The Barefoot Emperor: An Ethiopian Tragedy. Philip Marsden

a week or so he reached Suez. There he found that the rest of the embassy had been rescued from the reef. All the presents had been lost or destroyed, and the envoy himself refused ever to go near a boat again. Plowden continued to London on his own.

      2

      A few weeks later, from a hotel room in Covent Garden, Walter Plowden wrote to the Foreign Office. He laid his plans before them in two detailed, handwritten reports. The Foreign Secretary at the time was Lord Palmerston, and by coincidence he had also been Foreign Secretary some fifteen years earlier when a similar letter was doing the rounds. That earlier letter came through a William Coffin, son of a yeoman farmer from Dorset who had been stuck in Ethiopia for so long he could barely speak English when he emerged. He had brought a letter of friendship from a Tigrayan noble to King George IV. The Foreign Office lost it. Coffin waited three years in London before they gave him the reply.

      Plowden had more luck. This time Palmerston was immediately receptive. A foothold on the Red Sea was now of much more relevance, to protect the route to India from the French. He was convinced too of Plowden’s optimism about trade. Within a few weeks of landing in England (and after a little quiet investigation into the young man’s character), Plowden was appointed HM Consul to Massawa. He was to receive a salary of £500 a year, a gift budget for Ras Ali of £400, a letter signed by Queen Victoria herself and a nineteen-point treaty to lay before the ras.

      Six months later, Plowden was back in Ethiopia. Thrilled to be among the mountains again, he took the road to Gondar. As it led higher into the Simiens, the air grew colder, the cliffs steeper, until at a high pass it pushed through a narrow doorway in the rock. With the great inland sea of Lake Tana on his right he entered land ruled by Ras Ali. Striding ahead of his baggage train, he reached the capital of Debre Tabor. There, outside the ras’s residence, he met his old friend John Bell. Pushing through the crowd, Plowden embraced ‘several old acquaintances’. In the semi-darkness of the court he found Ras Ali sitting on a cowhide on the ground, while workmen and courtiers, horses, flies and children milled around him.

      ‘He was much pleased to see me,’ wrote Plowden, ‘and immediately besieged me with questions as to what I had brought for him.’

      After the initial meeting, Plowden retired. Several times that first day, messages arrived from the ras. Let me see the gifts. Have you brought guns?

      Plowden gave no answer.

      The next day he again entered the ras’s court, and read out the letter from Queen Victoria:

      ‘Your Highness will clearly perceive the great advantage to Abyssinia from intimate connection with the Sovereign of the British Empire whose dominions extend from the rising to the setting sun –’

      Ras Ali looked up at the long-legged Plowden: Why does the farenj stand?

      ‘– and whose fleets are to be met with in every part of the seas which encompass the earth.’

      Ras Ali knew nothing of the sea.

      Plowden then spread the bulk of the gifts before him. The afe-negus – ‘mouth of the king’– whispered to Plowden, ‘One thing at a time is usually better.’

      Plowden waved him away. His queen, he told him, did not mind. He gave a flamboyant bow, left the gifts, and stepped out again into the sunlight. Plowden was no longer the eager young traveller who had left the ras two years earlier. He was now Her Britannic Majesty’s Consul and he was playing the ras. As the days passed Ras Ali began to send requests to Plowden for more gifts.

      ‘It is needless to recall,’ boasted the consul, ‘all the childish messages with which I was bored every five minutes.’ With the ras primed, Plowden then subtly introduced the idea of signing the treaty.

      But Ras Ali was also playing Plowden. At each meeting, Plowden was forced again to go back to the beginning. What exactly is this treaty? What use is it to me? And each time Plowden had to explain that it offered friendship between sovereigns, and that his own sovereign whose fleets etc. Each time, Plowden had to part with a gift. He began to dig into his own supplies. First the matchlocks brought from Egypt. Then his own private armoury, the guns and pistols kept for his protection. And still Ras Ali put off signing the treaty.

      Then Plowden heard a familiar sound. From the tented city, from the plains around Debre Tabor came the beating of the ras’s negarits. Tens of thousands of souls stirred, packed up their tents, rounded up their sheep and cattle. The chiefs took down their slash-sleeved shirts, men left their homes to join the southbound flood. The ras was going to war. He was leaving for his annual fight with Biru Goshu. Plowden had no option but to take his treaty and follow him.

      They dropped down into the gorge of the Blue Nile, and crossed into Gojjam, the land of Biru Goshu. In time the campaign reached the stage it always reached. Biru sat safe in his mountain stronghold, Ali was camped below. The rains came, the ground turned to mud. The rains ended and then Ras Ali’s hordes began to pack up and leave.

      It was at that moment that Ras Ali summoned Consul Plowden. He was ready to sign the treaty.

      Ras Ali was on a divan in his tent discussing a horse with one of his men. The horse stood beside them. His scribe began to read out the Amharic text.

      ‘There shall be a firm, mutually cordial and lasting friendship between the king of Abyssinia and Victoria, the queen of England …’

      Ras Ali continued talking about the horse.

      ‘Please, master – listen!’

      He nodded.

      ‘The king of Abyssinia shall receive and protect the envoys or consuls of the queen of England … Likewise the queen of England shall receive and protect the envoys or officials of Abyssinia …’

      When all nineteen clauses had been heard, everyone looked to the ras. The ras looked up at the horse, admiring its sleek sides and strong legs.

      ‘I see no harm in this treaty, but it seems useless. The country as it is now is of no use to merchants. No English merchant will be able to reach it for ten years or more.’

      But he signed. Plowden prepared to leave for the coast.

      Ras Ali would not let him go. He told Plowden to give him his best rifle. Plowden refused. The days passed. His food ran low, his patience thin, and like the Portuguese delegation so many years before, the British envoy had the growing sense that he was a prisoner in these remote highlands. He gave in. He handed the ras his best rifle and left for Massawa. There he would wait for peace to spread through the troubled kingdom so that he could attract traders and artisans, and prove Ras Ali wrong.

      3

      Ethiopia’s Christians suffered not only from the endless round of civil war, but from the collective grief of former glory. In their eyes, Ras Ali was a usurper. He was an Oromo, and the Oromo did not share the same blessings as themselves, the high destiny bestowed on them, centuries earlier, by God. The Oromo were a pastoralist people, mainly Muslim, who had pushed up into the central highlands in the eighteenth century. They proved fearless in battle and were used as warriors first by the emperors’ rivals against the emperor, then by the emperor himself against his rivals. As the Christian regime weakened, the Oromo grew more powerful. In 1803, Ras Gugsa – grandfather of Ras Ali – became the country’s ruler, and converted from Islam to the Christianity of most of his subjects (though they all knew that really a hyena cannot become a goat).

      Ras Gugsa ruled for twenty-two years, and according to Zeneb, the Christian chronicler, those men who refused to submit to him had their penises cut off, while women lost their breasts.

      In the 1830s, at the age of twelve, Ras Ali became head of the dynasty. During his regency his mother Menen ruled in his stead. Reports describe her variously as capricious, flirtatious, wanton and shameless. She governed from the half-ruined palaces of the city of Gondar. In their rough stone interiors she listened unseen to the affairs of the court, sending judgements and orders through her eunuchs. Outside stood crowds of farmers and soldiers, noblemen and shield-bearers, priests