An excerpt from Waugh’s 1931 travel book Remote People has been included in a recent collection of writings about Ethiopia. The book, recently reviewed in the TLS, Ā is edited by Yves-Marie Stranger and is entitled Ethiopia: through writers’ eyes. The Waugh excerpt is entitled “Waugh on Rimbaud” and appears in Chapter 5 of the collection: “Goodbye Abyssinia, Hello Ethiopia (1930-2015).” The material probably relates to Waugh’s side trip to the remote outpost of Harar where the poet Arthur Rimbaud had lived in the 1880s, pursuing various trading ventures, including gunrunning. Waugh did manage to find an aged Roman Catholic cleric in Harar who recalled Rimbaud. There is also a selection in the book from Rimbaud’s works entitled “A Sunken Boat,” perhapsĀ an allusion to his poem “The Drunken Boat.”Ā
Waugh is very good on Ethiopia – and also very funny.
Except for his wilfully mistaken take on Mussolini’s attempts at empire building in Africa (he strays into philo-fascism when portraying the Italians in Abyssinia) Waugh acquired an understanding of Ethiopia few writers on the country were ever capable of at the time – or since.