The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat

by Ryzard Kapuscinski

  Z. S.-K.:

  A year after the Gojam uprising—which by showing the furious and unrelenting face of the people stirred the Palace and threw a fright into the dignitaries (and not only them: we servants also started getting the creeps)—a singular misfortune happened to me: my son Hailu, a university student in those depressing years, began to think. That’s right, he began to think, and I must explain to you, my friend, that in those days thinking was a painful inconvenience and a troubling deformity. His Unexcelled Majesty, in his incessant care for the good and comfort of his subjects, never spared any efforts to protect them from this inconvenience and deformity. Why should they waste the time that ought to be devoted to the cause of development, why should they disturb their internal peace and stuff their heads with all sorts of disloyal ideas? Nothing decent or comforting could result if someone decided to think restlessly and provocatively or mingle with those who were thinking. And yet my harebrained son committed exactly that indiscretion. My wife was the first to notice it. Her maternal instinct told her that dark clouds were gathering over our home, and she said to me one day, “Hailu must have started to think. You can see that he’s sad.” That’s how it was then. Those who surveyed the Empire and pondered their surroundings walked sadly and lost in thought, their eyes full of troubled pensiveness, as if they had a presentiment of something vague and unspeakable. Most often one saw such faces among students, who, let me add, were causing His Majesty a lot of grief. It truly amazes me that the police never caught the scent, the connection between thinking and mood. Had they made that discovery in time they could easily have neutralized these thinkers, who by their snorting and malicious reluctance to show satisfaction brought so many troubles and afflictions on His Venerable Majesty’s head.

  The Emperor, however, showing more perspicacity than his police, understood that sadness can drive one to thinking, disappointment, waffling, and shuffling, and so he ordered distractions, merriment, festivities, and masquerades for the whole Empire. His Noble Majesty himself had the Palace illuminated, threw banquets for the poor, and incited people to gaiety. When they had guzzled and gamboled, they gave praise to their King. This went on for years, and the distractions so filled people’s heads, so corked them up, that they could talk of nothing but having fun. Our feet are bare, but we’re debonair, hey ho! Only the thinkers, who saw everything getting gray, shrunken, mud-splashed, and moldy, skipped the jokes and the merriment. They became a nuisance. The unthinking ones were wiser; they didn’t let themselves get taken in, and when the students started holding rallies and talking, the nonthinkers stuffed their ears and made themselves scarce. What’s the use of knowing, when it’s better not to know? Why do it the hard way, when it can be easy? Why talk, if you’re better off keeping your mouth shut? Why get mixed up in the affairs of the Empire, when there’s so much to do closer to home, when there’s shopping to be done?

  Well, my friend, seeing what a dangerous course my son was sailing, I tried to dissuade him, to encourage him to participate in amusements, to send him on excursions. I would even have preferred that he devote himself to nightlife rather than to those damned demonstrations and conspiracies. Just imagine my pain, my distress: the father in the Palace, the son in the anti-Palace. In the streets I’m protected by the police from my own son, who demonstrates and throws rocks. I told him over and over again, “Why don’t you give up thinking? It doesn’t get you anywhere. Forget it. Fool around instead. Look at other people, those who listen to the wise—how cheerfully they walk around, laugh. No clouds on their foreheads. They devote themselves to the good life, and if they worry about anything it’s about how to fill their pockets, and to such concerns and solicitations His Majesty is always kindly inclined, always thinking of how to make things smooth and cozy.” “And how,” asks Hailu, “can there be a contradiction between a person who thinks and a wise person? If a person doesn’t think, he’s a fool.” “Not at all,” I say. “Wise he still is—it’s just that he has directed his thoughts to a safe, sheltered place, and not between rumbling, crushing millstones.” But it was too late. Hailu was already living in a different world; by then the university, located not far from the Palace, had turned itself into a real anti-Palace where only the brave set foot, and the space between the court and the university increasingly resembled a battlefield on which the fate of the Empire was being decided.

