end of the Ottoman Empire – the war on the Crimea peninsula. Every visitor was asked for news, for stories of Balaclava and Sevastopol. But Tewodros was baffled by the allegiances. Why in God’s name had France and Britain, who spent their time squabbling around him, been allies in the Crimea, helping the Muslim Turks against Christian Russia?

The future for Ethiopians would no longer be decided only within their own borders. They must learn not only to spare the lives of visiting foreigners, but to see that these strangers might actually bring benefits. He himself was frequently in debate with the two Englishmen, Plowden and Bell.

Plowden left a great deal of written material, but little is known about Bell. Yet it was he who was closest to Tewodros. He had been appointed his liqemekwas, involving among other things dressing as the emperor did in battle, to act as decoy. Bell was given his own detachment of cavalry and married a cousin of Tewodros, Wurqnesh Asfa Yilma. On campaign he often shared a tent with Tewodros and was known to read to him from a copy of Shakespeare with such devotion that the emperor referred to it as ‘Bell’s Bible’.

Tewodros wanted a modern state, a Christian state, without slavery, without feudal fiefdoms, defended by a standing army equipped with up-to-date weapons. More than anything he wanted a Church that did not hold the people in thrall, nor dictate to the crown, nor hoard the tithes from the third of the land it controlled, nor peddle its mysteries in a long-dead language. Plowden in his writings frequently mentions parallels between Ethiopia and medieval Europe. In his quest for unity and centralised rule, Tewodros was attempting ‘a task achieved in Europe only during the reigns of consecutive Kings’; in his taming of the Church his own Reformation. His ideals of worldly power were forged in the heat of the Books of Samuel and Kings yet tempered, with assistance from Bell’s ‘Bible’, by a little European humanism.

But God grants no easy victories. Tewodros’s people had lived for too long in darkness to appreciate at once the light he brought. In Tigray, Niguse and Tesemma, of the family of Wube, rose up against the new regime. In Gojjam, Tedla Gwalu rebelled. Kinfu’s son rebelled. Nor could the Oromo of Wollo yet understand that their years of rule were finished. Across the country, priests too had reservations, strangely slow to see that in Tewodros’s victories was the manifest will of the Almighty.

9

Standing barefoot on the stony earth, with his plain shamma around his shoulder, Tewodros would say: ‘Without Christ, I am nothing.’ He understood his worldly role in terms of biblical precedent. He understood his particular duty as saving Ethiopia’s Christians from extinction by Muslims. He would first convert the Oromo to Christianity, then put the choice to all remaining Muslims in his realm: follow Christ or leave the country. He was not above superstition, seeing portents when they were obviously put in his way. But his zealotry was Christian. He was a crusader, the heir of David, the Elect of God, the dutiful Slave of Christ.

Yet Tewodros didn’t much care for priests. During the Zemene Mesafint many of Ethiopia’s clergy had, according to the chronicles, become ‘polygamists, sorcerers and drunkards’; by day they performed the rites, by night they visited women without husbands. Even worse, they had confused and divided the people with their arguments, squandering the comforts of orthodoxy for baffling schisms. As in the Mesafint of old, when the children of Israel forgot Jahweh and went a-whoring after Baal and all the false gods, so the priesthood had forgotten the one truth.

Foreigners were to blame, at least in part. The Portuguese in the sixteenth century had brought their own interpretation of Christ’s nature and convinced many Ethiopians to adopt it. These ones became known first as Kidat – ‘Unctionists’– then as Yesaga Lij – ‘Son by Grace’– and finally as Sost Lidet or ‘Three Births’, because they said that Christ was anointed in a ‘third birth’. To their detractors the Three-Birthers had therefore to admit the inadmissible: that there was a time when Christ was not fully divine. For traditionalists of the Alexandrian, non-Chalcedonian persuasion, that was a heretical slur on the pure divinity of Christ. These ones referred to the Three-Birthers as Karra Haymanot – Faith-in-the-Knife – because they had sliced the third birth from their teaching.

Tewodros was not interested. He wanted conformity. If the Church was to help in re-unifying the country, it must be unified itself. In 1854, in his first act of statesmanship, he called a council of clergy in Gondar. He was not yet emperor, but having defeated Dejazmach Wube, he now stood with an important ally at his side – Abune Selama.

The abun was the head of the Ethiopian Church, the only bishop in the entire country. The post was never held by an Ethiopian, but always an Egyptian, a Copt appointed by the Patriarchate in Alexandria. Often the incumbent was elderly, unable to speak Amharic, and ignored. In the 1820s, writing about Selama’s predecessor, Dejazmach Sebadagis complained to the Alexandrian patriarch: ‘Was it because you hate Ethiopia that you sent him?’ And as Egypt expanded south under Muhammad Ali, and spread the terror of invasion in Ethiopia, so suspicions of the Coptic abun grew.

Arriving in Ethiopia in 1841, the new Abune Selama was young and ambitious. He was appalled at the spread of Catholic missionaries in northern Ethiopia, and was keen to protect the traditional conformity with Alexandria. In the rise of Tewodros he found someone of like mind, and as vigorous and as determined as himself. At the meeting of clergy in 1854, he and Tewodros outlawed the Three-Birthers, demanding a choice between confession of the Alexandrian creed, or death. They also ordered the expulsion of Catholic missionaries. Shortly afterwards Abune Selama crowned Tewodros and sanctified in church his marriage to Tewabach. Their alliance found its most powerful expression in the invasion of Shoa some months later, when they arrived together at the head of an army.

The fertile alliance between the two men did not last. Abune Selama was too ambitious, too strong-willed, too much like Tewodros himself, for it to be an easy relationship. Antagonisms between them began to multiply. The clergy too began to grumble about the speed of Tewodros’s reforms. After the rains of 1856 he called another gathering of clergy in Gondar, to persuade them of the need to tax some of their vast wealth.

‘Our enemies are many,’ Tewodros told them. ‘It is only fair that some of this should go to feed those who protect us all.’

The clergy also needed to eat, he was told. And anyway, there were more of them than of his soldiers. ‘What you should do,’ said one priest, ‘is take your army from one province to the next, allowing each one to recover its reserves of grain.’

‘That’s how it’s always been, Your Majesty,’ explained another. ‘It’s the custom.’

Neither side conceded anything. In the end the priests fetched the Fetha Negest, the ‘Book of the Law of Kings’, and read: ‘That which is taken to the Holy of Holies should not be taken out.’ From which was understood, it was not in anyone’s power to relinquish Church land.

‘This book,’ fumed the emperor, ‘has been translated a thousand times and interpreted in a thousand ways! If you want to put another on the throne, do so. And like the Oromo rulers I will continue to plunder the beasts and the fields of the people!’

He turned and left, and the priests watched his guards close around his back.

As quick as Tewodros’s anger was his remorse. Later he called Abune Selama to him, and the two men agreed a compromise. The priesthood would accept Tewodros’s right to tax them, and Tewodros would agree not to exercise the right.

And the next day the priests led a joyful procession through the streets of Gondar. The city was filled with the sound of the kebbero and the debteras’ sistra and the songs of Moses. Tewodros had failed. The expansion of his rule had, for now, reached its limit at the gates of the church. He returned to campaigning.

