The Barefoot Emperor: An Ethiopian Tragedy. Philip Marsden
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and were unable to move perished from cold. Ras Ali fled the battlefield. He never recovered his power. The Zemene Mesafint was over.
Kasa still had some regional problems to sort out. A lightning march on Tigray wrong-footed its ruler and secured for Kasa the transfer to his camp of Abune Selama, the most senior cleric in the country. Kasa moved south, against Biru Goshu in Gojjam. For years Biru’s men had resisted Ras Ali’s vast army. But now the enemy was not led by the Oromo. Biru’s men refused to fight the invincible Kasa, with the figure of the abun behind him. Biru was captured without a shot being fired. He was dragged in before Kasa, a penitential stone pressing down on his shoulders.
‘If it had been me before you,’ asked Kasa, ‘what would you have done?’
‘Executed you,’ he murmured.
Kasa’s men wanted his blood, but he spared Biru. The rebel chief remained in chains for the next fourteen years. In the meantime Dejazmach Wube, said to be the wiliest man in the whole of Ethiopia, still ruled in the north. His regime had begun even before that of Ras Ali. Kasa sent a messenger to Wube, demanding tribute. ‘Who are you,’ responded Wube, ‘that I should pay you tribute?’
‘You shall see, great Goliath.’
In January 1855, Kasa marched north. He moved rapidly into the Simien mountains. Day after day, without rest, he drove his troops until they reached the great basin at Deresgie. High brown peaks ringed the skyline. A city of white tents was massed below them. Kasa turned to Yohannis, his liqemekwas, his chamberlain, and asked him to look at the tents through his glass.
Yohannis was the Englishman John Bell. With the defeat of Ras Ali, Bell had neatly swapped his allegiance and joined Kasa. Bell pressed the telescope to his eye and told Kasa – Yes, those are the tents of Wube.
Kasa’s men were exhausted. They were daunted by the prospect of battle against the great Wube. When Kasa ordered the advance they did not move. He rode out in front of them. ‘After all our victories, does this old man frighten you?’
The men did not budge.
‘Do his guns, charged with rags, chill your souls?’
Nothing.
Kasa made one final plea to them. ‘I will give you my name!’
Now one or two cheers rose from the ranks. Soon they spread and became a chorus, a battle cry. No highlander was immune to word-play, and Kasa had given them a pun. ‘My name’ in Amharic is ‘simien’– the name also of the native province of Wube.
The battle was not easy. It continued all day. Only when a group of Kasa’s men stumbled on a resting Wube and captured him was it decided. Kasa now controlled all of Tigray too – and from Wube’s treasury, safe on a high amba, he collected a great hoard of gold and silver. He handed out the money to his nobles, officers and soldiers according to rank. Such was the quantity that he continued to do so for months afterwards. The rifles he found were so numerous they were hard for his men to carry. There were also two cannon.
Two days later, in the presence of both Abune Selama and the ichege, the country’s chief monk, Kasa was crowned.
Dejazmach Kasa did not yet take at this stage the title King of Kings, or claim to be the heir of Solomon. He did better than that.
‘I will give you simien,’ he had promised his troops days earlier. ‘I will give you my name.’ He promised an end to generations of oppression, to centuries of waiting – Kasa became Tewodros.
‘At my birth,’ he wrote, with echoes of King David, ‘God picked me up from the dust, gave me strength, raised me up and by Divine power, I chased away the Galla.’
Tewodros’s success lay not just in an astonishing series of military victories. He had something of that curious mystique that gathers round certain men, the impression that just a little of God’s energy flows directly through them. Although it failed to convince many of the old nobility, Tewodros’s charisma was more effective than any number of big guns, and remained with him throughout all the heady years of his reign, surviving his caprices, his violence, his self-destructive manias, the eventual depletion of his forces, and even his death.
II
Jidda gorge
7
Down in the heat of the Jidda gorge, Walter Plowden waded across the thigh-deep river and began to climb. High above him, some 4,000 feet, were the cliffs of the Delanta plateau. Up there was Tewodros’s camp, with his 50,000 soldiers and 100,000 followers. As the slope steepened, so the paths filled. The British consul passed scouts and sutlers, fell into step with water-carriers, wood-carriers, mules laden with grain, shepherds and stockmen driving their beasts to feed the emperor’s troops. Once he reached the plateau a group of mounted generals came out to escort him in to camp. Flautists played beside them. Drummers beat their goatskin tympana. As the party approached the open ground at the heart of the camp, with its reception tent, a volley of muskets was fired.
Inside, the consul blinked in the sudden darkness. As his eyes adjusted, he saw the emperor for the first time.
Tewodros was sitting on a divan, dressed in gold-threaded robes. The imperial crown lay on a cushion beside him, hung with pendants of silver filigree. The sword of state was held above him. Abune Selama and the ichege sat on high chairs on either side. Standing in attendance were dozens of officers. Plowden lowered himself to the carpet.
The earlier portraits he gives of other nobles – Wube and Biru and Merso, even Ras Ali – make them all larger than life. But none was painted with the same fascination as that of Tewodros. Plowden was at once struck by his physique – his fitness, his poise and his youth. His face was powerful and handsome, with thin lips and hair running back down to his shoulders.
Plowden stayed two weeks in the Delanta camp, and afterwards wrote an extensive report for his impatient masters at the Foreign Office. It remains one of the most detailed portraits of Tewodros at any stage, but certainly in this moment, in the first months after his coronation, flushed with his own success.
Tewodros, wrote Plowden, ‘is young in years, vigorous in all manly exercises, of a striking countenance peculiarly polite and engaging when pleased, and mostly displaying great tact and delicacy’. Like most observers, Plowden noted his energy. ‘Indefatigable in business, he takes little repose night or day; his ideas are clear and precise; hesitation is not known to him.’
Plowden’s reception showed the value Tewodros placed on ceremony and form. Yet his personal instincts were towards simplicity and equality. ‘He salutes his meanest subjects with courtesy,’ the consul wrote, ‘he is generous to excess and free from all cupidity.’
Tewodros’s plans were common currency in the camp, and Plowden stressed to London how important he could become in the politics of the Red Sea. ‘Next year he will devote to the settlement of Tigray, including the tribes along the coast, and meditates upon the occupation of Massawa.’ He would reclaim Ethiopia’s northern and western borders, the territory annexed by Egypt. ‘Nor does his military ardour hesitate to dream of the conquest of Egypt, and a triumphant march to the Holy Sepulchre.’ In this, as in all his actions, the emperor believed he was merely fulfilling the course of divine will: ‘His faith is signal.’
Plowden’s assessment of Tewodros was not blind to his faults. ‘The worst points in his character are, his violent anger at times, his unyielding pride as regards his kingly and divine right, and his fanatical religious zeal.’ It was, wrote Plowden, ‘impossible for him yet to believe that so great a monarch as himself exists in the world’.
Plowden proposed again the establishment of official relations between the two countries. He offered Tewodros the chance to send an embassy to London, in return for recognition of himself as consul. The treaty signed by Ras Ali contained in it clauses for his successor. So now Tewodros too could claim its benefits: There