  His thoughts return to the December events, when the commander of the Imperial Guard, Mengistu Neway, came to the university to show the students the dry bread with which the rebels had fed those closest to the Emperor. This event was a shock that the students never forgot. One of Haile Selassie’s closest and most trusted officers represented the Emperor—a divine being, with supernatural attributes—as a man who tolerated corruption in the Palace, defended a backward system, and accepted the misery of millions of his subjects. That day the fight began, and the university never again knew peace. The tumultuous conflict between the Palace and the university, lasting almost fourteen years, engulfed scores of victims and ended only with the overthrow of the Emperor.

  In those years there existed two images of Haile Selassie. One, known to international opinion, presented the Emperor as a rather exotic, gallant monarch, distinguished by indefatigable energy, a sharp mind, and profound sensitivity, a man who made a stand against Mussolini, recovered his Empire and his throne, and had ambitions of developing his country and playing an important role in the world. The other image, formed gradually by a critical and initially small segment of Ethiopian opinion, showed the monarch as a ruler committed to defending his power at any cost, a man who was above all a great demagogue and a theatrical paternalist who used words and gestures to mask the corruption and servility of a ruling elite that he had created and coddled. And, as often happens, both these images were correct. Haile Selassie had a complex personality, and to some he was full of charm while among others he provoked hatred. Some adored him, while others cursed him. He ruled a country that knew only the cruelest methods of fighting for power (or of keeping it), in which free elections were replaced by poison and the dagger, discussions by shooting and the gallows. He was a product of this tradition, and he himself fell back upon it. Yet at the same time he understood that there was an impossibility in it, that it was out of touch with the new world. But he could not change the system that kept him in power, and for him power came first. Hence the flights into demagoguery, into ceremony, into speeches about development—all so very empty in this country of oppressive misery and ignorance. He was a most amiable personage, a shrewd politician, a tragic father, a pathological miser. He condemned innocence to death and pardoned guilt. Whims of power, labyrinths of Palace politics, ambiguity, darkness that no one could penetrate.

  Z. S.-K.:

  Immediately after the Gojam uprising, Prince Kassa wanted to gather loyal students and stage a demonstration in support of the Emperor. Everything was prepared, portraits and banners, when His Noble Majesty found out about it and rebuked the prince sharply. All demonstrations were out of the question. They begin with support and end up with invective. They start with cheering, and end with shooting. Once more, my friend, you see here the awe-inspiring prescience of His Supreme Highness. In the general confusion they didn’t manage to call off the demonstration. When the march of the supporters, composed of policemen disguised as students, started, a great and rebellious mass of real students quickly joined it, this ominous rabble started rolling toward the Palace, and there was no other solution but to bring out the army to enforce the restoration of order. In this unfortunate confrontation, which ended in bloodshed, the leader of the students, Tilahum Gizaw, perished. What an irony it was that several of the policemen died, too, and yet were they not completely innocent? This, I remember, was at the end of 1969.

  The next day was awful for me. Hailu and all his friends went to the funeral, and such a crowd gathered at the coffin that it turned into a new demonstration. The continuous ferment and unrest in the capital could no
longer be tolerated, so His Distinguished Majesty sent in armored personnel carriers and commanded that order be restored in no uncertain terms. As a result more than twenty students perished and countless others were wounded and arrested. His Highness ordered that the university be closed for a year, thus saving the lives of many young people. Because if they had been studying, demonstrating, and storming the Palace, the Emperor would have had to respond again by clubbing, shooting, and spilling blood.

  THE COLLAPSE

  It is an amazing thing, the extraordinary feeling of security in which all those tenants of the highest and middle stories of the social edifice were living when the revolution broke out. In all naïveté of spirit they were discoursing on the people’s virtues, greatness, and loyalty, of their innocent joys, when the year ’93 was hanging over them : a comic and terrible sight.

  (de Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime and the Revolution)

  And something else besides, something invisible, a directing spirit of perdition that dwelt within.

