The British magazine History Today has posted on the internet the full text of its 2015 feature-length article, now entitled “In The Court of Haile Selassie.” This is by literary biographer and critic Jeffrey Meyers and tells the story of the Abyssinian emperor as reflected in the works of three authors. An abbreviated version under a different title was mentioned briefly in a previous post upon first publication. Here is the opening paragraph:
Christian and never colonised, remote and mysterious Abyssinia has only occasionally impinged on the western consciousness during its centuries of isolation. Evelyn Waugh visited it in 1930 and satirised what he saw as a barbaric country and the splendiferous coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie, who was to reign for 44 years, in Remote People (1931). He returned six years later to report and praise the Italian invasion in Waugh in Abyssinia (1936). Wilfred Thesiger, the son of a diplomat, was born in the mud buildings of the British legation in Addis Ababa, spent his childhood in Abyssinia and later explored unknown parts of the East African country. Serving in Orde Wingate’s Gideon Force during the Second World War, he helped drive out the Italian oppressors. He admired the traditional way of life and remained fiercely loyal to Selassie in his autobiography, The Life of My Choice (1987). The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski described the revolution of 1974 that overthrew Selassie in The Emperor (1978). In the books of these three writers Selassie appears in various guises: an exotic potentate, a victim of war and rebellion and an evil oriental despot…
Meyers then proceeds to describe in some detail how each of these writers manages to describe the life and career of same historic figure quite differently, starting from the same historic materials. I can’t speak for his discussion of the works of Thesiger and Kapucinski but his description of Waugh’s contribution is both accurate and eminently readable. My only quibble would be his assertion that Waugh had “punned in the title of Waugh in Abyssinia.” That title was selected not by Waugh but (as I recall) by the publisher of the book Tom Burns. In fact, Waugh was on record preferring to call the book The Disappointing War, which was the title under which excerpts were published in the English Review. Patey, p. 141.
The article concludes with this summary of the three different descriptions of Selassie:
…All three authors wrote superbly but distorted the truth to justify their own points of view. Waugh vividly portrayed the plight of the country but he praised the barbaric Italian invasion of 1935, which he believed would civilise and improve Abyssinia. Thesiger admired almost everything that Waugh disliked: locked in his own reactionary views, he knew more but understood less than Waugh. He hated and fought against the Italians who had destroyed an ancient culture that he felt should have been allowed to survive without western interference. Dazzled by the primitive pageantry he held to the idea, not the reality, of Selassie and was blindly loyal to the colourful Abyssinians. He longed for the pristine past; loved the wild Danakil, Masai, Samburu, Bedouin and Marsh Arabs and saw Abyssinia as a kind of private theatre for his delight. He wanted the spectacle to last forever and did not really care what happened to the mass of suffering people. Conditions that were funny to Waugh were tragic to the left-wing Kapuscinski. But when he arrived in Abyssinia 40 years after Waugh and political and social conditions had not improved, he agreed with the right-wing Waugh rather than with the retrograde Thesiger and supported the disastrous revolution in 1974.
The article is now available in full at this link.
