In Ethiopia with a Mule (19 page)

T
HIS RESPECTABLE ITALIAN-BUILT hotel is good value at twelve-
and-sixpence
a night. Now owned by a rich Gondare, it is a meeting-place for neatly-dressed students and civil servants who gamble with dice or cards, play billiards, or talk by the hour while drinking bottled beer. None of the
good-humoured
, slow-witted staff speaks English, but they all try – rather
unsuccessfully
– to be helpful. My room is about the size of the average
tukul
and has running cold – and sometimes hot – water, a large window that opens wide, a disconcertingly soft bed with fresh linen, a bed-side lamp, table, chair, chest of drawers and wardrobe. It was spotless until the arrival of my lamentable sacks, from which showers of fleas at once sprayed on to the floor and bed in search of pastures new.

After a large breakfast of coffee, rolls and Israeli jam I set out to do a ‘
preliminary
survey’ of Gondar. The Italians had planned to make this city the capital of their African Empire and many large, featureless buildings remain as monuments to Mussolini’s ambitions. The Post Office, bank, Army
Headquarters
, Police Headquarters, government offices, provincial court-house, spacious private houses, shops, hospital and cinema are all the sweets of occupation; without these Gondar would only have the ruins of its Royal Compound to
distinguish
it from Debarak. Even now the major – though not the most obvious – part of the town is the usual conglomeration of small shacks lining dusty, stony laneways.

Within the past few years the number of Gondar motor-vehicles has increased considerably, though horse-gharries are still used as taxis. The
electricity
operates all night, as in Asmara and Addis, but Ethiopian time is kept.
This means that 12 a.m. is our 6 a.m. – a logical system, since the new day does begin at dawn, rather than when one is going to bed. Weeks ago I changed my watch, for mental arithmetic was never my forte and in some areas all passers-by ask the time. (This questioning is a game to be played with
faranjs
; no highlander cares whether it is three o’clock or four o’clock, and the sun keeps him informed about the main events of the day.)

The Fasil Hotel restaurant serves only pasta and
wat
, so at lunch time I went to the Tourist Hotel to continue my camel-campaign of feeding up in
preparation
for the next lap. The Ethiopian Tourist Organisation’s newly-published guidebook had informed me that ‘the Itegue Menen Hotel in Gondar has a fairly good restaurant and tennis-courts as well as a swimming pool, though the latter is usually empty. Rates are rather high.’ However, I thought ten shillings
reasonable
for a four-course, Italian-cooked lunch that included unlimited green salad
*
and tomatoes, fresh butter (made near Asmara) and Port Salut that was not at all travel-weary.

The Itegue Menen Hotel is large, comfortable, attractively decorated and
efficiently
run by Italians: yet somehow it seems pathetic. Ethiopians frequently complain about their lack of accommodation for tourists, but today there were only four other visitors in the enormous restaurant – Americans who had flown from Addis and who provided me with much free entertainment. To them the Itegue Menen is such a primitive hostelry that they recoiled with yelps of horror from the salad, and before the meal one woman asked for soda-water in which to wash her forks and spoons.

After lunch I returned to my room – borrowing some books and visiting Jock on the way – and since then I have been diligently reading up the history of Gondar.

This morning I ‘did’ Gondar’s Royal Compound – for two hundred years the centre of the Imperial Court of Ethiopia.

In 1632 the Emperor Susenyos was forced to abdicate, having antagonised his subjects by allowing Portuguese Jesuits to convert him and by authorising the conversion of the Empire. He had already founded a capital at Gorgora, after his armies had been driven north by invading Galla tribes; but Gorgora is on the malarial north shore of Lake Tana, so his son Fasilidas moved the ‘city’ to the foothills of the Semien plateau, called it Gondar, forbade any foreigners to live in it and built himself a square, two-storey, Portuguese-inspired castle with a round tower at each corner.

Fasilidas died exactly three hundred years ago and was succeeded by his son, Yohannes I (The Just), who is described by my government-sponsored
guidebook
as ‘a deeply religious person. … He gave all Catholics the choice of
renouncing
their faith or being expelled to wander the deserts of the Sudan.’ During his reign Muslims were also banished from Gondar and the people’s feeling for the sacredness of the Emperor, which had been weakened by Susenyos’ defection, was fully restored.

