Abyssinian Johnson
Richard West
Lichfield, Staffs
Avisit to Samuel Johnson's birthplace serves to remind that he talked good sense, and about the same topics that we consider modern. He was right about Ireland and the 'persecutions against the Catholics'; he raged against the enslave- ment of Africans; he wrote against a popular war over the Falkland Islands. As the son of a Lichfield bookseller and a toiler in Grub Street, he almost certainly would have fought the proposal to add Value Added Tax on the sale of books. The Staffs Bookshop (prop. G. B. Morton: 'Welcome to our store of clean and sound secondhand books') displays a petition against the tax. 'We're going to the wall if VAT goes through,' Mr Morton told me. Poor Michael Johnson, the sage's father, was ruined by excisemen.
Knowing his views on patrons and pen- sions, one can suppose that Johnson might have joined in the present dispute on whether the Urban District Council should pay £5,000 out of the rates to the next year's Lichfield Arts Festival. The Labour
and Conservative groups are split down the middle, for once, but the Labour leader Mike Evans expresses a popular view: 'This is the fourth year we have beeIl, through this performance. If this coune" has £5,000 to spare I would rather it went to Ethiopia than to the Cathedral Arts. The plight of the Ethiopians came te mind again when I went to the market' place, which is not too altered from John. son's time, though the Three Crowns in where Boswell stayed on his only visit (an" grew very fuddled on Lichfield ale) is now a Computer Workshop, with tapes, dises etc. St Mary's Church, where Samuel Wa5, baptised, stands, though it now consists 0! an old people's day centre, a refectory fel refreshments (i.e. café), a treasury for city, church and regimental silver, a smallshl for visitors, and a Heritage Centre. Here , found a sale sponsored by Christian A for famine relief in Ethiopia. Now Samuel Johnson was, in the 18th century, acclaimed as Europe's leadin.gt authority on Ethiopia, or Abyssinia as Is was then known. At his birthplace, net.° the road from St Mary's Church, one can see a copy of Johnson's first published book a translation of Father Jerome Lobo's A Voyage to Abyssinia (Birming- ham, 1735). This translation was under- taken at the onset of Johnson's career as a hack writer, before he had even arrived at Grub Street in London, but nevertheless his imagination was caught by the subject matter. His preface, his first expression in print of his own opinions, reflects Samuel Johnson's lifelong contention that people in countries like Ethiopia, just because they are far away, are not for that reason exotic, but are similar in their manners and thought to Europeans. 'The reader will find here no region cursed with irremedi- able barrenness, or blessed with spon- taneous fecundity; no perpetual gloom or unceasing sunshine.' Indeed it appears from Fr Lobo, who went there in 1624, that Abyssinia then was as prosperous as his native Portugal, with 'innumerable cattle' and corn 'not dear, for in fruitful years, forty or fifty measures, weighing each about twenty-two pounds, may be purch- ased for a crown'. The main threat to the land came from locusts, 'the grasshoppers, that pest of Abyssinia, which carried famine and destruction over all the country'.
Johnson's interest in Abyssinia, which led him to read everything on that region, found expression in one of his best loved books, the moral fairy story Rasselas.
Although, of course, this is a work fiction, Johnson set his 'Happy Valley' among the fastnesses of the Abyssinian mountains, and the very word Rasselas may derive from the Amharic title and name, a pertinacious Ras (Prince or head of an army) Selassie (the Trinity). He accepted, on the authority of Fr Lobo, that the Abyssinian Empire stemmed from the Kingdom of Prester John, and that of these mountainous people, 'the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Amhara are the most civilised and polite'.
Soon after the publication of Rasselas (1759), Scotsman, James Bruce of Kin- naird, actually made his way into Abyssi- nia, where he spent nine years during a period of acute civil war, at last making his way back across the swamps and desert of south Sudan. As the first European to have visited Abyssinia since Fr Lobo's time, Bruce was lionised on his return in France and Italy, a fame that was spoilt for him by the discovery that his fiancée had long since married another man. He was not to be so well received in England and Scot- land. Perhaps people resented his bad temper; he had made a fool of himself by challenging the Italian count who married his Margaret Murray. Perhaps the British resented his popularity on the Continent. Perhaps they could not believe the out- landish stories he told of having discovered the source of the Nile, of burning purple winds, of chieftains wrapped in ox-gut, above all of the Abyssinian habit of cutting and eating flesh from the live bull.
It was perhaps unfortunate for Bruce that once back in Edinburgh he encoun- tered James Boswell, who interrogated him and reported what he said to the London newspapers. According to Bruce's biographer J. M. Reid (Traveller Extraor- dinary, 1968): 'James Bruce resisted and resented the questioning of a man who did not know a guinea-worm from a serpent and seemed to believe that Arabs wore wigs'. In his turn, Boswell regarded Bruce as 'a tiger that growled whenever you approached him.' Boswell reported with sarcasm Bruce's calumny of the Abyssi- nians: 'The light of the Gospel beams upon them very faintly, for they are a fierce and cruel people. Not satisfied with devouring raw flesh, their custom is to eat collops cut from live animals. A company of Abyssi- nians at dinner is a horrible spectacle.' This was an allusion to Bruce's description of feasts 'where bellowing cattle were vivisected at the door while willing princes and princesses crammed one another with raw beef and then made love in the dining room'.
Journalists were too afraid of a duel to call James Bruce a liar, though anonymous rhymers produced lines such as these:
Nor have I been where men (what loss, alas) Kill half a cow and turn the rest to grass.
James Bruce could have weathered such cheap attacks, but his whole achievement in Ethiopia was to be spoiled by the disapproval of Johnson. When Boswell taxed him on the subject — 'But has he not a nobleness of resolution?' — Johnson answered gravely: 'We are talking of his sense. A fighting cock has a nobleness of resolution.' Certainly Johnson did not like the stories of collops cut from the living bull; they clashed with his picture In Rasselas of a civilised people. Still more he resented Bruce's claim to have been the first to discover the source of the Blue Nile, which Johnson thought had been found by one of the Jesuit priests a century earlier. He told another biographer, Hat: kins, 'that when he had first conversed wit" Mr Bruce, the Abyssinian traveller, he was, very much inclined to believe that he ha, been there, but that he had afterwards altered his opinion'. The wretched Bruce and his truthful chronicle were discredited. Since Fr Lobo and James Bruce appear both to have been honest witnesses, one must conclude that during the 130 yer between their visits the wealth and civilisa- tion of Abyssinia had been in decline. It was to revive again this century under the rule of Haile Selassie, or Ras Tafari as he began. It has sunk again into barbarism, now unrelieved by the Church, since Christianity is banned. In the 17th centurY' Fr Lobo disapproved of the Coptic rites he found in the Abyssinian churches. Now would find most of the churches shut. A has changed except that the Amhara peo- ple, like General Mengistu, still lord it over the tribes of the north.
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