Britain’s post-war pillaging appears to have vanished from Ethiopia’s collective memory. The history books glide over it and, despite the publication of Richard Pankhurst’s paper in 1996, I have yet to meet an Ethiopian, no matter how well-read, who is aware of it. Perhaps a country whose sense of identity is rooted in its proud image as an unconquered land, simply refuses to make mental room for such a demeaning interlude.
In Eritrea, in contrast, where British dismantling would form part of a sustained pattern of foreign exploitation, the experience is seared into the public consciousness. As every superpower learns, communities which know themselves to have been victimized develop long memories, able to recite chapter and verse long after the empires concerned have turned senile and benign, snoozing in complacent forgetfulness. When I raised the subject with an elderly history professor at Asmara University he grew suddenly animated and told me how, as a small boy, he had stood with his friends on a bridge looking down on a heavily-laden train pulling out of Asmara. ‘We leaned over and spat on it, because we had been told by our parents that the British were taking away our riches, stealing what belonged to us.’ For a generation of younger Eritreans, raised during the Struggle, Sylvia’s Eritrea on the Eve was almost required reading, testimony to how badly not just one, but two European powers behaved during their time at the helm. At independence in 1993, some of these Eritreans, taking it for granted London would recall the episode with the same clarity as they did, could be heard predicting that a shame-faced British government would rush to make amends with generous offers of aid. In fact, of course, the development ministry in London retains no institutional memory of the event, and Britain today has no bilateral aid agreement with Eritrea.
When the angry old men die and Eritrea on the Eve is no longer read, the landscape itself will be left to bear witness to what the Foreign Office always denied. A few years ago, a South African businessman thinking of investing in Eritrea learned of an old potash mine the Italians had once operated on the edge of the Danakil Depression and a railway branch line that had ferried output to the coastal village of Mersa Fatuma. The line was still marked on the map–could enough of the original infrastructure remain, Moeletsi Mbeki wondered, to revive the project? The Eritrean government obligingly provided a military helicopter to allow him to survey the area.
Today, anyone who feels strong enough to brave the heat can walk the route he tracked from the air. Criss-crossed by ostriches and gazelles, the trail weaves its way between black table-topped mountains, across the gravel flats, past the rusting debris of a crashed German fighter to a jetty that thrusts into the blue sea. A lot of work clearly went into laying these solid earthworks. But every iron sleeper, every rail, has gone. The railway buildings are a tumble of shattered bricks and the smashed water vats hold the skeletons of goats which lost their way. ‘When we landed,’ remembers Mbeki, ‘all we found was a village elder who laughed, and said the British had taken it all away a long time ago.’30
CHAPTER 7
‘What do the baboons want?’
‘The UN is our conscience. If it succeeds, it is our success, if it fails, it is our failure.’
British sculptress Barbara Hepworth
‘The United Nations Resolution on the future of Eritrea constitutes one of the most outstanding and constructive experiments which the United Nations has undertaken throughout the world.’
UN Commissioner Eduardo Anze Matienzo,
October 1951
Arranging my tape recorder on the table, I jolted upright as I felt something warm and wet flicking over the bare toes of my sandalled feet. A sausage dog that had been trotting around the room had just given them an exploratory lick. Losing interest, she waddled to where a paper towel had been laid on the mushroom-coloured carpet. Positioning herself over the fabric, she ground her little bottom frenetically into the floor and had a pee. There was not a word of reproof from the black nurse, who merely picked up the soiled towel and dropped a new one in its place. In the world of John Spencer, longest-serving of Emperor Haile Selassie’s white advisers, Katy the dachshund clearly enjoyed extraordinary privileges.
His mind, in any case, was elsewhere. Lost in the folds of a tweed jacket originally bought for a younger, sturdier man, he sat musing on the past. Around his neck dangled an alarm button. If he pressed it, the white-robed attendants manning the desk at this Long Island ‘senior residence’ would come running, vaulting the cluster of Zimmer frames wielded by residents heading outdoors to enjoy the spring weather. But despite his physical fragility, Spencer did not really look in need of help. He was hard of hearing–this would be more a shouting match than a conversation–and he jumbled his dates, a weakness he recognized and which embarrassed him. But he rapped out his sentences with the testy peremptoriness of a man who regarded confrontation as a normal mode of discourse. The patrician, high-domed forehead and square jaw, framed by two ruched curtains of skin, were instantly recognizable. I had seen them in an earlier version, in the black-and-white photographs which showed a fresh-faced young American standing respectfully amongst the ministers gathered around an Ethiopian Emperor in his prime. Rather than diluting him, time had boiled Spencer down to his very essence: all bulbous knuckles, clenched jaw line and strong opinions. Given a legal brief and a case to make, one felt, he might still give an adversary a decent run for his money.
