unless it was as a shifta in which case, like Adonibezek who was pursued from the city of Bezek, you will have your hands and feet chopped off.
There shall be no more slavery. Existing slaves must be sold, the money given to charity, and the slaves baptised. Tewodros himself showed the way by buying slaves from the Muslim traders and sending them to priests for baptism. He encouraged others to follow him in formalising their marriage before the priests and to remain faithful to their chosen partners. Women of the camps and of the towns and of tella bets must no longer sell themselves to men. Murderers will not be handed over to the bereaved families for retribution, but dealt with by his own executioners. Tewodros revived the right of all citizens to approach him as the point of final appeal. Long before dawn, the cries of the persecuted surrounded his tent: ‘Jan Hoi! Jan Hoi! Your Majesty! Give me justice!’
He wanted roads. He planned a transport system with Debre Tabor as its hub and spokes pushing out to Gondar, to Meqdela, south to Gojjam. ‘Hitherto,’ wrote one observer, ‘not a single road had ever been constructed.’ The first stages, of route-planning and blasting, were carried out by German missionaries.
Nor did he remain silent on matters of dress. Under the old regime, clothes for the upper body – for man or woman – were a privilege. ‘Childish customs,’ scoffed the emperor, and introduced the wearing of a loose cotton shirt for all. If it reached below the knee, or was of silk, or was brightly coloured and had slashed sleeves, it meant that the wearer had earned the garment in service to the state.
Tewodros’s vision for his country was undeniably a righteous one. Even a man like the Catholic missionary Mgr Justin de Jacobis, driven out of Gondar by Tewodros, recognised, as he fled, the heroic scope of his persecutor’s ambition. Tewodros is ‘extraordinary’, he admitted, the bringer of ‘laws and admirable ordinances of public prosperity and morality’.
Tewodros wanted national unity, and tackled the problem of regional power. During the Mesafint, the provincial rulers had become too powerful, corrupted both by the habit of rebellion and by their alliance with the Oromo rulers. Tewodros (who himself was innocent of neither) ousted these hereditary rulers, and many now shuffled harmlessly around the flat-topped mountains, their hands and legs in chains. Tewodros appointed his own governors.
He was one of the first Ethiopian rulers to take any notice at all of the world outside. He had felt the full force of Egyptian expansion in 1848 at Debarki when a few men had devastated his forces with their guns; Ottoman power in the Red Sea, far to the south of the Bosphorus, was on the wane, and the British and French made no secret of their desire to fill the gap. European politics intrigued him, and he developed a fascination for the war that broke out as he rose to power, that concerned the shrinking of the other end of the Ottoman Empire – the war on the Crimea peninsula. Every visitor was asked for news, for stories of Balaclava and Sevastopol. But Tewodros was baffled by the allegiances. Why in God’s name had France and Britain, who spent their time squabbling around him, been allies in the Crimea, helping the Muslim Turks against Christian Russia?
The future for Ethiopians would no longer be decided only within their own borders. They must learn not only to spare the lives of visiting foreigners, but to see that these strangers might actually bring benefits. He himself was frequently in debate with the two Englishmen, Plowden and Bell.
Plowden left a great deal of written material, but little is known about Bell. Yet it was he who was closest to Tewodros. He had been appointed his liqemekwas, involving among other things dressing as the emperor did in battle, to act as decoy. Bell was given his own detachment of cavalry and married a cousin of Tewodros, Wurqnesh Asfa Yilma. On campaign he often shared a tent with Tewodros and was known to read to him from a copy of Shakespeare with such devotion that the emperor referred to it as ‘Bell’s Bible’.
Tewodros wanted a modern state, a Christian state, without slavery, without feudal fiefdoms, defended by a standing army equipped with up-to-date weapons. More than anything he wanted a Church that did not hold the people in thrall, nor dictate to the crown, nor hoard the tithes from the third of the land it controlled, nor peddle its mysteries in a long-dead language. Plowden in his writings frequently mentions parallels between Ethiopia and medieval Europe. In his quest for unity and centralised rule, Tewodros was attempting ‘a task achieved in Europe only during the reigns of consecutive Kings’; in his taming of the Church his own Reformation. His ideals of worldly power were forged in the heat of the Books of Samuel and Kings yet tempered, with assistance from Bell’s ‘Bible’, by a little European humanism.
But God grants no easy victories. Tewodros’s people had lived for too long in darkness to appreciate at once the light he brought. In Tigray, Niguse and Tesemma, of the family of Wube, rose up against the new regime. In Gojjam, Tedla Gwalu rebelled. Kinfu’s son rebelled. Nor could the Oromo of Wollo yet understand that their years of rule were finished. Across the country, priests too had reservations, strangely slow to see that in Tewodros’s victories was the manifest will of the Almighty.
9
Standing barefoot on the stony earth, with his plain shamma around his shoulder, Tewodros would say: ‘Without Christ, I am nothing.’ He understood his worldly role in terms of biblical precedent. He understood his particular duty as saving Ethiopia’s Christians from extinction by Muslims. He would first convert the Oromo to Christianity, then put the choice to all remaining Muslims in his realm: follow Christ or leave the country. He was not above superstition, seeing portents when they were obviously put in his way. But his zealotry was Christian. He was a crusader, the heir of David, the Elect of God, the dutiful Slave of Christ.
Yet Tewodros didn’t much care for priests. During the Zemene Mesafint many of Ethiopia’s clergy had, according to the chronicles, become ‘polygamists, sorcerers and drunkards’; by day they performed the rites, by night they visited women without husbands. Even worse, they had confused and divided the people with their arguments, squandering the comforts of orthodoxy for baffling schisms. As in the Mesafint of old, when the children of Israel forgot Jahweh and went a-whoring after Baal and all the false gods, so the priesthood had forgotten the one truth.
Foreigners were to blame, at least in part. The Portuguese in the sixteenth century had brought their own interpretation of Christ’s nature and convinced many Ethiopians to adopt it. These ones became known first as Kidat – ‘Unctionists’– then as Yesaga Lij – ‘Son by Grace’– and finally as Sost Lidet or ‘Three Births’, because they said that Christ was anointed in a ‘third birth’. To their detractors the Three-Birthers had therefore to admit the inadmissible: that there was a time when Christ was not fully divine. For traditionalists of the Alexandrian, non-Chalcedonian persuasion, that was a heretical slur on the pure divinity of Christ. These ones referred to the Three-Birthers as Karra Haymanot – Faith-in-the-Knife – because they had sliced the third birth from their teaching.
Tewodros was not interested. He wanted conformity. If the Church was to help in re-unifying the country, it must be unified itself. In 1854, in his first act of statesmanship, he called a council of clergy in Gondar. He was not yet emperor, but having defeated Dejazmach Wube, he now stood with an important ally at his side – Abune Selama.
The abun was the head of the Ethiopian Church, the only bishop in the entire country. The post was never held by an Ethiopian, but always an Egyptian, a Copt appointed by the Patriarchate in Alexandria. Often the incumbent was elderly, unable to speak Amharic, and ignored. In the 1820s, writing about Selama’s predecessor, Dejazmach Sebadagis complained to the Alexandrian patriarch: ‘Was it because you hate Ethiopia that you sent him?’ And as Egypt expanded south under Muhammad Ali, and spread the terror of invasion in Ethiopia, so suspicions of the Coptic abun grew.
Arriving in Ethiopia in 1841, the new Abune Selama was young and ambitious. He was appalled at the spread