10

Several months later, on 27 December 1856, the Coptic Patriarch Cyril IV – spiritual father of the Ethiopian Church – rode into Gondar. He had travelled for months from Alexandria. His men ran ahead of him, through the stony streets of the old capital, in and out of the juniper shadows, shooing all women from the slightest possibility of meeting his gaze.

The patriarch’s journey to Ethiopia was one of the most significant moments of Tewodros’s early reign. Cyril turned out to be the highest-ranking foreigner ever to reach the emperor, and his visit forced the imperial hand in his initial choice of overseas allies. It also revealed in public for the first time the extremes of Tewodros’s personality.

It began well enough. Tewodros received His Holiness in Debre Tabor with great ceremony and genuine deference. But as the days passed the emperor began to spot blemishes in the heavenly mantle of the primate. He heard Cyril’s muttering about his daughter Church, the inappropriate worship of the cross and of the saints, about how full the Ethiopian calendar was of fast days and holy days. For a man whose thoughts seldom strayed from matters of the spirit, the patriarch also appeared very keen to inspect the imperial forces. At the same time Tewodros received reports that Egyptian war-camels were gathering on his western border, and that Said Pasha himself, viceroy of Egypt, was in the Sudan. Suddenly all became clear to Tewodros – the patriarch’s visit was a ploy by the pasha to check Ethiopia’s weakness before invading. What should he do?

Tewodros imprisoned the patriarch. He locked him up in a house with his bishop Abune Selama and placed a hedge of thorns around it. During the days that followed, loyalties polarised sharply. Many Ethiopians were horrified at Tewodros’s sacrilege, and were quick to blame the other foreigners, the European Protestants. In turn, Tewodros turned to his ‘children’, Plowden and Bell, for support, and they saw a chance to press for a direct approach to Queen Victoria and Britain.

But the suggestion angered Tewodros. ‘Do you suppose me capable of fear, that I would use such a moment?’

‘I don’t believe the pasha would ever become the aggressor in the face of our protests,’ stressed Plowden.

Tewodros clung to his belief in the Protestants. With the Copts still imprisoned, he stood in court one day trying to explain his stance. Pointing to a pair of Protestant missionaries, he addressed the sceptics: ‘They seek our welfare, and have brought us Bibles and Testaments in our own language. But the holy father has come as a merchant and ambassador, asking us for wax and ivory and mules and zebal, and for friendship with the Mohammedans.’

He reminded them of the urgency and integrity of his own mission. ‘I am Christ’s servant. He gave me victory over all my enemies. I am labouring for His honour, to protect our Church against Muslims.’

They should trust him as their leader. ‘As long as I have life, I will keep down the patriarch, the abun and Said Pasha – even the Queen of England, should she help him.’

Yet between Tewodros’s suspicions and the detained churchmen, his people had made their choice. Both Tewodros and his Protestant friends found themselves marginalised.

Some days later, the emperor called a much larger assembly – courtiers, ministers, missionaries, foreigners. A thousand priests and debteras joined them, thousands more of his own troops. This time he stood before them not in defiance, but to confess: it was the devil who had made him abuse the churchmen in this way. He sent a message to the thorn-rounded house, pleading for reconciliation. When it was granted, he went to kneel before the patriarch and the abun and begged their forgiveness.

Before returning to Egypt, Cyril IV left a tiny seed to take root in Tewodros’s mind. Europeans, he said, were not to be trusted, their motives were selfish. Earlier he had urged Tewodros to expel the Protestants. Now he told the emperor quite plainly that the English merely wanted his friendship in order to ‘undermine his power and conquer his country’.

At the time Tewodros refused to believe it. But in years to come, as he tried to understand the ambiguous signals of British diplomacy, he often found cause to recall that patriarchal warning.

11

When Cyril left for the lowlands, Tewodros sent him off with personal gifts of ivory and, for Said Pasha, ‘three excellent and four average horses’, as well as some spears and a dagger. He also enclosed two letters in his saddlebags – one to the pasha, the other to Queen Victoria. It was his first foray into foreign relations.

Within eleven days the letter to Said Pasha passed from Amharic to Arabic. Its date changed from the Ethiopian 5 Hidar 1850 (13 November 1857 in the Gregorian calendar) to the Hejira 25 Rabi’ al-Awwal. The address was buffed up from the plain Amharic of Tewodros – ‘my friend Sa’id Pasha, the ruler of Egypt’– to the Arabic: ‘to His Highness, the most noble, the magnificent pleasure, and the true lover of God, Muhammad Sa’id Pasha, Protector of the Land of Egypt. May he continue to be preserved through the care of the Lord of Creation.’

The text itself reflected the turnaround in Tewodros’s attitude to Egypt. Glossing over his own furious imprisonment of Cyril, he wrote: ‘When I was told by my father the patriarch that you love me and want my friendship, I was very happy … May God increase our friendship.’

The letter to Queen Victoria was unembellished, and more neutral. He probably wouldn’t have sent it at all had Plowden not encouraged it. The consul was keen to preserve his own ambitions in the light of Tewodros’s new friendship with Cyril and Egypt:

May this letter sent by the King of Kings Tewodros of Ethiopia reach the queen of England, Biktorya. How are you? Are you well? I am well, thank God … I have received your envoy Buladin [Plowden] with love and friendship. It is because I have not found rest and [matters] have not settled down for me that I have not written until now. Now, you are the child of Christ and I am the child of Christ. For the love of Christ, I want friendship …

It was Plowden who was now isolated. He accompanied Tewodros’s letter to the queen with an explanatory one of his own. He stressed how finely balanced not only Tewodros’s interest in the British was, but also his entire rule. It was imperative to offer material support to Tewodros. Plowden was aware that only a year earlier the Egyptians had granted a licence to the French to build a canal at Suez. Now the French were trying to wrest Ethiopia from Tewodros: ‘The French and the Roman Catholic mission have already spent large sums to enable, if possible, his adversary Dejazmach Niguse to rival him and three cannon are now at Massawa for that purpose.’

To help save the Red Sea from French control, Plowden suggested to the Foreign Office that they send Tewodros a few hundred muskets and percussion caps – also a ‘handsome piece’ for the emperor’s own use.

In London Plowden’s long letter received a scribbled, single-word minute from Lord Clarendon: Approve. C.

The first reply to the two letters came from Egypt. An ambassador from Said Pasha arrived in Ethiopia with a long train of mules behind him, heavy with gifts for Tewodros – one hundred double-barrelled guns, numerous tents and silks and bolts of cloth – and four large cannon.

Meanwhile, from Lord Clarendon’s desk, Plowden’s plea for arms snailed its way to the War Office. A year passed. The War Office amended Plowden’s order, and a docket was filled out by a Mr Moore at the Tower:

Rifle with rammer and implements……………………………..1

Cone and screw-driver for Deane’s revolver………………..1

Case………………………………………………………………………………1

That was all. The War Office considered it ‘inappropriate’ to send arms to Tewodros at that moment. On 5 October 1859 – two years after the letters had left Ethiopia – Plowden at last received news of the request from his agent on the coast: ‘The rifle has been received, but no ammunition.’

Plowden’s position had become precarious. Four and a half years previously he had come up to the highlands on a brief visit to the new ruler. As British consul he was not only friendless now but surrounded by murmurs of hostility. The Ethiopians had reverted to their old suspicion of European Christians, and his way out of the country was blocked by the rebel Niguse. Walter Plowden was trapped.

