Black Dove, White Raven

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  • Haile Selassie didn’t actually acquire his Beechcraft airplane until November 1935. I had it arrive a few months earlier so Teo could take his flight test in it.

  • I made up the battle of Aksum and the occupation of the airfield there. Most Western accounts take the line that there was no bloodshed when Aksum fell to the Italians in October 1935; I’ve taken my line from reports in contemporary Australian newspapers that there was ‘a short attack in which aeroplanes participated’.

  • I made up Amba Kwala and its hidden airfield, mainly because I made up all the pilots who are stationed there. But Amba Kwala is not unlike Mai Edaga in Eritrea, where the Regia Aeronautica based a number of Romeo Ro.1s for terrestrial reconnaissance.

  • I also made up the character who appears as the Guardian of the Ark, an individual who must have had a real counterpart whose history I do not know.

  This raises the whole issue of mixing up invented characters with people who really existed. In my earlier books, my imaginary hero Telemakos interacts extensively with two important real historical figures: the Aksumite emperor Gebre Meskal and his contemporary Abreha, the elected king of Southern Arabia. In Black Dove, White Raven, it feels almost sacrilegious to introduce the emperor Haile Selassie in a speaking role; yet his involvement in the Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935–36 is so integral to the historical situation that I felt it was impossible to tell the story without making him a character in it, particularly since the Imperial Ethiopian Air Force at the time was so very small and so very close to the emperor.

  In addition, several of the pilots mentioned in this book were real, or were based on real people. John Robinson, often credited with being the man who provided the initial impetus for the piloting program at Tuskegee Institute, was in fact the only American pilot of the Chicago-based Challenger Air Pilots’ Association to make it to Ethiopia (a passport issue, of course). Robinson’s dedication to the Ethiopian Air Force is astonishing – as well as training Ethiopian pilots, he was essentially the emperor’s private air chauffeur throughout the war until Haile Selassie went into exile in Europe. After World War II, Robinson returned to Ethiopia where he continued to train pilots both civilian and military, and helped lay the groundwork to establish Ethiopian Airlines. In Black Dove, White Raven, his imaginary colleague and second-in-command, Billy Cooper, is loosely based on Robinson himself.

  My invented Horatio Augustus is based on Hubert Julian, a flamboyant figure who is only thinly disguised in this book. It’s impossible to write about Julian, even under a pseudonym, without making him recognisable; he really did jump out of a plane over New York City playing the saxophone, he really did wreck the Ethiopian emperor’s private plane in the coronation rehearsal, and he really did provoke a fistfight with John Robinson on their meeting in Addis Ababa. The contrast between Robinson’s steady dedication and Julian’s flair for the dramatic was as evident in real life as it is in my fictional portraits of Cooper and Augustus. Julian constantly risked reinforcing the minstrel-show stereotype of the black man as a buffoon; Robinson was so self-effacing in his quiet persistence that few whites took public notice of his achievements. The rarefied air of early aviation, not to mention Imperial Ethiopia, turned both men into innovators and high achievers. I have tried to sketch them sympathetically.

  The pilot Bessie Coleman, Rhoda and Delia’s early mentor, really was the first black woman to earn an International Pilot’s Licence – indeed, she was the first American of any colour or either sex to do so. It is true that no one would give her flight lessons in the United States. Determined to get in the air, she took a language course and went to France to learn to fly. It’s no secret that I take my inspiration from early women pilots, and increasingly I’m intrigued by those who had to overcome barriers of colour as well as of sex. More even than Bessie Coleman, I’m fascinated by Willa Brown, another founding member of the Challenger Air Pilots’ Association. She held a master’s degree in business administration and was the first African-American woman to earn an American private pilot’s licence, the first to become an officer in the Civil Air Patrol, the first to become a commercial pilot, and the first to run for Congress. She was one of the eight black aviators who intended to come to Ethiopia as military support during the Italian invasion. I am in awe of such courage.

