6 JULY 1985, Page 21

Waugh in Abyssinia

Sir: Donat Gallaher (Letters, 1 June) might have checked his own favourable Opinion of Waugh in Abyssinia less with contemporary reviews or with the author himself (unlikely after all to condemn his OW n book!) and more with those most Closely concerned, the Ethiopians. Specifically, Mr Gallaher attacks your re- viewer Mr Anthony Mockler on the grounds that 'any factual statement differ- ing from his own impression no doubt becomes a howler' (Mr Mockler had writ- ten of Evelyn Waugh's first long and historical chapter that it was both slanted and full of 'howlers'). The trouble is that so many of Waugh's 'factual statements' are simply not factual at all. Any Ethiopian, even nowadays, could have informed Mr Gallaher that Haile Selassie's father Ras Mekonnen was not the Emperor Menelik's 'nephew'. This is arguably a mere slip, though hardly reassuring to find an author slipping on so elementary a point. But what is one to make of, for instance, Waugh's statement that 'the real Emperor was in chains, none knew where'? First of all Lij Iyasu, Mene- lik's son (here referred to), never was Emperor. Secondly, everyone knew where he was imprisoned — first in Fische under my grandfather Ras Kassa's guard and later after his escape at Garamuleta in the priest Aba Hannah's custody. And by 'everyone' I mean not only all Ethiopians but all foreign journalists who — unlike Evelyn Waugh — took the trouble to make the minimum of enquiries while in our country and to avoid mere sensationalism when back in their own.

More importantly as regards the general bias of the chapter, may I ask Mr Gallaher to reread generally this paragraph: 'The Abyssinians had nothing to give their subject peoples, nothing to teach them. They brought no crafts or knowledge, no new system of agriculture, drainage or roadmaking, no medicine or hygiene, no higher political organisation, no superior- ity except in their magazine rifles and belts of cartridges. They built nothing; they squatted in the villages in the thatched huts of the conquered people, dirty, idle and domineering, burning the timber, devour- ing the crops, taxing the meagre stream of commerce that seeped in from outside, enslaving the people.'

This is Evelyn Waugh's considered view of the only literate and Christian culture in black Africa, a civilisation politically and religiously structured when Mr Gallaher's ancestors were wearing woad. 'The new regime is going to succeed,' Waugh con- cluded, writing of our Italian conquerors — again erroneously. It is not Anthony Mockler's but Evelyn Waugh's 'excitable imagination' and his own lack of balance that Mr Gallaher ought to ponder and condemn.

Rebecca Asrate Kassa

158F Bethune Road, London N16