12

After His Holiness Cyril IV left Gondar in 1857, Tewodros marched to Delanta. He defeated a rebel governor there, then crossed the Abbai into Gojjam, where a force had risen against him. He captured the wife of one of their leaders and stripped her naked before having her shot. The rebels themselves he released; some were later captured again, and this time had to be executed. In Gojjam he found a slave market and ordered all the slaves to be freed, and many of them married each other. Then he moved north and did battle with the Agew and captured their leaders. The governor of Wegera rebelled and Tewodros moved his forces west to fight him, but the governor escaped. Tewodros had his prisoners’ hands and feet cut off, and hanged them from an acacia in Gorgora. He then marched to Zur Amba, and to Gondar, then back to Wegera and down to Zur Amba again.

That year, the year of St Mark, turned out like the others. Tewodros drove his men back and forth through the high plains, putting down rebellions. ‘He is coming – he is coming!’ hissed all before him, but the rebellions flared up again as soon as he had left. In three years of rule, nothing he had done had yet become solid: not the defeat of the Oromo, nor the appointments he made from among his own people, nor the alliances with Abune Selama, the Egyptians, or the scheming Europeans. His kingdom was little more than the province where his army was camped, his palace his campaigning tent, his power the last battle he had won. Only his strange record of success bound his territory together, and hope – less the hope in his new reforms than in old notions of peace through power, unity of Church and crown and common cause beneath the tattered Solomonic banner.

Between Wollo and Begemder there stood a mountain. Its dark cliffs were like the sides of a great ship, its flat summits decks on which cattle grazed and crops grew. No man could approach that mountain without being seen; it could be defended with the tiniest force. It was called Meqdela. In time Tewodros saw it as the still point of his turbulent world: ‘Meqdela shall be the storehouse of my treasures; those who love me will come and settle there.’

Only Tewodros would have favoured such a location, surrounded by his enemies. ‘Believing I had power,’ he wrote years later, ‘I brought all the Christians to the land of the heathen.’

Meqdela became garrison, treasury, prison, stronghold and home. Over the years, everything that was most valuable to him ended up on Meqdela – his captured cannon, his precious stones, his looted manuscripts, his most important and belligerent prisoners. Biru Goshu was chained there, also the ‘rightful’ Solomonic ruler Yohannis the Fool, who was always treated with deference by Tewodros. HH Cyril IV and Abune Selama had attended the dedication of the mountain as a place for Tewodros’s treasures, at which there was ‘extraordinary rejoicing’. He erected a church dedicated to his favourite sacred figure – Medhane Alem, ‘saviour of the world’.

Up there too he had sent Tewabach, his beloved wife. He visited Meqdela when he could, and those around him noticed the calm that settled upon him when he was with her. She was one of his ‘guardian angels’, it was said (the other one being John Bell). She prepared his food, read the Bible with him, and though no heir had yet been given them, God would choose the moment in His own time.

That year, 1858, in the early days of keremt, the season of big rains, Tewodros rode up the mountain and was with Tewabach. She washed the dust of battle from his feet. He was still for a moment and went nowhere and sat reading the Psalms – Lord, how are they increased that trouble me! Many are they that have risen against me … Each day the clouds gathered over the peaks, and after the storm, the sun shone on the plains far below and its web of silvery streams.

While he was on Meqdela, Tewabach fell ill. With each day, the emperor’s anxiety grew. He ate only shurro, fasting food. He spent the nights in Medhane Alem church praying for her. He begged the small group of Protestant missionaries to apply their medicine to her. His army, so used to movement, began to plunder the villages around Meqdela, and Tewodros was forced to drag himself from his wife’s bedside and lead his troops southwards where they were able to attack the Oromo. There they could plunder all they liked.

On the evening of 13 Nehase, the day of Rob, in the year 7350 since the creation of the world, Itege Tewabach died. Tewodros was still with his forces. He returned at once and had her body put in a coffin, and the coffin put on a stretcher. From his fortress at Meqdela, Tewodros took her embalmed body from camp to camp. She lay in her own tent and Tewodros spent hours sitting alone with her. She was taken to another mountain, Amba Gishen, whose flat-topped summit faced the heavens in the shape of a cross. While her funeral was being arranged, Tewodros composed a lament:

I pray, ask her before she goes

If Itege Tewabach was wife and servant

She of such wisdom, such industry, died yesterday

She served me and treated me by ploughing the earth.

Many miles away, deep in Oromo country, was another mourner. Banished to his native province of Yejju, Ras Ali wrote a bitter verse for the double loss of his daughter. He had not seen her since Tewodros had robbed him of his power and driven him into exile:

When I said to her ‘I love mead!’ she brought me honey.

When I said to her ‘I am hungry!’ she brought me my chosen fruits.

When I said to her ‘I am cold!’ she sent me shammas.

Taken by my thief, she is now carried on a coffin;

I grieve not, as long ago she disowned me.

Some weeks before her burial a comet appeared in the heavens. Each night Tewodros went out and sat in the stillness of the mountain to watch the arc streak across the sky. On the fortieth night it was gone. He marched his forces to the Oromo region of Wollo and massacred many people. He captured thousands of animals, and meat became cheaper than cabbage. He appointed a new governor, a loyal man, and went south and killed all those Oromo he could find between Gimbia and Geneta. The children he distributed among his nobles.

In Shoa, someone whispered of the governor’s secret dealings with a rebel. Tewodros had the governor chained and another appointed. That one revealed his treachery before Tewodros left Shoa. He had him chained too. Then he heard that the new governor of Wollo had rebelled. He rode north again, tens of thousands behind him. He rode in silence.

13

Walter Plowden now cut a sorry figure. He had few supporters left in the highlands. He had nothing to offer Tewodros. London had lost interest in his mission. He was desperate to reach the coast, to return to Britain, but the road was still blocked by Niguse. Plowden never doubted that Tewodros would move against Niguse, take Massawa from the Turks and gain access to the sea. But in four years he had been oddly slow to do so.

He was with the emperor on another campaign in Oromo country. ‘Leave the Oromo,’ he urged. ‘Move on Niguse in the north.’

Tewodros resented the interference, but reassured the consul: ‘Nothing but my death shall prevent me from placing you at Massawa.’

It was the last time the two men ever saw each other. They had met in 1855 in a flurry of mutual hope – the newly-crowned Tewodros with his attendant military angel; Plowden and his epistolary link to the powerhouse of the British Foreign Office. Tewodros’s reforms had been stalled by his hydra-headed enemies. Plowden’s paper link had proved just that. In recent years they had grown apart.

In the 1840s, when Plowden had first stumbled into the Ethiopian highlands, the world was a bigger place. British interests were less compromised. Palmerston in 1847 had been able to share Plowden’s enthusiasm for an entire new territory, an ancient half-forgotten kingdom. Trade and thwarting the French added a little pragmatic purpose to Plowden’s carefree project.

By the time of Tewodros’s coronation in 1855, the Foreign Secretary Lord Clarendon remained thrilled by Plowden’s assessment of the emergence of Tewodros and the prospect of opening up relations: ‘Have read his very able report with great interest, and entirely approve his language and proceedings.’

But in the following years it had been impossible for Plowden even to leave the country. In the meantime the convergence of interests in the Red Sea – French, British, Egyptian and Ottoman – had made foreign policy a much more delicate exercise. Involvement in overseas territories was also seen as having a much greater price: the Indian Mutiny had revealed the strange truth that native peoples did not always appreciate the presence of the British. Ethiopia and Tewodros were an equation that didn’t work out; they were risk without profit.

