against me by means of a people brought into a state of discipline’ (Holland and Hozier, II, 42).
The third aspect of Tewodros’s military reforms was his unrelenting drive to acquire modern arms. Although his stockpile grew largely through purchases and seizure from vanquished enemies, it was to arms manufacture that he applied himself with remarkable persistence. The first experiment came right after the Battle of Dabarqi: as Kasa Haylu, Tewodros improvised a rather crude explosive from the trunk of a tree. It was to be set off from a distance by means of a connecting thread. The whole experiment was aborted when one of Kasa’s followers, captured by the enemy, divulged the secret under torture. When Tewodros later sought foreign assistance, it was not so much the arms that he sought as the skilled manpower to manufacture those arms and to impart those skills to Ethiopians.
The upshot of this strategy appeared at Gafat, an area near Dabra Tabor which, more than any other place, symbolized Tewodros’s modernizing drive. Gafat was at the same time a symbol of the uneasy relationship between Tewodros and the European missionaries. The latter came to Ethiopia to preach the gospel of love. They ended up being commandeered to manufacture weapons of destruction by a Christian sovereign who wanted from the Europeans their science, not their religion. At Gafat, a school was established where Ethiopian youths acquired literacy and some technical skills. By trial and error, and under the emperor’s ceaseless prodding, the missionaries managed to manufacture some weapons.
At Maqdala, the first well-documented arsenal in Ethiopian history was established, with 15 cannon, 7 mortars, 11,063 rifles of different types, 875 pistols and 481 bayonets, as well as ammunition including 555 cannon-shells and mortar-shells and 83,563 bullets. But the objective of creating a trained Ethiopian cadre of technicians could hardly be realized when the apprentices were drawn from groups then regarded as social outcasts, such as the Muslims and Falasha, and from Oromo captives. Nor could the weapons forged at the Gafat foundry bring about any dramatic change in the military equation – as the fate of the highly prized mortar ‘Sebastopol’ demonstrated. This show-piece of Tewodros’s arms manufacture was dragged in 1867 all the way up to the Maqdala massif at considerable sacrifice. But, when the moment came to empty it against the British, it misfired.
Tewodros also made the first attempt to put an end to the slave-trade which had become endemic in Ethiopian society. During one of his campaigns in Gojjam, he freed all the slaves at the Basso market and, in an impromptu wedding ceremony, he had all the male slaves married to the females. He followed this by an official ban on the slave-trade throughout his realm. In Qallu, Wallo, he forbade his soldiers to resell slaves they had captured. Such measures against the slave-trade did not extend to an abolition of the institution of slavery itself; perhaps understandably so, since slavery had come to be embedded in the Ethiopian social fabric. Indeed, later in his reign, we find Tewodros, exasperated by the guerrilla tactics of the Wallo rebel Amade Bashir, authorizing his soldiers to enslave the Muslim followers of his enemy.
Culturally, Tewodros’s reign is significant because it witnessed the birth of a fairly well-developed literary Amharic. A world of stylistic difference separates the Amharic correspondence sent by Tewodros and that of previous correspondents such as Dajjach Subagadis. Amharic prose attained even higher, almost poetic, elegance in the chronicle of Dabtara Zanab, the emperor’s admirer.
Like all modernizing rulers, Tewodros realized that introducing far-reaching reforms was impossible without a secure financial base. It was in an effort to solve this problem that he came into collision with the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. That ultimately proved his undoing. His conflict with the clergy initially arose from two different levels of morality. With understandable exaggeration, Zanab draws a striking contrast between the virtues of Tewodros and the vices of the clergy of the Zamana Masafent: purity versus debauchery, chastity versus licentiousness, monogamy versus polygamy, and honesty versus dishonesty. Further, just as he sought to establish a unitary state, Tewodros wanted to see the church overcome its doctrinal divisions and emerge as a united institution. His ‘concordat’ with the Egyptian bishop Abuna Salama, whereby the latter gave his blessing to Tewodros’s seizure of political power in return for his enforcement of the Tawahedo doctrine, appeared to have ushered in a new era of the unity of church and state.
But this spirit of co-operation was short-lived. The relationship between Tewodros and the clergy was soon beset with fundamental political and economic contradictions. As was revealed by the controversy over the temtem, the turban customarily worn by Ethiopian Orthodox Christian priests, Tewodros appears to have been bent on establishing absolute power over the clergy. He could not tolerate the fact that they appeared turbaned in front of him, whereas they had to take off their turbans in the holy of holies, the inner sanctuary of a church. It was the vital question of land, however, which made the church a sworn enemy of the emperor. In a question of striking directness, Tewodros enquired of the clergy in 1856: ‘What shall I eat, and with what shall I feed my troops? You have taken half the land as masqal maret and the other half as rim and gadam’ (Zanab, 28). (Tewodros was here referring to three of the various categories of church land.) The response of the clergy was as medieval as the emperor’s question was modern. He was told to roam from one province to another and live off the land, ‘as in the past’. Tewodros found the suggestion not at all attractive. After four years of procrastination in view of strong clerical opposition, he expropriated what he deemed was land in excess of the clergy’s requirements and distributed it among tribute-paying peasants.
Tewodros and the foreigners
Interrelated with the broad vision which Tewodros brought to solve the internal problems of the country was his energetic response to the external challenge. This challenge had two elements: Egyptian and European. But there was an intimate link between the two, just as the external and the internal elements were closely interconnected. The quest for European assistance could be regarded as the pivot of Tewodros’s policy. It was with that assistance that he sought to eliminate the Egyptian danger (in his words, the ‘Turkish’ danger) and to bring about internal reforms. Knowledge of the alignments during the Crimean War of 1853–1856 (Christian Britain and France against Orthodox Christian Russia on the side of Muslim Turkey) must have been a shock to him. But it did not deter him from continuing to invoke the principle of Christian solidarity against Muslim Egypt. Conversely, the possibility of a Crimean-like collusion between the ‘Turks’ and the Europeans, particularly the British, perennially haunted him. Captain Cameron, the British consul appointed to Ethiopia in 1862, was finally imprisoned because, after his visit to Massawa, he failed to bring back a response to Tewodros’s letter of that year to Queen Victoria, in which he asked for British assistance to help him break out of the Muslim blockade. Cameron also compounded his error by returning via Matamma, then under Egyptian control, and, so Tewodros suspected, by plotting with the ‘Turks’.
Given his background of border clashes with the Egyptians, it is not surprising that Tewodros continued to harbour an ingrained suspicion of them. This was clearly seen in 1857, when he suddenly arrested the Coptic Patriarch Qerilos (then on a visit from Alexandria to Ethiopia) and Abuna Salama (head of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church) – both Egyptians – on discovering that they had sent a request for Egyptian military assistance on Tewodros’s behalf, but without his knowledge. Simultaneously, he tried to undermine Egyptian authority in Sudan by using Sudanese refugees such as Wad Nimr, son of Makk Nimr, leader of a Sudanese revolt against Egyptian rule in 1821, to make inroads into Sudan and even collect taxes in Tewodros’s name. But Tewodros the emperor, unlike Kasa the shefta, was preoccupied mainly with the coast rather than with the western borderlands. As he groped outwards for contacts with Europe, he found his outlet Massawa sealed off by the Egyptian presence. This feeling of insulation underlay his letter to Queen Victoria.
Although Tewodros sought to cultivate friendly relations with all European nations, it was towards the British that he manifested a special, almost affectionate, regard. It was to be one of his tragedies that this affection went unreciprocated. Such a special attitude may have been the result of his close association with John
