won the favour of the emperor to such a degree that he became Tewodros’s liqa makwas (an important court official who, among other things, acted as the emperor’s double, with the aim of misdirecting possible assassination attempts), and with Walter Plowden, the first British consul to Ethiopia, who arrived in 1848. Tewodros went to great lengths to demonstrate his liking for the British. The killing of Plowden and then of Bell in 1860 by Garad, Tewodros’s rebellious nephew, roused the emperor to a furious act of revenge against his own relatives. In the letters that he wrote to Hormuzd Rassam, the British envoy sent in 1864 to negotiate the release of the Europeans imprisoned in January of that year, Tewodros repeatedly expressed his ‘love’ for the British. At the same time, however, he could not conceal his dismay at the fact that, far from responding positively to his friendly overtures, the British appeared to be conspiring with his avowed enemy, the ‘Turks’. This contradiction lay at the root of his quarrel with the British; hence the irony that the nation he had hoped would be his most reliable ally turned out to be his most bitter enemy.
Tewodros’s unrelenting quest for European technical assistance arose from his acute realization of the backwardness of his country. Not only was he aware of this backwardness, but he was also not ashamed to publicize it. And he chose the most forceful language to do so: in his letters to Queen Victoria and Rassam, he called himself ‘blind’, ‘ignorant’, ‘a blind ass’. He repeatedly contrasted the ‘darkness’ of Ethiopia with the ‘light’ of Europe. In the letter that he wrote in 1866 when he sent the Protestant missionary Martin Flad to Europe to recruit artisans, Tewodros was at pains to emphasize the favourable terms of employment that he envisaged for potential recruits:
I am sending Mr. Flad to Europe. I am seeking skilled artisans. I shall gladly receive all artisans who come to me. If they stay, I shall ensure that they live happily. If they wish to return to their country once they have taught their skills, I shall pay their salary and let them leave, happy and with an escort.
(Girma-Selassie and Appleyard, 336)
It was also Tewodros’s eagerness to introduce European technology into his country that shaped his relations with the missionaries, particularly the Protestants. His relations with the Catholics were never happy. This was partly the result of the greater influence that Catholicism had come to exercise in northern Ethiopia, and the threat that this posed to Tewodros’s own authority. Partly, too, it arose from the closer identification of the Catholics with a secular power, France. The conflict between Catholicism and Orthodoxy came to be dramatized in a personal antagonism between Giustino De Jacobis and Abuna Salama. Tewodros’s ‘concordat’ with the latter inevitably placed him against the former. De Jacobis was expelled from Ethiopia in 1854, and his Ethiopian followers were persecuted. Thereafter the Catholics and the French became enemies of Tewodros and worked towards his downfall. In Agaw Neguse of Semen, nephew of the defeated Dajjach Webe who had been a patron of the Catholics, they found a domestic ally. Adopting the title of negus to bolster his pretensions, Agaw Neguse began a policy of active collaboration with Paris and the Vatican, going to the extent of offering the French the port of Zula, south of Massawa, in return for arms. The suppression of his rebellion and his own death in 1860 deprived the French and the Catholics of a strategically located and enthusiastic ally.
With the Protestants, Tewodros had more amicable relations. The influence of the Protestants Bell and Plowden and the educational background of Abuna Salama in the Church Missionary Society have been adduced as factors in this relationship. Protestant strategy, which aimed at the internal reform of the Orthodox Church rather than at conversion, also helped. The more practical orientation of the Protestant missionaries, such as their programme of introducing crafts like joinery and masonry, must also have made them more attractive to an emperor bent on introducing European artisanship. At any rate, the rapport between emperor and missionaries attained such degrees of intimacy as partaking together of holy communion. Two of the missionaries, J. Mayer and Theophil Waldmeier, married Ethiopians. Waldmeier, a steadfast admirer of Tewodros even when the ruler’s later excesses made him a solitary figure, gave passionate expression to the Protestant image of Tewodros as a Reformation prince:
Where is another king to be found, who in spite of his power and greatness in self-denial disdains all comforts, luxury and good-living? . . . We all firmly believe that the Lord has proclaimed this man with His strength, and that subsequently He will use him still more as an extraordinary instrument for the physical and spiritual well-being of his entire people.
(Crummey, Priests and Politicians, 126)
Yet, however enthusiastic the Protestants might have been towards Tewodros, they were not prepared for the task that the emperor had in store for them: the manufacture of heavy armaments. They had to be coerced into it. As far as their evangelical activity was concerned, it was confined on the emperor’s order to such non-Christian communities as the Falasha, although occasionally they could count among their converts such close associates of the emperor as his chronicler, the ecclesiastic Dabtara Zanab. In the end, the emperor did not spare the Protestant missionaries when he turned against the Europeans. It was indeed one of these missionaries, Henry A. Stern, who, because of his rather indecent references to Tewodros’s parentage, fanned the flame of the emperor’s anti-European fury. A number of the missionaries were subsequently among the captives at Maqdala.
2.2 The prisoners of Emperor Tewodros II. Captain Cameron, the British consul, is first on the right; Hormuzd Rassam, the envoy who was sent to negotiate the release of the prisoners but ended up joining them, is seated second on the left; the missionary Henry Stern is standing first on the left
The end of Tewodros
Both domestically and externally, therefore, Tewodros was confronted with a gloomy picture. Internally, he faced nation-wide opposition and rebellion. From the Europeans whom he had expected to come to his aid, he received only indifference or insolence. The frustration of his lofty objectives led him to seek extreme solutions. In exasperation, he spared neither friend nor foe. His indiscriminate violence aggravated his situation. At home, it multiplied his enemies. Abroad, it moved the British to action – against him. They were indifferent to his demands for assistance, but not to his imprisonment of Europeans.
Internal opposition to Tewodros’s authority had started as early as 1855. In the subsequent decade, Tewodros was to spend most of his time moving in haste from one province to another, faced with a fresh outbreak of rebellion before he had succeeded in putting down the previous one. In Gojjam, Tadla Gwalu, a member of the local dynasty, remained a permanent thorn in the flesh. Closer to the emperor’s seat of power, Tesso Gobaze of Walqayt threatened his authority to the extent of once even occupying Gondar. In Lasta, Wag Shum Gobaze – the future Emperor Takla-Giyorgis (r. 1868–1871) – raised the standard of rebellion after he had seen his own father executed by Tewodros. In Shawa, ever-defiant Sayfu Sahla-Sellase and also Bazabeh, the man whom Tewodros himself had appointed, rose against him. Likewise, the emperor’s appointee in Wallo, Dajjach Liban Amade, was joined by an even more implacable opponent, Amade Bashir, to make that province Tewodros’s political graveyard.
Both the reverses of his political fortune and his own spiralling violence depleted his own ranks. By 1866, as a result of desertions, his army, which had once numbered about 60,000, had been reduced to some 10,000 men. Tewodros had been forced to restrict his movements to the Dabra Tabor–Maqdala axis. Soon, even this stretch of territory was put at the mercy of the growing rebel forces. Towards the end of 1867, Tewodros was forced to abandon the old capital, Dabra Tabor, and establish his last stronghold in Maqdala. This retreat symbolized the ultimate frustration of his dream. The man who had dreamt of uniting all Ethiopia came to be confined to one isolated amba, a hilly stronghold. In his final letter to Sir Robert Napier, leader of the British and Indian forces in 1868, Tewodros himself called it ‘this heathen