  Sinidu, my own Ethiopian aviatrix, has her inspiration in Mulumebet Emeru, who trained to fly in Addis Ababa in the early 1930s. Mulumebet had soloed but had not yet been licensed at the time of the Italian invasion. I know little about this progressive and daring pilot, but Sinidu also represents many gallant Ethiopian women who served as combatants, medics and camp followers during the Italo-Ethiopian War – such as Lekyelesh Beyan, who fought at her husband’s side under Haile Selassie at the battle of Maychew on 31 March 1936, carrying her father’s rifle and her four-month-old daughter on her back.

  Like John Robinson and Willa Brown, American blacks knew what was going on in Ethiopia in 1935 and desperately wanted to send them support. In the early 1930s there were about a hundred African-Americans and West Indians living in Addis Ababa, some of them in official positions: John West, a graduate of Howard University, worked for the Ethiopian Ministry of Education, and Dr Reuben S Young for the Ministry of Public Health. American newspapers, black and white, almost universally detested Italy’s leader, Benito Mussolini. But anti-war sentiment prevailed, which is why no passports were ever issued to the brave men and one woman in Chicago who’d planned to offer their services as pilots to the Imperial Ethiopian Air Force.

  Historians view the Italian conflict in Ethiopia as the opening gambit of World War II; the unwillingness of the League of Nations to take sides in Ethiopia mirrors their reluctance to antagonise the growing threat of Nazi Germany. Britain and France dragged their feet at interfering because they didn’t want to lose Italy as an ally against Germany (remember, Italy had been their ally against Germany in the First World War). Hitler, for his part, watched the scenario with growing confidence. Italy’s advance on Ethiopia proved the powerlessness of the League of Nations, which could not control its member nation Italy nor support its member nation Ethiopia; it proved that the United States would not interfere in global conflict; it proved that the Great Powers of Europe didn’t want to engage in battle. In 1935 Germany had already withdrawn from the League of Nations, yet even as Britain refused to give aid to the Ethiopians it negotiated the British/German Naval Treaty, in violation of more than one international agreement, which pretty much allowed Germany to build a navy superior to any in Europe. And by observing France’s response to Mussolini’s bullying manipulation, Hitler was able to assure himself he’d get no resistance from the French when, in March of 1936, as Haile Selassie’s forces were choking under Italy’s mustard gas attacks, Hitler sent the German army to take over the Rhineland.

  Mussolini was pretty shameless in his battering of Ethiopia, and in the wide-spread bombing of civilians and international aid workers there. Although I have found no reliable record of poison gas being used against international Red Cross units, it was used unscrupulously against Ethiopian troops and civilians. Mustard gas – indeed, all toxic gas – was banned under the Geneva Protocol of 1925, a term of the agreement which both Ethiopia and Italy claimed to uphold; Mussolini’s excuse for using it was as retaliation for the brutal torture and mutilation of a captured Italian airman. But it’s not clear why Mussolini’s air force also felt free to make brazen and relentless attacks on Red Cross field hospitals. Bomb attacks with explosives and incendiaries were carried out on a Swedish unit on 30 December 1935 and on a British unit on 4 March 1936, the event on which I’ve based the final scenes of this novel. Italians claimed that Ethiopians were using the Red Cross emblem to disguise military units (which is why I imagine they showed no mercy to Ezra’s makeshift indigenous field hospital). It’s also possible that the Italian commanders really wanted neutral Europeans to leave the country as the native population was being pulverised, since it would be harder for the inte
rnational press to ignore the witness of educated white men than for them to ignore barefoot Ethiopians.

  The Italian use of mustard gas against the Ethiopian forces is pretty well considered to be the tactic that destroyed Haile Selassie’s army in 1936. It’s amazing how surprised people are when I tell them this. But I didn’t know it either before I wrote this book.

  The village of Tazma Meda, the setting for much of this novel, is itself, alas, a fantasy of progressive modernism for Ethiopia in 1935. The benevolent Sinclairs are very loosely based on Daniel and Christine Sandford, who raised six children on a farm near Addis Ababa between 1920 and 1935, trading coffee and hides and assisting in setting up a ‘model province’ for the Ethiopian government in 1935. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that the Ethiopian government began to regulate coffee production; cooperatives were recognised as legal institutions in the 1960s, and coffee cooperatives became the norm only in the 1970s. Ezra, Tazma Meda’s forward-thinking educated doctor, is also my own invention. According to the International Red Cross, Ethiopia in 1935 was a country without a single qualified native doctor – doctors in the modern hospital in Addis Ababa were all European. Nevertheless, Ethiopia created its own branch of the Red Cross in July of 1935, and many trained nurses were Ethiopian, impressing even the most patronising and prejudiced of Western journalists with their cleanliness and efficiency.

