The Barefoot Emperor: An Ethiopian Tragedy. Philip Marsden
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.
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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.
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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