I Didn't Do It for You

by Michela Wrong

  ‘Swear to me by thy God, the God of Israel, that thou wilt not take me by force,’ demands the anxious Queen, sensing something is afoot. Solomon agrees, but on one condition: she, too, must promise not to take anything of his by force. When Makeda wakes in the night with a raging thirst and reaches for a jug, Solomon grabs her hand: she is about to break her promise, he claims, for what could be more precious to him than water? ‘He permitted her to drink water, and after she had drunk water he worked his will with her,’ records the Kebra Negast. The strip cartoon paintings that tell the story show first one female head on the pillow, then a male and a female head together: the relationship has been consummated. If she has been tricked into sex, the Queen of Sheba is usually portrayed as accepting the fact with philosophical resignation–the paintings often show the faintest of post-coital smirks.

  This is not to be a lasting union, for Makeda must return to her kingdom. But on the long trip home she gives birth to a son, Menelik, the great founding leader from whom Ethiopia’s long line of emperors will be descended. When the boy comes of age, he goes to Jerusalem to meet his father, who showers him in gold and silver and offers him the throne of Israel. But Menelik, like his mother, decides to return to Ethiopia, taking a retinue of noblemen’s sons. It is only when his convoy reaches the Red Sea that these young Israelis confess what they did before leaving. Stealing into Jerusalem’s Temple, they have removed the Ark of the Covenant. Menelik, they say, must take the holy vessel, possessed of terrifying divine powers, into Ethiopia to guide him and his royal successors. The theft appears to have God’s blessing, for when a furious Solomon sends troops to retrieve the Ark, the Archangel Michael marches before Menelik and his followers, allowing them to walk across the water. ‘Everyone travelled in the wagons like a ship on the sea when the wind bloweth, like a bat in the air and like an eagle when his body glideth above the wind.’

  Although Solomon was to live another 11 years, ‘his heart turned aside from the love of God, and he forgot his wisdom, through his excessive love of women’. Both he and his nation had paid a high price for his libido. For in allowing the Ark to leave Jerusalem, the Kebra Negast made clear, God removed his special favour from Israel and transferred it to Ethiopia, a kingdom which could trace its lineage, via Solomon, back to Adam himself. ‘And now God hath chosen thee to be the servant of the holy and heavenly Zion, the Tabernacle of the Law of God,’ Menelik was told, ‘and it shall be a guide to thee for ever, thee and to thy seed after thee.’ Axum was the new Zion. If Axum’s empire flourished, it was thanks to the divine favour made manifest in the Ark, and when word of Jesus Christ was brought to the city in the fourth century by two young boys, it was hardly surprising that the Ethiopians embraced it as the word of God, while the Jews, who had lost their way, foolishly rejected the Messiah.

  The myth of the Queen of Sheba was a gift to any prospective ruler. If he could only establish a blood link with the great Menelik I, then his claim to supreme power was theoretically safe from challenge. His reign was not of this world, but divinely ordained. No wonder so many of Ethiopia’s leaders were ready to draw the most contorted of family trees, seeking to establish a connection with the royal Solomonic dynasty that sprang from Menelik’s loins.

  The Ethiopian monarchs were hardly the first to try and pull off the trick of heavenly endorsement. Egypt’s pharaohs presented themselves as incarnations of the Sun-God; Charles Stuart, King of England, famously proclaimed the Divine Right of Kings. But the time of pharaohs expired with Cleopatra in 30 BC. King Charles I was executed in the mid-17th century, his claim to special status rejected by parliament. What is unnerving about the Queen of Sheba legend is that it is not a quaint historical tale. The claim that Ethiopia’s rulers were descended from Sheba and Solomon would be enshrined in the country’s constitution as late as 1955. Haile Selassie, routinely addressed as ‘Emperor of Ethiopia, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Elect of God, Light of the World’, 225th descendant of Sheba and Solomon, was still insisting on his direct link with the supreme deity in the middle of the 20th century, era of television, the combustion engine and the jet plane.