I had come to this quiet suburb, where the Stars and Stripes flapped over clipped lawns and motorists drove with the exaggerated care of the old, in a state of incredulity. I could hardly believe that John Spencer, the man who served as Haile Selassie’s international legal adviser through four decades–with the occasional interruption for the Italian invasion, the Second World War and family duties–was still alive. The fact that, at the age of 95, he also retained a lucid grasp of the process that led up to Eritrea’s incorporation in Ethiopia–a marriage that was to end in the most drawn-out and bitter of divorces–seemed positively miraculous.
He had been recruited in 1935 when Haile Selassie, his territory penetrated by Mussolini’s invading troops, had registered the need for an expert who understood the ways of the West, its unfamiliar legal terminology and institutions, and could put Ethiopia’s case to an international audience. The Emperor wanted a citizen of a country with no history of colonialism and someone who was at ease in French, the Western language spoken by most of Ethiopia’s elite. Spencer, a US national who had spent four years studying law in Paris, met both requirements. Haile Selassie experienced second thoughts when he actually met Spencer, who, at 28, still looked alarmingly young for his age. But by then it was too late, the lawyer had already taken up his post at the Ethiopian Foreign Ministry. There, plagued by fleas, forced to dash into the nearby eucalyptus groves whenever Italian bombers droned overhead, he pounded out press releases on the one and only typewriter, denouncing Italy’s use of poison gas and calling for international intervention. Four months later, Spencer’s interesting new job sputtered to a premature end. As Italian soldiers advanced on Addis, Haile Selassie quietly boarded an overloaded train to Djibouti with his wife and five children, brushing aside the remonstrations of aghast Ethiopian notables. His latest appointee was left to wander a city that looked as though it had experienced a sudden snowstorm: ripping through mattresses as they systematically trashed the capital, looters had covered the streets in down. After taking part in the armed defence of the US and British legations, under siege from gangs dressed in stolen top hats and tails, Spencer abandoned Addis to its new owners.
This initial encounter with the Lion of Judah gave him an intriguing foretaste of his employer’s ambiguous character. On the front line, Spencer had watched fascinated as Haile Selassie shooed anxious aides away, donned a helmet, climbed into a trench, took the controls of a piece of heavy artillery, and attempted to shoot down an Italian aircraft. The man was undeniably capable of physical bravery. Yet by slipping away into exile, rather than fighting to the death in the tradition of Ethiopia’s great
warrior-kings, Haile Selassie committed an act of disgraceful cowardice in the eyes of his countrymen, which many never forgave.
Spencer caught up with the Ethiopian delegation in Europe, helping to draft the famous reproach the Emperor delivered to the supine League of Nations. But once that task had been completed, Haile Selassie could no longer afford to keep him on the payroll. Spencer went to work for the State Department and was then caught up in the Second World War. He was called away from his post aboard a US warship as the landings at the Italian port of Salerno got under way in October 1943. The reinstated Emperor needed his international legal adviser and Washington, which had its own agenda in the Horn of Africa, was only too happy to see an American citizen take up the key post.
In the years that followed, Spencer was to demonstrate his enormous value to his employer. He was one of a small team of well-qualified expatriates, dubbed the ‘white Ethiopians’ by their foreign counterparts, who advised the Emperor. Powerful men hire aggressive lawyers so that they don’t have to show aggression themselves–the old ‘if you have a dog, don’t bark’ principle. And Spencer was truly a terrier of a man, worrying his adversaries until they succumbed. If the prickly Ethiopians were always ready to detect signs of condescension amongst foreign colleagues, Spencer was even quicker to take offence on their behalf. Stubborn and astringent, he could–he admits in his memoirs–be legalistic to a fault, often pushing things to a point where even Aklilou Habte Wold, the long-serving Ethiopian Foreign Minister who became a trusted friend, called for compromise.
When he arrived in Addis, Spencer admits in his memoirs, he was ‘naively opinionated, deeply suspicious…and totally ignorant of the Byzantine arabesques of Ethiopian thought processes, habits, and face-saving devices’. But he learned fast in the imperial court, a nest of jealous rivalries and long-brewed feuds which Haile Selassie dominated by applying the age-old tactic of divide and rule. Those early hair-raising experiences in pillaged Addis left their mark, for Spencer’s view of his client was always to be a nuanced one, vacillating between critical exasperation and awe-struck admiration. As he briefed the Emperor, who would invariably sit immobile, silently twisting a ring on his finger, occasionally flashing a dark look of amusement or contempt from the vast throne that dwarfed him, Spencer built up a picture of a complex, contradictory personality.
