Odd Jobs (136 page)

S
AILING
T
HROUGH
C
HINA, BY
Paul Theroux, with illustrations by Patrick Procktor. 64 pp. Houghton Mifflin, 1984.

Mr. Theroux, whose last travel book was a long and dour walk around the coast of the United Kingdom, here sails down the Yangtze with a group of American millionaires, with much less effort to himself. His account seems more a set of notes than a finished work, and has the charm of fragments. The millionaires played cards to win, and the famous gorges on the river lived up to their billing. The Chinese cities, however, were “poisonous-looking,” and “the air of pollution gives China the look of existing in a permanent sunset,” and “the land looked scraped—no trees, only tiny houses, or huts, and cultivation everywhere.” Waxing apocalyptic, the Anglo-American traveller concludes that threadbare, overused, birdless China is everybody’s future: “In a hundred years or so, under a cold uncolonized moon, what we call the civilized world will all look like China, muddy and senile and oldfangled.… Our future is this mildly poisoned earth and its smoky air. We are in for hunger and hard work, the highest stage of poverty—no starvation, but crudeness everywhere, clumsy art, simple language, bad books, brutal laws, plain vegetables, and clothes of one colour. It will be damp and dull, like this.” Enough to make one nostalgic for 1984.

T
HE
E
MPEROR:
Downfall of an Autocrat
, by Ryszard Kapuściński, translated from the Polish by William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand. 164 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.

In September of 1974 the Emperor Haile Selassie I was deposed as ruler of Ethiopia by a committee of young Army officers called the Dergue; at that time the monarch had reigned for forty-four of his
eighty-two years. The nature of his long rule and the circumstances of his deposition are enchantingly illuminated in
The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat
. Ryszard Kapuściński, who for many years covered the Third World for the Polish Press Agency, visited Ethiopia in 1963, when Haile Selassie was playing host to a conference of African leaders in Addis Ababa, “then a large village of a few hundred thousand inhabitants, situated on hills, amid eucalyptus groves.” On this occasion the Polish reporter befriended a member of the Imperial Ministry of Information, “a tall, handsome, usually silent and reserved Amhara” named Teferra Gebrewold. Not long after the Emperor’s fall, Mr. Kapuściński returned to Addis Ababa and with Teferra’s help sought out in their hiding places surviving members of the Emperor’s circle and interviewed them. “We were a couple of collectors out to recover pictures doomed to destruction: we wanted to make an exhibition of the old art of governing.”

A stunning exhibit it is; the interviewed subjects, while the turbulent aftermath of the revolution and its frenzied nationwide
fetasha
(Amharic for “search”) raged about them, enunciated their memories of the days of Haile Selassie in a magical reverie that frequently achieves poetry and aphorism:

The first of his activities, having risen at four or five, was to walk within the Palace grounds while a scheduled series of high-ranking informers poured news of the night’s conspiracies into his ear. They walked a step behind the Emperor, who never made a comment or took a note: “Our monarch not only never used his ability to read, but he also never wrote anything and never signed anything in his own hand. Though he ruled for half a century, not even those closest to him knew what his signature looked like.” During imperial audiences, a Minister of the Pen, when the Emperor spoke, “moved his ear as close as a microphone” and “transcribed
his ruler’s scant and foggy mutterings. All the rest was interpretation.” In hourly segments rather picturesquely named—the Hour of the Cashbox, the Hour of the Supreme Court of Final Appeal—Haile Selassie moved through his day, expressionless, virtually inaudible, his every move framed by slavish attendance. One employee of the court had the sole job of wiping from the shoes of respectfully immobile dignitaries the urine deposited there by the Emperor’s pet lapdog, Lulu; another was for twenty-six years “His Most Virtuous Highness’s pillow bearer”:

The “keeper of the third door” also had his heavy responsibilities and his pride of expertise: “It was an art to open the door at the right moment, the exact instant. To open the door too early would have been reprehensible, as if I were hurrying the Emperor out. If I opened it too late, on the other hand, His Sublime Highness would have to slow down, or perhaps even stop, which would detract from his lordly dignity, a dignity that meant getting around without collisions or obstacles.” And a high ceremonial official rejoiced in being called “His Distinguished Majesty’s cuckoo”; his duty was, when the moment came “for the Emperor, in accordance with official protocol, to pass from one activity to another,” to stand before him and rapidly bow several times, as a signal.