  No one knows for certain whether the Queen of Sheba ever existed or, if she did, where her kingdom actually stretched. Yemen, unimpressed by Ethiopia’s supposed bond, has claimed her as its own. While the Old Testament certainly mentions a love affair between Sheba and Solomon, celebrated in the erotic Song of Songs, it makes no reference to a son of theirs stealing the Ark, which simply disappears, without explanation, from the narrative. The Axumite empire itself, so intimately associated with Makeda, was probably founded hundreds of years after her supposed reign. And the notion that Axum’s sophisticated skills can be attributed to a Semitic exodus from across the Red Sea has been shaken by excavations revealing the existence in Eritrea of settled communities dating back to 800 BC.

  But none of this really matters. Tourists visiting Axum today are told by their guides, speaking with a quiet certainty, that inside the church of St Mary of Zion, only ever glimpsed by the official guardian, lies the Ark of the Covenant. In each of Ethiopia’s 35,000 Orthodox churches rests at least one tabot, a wooden replica of this most feared and venerated of objects, constant reminder of a nation’s special relationship with God. Told and retold by Ethiopia’s 500,000-strong clergy, the Solomonic myth seeped into the national psyche, justifying a deep-rooted sense of racial and cultural superiority. It is possible to know in one’s head that something is a fable, while feeling in one’s heart it holds an essential truth. I once asked the manager of a computer school in the northern town of Mekelle whether he really believed the Ark was in Axum, expecting a sceptical response from a young Ethiopian at ease with Microsoft Word and Google. ‘Where else would it be?’ he replied, with genuine puzzlement. His contemporaries in Addis are more prone to dismiss the Queen of Sheba story as picturesque mumbo jumbo, believed only by their fathers’ churchgoing generation. But ask them if they feel Ethiopia is part of Africa and they respond with what only seems a non-sequitur: ‘We are an ancient civilization, we go back more than 3,000 years.’ Featured on coffee packets and tea towels, painted on restaurant ceilings and shop walls, the story captures a sense of uniqueness. ‘These legends lie at the heart of the Ethiopian sense of national identity,’ says Shiferaw Bekele, associate professor of history at Addis Ababa University. ‘It is a complicated, zig-zag line, but the feeling that we are different, somehow special, can be traced back to them.’10

  Through the centuries, Ethiopians held on to the conviction that their nation, a Christian outpost in a sea of Islam and pagan belief, was different from the rest of Africa: black, tribal, subjugated. Ethiopia had once possessed a great empire, Ethiopia had never been colonized, Ethiopia, in fact, traced its ancestry across the sea, back to Biblical lands: the light skins and fine features of the ruling Amhara and Tigrayan elite proved the Semitic link. ‘You are knocking at the wrong door,’ Menelik II once politely informed a West Indian asking him to lead a campaign for the ‘Amelioration of the Negro Race’. ‘I am not a Negro at all, I am a Caucasian.’11 As for Haile Selassie, although he would come to be hailed by Rastafarians as a living God, he was no keener than Menelik to establish a connection with the negro race, associated with the humiliations of both the slave trade and colonialism. Ethiopians, he said, were ‘a mixed Hamito-Semitic people’. A popular fable captured this sense of superiority: in creating man, it was said, God the baker had put three trays of dough in the oven. The whites were removed too early, the blacks too late, but with the Ethiopians, God got the timing just right.

  Nationalism and religion, woven so tight the individual threads cannot be unpicked: there can be no more seductive or dangerous a combination. History’s most implacable wars have always been fought by peoples convinced they enjoyed a direct line to God. For Eritreans, the myth of the Queen of Sheba and all that went with it was to prove the most malign of curses. For when Ethiopia’s 20th-century rulers dreamt of r
estoring the glory that was Greater Ethiopia, they glossed over the complex tumble of events separating the present from the fall of the Axumite kingdom, seeing instead one long continuous chain, interrupted only by the aberrant blip of European colonialism. Thanks to the Kebra Negast, the irredentists pined for the great nation that had gobbled up a swathe of Africa and the Middle East, its proud sailing vessels bringing the riches of the Orient to the bustling port of Adulis. ‘There is definitely a religious element to Ethiopian feelings towards Eritrea,’ an expert on Geez at the university told me. ‘For an Ethiopian, losing Eritrea has always felt like losing part of our body.’

