Life in Ethiopia
Ethiopia Under Haile Selassie. By Christine Sandford. (J. M. Dent and Sons. 10s. 6d.) .11,•=;
MRS. SANDFOFtD is distinguished from all the other recent writers on Ethiopia whom I can call to mind by her intimate personal know- ledge of the country. She came to it first twenty-six years ago and has been closely associated with it ever since. She has kept house, farmed, doctored, taught, travelled and raised a large family in it. She has been the trusted friend of most of the great ladies of the Court and the untiring benefactress of countless humble folk in town and country. She has spoken two of its languages fluently for tweiny years. Not -long ' before Italy invaded it, and a distin- guished English peer—if I remember rightly—described its people as "bloodthirsty ruffians," she took her two daughters and a friend for a 'six weeks' ride to Lake Tsana and back with no thought of a male escort and no more sense of adventure than the suburban mother feels when she takes her offspring to the sea.
Add to this mass of experience the unique knowledge of Ethiopia gained by her husband over an even longer period and in the execution of an astounding variety of important tasks' including the reform of the Empire's most backward province and the organi- sation of the patriot movement which did so much towards the restoration of the Emperor to his throne. Garnish with the glean- ings of six active-minded and multilingual children, and I think it will be agreed that Mrs. Sandford's Ethiopian background is such as few, if any, authors on the subject have enjoyed. Against it she has sketched in her picture with a lucid pen and extreme honesty of purpose. The result, if truth still_ has value and Ethiopia any importance, is a valuable ,and important book.
When Mrs. Sandford arrived in Ethiopia the present Emperor, young in years but already old in administrative and political ex- perience, had not long been settled in the slippery saddle of the Regency. The main purpose of her book is to tell the story of his and his country's advance along the path of progress from then on. It needs no summarising, but it is notable as giving continuity to a phase of Ethiopian history which is rarely appreciated. It was the Emperor Menelik who was the first to lead Ethiopia towards a civilisation derived from the outer world. He lived in an age of expansion and concomitant violence, and the progress he sought was material rather than moral, but his whole reign was marked by progress and by increasing contact with European influences. His lapse into senility and death were followed by the reactionary regency of Taitu and the short period of misrule by Lij Yasu. But the two together covered only six years and were no sooner over than Ras Tafari Makonnen, now Haile Selassie I, took up the torch of a more idealised form of progress.
The road was rough, the pace perforce slow, but the advance, as Mrs. Sandford shows, continuous. Then came the Italian deluge. In it many of the Emperor's most valued helpers perished, and if, receding, it left some little treasure-trove, it left more slime and wreckage. But no sooner had it ebbed and the Emperor once more assumed the reins of power than his plans of progress and reform, matured in the tragic but never despairing hours of exile, were re- launched. Mrs. Sandford -is the first writer I have met to make the continuity of the planting and effort plain and to show Ethiopia, not as a barbarous country'emerging by the grace of God and Great Britain from centuries op-anarchy and a lustrum of foreign rule into an unconvincing imitation of modernity, but as a nation of centri- petal rather than centrifugal components, led by a man of incredible patience and unshaken purpose along a path which it has been his life's work to plan and up the steeps of which his people are follow- ing him with ever-increasing readiness and impetus. A book to
Previous page