Yohannes was succeeded in 1682 by his twenty-year-old son Iyasu I, known as The Great. Iyasu was a learned scriptural scholar, the finest horseman of his day, a lover of ceremony, a collector of jewels, a champion of the rights of the exiled princes on Amba Wahni and a reformer of corrupt customs collections. He also diluted the official xenophobia, made two unsuccessful attempts to establish diplomatic relations with the French court and firmly reasserted the authority of the Crown over the Church.

However, Iyasu was too great for the good of his own line. Ethiopia in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was not yet ready for a ruler who sat in a castle studying the scriptures, fingering jewels, reforming the
administration
and expressing a reluctance to shed blood. Gondar was the Empire’s first city since the decline of ancient Aksum and by the time of Iyasu’s accession the capital had become dangerously ecclesiastical and detached from the realities of highland life, which were no less harsh then than they had always been. The nobles used Iyasu’s peaceful twenty-five-year reign to build up strong armies and high ambitions; and then the Emperor’s son, Takla Haimanot, joined them in a conspiracy to depose his father, who was compelled to become a monk in a Lake Tana island monastery – but was murdered a few months later, lest he should attempt to regain his throne.

Fifteen years of anarchy followed. After a two-year reign Takla Haimanot I was murdered and succeeded by his fifty-year-old uncle, Theophilos, a brother of Iyasu I, who lived long enough to kill the nobles involved in the
assassinations
of his brother and nephew. These included Iyasu’s widow, Queen
Malakotawit
, who was hanged with one of her brothers and their chopped-up bodies thrown outside the palace gates to the hyenas. Three years later Theophilos died – tamely, of a fever – and the throne was seized by a provincial noble named Yostos, whose mother had been a daughter of Yohannes I and who is said to have been poisoned in 1717, after a six-year reign. Yostos was succeeded by a twenty-year-old son of Iyasu I, Dawit III, who was certainly poisoned in 1719, though he had endeared himself to the people by ordering the stoning to death of three Capuchin missionaries who somehow infiltrated into Gondar. Dawit III was a fanatical adherent to the Eustathian sect of Ethiopian Christianity, which believed that the Unction of the Holy Spirit which Christ received at his baptism united his human and divine natures; and this view was opposed by the monks of Debra Libanos, Ethiopia’s most revered monastery, who maintained that the Unction was the grace of the Holy Spirit given to the human nature of Christ at the moment of the union of his two natures, and having as its effect the
restoration
of human dignity lost by the fall of Adam. One wouldn’t expect such a rarefied debate to provoke the baser – or indeed any – human emotions; but shortly before he was poisoned the young Emperor took umbrage at the monks’ impertinent arguing with their ruler and sent a contingent of his ferocious Galla troops to massacre the lot. Controversies of this kind still enliven Ethiopia’s theological scene, though they no longer lead to massacres.

The next Emperor, ’Asma Giorgis, was yet another son of the virile Iyasu I. (It was not necessary to be a legitimate son to succeed to the throne;
acknowledged
royal blood sufficed. Neither primogeniture nor legitimacy counted for anything and all the numerous sons of an Emperor shared in the privileges of their descent.) ’Asma Giorgis is always known as Bakaffa (The Inexorable) and during his ten-year reign he ruthlessly subdued the nobles and kept them down by filling all important governorships and offices with men whom he could trust because they were dependent on him. (The present Emperor follows a not
dissimilar
policy for much the same reasons.) Yet Bakaffa’s severity did not prevent him from becoming one of the favourite heroes of highland folk-history: his name recurred often in the chantings of the shepherds I camped with and many are the tales told of his courage and cunning. He had a habit of travelling in disguise – to gauge popular feeling and use this special knowledge against the nobles – and on one of those journeys he fell ill in a Galla village and was nursed by the beautiful daughter of a local chieftain. Her name was Glory of Grace, and she became the famous Empress Mentuab.

Unlike most Ethiopian emperors Bakaffa remained faithful to his wife and produced no wide selection of heirs. He died in 1729, leaving an infant son as the Emperor Iyasu II, and Mentuab as Regent. Then came the final phase of dissolution. Mentuab’s nepotism enraged the nobles and she was too weak to control their many rebellions and conspiracies. Iyasu II, when he grew up, was mockingly known as ‘The Little’, in contrast to his grandfather ‘The Great’, and the people despised him for his expensive artistic tastes. Eventually he was taunted into leading a campaign against Sennar and almost the entire Imperial army was massacred.

