the highlands. When the Ethiopian emperor received from the coast the stuffed heads of some French and Italian Capuchins, he knew he had found a reliable ally. Secure from both Turks and proselytising Christians, the Ethiopians remained isolated in the fortress of their mountains, free to pursue their own internal squabbles.
In 1798, Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt brought a new era of European power to the Middle East and introduced to Egypt the restless spirit of the Enlightenment. Twenty years later the Egyptian ruler, Muhammad Ali, pushed southwards down the Nile. For decades, pressing at the lowlands around Ethiopia, Egyptian forces made periodic forays into the mountains. Conquest by Egypt was the most persistent outside threat to Ethiopia during the nineteenth century.
The young Tewodros never forgot the encounter he had on the edge of the Sahara desert. In March 1848, as a warlord, he and his thousands of followers moved against the undermanned garrison at Dabarki. They were destroyed. The Egyptians had been well-drilled and well-armed. They also had two cannon. The guns turned Tewodros’s forces more effectively than 20,000 men and established in him a lifelong yearning for artillery.
At the same time, on the coast, France and Britain had shipped their perennial rivalry to the Red Sea. As Ottoman power declined and the port of Massawa grew sleepier, so the two European states found a new cause to fight over – access to India and the Far East. The existence of Christian Ethiopia just inland lured a new generation of European envoys and adventurers.
Two hundred years after the expulsion of the Jesuits, a young Englishman reached the highlands and conceived the idea of Anglo–Ethiopian contacts. It was the tentative start of a relationship that would stumble on through years of inertia, calamity and ignorance, grow stronger through expediency and expressions of mutual love, stumble again through bereavement, suspicion, muddle and imprisonment before entering the arena of its bloody dénouement, some twenty years later, amidst the dark basalt cliffs of Meqdela.
* Ethiopian time is measured from dawn: thus seven o’clock is one o’clock, midday and midnight are six o’clock.
Tewodros’s Order of the Cross and Solomon’s Seal. From Hormuzd Rassam, Narrative of the British Mission to Theodore, King of Abyssinia (1869)
1
Walter Plowden lay on deck. It was April 1847. A warm wind filled the great lateen sail above his head; beneath him the dhow pitched to the short swells of the Red Sea. Far astern, to the south, he could see the distant rise of the Ethiopian highlands. Four years he’d spent there among its mountains, its roving courts, shifting from fief to fief, from battle to battle. He drew on his pipe, leaned back against the alga, and was filled with the reckless joy of parting.
‘Once more on the free waves,’ he wrote, ‘my heart beat lightly.’
Plowden was on a mission. He had persuaded Ethiopia’s ruler, Ras Ali, that there was one thing a modern state could not be without, and that was a trade treaty with Britain. Ras Ali himself couldn’t see the point. How would a trade treaty keep Dejazmach Wube to heel? Or the peoples of Wag and Lasta? What use was it against Biru Goshu, who had made off with his wife and who every year slaughtered the governors he appointed in Gojjam?
But all right, isshi, he would send an envoy with the young Englishman.
And here he was, the envoy, a poor highlander who had never before laid eyes on the sea, squatting in wide-eyed terror in Plowden’s cabin. With him were the gifts Ras Ali had selected for Queen Victoria – some rusting lances, a few bolts of homespun cotton and three very rare gazelle calves. The gazelles were also strangers to the sea. Plowden had bought them a nanny-goat for milk, and whenever they heard her bleating they would tug at their halters, squeak and whinny, and the deck would tip-tap with the sound of their delicate little hooves. Such was Ethiopia’s first embassy to Britain – a menagerie of the terrified, the untamed and the hopeful, despatched in indifference by a war-weakened ruler.
Plowden passed the days in impatient idleness. He lay on deck. He smoked his pipe. He drank beakers of coffee. Stretching his long limbs over the alga, he closed his eyes and felt the desert wind warm on his face.
Four years earlier, in his early twenties, he had been sailing the same waters. Then too he had been heading for England, fleeing India and a death-in-life job at Carr Tagore & Co. of Calcutta. But in Suez he met John Bell, a Scottish sailor as footloose and impulsive as himself. According to his brother, Plowden’s ‘ardent and ambitious temperament induced him, on the spur of the moment, without preparation and with limited funds, to join that gentleman in an expedition’. To Plowden, Ethiopia was rich with classical and biblical associations, a mountain enclave of Christianity in a Muslim region. Bell’s plan also had the whiff of antiquity around it – they would hunt the source of the Nile, whose annual flood had spawned the great civilisation of ancient Egypt.
The two set off overland and entered Ethiopia posing as elephant hunters. Within weeks they had been sucked into the country’s dramas. They forgot about the Nile. With each battle, each tented court, each chief who wooed them, they found the outside world receding. John Bell married a local woman and became a general in Ras Ali’s army. Neither he nor Plowden ever escaped the strange spell of the upland kingdom.
Plowden in particular found a fascination in Ethiopia’s medieval pageantry, in the ‘foppish’ self-love of the warrior caste, the ‘strain of feudal glamour’. For him Ethiopia’s antiquity, isolation and uniqueness were counters to the unsightly spread of modernity: ‘there is no parallel to it in this steaming and telegraphing world’. He grew to love the troubadour traditions of the quick-witted azmari, the recital of battle deeds in the doomfata; he learned to play the battle-polo of gugs, a game as deadly as any skirmish. With an ethnographer’s eye he began to record his observations, ‘Notes on Peculiar Customs’– ‘the Galla find the eating of fish disgusting, as do the Shoho … On waking, Christians utter a prayer to stop the devil entering their mouth … the shadow of a man who has slept with a woman the previous night is considered harmful …’ In Tigray he heard a host of proverbs convincing people that ‘relatives were of no use till after death’. He noted the prevalence of female circumcision among the peoples of the north.
During those early years he passed through the courts and camps of dozens of minor nobles, warlords and great regional chiefs. He rode with them, was captured by them, campaigned with them. He made many friends, and found himself offered horses, land and gifts. Some offered him their women ‘as one might offer the loan of a horse’. One ruler promised him his sister and two provinces. ‘For a moment I was tempted, having my full share (and a little more) of youthful folly, loving adventure, not being averse to war.’ But he moved on, to other valleys, other forested regions, other noble feuds.
War, he found, drove the ambition and passion of every Ethiopian highlander. War was a way of life, an end in itself. When the big rains finished in September, the month of Meskerem, and the rivers began to recede, the entire country stirred to the sound of the negarits, the recruiting drums. In tens of thousands, men then flocked to their shum, sitting astride his caparisoned mount in a thigh-length shirt of coloured silk, with a lion’s-mane cape over his shoulder.
Plowden’s enthusiasm for this world bubbles from every page of his writing. He was intrigued by its unseen codes and hierarchies. Followers outnumbered the fighting forces by as many as two to one. When Ras
