The Barefoot Emperor: An Ethiopian Tragedy. Philip Marsden
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and the abun and begged their forgiveness.
Before returning to Egypt, Cyril IV left a tiny seed to take root in Tewodros’s mind. Europeans, he said, were not to be trusted, their motives were selfish. Earlier he had urged Tewodros to expel the Protestants. Now he told the emperor quite plainly that the English merely wanted his friendship in order to ‘undermine his power and conquer his country’.
At the time Tewodros refused to believe it. But in years to come, as he tried to understand the ambiguous signals of British diplomacy, he often found cause to recall that patriarchal warning.
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When Cyril left for the lowlands, Tewodros sent him off with personal gifts of ivory and, for Said Pasha, ‘three excellent and four average horses’, as well as some spears and a dagger. He also enclosed two letters in his saddlebags – one to the pasha, the other to Queen Victoria. It was his first foray into foreign relations.
Within eleven days the letter to Said Pasha passed from Amharic to Arabic. Its date changed from the Ethiopian 5 Hidar 1850 (13 November 1857 in the Gregorian calendar) to the Hejira 25 Rabi’ al-Awwal. The address was buffed up from the plain Amharic of Tewodros – ‘my friend Sa’id Pasha, the ruler of Egypt’– to the Arabic: ‘to His Highness, the most noble, the magnificent pleasure, and the true lover of God, Muhammad Sa’id Pasha, Protector of the Land of Egypt. May he continue to be preserved through the care of the Lord of Creation.’
The text itself reflected the turnaround in Tewodros’s attitude to Egypt. Glossing over his own furious imprisonment of Cyril, he wrote: ‘When I was told by my father the patriarch that you love me and want my friendship, I was very happy … May God increase our friendship.’
The letter to Queen Victoria was unembellished, and more neutral. He probably wouldn’t have sent it at all had Plowden not encouraged it. The consul was keen to preserve his own ambitions in the light of Tewodros’s new friendship with Cyril and Egypt:
May this letter sent by the King of Kings Tewodros of Ethiopia reach the queen of England, Biktorya. How are you? Are you well? I am well, thank God … I have received your envoy Buladin [Plowden] with love and friendship. It is because I have not found rest and [matters] have not settled down for me that I have not written until now. Now, you are the child of Christ and I am the child of Christ. For the love of Christ, I want friendship …
It was Plowden who was now isolated. He accompanied Tewodros’s letter to the queen with an explanatory one of his own. He stressed how finely balanced not only Tewodros’s interest in the British was, but also his entire rule. It was imperative to offer material support to Tewodros. Plowden was aware that only a year earlier the Egyptians had granted a licence to the French to build a canal at Suez. Now the French were trying to wrest Ethiopia from Tewodros: ‘The French and the Roman Catholic mission have already spent large sums to enable, if possible, his adversary Dejazmach Niguse to rival him and three cannon are now at Massawa for that purpose.’
To help save the Red Sea from French control, Plowden suggested to the Foreign Office that they send Tewodros a few hundred muskets and percussion caps – also a ‘handsome piece’ for the emperor’s own use.
In London Plowden’s long letter received a scribbled, single-word minute from Lord Clarendon: Approve. C.
The first reply to the two letters came from Egypt. An ambassador from Said Pasha arrived in Ethiopia with a long train of mules behind him, heavy with gifts for Tewodros – one hundred double-barrelled guns, numerous tents and silks and bolts of cloth – and four large cannon.
Meanwhile, from Lord Clarendon’s desk, Plowden’s plea for arms snailed its way to the War Office. A year passed. The War Office amended Plowden’s order, and a docket was filled out by a Mr Moore at the Tower:
Rifle with rammer and implements……………………………..1
Cone and screw-driver for Deane’s revolver………………..1
Case………………………………………………………………………………1
That was all. The War Office considered it ‘inappropriate’ to send arms to Tewodros at that moment. On 5 October 1859 – two years after the letters had left Ethiopia – Plowden at last received news of the request from his agent on the coast: ‘The rifle has been received, but no ammunition.’
Plowden’s position had become precarious. Four and a half years previously he had come up to the highlands on a brief visit to the new ruler. As British consul he was not only friendless now but surrounded by murmurs of hostility. The Ethiopians had reverted to their old suspicion of European Christians, and his way out of the country was blocked by the rebel Niguse. Walter Plowden was trapped.
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After His Holiness Cyril IV left Gondar in 1857, Tewodros marched to Delanta. He defeated a rebel governor there, then crossed the Abbai into Gojjam, where a force had risen against him. He captured the wife of one of their leaders and stripped her naked before having her shot. The rebels themselves he released; some were later captured again, and this time had to be executed. In Gojjam he found a slave market and ordered all the slaves to be freed, and many of them married each other. Then he moved north and did battle with the Agew and captured their leaders. The governor of Wegera rebelled and Tewodros moved his forces west to fight him, but the governor escaped. Tewodros had his prisoners’ hands and feet cut off, and hanged them from an acacia in Gorgora. He then marched to Zur Amba, and to Gondar, then back to Wegera and down to Zur Amba again.
That year, the year of St Mark, turned out like the others. Tewodros drove his men back and forth through the high plains, putting down rebellions. ‘He is coming – he is coming!’ hissed all before him, but the rebellions flared up again as soon as he had left. In three years of rule, nothing he had done had yet become solid: not the defeat of the Oromo, nor the appointments he made from among his own people, nor the alliances with Abune Selama, the Egyptians, or the scheming Europeans. His kingdom was little more than the province where his army was camped, his palace his campaigning tent, his power the last battle he had won. Only his strange record of success bound his territory together, and hope – less the hope in his new reforms than in old notions of peace through power, unity of Church and crown and common cause beneath the tattered Solomonic banner.
Between Wollo and Begemder there stood a mountain. Its dark cliffs were like the sides of a great ship, its flat summits decks on which cattle grazed and crops grew. No man could approach that mountain without being seen; it could be defended with the tiniest force. It was called Meqdela. In time Tewodros saw it as the still point of his turbulent world: ‘Meqdela shall be the storehouse of my treasures; those who love me will come and settle there.’
Only Tewodros would have favoured such a location, surrounded by his enemies. ‘Believing I had power,’ he wrote years later, ‘I brought all the Christians to the land of the heathen.’
Meqdela became garrison, treasury, prison, stronghold and home. Over the years, everything that was most valuable to him ended up on Meqdela – his captured cannon, his precious stones, his looted manuscripts, his most important and belligerent prisoners. Biru Goshu was chained there, also the ‘rightful’ Solomonic ruler Yohannis the Fool, who was always treated with deference by Tewodros. HH Cyril IV and Abune Selama had attended the dedication of the mountain as a place for Tewodros’s treasures, at which there was ‘extraordinary rejoicing’. He erected a church dedicated to his favourite sacred figure – Medhane Alem, ‘saviour of the world’.
Up there too he had sent Tewabach, his beloved wife. He visited Meqdela when he could, and those around him noticed the calm that settled upon him when he was with her. She was one of his ‘guardian angels’, it was said (the other one being John Bell). She prepared his food, read the Bible with him, and though no heir had yet been given them, God would choose the moment in His own time.
That year, 1858, in the early days of keremt, the season of big rains, Tewodros rode up the mountain and was with Tewabach. She washed the dust of battle from his