The lion of Africa

Richard West

Haile Selassie's War Anthony Mockler (Oxford £17.50)

Soon after the fall of Prince Norodom , Sihanouk of Cambodia, I went off to Ethiopia, the only other country I knew that still enjoyed a civilisation largely unspoilt by the inventions and ideologies of the 20th century. On the Emperor's 80th birthday, 23 July 1972, I joined the multi- tude of his subjects who covered the hillside beneath the Grand Palace — the soldiers with bare feet and bandoliers over the shoulders, scowling old men with staves, maidens in white muslin, hundreds of scruffy priests, a bishop with a movie camera, and one old fellow who bought a double bass as a present. The noise of Ululation thrilled over what is at once a city and village, where sheep, goats, hyenas, Jackals, pie-dogs and kites scavenge among the mud huts and the crumbling office, blocks. The Emperor stood on his balcony, as the band played Colonel Bogey. That evening, he gave a feast for almost the Whole nobility of the country. I got a place at one of the furthest tables, among the most junior rasses, who assured me that we were drinking 'the very best mead' and raw meat from the 'very best bulls'. At the feast, as at the Palace earlier and on the Many occasions I saw him at state func- tions, or taking a stroll in Dire Dawa, Haile Selassie seemed dignified, quite un- afraid of assassins, a man at peace with himself and his subjects, or as Evelyn Waugh had described him in 1930: '. . . a small, elegant figure, Oriental rather than African, formal, circumspect, inscrutable

• • Even in 1930, at his coronation, Haile Selassie had ruled the country for 14 years.

It seemed to me in 1972 that the life of. Haile Selassie, which is much the same thing as the modern history of his country, was a subject in need of a book. There was at that time almost nothing about Ethiopia between the laborious works of a few scholars and Evelyn Waugh's satirical novels. The countless writers and journal- istswho went to Ethiopia during the war against Italy failed to discover what actual- lY happened on the battlefield, and what

information there was came from Italian sources. Even those foreigners who sup-. ported the Ethiopian cause were inclined to underestimate the skill of Haile Selassie as a diplomat and a general. There was a good book on Ethiopia crying out to be written, and now Anthony Mockler has written it. One cannot say that it is the best book on the subject because it is virtually the only book, but it is very well researched, entertainingly presented and fair in its judgment. It also explains, for the first time, how and why Italy conquered Ethiopia in 1936 and lost it again in 1941.

The book opens, as it should, with the Battle of Adowa in 1896 when the Italians were defeated in their first invasion of Ethiopia. However, Mr Mockler refutes the legend of an Italian army over-run by hordes of savages. The Ethiopians were

appalled at having to fight fellow Christ- ians. Far from slaughtering and castrating the vanquished Italians, the Ethiopians took them prisoner and treated them kind- ly. In the next invasion, beginning in 1935,

the savagery was worse on the Italian side.

From Mr Mockler's detailed but never obscure account of this war, it appears that the Ethiopians might have held on or even triumphed if they had used guerrilla tactics to offset Italy's advantage in planes, artil- lery, poison gas and wireless communica- tions. Even so, the Ethiopians very nearly won the conventional pitched Battle of Mai Ceu.

At the time, it was said that Haile Selassie failed as a general but triumphed

as a diplomat in winning the sympathy of

the League of Nations and Western liberal opinion. In Mr Mockler's opinion, the Emperor made one of his few errors by going to the League of Nations and thus forcing Mussolini to carry out his invasion rather than lose face. Western sympathy did no good. However, Mr Mockler thinks. that the Emperor was wise to escape from Ethiopia before the fall of Addis Ababa rather than staying on as a guerrilla leader. Such a resistance would have produced appalling casualties. Even the few terrorist

acts of resistance, such as the bombs at Addis Ababa in February 1937, brought down atrocious reprisals from the Italian

Fascists. The loathsome Graziani ordered the execution not only of prisoners and political suspects but also of 'soothsayers, fortune-tellers, bards, and suspicious vaga- bonds'.

It is hardly surprising that most Ethio- pians welcomed the Emperor back with the British army in 1941, although Mr Mockler makes it clear that the Italians were popu- lar in their established colonies of Somali- land and Eritrea. His acount of this second and shorter war is fuller than that of the earlier war, because there is more docu- mentation. Although Mr Mockler does not dismiss General Wingate as a fanatic and charlatan, he makes it clear that 'Gideon Force' played only a small part in defeating Italy, compared to the more conventional force from Kenya. He does debunk some of the received notions about that war. The Italians, when they were well led, fought well. Some of the British units ran away. General Cunningham, who believed impli- citly in the racial superiority of whites over blacks, was puzzled to find that the Gold Coast and Nigerian troops under his own command behaved heroically, while his South African troops were gun-shy.

In his preface, Anthony Mockler writes that the book 'has no particular hero and no particular villain', but he nevertheless has a huge and justified admiration for Haile Selassie, and little sympathy for the Italian Fascists or for the Russian Com- munists who eventually overthrew him. It is sad to read this book and recall that Haile Selassie's empire has now been seized by bloodthirsty ideologues, bringing behind them war, famine and pestilence.

My only complaint about Anthony Mockler's book should be levelled against his publishers. He says in the preface: 'The original manuscript was over three times the present length. An Italian translation, Published by Rizzoli under the title 11 Mito dell'Impero, though already much short- ened from the original, is perhaps twice as long as this, and its existence ought there- fore to be mentioned if only for the benefit of serious students of the period who read Italian.' Considering how many utterly worthless books about Africa. are pub- lished every year, it is a scandal that Mr Mockler could not find a publisher for this history in its full version, in two volumes if necessary. Perhaps the Oxford University Press can no longer find the time to publish Proper books between the trendy antholo- gies of homosexual verse and a dictionary of quotations, with Sliakespeare and the Bible cut down to make room for the sayings of TV comedians.