  No matter how dramatic, Ethiopia’s ideological chops and changes barely made a dent in this sense of frustrated geographical oneness. ‘For 4,000 years Eritrea and Ethiopia have been identical: identical in their origins, identical in their historical development, identical in their defence of the Ethiopian and Eritrean region,’ Haile Selassie’s Foreign Minister Aklilou Habte Wold told the UN in 1949.12 The Marxist regime that took over in 1974 executed Aklilou, but embraced his vision of history. ‘Until the second half of the 19th century, the strong link between the Eritrean region and the central government has never been severed,’ claimed the Derg.13 Why, you only had to look at the faces, clothing and hairstyles of the Tigrinya-speaking communities on both sides of the Eritrean border to see the link. Italy had messed things up, poking its nose where it didn’t belong. But by rights, the Ethiopian empire came with coast attached. The Eritrean coast.

  Sifting through the library shelves of writings on Ethiopia, what is striking is the extent to which the myth of the Queen of Sheba, while nominally designated a legend, has cast its romantic spell over scholars and historians, Ethiopian and Western alike. Discussing Ethiopia’s ambitions for Eritrea, most writers use ‘restoration’, ‘recovery’ and ‘return’–words which give credit to the notion of modern Ethiopia as a direct descendant of ancient Axum. Most of the Western politicians who debated Eritrea’s future in the post-war years did likewise. Confronted by such widespread acceptance of a reinvented past, the Eritrean liberation movement would produce their own, alternative history, in which a fierce sense of separate Eritrean identity existed long before the first Italian jumped ashore at Assab. Bent on challenging a historical makeover, the EPLF swerved too far in the opposite direction. Nonetheless, on examination the notion of a smooth continuum, with Eritrea bound to Ethiopia by a 3,000-year common history, looks decidedly ropey.

  In fact, the history of the Christian empire in the Horn was a stop-start, messy affair, in which one ruling dynasty’s area of influence rarely overlapped with its predecessor’s and ‘control’, in any case, hardly ever meant more than a frightened community’s payment of tribute to escape looting by an angry warlord. As Moslem power grew between 800 and 1,000 AD, Axum lost its hold on the Red Sea and Adulis withered away. With the coast subjected to repeated Arab invasions, what remained of Axum’s Christian civilization shifted inland. The Zagwe dynasty that eventually followed was centred on Lalibela, a good 300 km south of Eritrea’s current border, while north-western Eritrea was ruled by the Bejas, a Cushitic people who had migrated from Sudan. After the Solomonic empire was ‘restored’ in the 13th century, the Bahr Negash, a ruler who controlled the Eritrean highlands, did pay annual tribute to the Ethiopian kings, then based in Gonder. But that tenuous link was destroyed in the 17th century when fighting between regional princes stripped the king of most of his power. ‘There was no sense of the peoples of Eritrea being a constituent part of a territorial state with clear boundaries,’ argues David Pool, a British expert on Eritrea. ‘Indeed, it is not at all clear after the sixteenth century, and until the late nineteenth century, that Ethiopia existed as a unified state with a recognised ruler.’14

  It was only in the mid-19th century, just when European colonialism was making its first inroads into the Horn, that strong Ethiopian emperors such as Tewodros II and Yohannes IV showed themselves capable of exercising anything approaching centralized control and even that rarely extended further north than Eritrea’s kebessa. As for the coast, it was seized by the Ottomans at the start of the 16th century and remained in Turkish control until Egypt took over in the early 19th century, eventually ceding to Italy. Viewed from this angle, Ethiopia’s ‘historical’ claim to the whole of Eritrea as an estranged northern province makes about as much sense as Britain arguing that the French region of Normandy is rightfully hers today on the basis of the marriage between Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152.

  But claim it, Haile Selassie did, just as his fathers had done. Underlying any sense of religious predestination was a strong element of strategic pragmatism. Ethiopia’s rulers had initially congratulated themselves on the natural protection provided by their geographical inaccessibility beyond the mountains. European visitors to the 15th-century court were warmly welcomed, but told that they would never be allowed to return home to spread tales about the land of Prester John, the legendary Christian empire in the East. But over time Ethiopia’s leaders had come to register the price paid for such isolation. With no port of their own, they depended on their neighbours for contact with the outside world and their neighbours, happy for this regional giant to remain locked in the Middle Ages, had done their best to block trade, and the weapons that always made up the most valuable part of trade. Emperors had been reduced to begging the few Italian explorers and British adventurers who ventured south to bring muskets and ammunition, and their pleas often went ignored. Access to the sea: it was the only way of relieving this sensation of choking, the claustrophobia of the humiliatingly landlocked. ‘Let me tell you a secret,’ Menelik II confided in Ferdinando Martini at their one and only meeting. ‘Every other nation has a port, Abyssinia has none. You must ask the King to give me one, too. My access to the sea harms no one.’15 The reinstated Haile Selassie could never forget how, in the run-up to the Fascist invasion, the French had banned weapons shipments along the railway that ran from Djibouti to Addis Ababa, making it impossible for his country to arm itself. Ethiopia must have its own ports, operating free from European meddling. The myth of the Queen of Sheba, his country’s awareness of past greatness, merely sanctified what was, in the Emperor’s view, a practical necessity.