To the Foreign Office, Consul Plowden slipped from view. There was no more talk of receiving an ambassador. By 1860 Lord Russell, Clarendon’s successor as Foreign Secretary, was fed up with this emperor and his endless struggles; all that mattered was the coast. Plowden was wasting his time in the highlands: ‘You will therefore return to Massawa, which is your proper residence, and you will not leave it, unless under very exceptional circumstances.’

But he could not even reach Massawa.

The only duty the Foreign Office now asked of Plowden was to tell Tewodros to stop his persecution of a group of Ethiopian Catholics. Very reluctantly, Plowden sent their letter on to Tewodros: ‘We would advise you earnestly to be like ourselves, that all people shall have religious liberty in your country.’

Not for the first time, Tewodros was baffled by the Europeans. What was his old friend Plowden doing, speaking up for his enemies? The French were supporting Niguse in the north, and Niguse had promised to convert to Rome when he had defeated Tewodros. Yet through Plowden, Tewodros was being asked to accept the Catholics. Was Plowden in league with the French?

Tewodros read the letter on campaign. He handed it to an aide. Six hours later he gave the order to break camp. He never replied.

Seventeen years had passed since Plowden first arrived in the country. ‘The love of change and of the wildest freedom first led me to Abyssinia and made me feel as imprisonment the least restraint.’ Now in Gondar, in and out of fever, lying on another alga in another season of highland rains, he recalled those early days – the excitement of Biru’s camp with just a thaler to his name, the week of ‘song and merrymaking’ after killing an elephant, then rushing to war; hunting hippo on the shores of Lake Tana, or the sunset scene, ‘so strange and novel’, of watching thousands of Oromo swimming the Blue Nile in its mile-deep gorge.

There was the time spent in a mini-fortress with the eighteen-stone Oromo chief Ahmed Huru – ‘the rain prevented us from going out, so we drank tej without ceasing’, and without eating, for six days, while Ahmed ‘eyed me askance in a most ludicrous way’. (He also made an offer to Plowden of his daughter ‘to be my lawful wife, and of a fat portion of his dominions’.)

Plowden had always had luck – leaving his residence in Monculu just hours before the arrival of an army that burned the village to the ground. He had won over the right people – Biru and Wube and Abune Selama and the dangerous Haile the Devil – ‘with my usual good fortune in Abyssinia, I made him my friend’. His friendship with Tewodros was, in its best moments, of great significance to them both. Once on parting for the battlefield the emperor had taken Plowden by the hand and said: ‘All men are mortal; if anything happens to me, befriend my son. Write to your country; say you had a friend who loved you all, and who intended to send an embassy to you for your friendship, and beg them to support my son.’ When Plowden agreed, Tewodros told him: ‘I love and trust you – goodbye!’

Plowden heard the echoes of English history in the country’s arcane customs and codes and its battle lore. He saw Ethiopia on the road of progress, behind Europe, but on the same road, in its own Middle Ages. He admired too the defiant strangeness, the beauty of the landscape, the sights that the people in it would suddenly produce, like gugs – ‘a fine animated game’ of feigned battle: ‘with their scarlet saddle-cloths and glittering benaicka flashing in the sun, and long sheepskins on their shoulders, the hair streaming as they gallop, they present a picturesque and wild appearance’.

From the time that he became consul and signed the treaty, something of Plowden’s initial joy was lost. Even the excitement of Tewodros’s early reign soured. Five years he had been stuck in the highlands. Now his luck seeped from him. In November 1859, playing a game of gugs himself, his horse rolled and he broke his leg. For two months he was ‘entirely incapacitated’. When he wrote again to Lord Russell, and apologised, it was to tell him that he had heard that the French had sent an embassy to Massawa – further backing for Niguse. For some time the rivalry between Niguse and Tewodros had reflected the growing rivalry for the Red Sea between Britain and France. Niguse had the advantage, having blocked Tewodros from the coast. Tewodros now appeared the loser.

In fact, he had already made his move. The very next day, Plowden received the news he had waited years for: from Shoa, Tewodros had suddenly marched his forces to Tigray. It was an astonishing feat. Only Tewodros could have achieved it. Six hundred miles through mountainous terrain in forty-odd days. With 60,000 men he had confronted Niguse. Niguse fled to the west. After five years, Tewodros had at last added Tigray to his realm. His territory now stretched from the Awash river in the south to the mountains above the Red Sea coast. It included Aksum, seat of the first Ethiopian empire. It revived for many the stalled hopes of Tewodros’s early years. Plowden was among them.

In Gondar, he hopped to his feet. He packed his belongings and prepared for the journey. He would see Tewodros in Tigray, then continue on to the coast. In Britain he could have his leg set properly and, with Tewodros’s new strategic advantage, present his case for the first time in person to the Foreign Office. Raised up onto a mule, he was escorted out of Gondar.

His small party was crossing the River Keha when a group of four hundred men attacked them. They were led by Gared, a nephew of Tewodros but a follower of Niguse. Plowden’s side was pierced by a spear. He died nine days later.

Later that year, Tewodros avenged the death of his old friend. He drew Gared into battle at Debarek. It was Yohannis, John Bell – in the uniform of the liqemekwas – who spotted Gared and shot him dead. But as he fired his pistol, Gared’s brother killed Bell, and was himself killed by Tewodros.

Tewodros knelt beside the body of John Bell. First Tewabach, then Plowden, and now Bell.

‘Yohannis! Poor Yohannis,’ he wept. ‘You saved my life, but at the expense of your own.’

Witnesses saw him sit there for some moments, overcome by grief. Suddenly he rose. He leapt onto the fallen figure of Bell’s killer, thrusting his spear again and again into the corpse’s head. ‘You wretch, you have taken from me my best friend, my only friend!’

Some months later, a visiting missionary showed the emperor a ‘stereoscopic image’. It showed a soldier weeping at the grave of friends fallen in recent fighting at Melegnano. When Tewodros saw the picture, he gazed at it a long time.

‘Let me also weep,’ he told the missionary, ‘for I have lost my best friends.’

III

Tewodros at the Gefat foundry, from a mural in the bar of the Hotel Tewodros, Debre Tabor

14

One of the first letters Tewodros sent after his coronation in 1855 was to Samuel Gobat, Anglican bishop of Jerusalem. Gobat had been a missionary in Ethiopia some twenty years earlier, but had been forced out by the country’s paralysing instability. Like others, he had watched the emergence of Tewodros and felt the chance had come again – not for him, but for a new generation of evangelical workers.

Tewodros, however, was asking him for artisans and craftsmen. He certainly did not want priests. ‘You know the situation of our country. It is where you lived. It has been divided, one against another, even into three. Now, by the power of God, I have unified it, so now let not priests who disrupt the faith come to me … of workers, let one who ploughs with a fire-wheel come, bringing the engine with him to me. I have heard people say that it exists.’

Eight months later, Samuel Gobat stood before the Anglican congregation on Mount Zion in Jerusalem. Seven fresh-faced, Swiss-trained missionaries gazed up at him.

‘Beloved brethren,’ he began, ‘the hour has come for which you have for some years been preparing yourselves, the hour for parting with the Christians in whose circle your spiritual life has been developed.’