  (Conrad, Lord Jim)

  On the other hand, the courtiers of Justinian who stayed at his side in the palace until the late hours had the impression that, instead of him, they saw a strange phantom. One of them claimed that the Emperor would spring suddenly from the throne and start pacing up and down the chamber (indeed, he could no longer stay in one place); all of a sudden Justinian’s head would disappear, but the body would go on pacing. The courtier, thinking his eyesight had betrayed him, stood for a long while helpless and confused. Afterward, however, when the head returned to its place on the torso, he found himself amazed to see what had not been there a moment ago.

  (Procopius, The Secret History)

  Next I ask myself the question, Where is it all now? Smoke, ashes, fable. Or perhaps it is no longer even a fable.

  (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations)

  Nobody’s candle keeps burning until the very dawn.

  (Ivo Andric, The Consuls of Their Imperial Highnesses)

  M. S.

  For many years I served as mortarman to His Most Extraordinary Highness. I used to set up the mortar near the place where the kindly monarch gave feasts for the poor, who craved food. As the banquet was ending, I would fire a series of projectiles. When they burst, these projectiles re-leased a colored cloud that slowly floated to the ground—colored handkerchiefs bearing the likeness of the Emperor. The people crowded, pushing each other, stretching out their hands, everyone wanting to return home with a picture of His Highness that had miraculously dropped from the sky.

  A. A.:

  Nobody, but nobody, my friend, had any foreboding that the end was drawing near. Or rather, one did sense something, something haunting, but so vague, so indistinct, that it was not like a presentiment of the extraordinary. For a long time there had been a valet de chambre who floated around the Palace, turning off lights here and there. But one’s eyes got used to the dimness, and there followed a comfortable inner resignation to the fact that everything had to be turned off, extinguished, obscured. What’s more, shameful disorder crept into the Empire, disorder that caused annoyance to the whole Palace, but most of all to our Minister of Information, Mr. Tesfaye Gebre-Egzy, later shot by the rebels who rule today.

  This is how it began. In 1973, in the summer, a certain Jonathan Dimbleby, a journalist from London television, came to our country. He had visited the Empire before and made commendable films about His Supreme Majesty, and so it occurred to no one that such a journalist, who had earlier praised, would dare to criticize later. But such is obviously the dastardly nature of people without dignity or faith. Anyway, this time, instead of showing how His Highness attends to development and cares for the prosperity of the little ones, Dimbleby went up north, from where he supposedly returned perturbed and shaken. Right away he left for England. A month hadn’t passed when a report came from our embassy there that Mr. Dimbleby had shown a film entitled Ethiopia: The Unknown Famine on London TV, in which this unprincipled calumniator pulled the demagogic trick of showing thousands of people dying of hunger, and next to that His Venerable Highness feasting with dignitaries. Then he showed roads on which scores of poor, famished skeletons were lying, and immediately afterward our airplanes bringing champagne and caviar from Europe. Here, whole fields of dying scrags; there, His Highness serving meat to his dogs from a silver platter. This, then that: splendor—misery, riches—despair, corruption—death. In addition, Mr. Dimbleby announced that hunger had already caused the death of a hundred thousand people, perhaps even two hundred thousand, and that twice that number might share their fate in the very near future. The report from the embassy said that after the film was shown, a great scandal broke out in London. There were appeals to Parliament, the newspapers raised alarms, His Royal Highness was condemned.

  Here you can see, my friend, the irresponsibility of the foreign press, which like Mr. Dimbleby praised our monarch for years and then suddenly, without any rhyme or reason, condemned him. Why? Why such treason and immorality? The embassy reports that a whole airplaneload of European journalists is taking off from London, to come see death from hunger, to know our reality, and to determine where the money goes that their governments have given to His August Majesty for development, catching up, and surpassing. Bluntly speaking, interference in the internal affairs of the Empire! In the Palace, commotion and indignation, but His Most Singular Highness counsels calm and discretion. Now we await the highest decisions. Right away voices sound for recalling the ambassador, who sent such unpleasant and alarming reports and brought so much unrest into the Palace. However, the Minister of Foreign Affairs argues that such a recall will put fear into the remaining ambassadors and make them stop reporting, and yet His Venerable Highness needs to know what is said about him in various parts of the world. Next the members of the Crown Council speak up, demanding that the airplane carrying the journalists be turned back and that none of the blasphemous rabble be let into the Empire. But how, asks the Minister of Information, can we not let them in? They’ll raise hell and condemn His Gracious Majesty more than ever.

