cesil\solinas2\1solinas

.................................................Stenio Solinas

The next day of the coup d'etat that costs the throne to Hailé Selassié, emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974, Ryszard Kapuscinski, a Polish reporter, went to Addis Abeba trying to reconstruct, through the reports and the testimonies of the palace men, what have had been the absolute monarchy, what brought about its fall and how it occurred.
It was not an easy task: the capital was at that time under a total anarchy, every one suspected every one, and everybody felt oneself he must submit one's neighbour to arrests and persecutions.
Meeting

the imperial entourage representative, fallen into disfavour was neither easy nor riskless.
Thanks to Teferra Gebrewold, department chief of the Information Ministry who he had met 10 years before, when Ethiopia have sheltered an African independents countries meeting, Kapuscinski reached his purpose.
From these night appointments and the astonished, sorrowful and dramatic reports, some times unintentionally comical, he got a book, The Emperor, which, when it was published 15 years ago, was included by the weekly American Newsweek "among the first 10 books of the year".

"The Emperor" is the history of Ethiopia, a country Italy was related to because, in the Thirties, got in its way annexing it as a colony and also in its absolute sovereign's for nearly forty years.
It is the report about what a monarchy by divine origin is, the extent of servility and adulation; it is the tale of the mysteries of the Africa native and the people who lives there.

Hailé Selassié embodies at the maximum extent the contradictions of an ancient tradition country, which entered, the next day of the Second World War, to modernity and progress.
He was the last specimen of a by then disappeared world, swept away by the de-colonisation, who succeed in keeping in power for more than a quarter century practically by keeping all nation into an entanglement of secrets, informers, deceits and fear.
He was not, in the average of other dictators or absolute sovereigns, particularly cruel and that lengthens his power.
What he succeeded in was the total block of any activity of the country, any growing, any attempt to better standard of life.
To achieve that, he prevent the government elite from governing: he laid down and removed all ministries and responsible of provinces or districts who attempted to act on his own, maybe according to common sense, without in other words longing for personal power.
He did not surround himself by capable men; he always selected and preferred loyal men, replicas of his will.
Such a way of government, Kapuscinski observes, gave a dual image of Hailé Selassié:
"The first one, the public opinion used to know, shows the emperor as a kind of monarch somewhat exotic, but valid, gifted with an indefatigable energy, a first degree mind, a not common sensibility, a man who opposed Mussolini, reconquering Ethiopia and the throne and who aimed at the development of his country and play an important role in the world.

The other one, gradually elaborated by a critical on the beginning little sector of the internal public opinion, look at the sovereign as a man resolute to defend his power by any mean, and overall a real demagogue, a paternalist, who by the means of words and signals hid corruption and servility of a dull-minded leading class which he created and blandished.
As often occurs both images contain part of truth. "Hailé Selassié, Ryszard Kapuscinski goes on writing, governed a country who knew the most cruel power fighting methods, where poisons and swords replaced free elections, executions and hangings free discussions.
It was the continuous of the tradition he himself appealed to.
At the same time he felt that there were something impossible in all this, that could be not be assimilated by the new world, but certainly he couldn't mine the system which were keeping him in power, power preceded anything for him.
Here, the use of demagogy, ceremonial, the speeches about development... so desolately meaningless in this country featured by an overwhelming poverty and ignorance.

The Kapuscinski's book conquers the reader not only for the touch of extravagancy, of estrange to occidental thinking that it shows by narrating silly as much as unbelievable ceremonials: a courtier attached to clean the urine that the emperor's dog have piddled on dignitaries's shoes; the one attached to be the emperor's clock; the one attached to open the door, and woe! opening too soon, it would have been like to quicken the Imperial Majesty, or too late, because it would compel him to slacken his pace.
Its main merit is the description and the comprehension of a monarchy whose politics wasn't other than a slow diarrhoea which emptied all things and people, until delivering itself into the hands of whom will decree its end.

There is neither a brief and violent coup d'etat, nor an attack to the Winter Palace; there is a group of plotters, the military committee of the Derg, which has been isolating him for more than six months simulating acting in his name, but having never been really contradicted by the sovereign, a sort of desperate hide-and-seek play, a sort of sage and desperate surrender strategy. When on September 12, 1974 Hailé Selassié has been at last put down, he is an 81 years old man about whom everything has been revealed to the Ethiopian people in the last months: his thefts, those of the leading class, the corruption of the power apparatus.
Notwithstanding, it has been saved to him the shame of the arrest and criminal trial and life. He will die next year of a cardiocirculatory collapse.
Unfortunately post-Negus has not been good for this unlucky country.
From an autocratic dictatorship the Ethiopians have passed to a communist dictatorship, under Menghistu, that lasted 16 years and that has dipped Ethiopia into racial desegregation.

What a pity, if one think about that, according to an ancient tradition, Ethiopia was the Earthly Paradise where Adam and Eve were sheltered.
It's enough to go, departing from south Addis Abeba, toward the Rift Valley, the immense split of the crust of the earth that cuts across the Ethiopian tableland and divides it in two parts, to meet a landscape that takes one's breath away: lakes where flamingos, marabous, wild ducks, hippopotamus, crocodiles live.
To the north, here the way to the Tana Lake, where the Blue Niles rises, a real internal sea where 37 isles emerge and you can find there twenty churches and monasteries.
What about Harrar, the town at the top of a hill, surrounded by high walls cut by 5 gates and 25 towers?
Or about Lialeba and its 11 monolithic churches dug in the rock, so beautiful and inaccessible and whose building local legends ascribe to divine creatures?
And more, the Taakha Meryem, in Axum, the ancient capital, with its monolithic decorated funeral stele, dated back to IV century and the artificial basin dug in the rock, better known as the Queen Saba's bath; Gonder, with its imperial circuit of Fasilidas's palaces of 1600 and Yassou the Great's of 1700; the ruins of Cohaito, with its tombs and its frescoes, those of Matara, the national park of Awash....

Also food is very interesting; the dorowat, a chicken based piquant stew, with onions, tomatoes and berberé (the typical Ethiopian spiceto be spread on the ingera, the plane bread, obtained by fermenting the teff, a local cereal; the dorodabbo, that is a variant of this dish, used on feast days where the bread dough is mixed with chicken, boned meat and spices and then baked; the aliccia, a stewed meat with a mix of vegetables, flavoured with saffron; the sciròa a chick-pea purée.
A poor food, certainly, peculiar of a poor earth, injured in this century as many others of the continent.
Modernity doesn't know pity.

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