The bishop was a solid and portly man. A great bib of a white beard hung down his chest. In his address, he drew on his own experience in the field years earlier.

‘Now, you will have to lean on the Lord in your weakness, in a land that is covered with darkness, and among a people who are still in the shadow of death. If you have ever felt and understood your infinite weakness and helplessness, as every one must into whose soul a ray from the Sun of Righteousness has penetrated, you must increasingly feel it in this solemn hour, as you see before you the difficulties of the journey and the deep degradation of the people to whom you are going …’

But with their own deviant version of Christianity, the Ethiopians were a people not entirely without redemption.

‘According to the ideas of the present king, who himself reads the Bible in his own language, and according to the practice of the Abune Selama, I do not think you will have any obstacle in spreading the Word of God. Judging by my own experience, I believe that many an Abyssinian will receive the Bible with thankfulness.’

He did warn them of the ambiguity that lay behind their mission.

‘Do not put to the king direct questions, so as to get decisive answers, as to whether you may settle in his country as messengers of salvation. The better plan will be not to bring the matter forward, nor seem anxious about it, but try first to persuade and convince the king through your behaviour, that you are true Christians who are led by the Spirit and the Word of God.’

Gobat believed that in Africa a great new world of evangelism was opening up. He and his committee planned an ‘Apostelstrasse’, a series of twelve stations between Egypt and Ethiopia which would help supply the Ethiopian mission, as well as radiating the Word of God from each station.

‘The field that lies desert before you, and must be worked and turned into a garden of God, is a wide, almost immeasurable field. It not only includes all Abyssinia, but the neighbouring heathenish Galla tribes, and the whole centre of Africa, of which Abyssinia is only the entrance. There the devil has his kingdom, and for thousands of years it has been allowed to go on quietly and undisturbed beneath his government.’

He concluded by reminding them that they were invited as artisans, and that their missionary activity should be covert.

‘You may feel it strange and disagreeable to hear that instead of preaching and baptising you are asked to work with your hands, and partly to earn your own living. The devil will whisper to you, and your own hearts will answer him loudly enough: “Work and earn our bread, live and die, we could have done in Germany, without the long preparation, and without going to wild Abyssinia.”’

Three of the men were so alarmed by Gobat’s portrait of wild Abyssinia that they pulled out. Among the others there were reservations. Only two out of the seven – Mayer and Kienzlen – set off for Ethiopia with anything approaching enthusiasm.

15

For a few years the mission ran smoothly. Tewodros was too busy campaigning to pay the missionaries much attention. But in 1858 he asked them to treat the dying Tewabach, and though they could do nothing, it marked the beginning of a closer relationship. As his own clergy revealed themselves to him as hidebound fools, so Tewodros took to spending time with the south German Pietists, and developed a respect for their brand of unadorned faith. They in turn overlooked his brutal sorties against the Oromo, and came to admire him.

‘He is,’ wrote Kienzlen, ‘the only man in Abyssinia who possesses the fear of God.’

In 1859, a new missionary arrived – Theophilus Waldmeier, a young Swiss of deep humility and an almost saintly gentleness. Tewodros always had favourites among the foreigners, and as the years passed Waldmeier came to fill the gap left by John Bell.

Theophilus Waldmeier had had a strict Catholic upbringing. As a boy he soon realised that ‘the priest is a bigger sinner than other people’. His grandmother beat him with a stick for saying so and he ran away from home. He rejected Catholicism and ended up at missionary school, at the famous St Chrischona College. There Samuel Gobat came and selected him for service in Ethiopia.

He travelled to Ethiopia with another recruit, Saalmuller. With them too was the German missionary Martin Flad and his new wife, Sister Paulina. As a concession to Tewodros’s secular ambitions, they were also accompanied by a man named Schroth and his son. They were gunsmiths. In the last days of 1858 the party set out across the Egyptian desert. A long line of camels stretched behind them – thirty-two, loaded ‘mostly with Amharic Bibles and Testaments’.

The journey itself was a great excitement for young Waldmeier. He was interested in seeing Egypt because it was the land of the pharaohs and the children of Israel had lived there in exile. The desert looked like ‘a past world burned by the wrath of God’, and desert travelling was hard, he warned in his own innocent way, because ‘water is scarce’.

It became harder, and hotter. The sperm-candles in their baggage oozed through the crates and onto the flanks of the camels. Everyone but Mrs Flad fell ill, and they camped for days slumped in the heat, in the shadow of mounds of Bibles. When Schroth and his son died, the others could barely drag themselves out to scrape at the sand to bury them. They all believed that they would soon go the same way. But the Lord spared them, and soon they found themselves climbing into the highlands, surrounded by wild roses and fresh water.

At that time, in 1859, John Bell was liqemekwas, and greeted them in the royal camp. He in turn presented them to Tewodros. Waldmeier thought the emperor very civil. With great charm he asked about their journey, and expressed regret that Schroth and his son had died on the road.

‘It is on account of my sins,’ Tewodros told the missionaries, ‘that God took these two men away from me.’

Tewodros sent them to Meqdela. It was for their own safety. Theophilus Waldmeier settled easily into his new mountaintop home. He shared a hut with five of the other missionaries, studied Amharic and taught some basic mechanical skills. There were long debates about the Bible with the royal scribe Debtera Zeneb, who in time came to see the true light of the Gospel.

Waldmeier was delighted by the country of his calling. After the rains, he wrote, the entire land turned into ‘a beautiful flower garden’. The people were ‘nice-looking’ and ‘clever in everything when taught’. Like Plowden before him, he dreamed of Ethiopia’s development, of its prospects if it could ‘only have good government, and its own old sea-port of Massowah’. He believed too in Tewodros’s good intentions. ‘Where is another king to be found, who in spite of his power and greatness in self-denial disdains all comforts, luxury and good living – he lives very poorly, while he rewards and gives royally – who in living trust in God’s help lays before his feet heathen and wild nations?’

In turn, Waldmeier came to the attention of Tewodros early on by repairing some of his great store of broken muskets.

By December, Waldmeier had even married into his family. Among the community on top of Meqdela was Tewodros’s cousin Wurqnesh, the wife of John Bell. Waldmeier married their eldest daughter, Sarah (Saalmuller later married her sister). For the wedding Tewodros sent Waldmeier an ornamental saddle embroidered with gold thread, a silk shirt of rank, eighty oxen and five hundred sheep. The feast continued for a whole week.

But Waldmeier felt Meqdela was too isolated for their evangelical work. He told his father-in-law, John Bell, that they needed to establish a mission. Tewodros gave them Gefat, a small hill a little to the north of his capital at Debre Tabor. Plowden had lived here for a while. It was a beautiful place. Accounts of the early days at Gefat, with the young families clearing brush to build lodgings and huts, opening a school for children of the poor, shine with a pioneer zeal.

In time Gefat became a great centre of technical skills. The missionaries built a water wheel. Tewodros sent hundreds of people there for instruction – ‘all the clever men of Abyssinia were brought thither by order of the king’. Tewodros himself paid visits more and more frequently. ‘I often sat for hours with the king,’ wrote Waldmeier, ‘engaged in religious conversation and speaking about the welfare of his country and its people.’

Then John Bell was killed and Tewodros’s world grew darker. The high-minded conversations became less frequent and the emperor made it clear what he wanted from the missionaries at Gefat. He wanted them to build guns, bigger and bigger guns.