At the center of all this clockworklike apparatus of absolutism, the Emperor maintained, according to the testimony of these voices (identified simply by initials, for their own protection), an inscrutable poise, a trance of power that let scarcely an appointment or an expenditure take place within the entirety of the empire without his approval. His objective was peace, obtained by balancing factions: “The Palace divided itself into factions and coteries that fought incessant wars, weakening and destroying each other. That is exactly what His Benevolent Majesty
wanted. Such a balance assured his blessed peace.” He distrusted activists and fanatic enforcers of order: “Desirous of His Majesty’s approbation, they tried to introduce absolute order, whereas His Supreme Majesty wanted basic order with a margin of disorder on which his monarchical gentleness could exert itself.” What power he shared he shared on one basis: loyalty. “It didn’t matter if a given dignitary measured up or not, as long as he showed unshakable loyalty.” “I don’t remember His Magnanimous Highness’s ever demoting someone and pressing his head to the cobblestones because of corruption. Let him enjoy his corruption, as long as he shows his loyalty!” A certain Prince Imru “began to smell of reform, and without asking the Emperor’s permission he gave some of his lands to the peasants. Thus, having kept something secret from the Emperor, in an irritating and even provocative way he violated the principle of loyalty. His Benevolent Highness, who had been preparing a supremely honorable office for the prince, had to exile him from the country for twenty years.” The underlying rationale is expressed by one former courtier in a celestial metaphor:

One wonders how much of the elegant style of Abyssinian testimony—beautifully caught by this supple English translation—was smuggled in by way of Mr. Kapuścińskis Polish. Certainly the editing and sequencing of these interviews is highly artistic, and creates a more than documentary effect, a Kafkaesque poetry and mystery. The events that led to the Emperor’s downfall are, but for an occasional italicized interpolation, seen entirely from within the court, with the moist eyes of injured innocence:

There had been an unsuccessful rebellion in 1960, led by Germame Neway, an aristocrat who had returned at the age of thirty from the United States, where an imperial scholarship had financed a university education. Made governor of the southern province of Sidamo, Germame began to turn uncultivated land over to landless peasants; Haile Selassie’s characteristically mild reaction was to transfer the rash reformer to the governorship of Jijiga, where the only inhabitants were nomads uninterested in land. Germame’s attempted coup, when it came, was efficiently quelled by the Army; the common people, lacking radios, were slow to realize that a revolution was in progress and the Palace had
been taken. When they became aware, they pursued the rebels with sticks and stones. Nevertheless, from 1960 on “a sort of negativism started to flood over us.… you noticed it everywhere on people’s faces, faces that seemed diminished and abandoned, without light or energy, in what people did and how they did it.… Even though the Emperor went on issuing decrees and striving to get things done, got up early and never rested, all the same the negativism was there, growing all the time.… People seemed unable to control things; things existed and ceased to exist in their own malicious ways, slipping through people’s hands.… The Palace was sinking, and we all felt it.… We could feel the temperature falling, life becoming more and more precisely framed by ritual but more and more cut-and-dried, banal, negative.”

Haile Selassie was not bloodthirsty or unintelligent. He perpetrated many actual reforms in his anachronistic empire, and to the last was going through the motions of “development.” The fatal weakness of his rule—which he would not have outlived had he not lived so very long—was the rapacity of his officials, a rapacity he encouraged as a seal to their loyalty. As the collapse drew near, the corruption grew worse: “The closer it got to the end, the more horrible was the grabbing and the unrestrained snatching. Instead, my friend, of applying himself to the tiller or the sails as the boat started to sink, each one of our magnates stuffed his bag and looked around for a comfortable lifeboat.”

The vessel sank, finally, under the weight of the Sahel drought, which had been afflicting northern Africa for a number of years. A British television journalist, Jonathan Dimbleby, who had previously made films flattering to the Emperor, in 1973 took cameras into the desolated north of the country and produced a film entitled
Ethiopia: The Unknown Famine
, “in which this unprincipled calumniator”—to quote the interview subject called “A. A.”—“pulled the demagogic trick of showing thousands of people dying of hunger, and next to that His Venerable Highness feasting with dignitaries. Then he showed roads on which scores of poor, famished skeletons were lying, and immediately afterward our airplanes bringing champagne and caviar from Europe. Here, whole fields of dying scrags; there, His Highness serving meat to his dogs from a silver platter.” An outcry greeted the film’s showing in England, and the empire reluctantly had to admit foreign aid with its attendant personnel, including “correspondents disguised as male nurses.”