  In the years to come, winning Eritrea was to become a near-obsession, a craving that demanded to be satisfied. But while Haile Selassie waited for an opportunity to stake his claim, the European nation entrusted with Eritrea’s care was not sitting idle. When the Emperor finally got his hands on what he regarded as his rightful inheritance, he would find that while he had certainly won access to the sea, the rest of the legacy had been plundered.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Feminist Fuzzy-Wuzzy

  ‘She is an unscrupulous woman whose information is inaccurate, views distorted and influence practically nil.’

  A Foreign Office employee gives his

  assessment of Sylvia Pankhurst

  On April 17, 1950, Count Gherardo Cornaggia Medici Castiglioni, the Italian government’s somewhat extravagantly-named representative in London, was ushered into the African Department at the Foreign Office. The Italian nobleman was not happy, but he was careful to keep his tone of voice level, his manner deferential. This was something more than the diplomat’s professional self-control. As the envoy of a defeated nation forced to accept the occupation of its African colonies, the count knew he enjoyed no leverage over the British official sitting before him. Going on the offensive would gain him nothing.

  Presenting his compliments, he confessed that Rome had been disappointed by a letter the British government had sent in response to concerns raised, he admitted, on a purely unofficial basis. Italy, he said, did not want to argue the legal issues. It felt, however, that what the British were doing in Eritrea went against basic economic good sense. To support his comments, he handed over a wad of black-and-white photographs. They showed what had so outraged Cornaggia and his colleagues back in Italy.

 
; The naval base in the port of Massawa, built by the Fascists to hold 1,000 sailors, had been bulldozed to the ground. Navy headquarters, a 500-bed hospital with its air-conditioning plant, the oil storage tankers, main water supply tank, electricity unit, naval warehouses, customs offices–more than 75 buildings in all–had been reduced to an expanse of rubble. The photographs tracked the relentless demolition from start to finish. The first showed the neoclassical colonnaded buildings standing tall. In the next, sweating Eritrean labourers with pickaxes stood perched on collapsed piles of masonry that had been toppled by explosives. The last showed the steel rods and blocks of timber extracted from the reinforced concrete, neatly crated up on the quayside and waiting to be shipped abroad.

  R Scrivener, the British official who received the count, was not unsympathetic. ‘The Italians have no official standing in this matter,’ he acknowledged in a note to his superiors. Nonetheless, he said, ‘it would be helpful if we were to show that our action was economically sound and not just wanton. I think the Italians feel we are just being spiteful over this. This is foolish of them, but we ought to try and smooth the ruffled feathers even if we are under no obligation to do so.’1 A month later, the African Department drafted a lofty response. If the Italians raised the issue in future, it decreed, they could be told that buildings decayed rapidly in the humidity of the Red Sea and were liable to be looted by ‘local natives’. Since the British taxpayer could hardly be expected to shell out for the police force needed to guard the site, destruction had been the only option. The possibility that grubby mercantile motives might have played a role was not even deemed worthy of mention.

  Nowadays, anyone who cares to can leaf through the same photographs and read the furious comments scrawled on their backs by some Italian hand. They lie in individual waxed paper bags at the Public Record Office in Kew, south London.2 Only made public in 1981 under the 30-year rule, they record the final, small-minded episode in a sequence of breathtakingly petty British actions in the Horn of Africa. Both Eritrea and Ethiopia would share a strikingly similar fate at Britain’s hands, a fate that would have gone totally unnoticed in the West had it not been for a pigheaded iconoclast called Sylvia Pankhurst and her equally stubborn son.