16

Tewodros first tried to build artillery before he became emperor, during a campaign against Ras Ali. He hollowed out a log, coiled wire around the outside and filled it with stone shot. It wasn’t a great success. His victories enabled him to capture a few cannon. He received four more from Said Pasha, but other gifts of guns tended to be seized by the Turkish governor at Massawa. Lacking a coastline, Tewodros realised that if he was to have proper artillery, he would have to make it.

In 1861 a man named Monsieur Jaquin arrived in Ethiopia, and word spread that this Frenchman was something of an expert in metal casting. Tewodros sent him an order: Go to the community of Gefat, where Theophilus Waldmeier and the Protestant missionaries will assist you in casting a cannon. In turn he told the missionaries that they must provide Jaquin with all the materials he required. They must organise labour for him and support him in every way in the construction of ‘deadly weapons’.

‘We could make no objection to this,’ wrote the ever-forgiving Waldmeier.

Jaquin arrived and the missionaries recruited hundreds of workers. Some were despatched with mules to the iron mines. Others collected boulders of tufa to be broken and graded. Within days the walls of a blast furnace began to rise on the small knoll of Gefat. Ox-hides were sewn together to make bellows. Charcoal was burnt, and Jaquin inspected the work with some anxiety. The day came when he decided that it was complete, and a great crowd gathered to watch.

The furnace was lit. The bellows pumped. Blasts of air shot through the clay tuyère. The fire inside flickered, then whooshed into life. Nervously Jaquin stood watching. The fat leather lungs swelled … emptied … swelled … emptied … The temperature climbed higher. The ore inside took on a yellowish glow. Still the bellows worked. The heat rose still further, the ore glowed brighter – and then, very slowly, the outer walls of the furnace began to crumble.

‘The Frenchman,’ observed Waldmeier, ‘began to lament and weep; he went half-mad, cried wildly and finally asked the king’s permission to leave. After obtaining it he left the land.’

Some time later, Tewodros himself came to Gefat. He summoned the missionaries. He told them they must carry on with the work of Jaquin, and endeavour to forge a large gun.

‘Your Majesty,’ they said with all due tact, ‘we have neither knowledge nor experience in this matter, and are quite ignorant of it, and we are afraid to try what is above our strength.’

‘That does not matter,’ replied Tewodros. ‘If you are my friends, then try. If God allows it to succeed, it will be well; if not, it also will be well.’

They found that no argument could be made against that statement. Before leaving, Tewodros encouraged them by ordering their servants to be imprisoned. Waldmeier and the others came together to discuss the matter. Building guns to terrorise the people was not what Gobat had in mind when he sent them out. But they agreed that the work of the Gefat mission – the school, the informal teaching they dispensed to the hundreds of workers – was of great value. They must obey Tewodros. But how? They prayed for guidance. They debated. They prayed again. They tried to remember all that Jaquin had talked about. They made several attempts at rebuilding the blast furnace with stronger walls. All failed. They did not know what to do – and also all their servants were locked up. The missionaries agreed that they should go to the emperor and explain to him that they were willing to undertake any work for him, anything – building of roads and bridges, teaching – but not casting metal. It was too difficult.

Tewodros told them to make him a cart.

Mayer set to work. He produced a vehicle hauled by four mules, but the wheels were useless without roads. The farmers found it a great joke, because it had to be taken to pieces to go any distance. Waldmeier spent days fashioning a gunstock for Tewodros, and when he saw its beauty the emperor ordered the release of the missionaries’ servants.

But he was no closer to building cannon.

For some years there had been in Ethiopia a Pole named Moritz Hall, a deserter who had fled the tsarist strictures of the army of Nicholas I for the boundless south. By trade he was a caster of bells, and as the Protestants at Gefat struggled even to build the means for casting, Hall performed a small miracle in another part of Tewodros’s kingdom. He made a gun. It was strangely bell-shaped, but propped on its side it appeared heavy and robust and warlike.

‘When the king saw it,’ said Waldmeier, ‘he jumped with happiness and thanked God.’

For some time Tewodros felt the same joy every time he looked at the gun, but then, gradually, he became less satisfied. He sent for Hall and told him this one was too small. He wanted a larger one.

‘I alone am unable to undertake such a work,’ replied Hall, ‘but if the Europeans at Gefat help me I hope to be able to oblige Your Majesty.’

‘Waldmeier and all the Europeans shall be put at your disposal; consult together and work together in mutual love.’

With the emperor’s blessing Hall went to Gefat. When he told the Europeans what they must do, they all became nervous. Many times Tewodros’s messenger came to Gefat, and every time they had to tell him there was no progress. Never mind, the emperor told them. Begin again at the beginning, and do each thing with care.

Then another European, an Austrian named Baptist, arrived at the court of Tewodros. He had heard of the emperor’s longing for munitions, and said he had managed to make high-quality gunpowder from local components. He produced a small pouch of it and, time and again, when he ignited it the powder exploded in a most beautiful manner.

Tewodros was delighted. He gave the man honey and sheep, and butter and cash, and asked him to prepare a larger batch. But it soon became clear that Baptist was not what he appeared. The powder he had been demonstrating was English powder. He had brought it in from abroad, and now it was finished. When Tewodros again asked him to demonstrate, Baptist really did use local components, and it failed. Even when it was thrown in the fire, nothing happened. Baptist fled. Some time later, the missionaries heard that he’d been accused of murder in Mecca, and executed.

‘We made a final despairing attempt,’ wrote Waldmeier. ‘And behold, for the first time, we were successful.’

At Gefat, success was no closer for Hall and the missionaries. Whispers reached the ears of Tewodros: these Europeans are liars, they’re just deceivers like Baptist. The emperor was shamed in the eyes of his people, and in his shame the missionaries realised their own danger. They gathered together and prayed. One last time, they collected ore and prepared the furnace.

At once everything changed. The local people stopped laughing at them. They marvelled at the gun and congratulated them. ‘The king,’ wrote Waldmeier, ‘was pleased beyond all measure with our little piece of metal, kissed it and cried, “Now I am convinced that it is possible to make everything in Habesh. Now the art has been discovered. God has at last revealed Himself!”’

He arranged a great feast for the missionaries and asked, ‘What, save my crown and my kingdom, can I give you?’

‘Your Majesty,’ replied the missionaries piously, ‘we wish for nothing but to remain in constant possession of your love and friendship.’

Tewodros gave them a thousand thalers each, and for a while all sides were happy.

Then the emperor asked for a larger mortar.

Once again the missionaries were afraid. They retired to Gefat and prayed and prayed, and were successful. In response, Tewodros wrote one of the longest and most effusive of all his surviving letters:

My friends and my children! God, who can do everything, and does it, has not allowed us to be shamed in our work. Many people who hate us in this country as well as abroad, have derided and mocked us, but now they have been disgraced, since God is moved in all things by the prayers of those who believe in Him and he helps them in time of need.

You have opened the eyes of us Abyssinians, whom others have abused as blind donkeys.

(Tewodros himself, for one – ‘My country is like a paradise,’ he once told Waldmeier, ‘only I am sorry to say it is inhabited by donkeys.’)

Hard work and perseverance had rewarded the Protestant missionaries:

Since God said to Adam, ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,’ it would be a sin to lie down like a sluggard and not care about a country like this, which still lies in such disarray.