  What happened to the Tabot of Zion – also known as the Ark of the Covenant – during the Italian occupation of Ethiopia is something I don’t know. It may have been removed from Aksum and hidden, but I have yet to uncover a believable official line verifying this one way or another. My personal view is this: the Ethiopian church would have been crazy not to hide it. The British looting of Magdala in 1868 was shameless: troops hauled the stolen goods out on elephants and mules and then sold off everything in an auction. Hoards of Ethiopian church treasures and illuminated manuscripts are still kept in special collections in the British Library and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, despite repeated requests for their repatriation. And speaking of looting, in 1937 the Italians hauled down the tallest of the ancient obelisks from the Necropolis at Aksum, cut it into three chunks, trucked it overland and shipped it back to Rome where it stood for over sixty years. I find it pretty inconceivable that they wouldn’t also have taken the Ark of the Covenant with them if they had been able to get their hands on it, given that there is no secret about where it is kept; or that the Ethiopians would not have instantly raised a clamouring outcry against its loss. But there is no indication that the sacred Tabot of Zion ever left the country. The story of the Aksum obelisk, incidentally, has a happy ending. In 2005, at a cost of nearly eight million dollars, Italy flew the stolen obelisk back to Aksum and re-erected it there.

  How do all the other threads of the story end? The answer is, of course, Ethiopia’s story has no real ending. It’s like The Adventures of Black Dove and White Raven, a series of episodes that continues for years and years with no closure ever anticipated by the reader. After the Italians successfully occupied Ethiopia in May 1936, the local people fought a bloody and terrible guerrilla war against the invaders that lasted five years. Haile Selassie went into exile in Europe; when Italy declared war on Britain in 1940, British troops had the excuse they needed to bring weapons into Ethiopia and drive the Italians out. Haile Selassie returned as emperor in 1941, and with the tables turned another two years of guerrilla warfare raged on, this time with the Italians on the resisting side. When World War II ended, Italians still living in Ethiopia were given a full pardon by Haile Selassie. Some of that aging few still live in Ethiopia today, their descendants speaking Amharic, proud of their mixed heritage.

  In 1974, Haile Selassie’s aging and failing regime was toppled by a military government known as the Derg (it simply means ‘council’ in Ge’ez, the ancient language of the Ethiopian church), who instituted what was essentially a reign of terror for over a decade. The Derg’s rule began a cycle of war, famine and poverty that has given this beautiful country its current perceived character in Western consciousness; yet the Ethiopian people cling tenaciously to their rich cultural history, optimism and fierce national pride. The little snapshot of Ethiopian history that this novel gives you is like a captionless picture torn out of a textbook. The scene is fascinating (I hope), but painfully alone and out of context. I hope it inspires the reader to find out more.

  This book was hard for me to write. It would never have happened without the unflagging encouragement of my agent, Ginger Clark, and the support of a number of dedicated editors: Stella Paskins, Amy Black, Lisa Yoskowitz, and – the woman who pulled this manuscript together – Kate Egan. Dr Fikre Tolossa provided careful historical notes, including the culling of information from Amharic sources to which I do not have access. And I could not write a book about modern Ethiopia without thanking Susan and Roger Whitaker, who took me there.

  This book’s successes I owe to others. Its faults are all my own.

  11th October 1943 A British spy plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France. Its pilot and passenger are best friends. One of the girls has a shot at survival. The other has lost the game before it’s barely begun.

  Devastating, shocking, compelling and inspiring – once read, never forgotten.

  Rose Justice is a young American ATA pilot, delivering planes and taxiing pilots for the RAF in the UK during the summer of 1944. A budding poet who feels most alive while flying, she discovers that not all battles are fought in the air.

  ‘I would crawl over broken glass to get Elizabeth Wein’s next book’ Author R J Anderson

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Author’s Note