Meanwhile Ras Mikael Sehul of Tigre was becoming the strongest man in Ethiopia. He ruled the whole country north of the Takazze, and even dominated the port of Massawah, through his influence over the Muslim Naib. He grew immensely rich on customs dues, and could control the importing of firearms and see to it that his own army was better equipped than anyone else’s. When Iyasu II died in 1753 Ras Mikael was ready to spring.

Mentuab had married Iyasu to a Galla princess disarmingly named Wobit; and now Wobit elbowed the old Dowager Empress aside and took it upon herself to rule in the name of her young son Joas. Soon the Court had been virtually taken over by Galla officials, and the Galla tribesmen who had accompanied these chieftains to Gondar were camping nearby in their thousands. Chaos followed, and by the time Joas had come of age the highlanders were in such a state of anti-Galla rebellion that the desperate young Emperor was driven to appealing to Ras Mikael for help. The seventy-year-old Tigrean at once occupied Gondar, defeated but failed to annihilate the Gallas, married Mentuab’s daughter by her second husband, murdered Joas, brought another (septuagenarian) son of Iyasu the Great to the throne, found him too ineffectual and poisoned him, enthroned his son Takla Haimanot II instead and had so many dismembered corpses of traitors thrown on the streets that protein-emboldened hyenas became a danger to the public. (It is difficult to determine what constituted treason at this stage, but doubtless Ras Mikael knew.)

Takla Haimanot II was murdered in 1779 and succeeded by his brother Takla Giorgis, who was forcibly exiled to Ambasal in 1784. By 1800 there were said to be six puppet emperors alive and already the royal buildings of Gondar were disintegrating in sympathy with the imperial power. Until the mid-nineteenth century the highlands ran blood as warring nobles strained to manoeuvre
themselves
closer and closer to the throne. These gentlemen were dominated by the rulers of Tigre, Shoa, Amhara and Gojam; but after the last two had been
simultaneously
killed in battle it was a newcomer to the struggle who won through – and Kassa, the ex-
shifta
, was crowned as the Emperor Theodore II. (His father, a minor chieftain, was reputed to be of the royal line. Nor is this incredible, for by then a considerable proportion of the population must have been thus privileged.)

Theodore moved the capital to Magdala, where he was so soon to commit suicide after his defeat by Lord Napier. And my guidebook – remembering that Theodore is an obligatory hero in modern Ethiopia – tactfully explains that he ‘furthered the decline of Gondar with several punitive attacks on the city, damaging the castles’. In fact Gondar was not at that time in need of punishment, but Theodore was in need of treasure – and had always disliked the city – so on 2 December, 1866, he led his army into the ex-capital, plundered all the churches, drove ten thousand people from their homes and set fire to the whole place. Four out of forty-four churches escaped the blaze and the more solid castles survived. But these were again damaged by the Dervishes in 1888, by the Italians during the Occupation, and by British bombers during the Liberation. So it is surprising that the Royal Compound remains Gondar’s most conspicuous feature.

It took me half-an-hour to stroll round outside the high, crenellated compound wall, past the twelve ceremonial gateways, which have such evocative names as ‘The Gate of the Judges’, ‘The Gate of the Funeral Commemorations’, ‘The Gate of the Spinners’, ‘The Gate of the Pigeons’, ‘The Gate of the Chiefs’, ‘The Gate of the Secret Chamber’, ‘The Gate of the Treasury of the House of Mary’. Then I entered the compound – buying a three and fourpenny ticket from a nice young man who made no attempt to ‘guide’ me – and for the next two hours I was disturbed by neither
faranjs
nor locals.

Most of the Gondarine emperors built elaborately within this enclosure and, while walking through the long, burnt grass from ruin to silent ruin, one is touched by the element of make-believe that permeated those two centuries. Here a library was built, and a chancery, a ‘House of Song’ and a ‘Pavilion of Delight’. Banqueting-halls and palaces were decorated with silks, carpets, ivory, mosaics, porcelain, Venetian glass and China dishes. But all this was as far from the truth of the highlands as Addis Ababa is today. Beyond Gondar, in every direction, hard-riding, hard-fighting noblemen were living in hide tents, tearing at hunks of warm, raw beef, drinking mead out of horn-cups and not being at all impressed by the novel refinements of their static capital. Now these frail though fortified materialisations of kingly dreams lie deserted and despoiled, their
irrelevance
proven by history.