The letter was clearly written in one of the emperor’s more excitable moods – when his imagination raced across the centuries:

Napoleon Bonaparte, the emperor of the French, who defeated other kings with many guns and mortars, at last fell from his high position and died. Although he was a strong ruler, Nikolai, the emperor of the Russians, was defeated by the English, the French and the Turks, and died soon after, without being able to carry out the plans of his heart. Sennacherib of Assyria was proud of his power and relied on himself. In the pride of his heart he abandoned the Lord and died. The pharaoh of Egypt was proud of his power, hardened his heart against God, and perished in the Red Sea. But what more shall I say to thee? You yourselves are learned and well versed in the Bible. ‘Do not cut meat for a lion and do not teach a learned man.’

At the same time, Tewodros displayed a touchiness about his own parentage and ancestry – a theme which preyed on him more and more:

Finally, I have to note that people have slandered me, saying that I am not the rightful heir to the throne, but only the son of poor parents. It is possible to prove my ancestry and my right to the throne from Abraham to David and Solomon, from there to Fasil and Fasil to myself.

One day a few months later, the emperor came to Gefat and asked for a demonstration of the guns. The party assembled in front of Saalmuller’s house. A carpet was spread out for Tewodros and he tucked his legs under him and took his place. The others gathered to one side and behind him. The most recently-cast mortar was brought out. It was the largest the missionaries had built so far. It was charged and primed. Brother Bender, House Father of the mission, leaned down to fire it. For a moment there was silence. Then the mortar lurched back out of its carriage, and Bender had to leap aside to avoid it. Distant slopes repeated the shot in ever-decreasing reports. Tewodros was silent.

Several more shots were fired. All the while, Tewodros said nothing. The missionaries were apprehensive. His lips were pressed tight together, his brow pressed down over his eyes. He appeared to be in some sort of trance.

But as soon as the last shot had been fired, he put an arm around the shoulder of one of the missionaries’ children and began a lively conversation about military strategy, asking about the powers of Europe and their use of cannon. Once again he admired the new gun, telling them all what a fine job they had done and what a beautiful gun it was. But it was too small. Now, according to the will of God, they must build him a bigger one.

IV

Ethiopian shield, silver on buffalo skin, nineteenth century. (Reproduced courtesy of Gail Warden)

17

On 7 October 1862, two and a half years after Plowden’s death, Tewodros ordered his ministers to put on their silken lemds, their lion’s-mane cloaks, their finest shammas, and to gather in his salon tent. He himself settled on a silk-covered divan. He placed a double-barrelled gun beside him, and two loaded pistols. The boom of twelve cannon bounced back and forth from the surrounding slopes.

The tent flaps lifted, and the new British consul ducked through them. He was unwell. He asked to sit down. Tewodros sensed at once that here was a different sort of man to Bell and Plowden. Charles Duncan Cameron was a little older than them. For many years he had obeyed his orders as a soldier, then served as consul in the Black Sea port of Poti. For eighteen months, he had delayed his departure from London. Tewodros’s late British friends had loved Ethiopia and none other. For Cameron it was another posting, and an uncomfortable one at that.

Tewodros began by explaining exactly what had happened to his predecessors. He listed the details of Plowden’s luckless death, and how it had been avenged. He explained that after Bell was killed he had taken five hundred prisoners and had them decapitated in Debarek market. The heads made such a large pile, the chronicler said, that they could only be counted in rows. ‘This was done,’ explained Tewodros modestly, ‘in order to win the friendship of Her Majesty.’

A couple of days later Cameron had another interview. Tewodros’s principal concern was ‘the Turks’ (meaning both Ottomans and Egyptians). In recent years, his good relations with the Egyptians had broken down. Annexing Tigray had also brought him up against the Ottomans of the Red Sea coast. He wanted to attack, to push the Egyptians back from the lowlands of the west, to march on Massawa. Before doing so, he was keen to have the support of the Christian powers of Europe.

Ethiopia, stressed Tewodros, was being encroached upon on all sides by Muslims, and he would do all he could to see off their incursions. ‘If not,’ he said, ‘I will die preventing it!’

All this talk of war and defiance worried poor Cameron: it was ‘not the sort of temper I was sent to encourage’. He made the position clear to Tewodros: if you maintain peace, we can invite your envoys to London and ensure their safe passage. But if you fight, it will be impossible.

‘Skirmishes?’

‘No.’

Cameron returned to his tent. He had done his duty. Diplomacy must follow its proper course.

Over the coming days, he noticed that the food delivered to his tent became worse, and less frequent. When he tried to see Tewodros, it was not convenient. Those charged with looking after him became curt and careless. They began to ask how long he’d be staying. When the requests were made ‘hourly’, the consul grew impatient: ‘I will stay six months if that’s what it takes to finish the work I was sent by my government to do.’

Tewodros was furious. ‘Leave for the sea at once!’ he ordered the consul.

But Cameron knew that Her Majesty’s diplomats were not dismissed like that. He stayed, and his patience was rewarded. When he did leave camp, a month or so later, he carried a letter of friendship to Queen Victoria.

Tewodros did not only write to Great Britain. He told Cameron he wanted to inform ‘all Christendom’ before making any move against the Egyptians and Turks. He wrote to France, and also possibly to Holland, Germany, Austria and Russia. Only two of these letters survive – though the common ground between these two suggests that they would all have said broadly the same thing. To Queen Victoria: ‘The Turks [Egyptians] refused to leave my father’s land when I told them to. Therefore, by the power of God, I shall fight [them] now.’

To Napoleon III: ‘The Turks [Egyptians], however, resist the will of God, and since they refuse to surrender the land of my fathers, I am going out to fight with them.’

The basis of his appeal for friendship varied a little more. To Napoleon III, he wrote: ‘The splendour of your reputation as the emperor of the French and the prince of the Christians has reached us. I rejoiced and desired that, by the Grace of God, bonds of friendship would unite us, that you would look upon me as one of your relatives, and that you would love me.’

To Queen Victoria, he recalled that ‘Mr Plowden and Liqemekwas John used to tell me that there is a Christian king, a great man, who loves Christians, with whom they would acquaint me.’ (The confusion of Victoria’s gender lay more with the scribe than with Tewodros.) He also asked to send embassies. Plowden had always made it clear that, when peace permitted, the two countries could exchange envoys. Peace was still pending. ‘Since the Turks deny me passage by sea,’ he told Queen Victoria, ‘I have been unable to send my envoy with Consul Cameron.’

To Napoleon, he said: ‘I wish to send you ambassadors. Please, Your Majesty, let me know if you will indeed receive them.’

Tewodros had made his appeal. He now settled back to wait. The threats from the Egyptians increased, but, placing all his hopes in European support, he kept his forces in camp.

18

Ten months later, Tewodros was sitting in a small recess in one of Gondar’s ancient palaces. Around him was the scatter of vellum and parchment, the nap of leather-bound books. Behind him rose a tall, glassless window. Below was the palace compound and the walls, and beyond that the town and the tents of his army and in the distance, streaked by early sun, stretched the plains, green and fertile after the rainy season. It was early on the morning of 28 September 1863, and the wild celebrations of Mesqel, the Feast of the Finding of the True Cross, were over. The great pyres had all burnt down. The city dozed.

