The latest edition of British-based journal History Today (access to full article requires subscription) contains a survey of previous writings relating to Haile Selassie, late emperor of Abyssinia.
The article, entitled “Abyssinia Out of the Shadows,” is written by literary critic and biographer Jeffrey Meyers. In it, he compares and contrasts the books of three writers who addressed the career of Selassie from different perspectives: Waugh, who “satirised what he saw as a barbaric country and the splendiferous coronation of the Emperor” in Remote People and “returned six years later to report and praise the Italian invasion” in Waugh in Abyssinia; Wilfrid Thesinger, who spent his childhood in Addis Ababa and later wrote in his autobiography (The Life of My Choice) how Selassie “helped drive out the Italian oppressors…and remained fiercely loyal to Selassie”; and Ryszard Kapuscinski who described the revolution that overthrew Selassie in 1974 in his book The Emperor.
