Books: Dark Past:HAILE SELASSIE’S WAR

The image of Ethiopia is the face of famine. Hollow cheeks and desolate eyes are symbols of the country’s present catastrophe. But they say nothing about its astonishing past. Today it is hard to recall Haile Selassie, King of Kings, Conquering Lion of Judah, who reigned as Emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 until 1974, when he was deposed at the age of 82, less than a year before his death. A half-century ago, Haile Selassie was an international hero. In 1935, Ethiopia, also known as Abyssinia, consumed almost as much editorial space as it does today. But the world was worried less about its citizens than about its independence. For in that year Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini threw his Fascist legions against the East African nation.

British Historian Anthony Mockler calls his book Haile Selassie’s War because it thrusts the wily, ambitious little (5 ft. 4 in.) Emperor onto center stage as the noble foe of Fascism. In fact, the war began almost 40 years earlier, when an imperial army of 16,000 Italians engaged the forces of the Ethiopian Emperor Men-elik II at the Battle of Adowa and suffered a humiliating defeat.

The memory of Adowa poisoned relations between the two countries. Finally, a bloody border incident in 1934 on the frontier between Ethiopia and Italian Somaliland provided the incendiary device. Ethiopia protested to the League of Nations, an act, suggests Mockler, that goaded the vainglorious Duce into war. On Oct. 3, 1935, 100,000 Italian troops began their invasion.

In the counterattack, Ethiopian soldiers took only five prisoners. They did not understand the Italian arms-up attitude of surrender, Mockler reports, and simply found an enemy thus exposed an even more convenient target for rifle or scimitar. The invaders retaliated with mustard gas, dropped by plane. The war was won from the air. Seven months after the invasion, Ethiopia was defeated, annexed, and soon turned into a rigid Fascist colony.

Yet subjugation was never complete. An assassination attempt against a group of Italian overlords prompted murderous reprisals. They in turn ignited a guerrilla campaign (a tactic Mockler thinks the Ethiopians should have used from the beginning instead of suicidal frontal assaults). But not until Britain and Italy opposed each other in World War II did Italy’s grip truly loosen. One of the attacking British contingents was a motley group called Gideon Force, led by Palestine Veteran and ardent Zionist Orde Wingate. Escorted by the force, Haile Selassie re-entered Addis Ababa in triumph in 1941.

Mockler suggests the essentials of his characters in swift strokes. “I am not happy,” Wingate confides to a subordinate. “But then, I have been thinking, no great man ever was really happy.” And the author is an excellent guide through the winding complexities of Ethiopian culture, its ancient Coptic Christian religion and its legendary past (the first Emperor, Menelik I, was purported to be the son of the biblical King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba).

But even he can only unravel, he cannot explain. Before the war, reports the author, Haile Selassie had set about turning his country into a modern nation, hoping to learn, as Japan had quickly done, from Europe and America. Restored to his throne, however, he did less to open his country to the future than to close it within the past, preserving outworn traditions, and his own tenure, long after their usefulness had passed.

With detailed genealogies, biographies, photographs and maps, the historian traverses ground that has since been overrun by tyrannies and famine. The arena is variously host to epic, comedy and finally tragedy, and it houses enough intrigue to fill a shelf. Here is the gigantic face of Mussolini, carved out of East African rock, a modern sphinx without a secret. Here is Haile Selassie, dwarfed behind a desk only slightly smaller than an aircraft carrier. Here is Sir Sidney Barton, the eccentric British envoy who provided the model for Sir Samson Courteney in Evelyn Waugh’s farce Black Mischief. Here are camels and trucks, scimitars and machine guns, lions and airplanes in a clash of politics and, more significantly, of centuries. It is a tribute to Mockler that he has managed to make this convoluted tale lucid and compelling. Still, he needed some five decades to go by before the sorrows of Ethiopia could be seen in light of the calamities of Abyssinia. –By Mayo Mohs