Tewodros did not doze. He had summoned the Europeans to a meeting. Out of the half-darkness of the palace interior came Consul Cameron in his blue diplomatic uniform. He had returned, as had Monsieur Bardel, the French envoy. A number of the missionaries were with them – Theophilus Waldmeier and Reverend Henry Stern, who had been trying to convert the Falashas, the Ethiopian Jews. They all arranged themselves at the emperor’s feet, on a semi-circle of rugs.

While waiting for a reply to his letters to European capitals, Tewodros had been attacked by the Egyptians. Musa Pasha had looted Metemma, burned Dunkur, marched on Wehni. Tewodros’s hold on the lowlands was destroyed, his native Qwara overrun. He had done nothing. During his visit, Cameron had convinced the emperor that European support was too great a prize to risk with an impulsive attack. Tewodros waited for a reply to the letters.

Yet by June not one response had come back. When Cameron returned to Ethiopia just before the rains, he was empty-handed.

‘Your Majesty,’ he promised, ‘I will give my head if after two months the answer to your letter is not here.’

Tewodros was already angry with Cameron. He had not taken Tewodros’s letter himself, but sent it to London by a messenger. He then went off to travel through the eastern Sudan, the very lands that the Egyptians had overrun.

A couple of months later, Tewodros received better news. A response had arrived from the French, and he had now called the Europeans to hear it read out. He turned to M. Bardel and asked him about his mission – Bardel, who at least had had the courtesy to go to Paris.

‘Your Majesty, I met with a most uncourteous reception at the court of France.’

‘Did they provide you with a house, food and all you required?’

‘No, Jan Hoi. I got neither a house to dwell in, nor food, nor money to supply my daily wants.’

‘What did the emperor tell you when you presented my letter?’

‘He dismissed me with the sarcastic sentence, “I will have no direct intercourse with a sovereign who cuts off the hands and feet of his subjects.”’

Several things were at once clear to the others listening. Bardel and Tewodros had rehearsed this exchange, Bardel was making it up – he had never had an audience with Napoleon III – and Tewodros was struggling to control an unholy rage.

He told Consul Cameron to read out the letter from the French. It was not even from Napoleon, but from the Minister of Foreign Affairs, M. Drouyn de Lhuys, dated 23 March 1863. Just as the British government had through Plowden, the French urged Tewodros’s protection of Catholic missionaries: ‘all those governments worthy of calling themselves civilised have adopted the principle of freedom of belief’.

Like the British too, the French found it necessary to lecture Tewodros on his war plans. ‘Before going to war against powerful neighbours, it is as well to take note of their forces, and to guard against losing any advantage already acquired in rushing into such a hazardous undertaking.’

Tewodros had placed great faith in the Christian powers of Europe. This is what came back. The more he saw of Europeans, the more disappointed he was. In their world there seemed no clarity of alliance – Christian and Muslim fought on the same side. Privately the French envoy said one thing to him, the British another; when he asked for their support in defending himself, they said the same thing: don’t. He had taken a personal dislike to the two envoys, Bardel and Cameron. ‘The Frenchman is a madman, the Englishman an ass,’ he was reported as saying. The individuals now sitting at his feet were not, in his eyes, of the calibre of loyal John Bell or Walter Plowden.

He snatched the paper from Cameron’s hand. ‘Is this an answer to my letter? Napoleon may think himself great, but I am greater still. His genealogy is only of yesterday, mine I trace back to David and Solomon!’

Each of those sitting before the emperor, watching his anger, realised that something had changed. They had come to Ethiopia for their own reasons – duty, vocation, adventure. Many now decided that the time had come to leave. Those who did not looked back to that morning in the old palace at Gondar and remembered the sight of the raging Tewodros, and realised it had been their last chance.

19

Just over ten years had passed since Tewodros rebelled against Ras Ali and began his dazzling march to the throne. He had defeated Ras Ali and his mother Menen and Wube and Goshu and Biru, all the giants of old. The Yejju dynasty was no more, the kingdoms of Wag and Lasta were under his rule, Shoa and Tigray too. With the support of Abune Selama he had rid the Church of hundreds of years of division. He had purged and conquered, and put in place reforms to elevate the ancient kingdom back to its rightful place in God’s order.

In 1859, Tewodros had admitted to Plowden that it was all taking a little longer than he’d hoped. ‘Providence,’ he explained, ‘wills that some delay should interpose between my coronation and my perfect success.’

Four years later, he saw things more darkly. ‘It is evident I have deceived myself. This is a stiff-necked people, and it is necessary to chastise them before they enjoy the blessings which Providence has intended for them.’

The missionary Henry Stern saw the change in Tewodros as sudden: ‘he boldly burst the barriers which had hitherto restrained his impetuous temper, and threw aside the garb of sanctity which had disguised his true character’. Likewise in 1863, the acting French vice-consul Guillaume Lejean watched

In truth, the emperor’s behaviour had been pretty extreme for several years. With Tewodros, there were always spells of good humour, acts of forgiveness, moments of generosity, gestures that surprised everyone around him with their humility and grace. Yet they were more infrequent, and interspersed with such savage rage that few trusted him any more. him rid himself of ‘the last scruple which had restrained him on the edge of a terrible brink’.

Many put it down to grief. The moderating counsel of Bell and Plowden had gone, though most pointed to his losing the intimacy of Tewabach, his ‘good genius’.

In 1860, Tewodros had married again. Tirunesh Wube was the daughter of his former rival Dejazmach Wube – meaning that the daughter of each of his great enemies had become his wife. When Tirunesh produced an heir, Alemayehu, five hundred prisoners were freed in celebration. But the marriage was not a happy one. Tirunesh resented her husband, the upstart conqueror of her father’s kingdom. Little is known of their time together, in part because there was not much of it. But a story tells of him walking into her tent, and her failing to rise. ‘Iam conversing with a greater king than you,’ she muttered, continuing to read from the Psalms. Tirunesh – and Abune Selama – were now the only two who dared stand up to Tewodros.

He sent Tirunesh and their son Alemayehu to Meqdela, and took his pick from the women of the camp. ‘Since the death of my good queen,’ he said, ‘I have been leading an un-Christian and disreputable life.’

If there was, as Stern and Lejean suggest, a moment that marked Tewodros’s decline, it was the first few months of 1863. On 10 February, the emperor rode out of Debre Tabor. He was heading for Gojjam, where Tedla Gwalu, scion of the old ruling family, had recently built up a formidable band of rebels. Tewodros riding at the head of his vast army was still an impressive sight. A traveller’s description of him at this time gives a sense of his striking presence:

‘The forehead is high, and tends to be prominent. His eye is black, full of fire, quick and piercing. His mouth is perfect, and the smile, which during the conversation continually played upon it, was exceedingly agreeable, I may say fascinating … His manner was peculiarly pleasant, and even polite, and his general expression, even when his features were at rest, was one of intelligence and benevolence.’

For several days, the army marched south. When they approached the Blue Nile, Tewodros stood in the fort by the old Portuguese bridge and watched his forces pass. Hour after hour they flowed down the rocky slope. With Tewodros was Lejean, who recorded the sight: ‘Cavalry, infantry, baggage and followers all descend, or rather roll, like a thick cloud of dust, amidst the glittering of thousands of lances.’ Lejean estimated that 40,000 crossed the small bridge. Tewodros, ‘that indefatigable marcher’, then bounded up the slope. Lejean struggled behind him.

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