  After much deliberation they decide to offer His Benevolent Highness the following solution: let them in, but deny the hunger. Keep them in Addis Ababa, show them the development, and let them write only what can be read in our newspapers. And I’ll go so far, my friend, as to say that we had a loyal press—yes, loyal in an exemplary way. To tell the truth, there wasn’t much of it, because for over thirty million subjects twenty-five thousand copies were printed daily, but His Highness worked on the assumption that even the most loyal press should not be given in abundance, because that might create a habit of reading, and from there it is only a single step to the habit of thinking, and it is well known what inconveniences, vexations, troubles, and worries thinking causes. For even what is written loyally can be read disloyally. Someone will start to read a loyal text, then he will want a disloyal one, and so he will follow the road that leads him away from the throne, away from development, and straight toward the malcontents. No, no, His Majesty could not allow such demoralization to happen, such straying, and that’s why in general he wasn’t an enthusiast of excessive reading.

  Soon afterward we suffered a real invasion of foreign correspondents. A press conference took place immediately after their arrival. “What,” they ask, “does the problem of death from hunger, which decimates the population, look like?” “I know nothing of any such matter,” answers the Minister of Information, and I must tell you, friend, that he wasn’t far from the truth. First of all, death from hunger had existed in our Empire for hundreds of years, an everyday, natural thing, and it never occurred to anyone to make any noise about it. Drought would come and the earth would dry up, the cattle would drop dead, the peasants would starve. Ordinary, in accordance with the laws of nature and the eternal order of things. Since this was eternal and normal, none of the dignitaries would dare to bother His Most Exalted Highness with the news that in such and such a province a given person had died of hu
nger. Of course, His Benevolent Highness visited the provinces himself, but it was not his custom to stop in poor regions where there was hunger, and anyway how much can one see during official visits? Palace people didn’t spend much time in the provinces either, because it was enough for a man to leave the Palace and they would gossip about him, report on him, so that when he came back he would find that his enemies had moved him closer to the street. So how were we to know that there was unusual hunger up north?

  “Can we,” ask the correspondents, “go north?” “No, you can’t,” explains the minister, “because the roads are full of bandits.” Again, I must remark, he wasn’t far from the truth, because increased incidents of armed disloyalty near highways all over the Empire had been much reported of late. And then the minister took them for an excursion around the capital, showing them factories and praising the development. But with that gang, forget it! They don’t want devel opment, they demand hunger and that’s all there is to it. “Well,” says the minister, “you won’t get hunger. How can there be hunger if there is development?”

  But here, my friend, there was a new development. Our rebellious students sent their delegates north, and they came back with photographs and terrible stories about how the nation is dying—and all this they passed along to the correspondents on the sly. So a scandal broke out. You could no longer say that there was no hunger. And once more the correspondents attack, they wave the pictures, they ask what the government has done about hunger. “His Most Supreme Majesty,” the minister answers, “has attached the utmost importance to this matter.” “But specifically! Specifically what?” this devilish rabble cries disrespectfully. “His Majesty,” the minister says calmly, “will announce in due time his intended royal decisions, assignments, and directions, because it is not fitting for ministers to do so.” Finally the correspondents flew away, without seeing hunger close up. And this whole affair, conducted so smoothly and in such a dignified manner, the minister considered a success and our press called a victory, which was fine, but we feared that if the minister were to disappear tomorrow we would have nothing but sorrow. And that was exactly what happened later, when the rebels put him against the wall.