At this stage of his life, the Emperor possessed a palpable magnetism. ‘He was endowed with radiant charisma,’ Spencer noted. ‘He effortlessly commanded the rapt attention of all who came into his presence.’1 Having survived the labyrinthine intrigues of Menelik’s royal court as a young man and faultlessly plotted his course from regent to ruler, Haile Selassie had learnt how to create a reverential stillness around him, the shimmering aura of unchallenged power. Lolling ministers leapt to their feet and bowed into space when they heard his voice on the end of the telephone, dignitaries ushered into his presence knelt so low their heads touched the floor. Legend had it that no ordinary mortal could look the Emperor in the eyes, so overwhelming was his gaze. When his motorcade swept through Addis, drivers spotting that aquiline profile and impassive face would brake, get out of their cars and stand respectfully by the roadside.
Yet nature had hardly been generous with Haile Selassie. In Africa, where a leader’s path to power is often rooted in the brute fact of physical domination, presidents tend to be built on imposing lines, capable of quieting restless crowds and shouting down mutinying conscripts. As the empty uniforms on display today in Haile Selassie’s former palace attest, the Emperor never grew taller than a stunted teenager. With his predilection for sweeping military capes and oversized pith helmets, the effect could be downright comic–from a distance, it looked as though a wilful child had been let loose on his father’s wardrobe. A glimpse of the saturnine face on top of the tiny body, framed by craning, stooping courtiers, carried the same disconcerting punch as the wizened features of a music-hall midget. His voice was low and grating, it rasped at the nerves.
But Spencer swiftly registered that the Emperor had developed techniques to combat the disadvantages of his unprepossessing stature and harsh delivery. ‘Even when standing, he never directed his gaze upwards towards the taller inter-locutor. Unless inspecting a building or following birds or aircraft in flight, he invariably looked out upon the world as from an inner eminence.’2 Naturally aloof, he kept his words to a minimum–the less said, after all, the more likely that men would hang upon his every utterance, transformed from the mundane into pronouncements from the Oracle. From the measured movement of his hands to the deliberate carriage of the head, the Emperor’s deportment was as poised and devoid of spontaneity as the court’s elaborate protocol. And when it suited him, the Emperor used his physical vulnerability and contained demeanour as a stratagem. As Ras Tafari, he had risen to the post of regent by convincing powerful ministers he could be manipulated, only to expose the steel in his character once his position was assured. He used the same technique to take control of the Organization of African Unity, walking meekly hand-in-hand with African ministers he had long despised. ‘Do not underestimate the power of Tafari. He creeps like a mouse but has jaws like a lion,’ a bested Ethiopian warlord once ruefully observed.3
The ultimate manipulator, the Emperor had premised his survival on his instinctive suspicion of individuals, nations and policies. He had an extraordinary gift for recall, and his insistence on micro-managing the business of government, centralizing power ever more efficiently in his slender-boned hands, meant he was in possession of a host of potentially embarrassing information. Details of a past dismissal, banishment or indiscretion would be coldly dangled in front of a supplicant who had been counting on official amnesia to get his way. ‘At the same time, and in thundering contradiction, he was the constant victim of a confidence which, once placed, he instinctively could not withdraw,’ said Spencer, noting how advisers who had failed the Emperor–not once but many times–remained at their posts. Lavishing luxury on himself, the Emperor’s love of ceremonial pomp and his greedy determination to secure a personal share of any profitable enterprise established in Ethiopia repelled many a visiting foreign dignitary. Yet he could be surprisingly generous with those around him, anticipating their needs and rendering kindnesses with no thought of return. Courageous and cowardly, remorseless yet forgiving, the Emperor, the legal adviser ultimately decided, was a fascinating split personality. But below all the seeming contradictions, Spencer concluded, lay a bedrock of enormous vanity and overweening egotism. ‘He was fundamentally an intensely self-centred person for whom the lives of others counted for little beside his own,’ said Spencer, who never forgot the indiscreet comment that burst from Foreign Minister Aklilou’s lips in a moment of fury: ‘I swear to you that His Majesty is beyond doubt, even beyond imagination, the most selfish and grasping man I have ever known.’4
This, then, was the leader whose interests Spencer championed as Ethiopia set about negotiating an end to Britain’s occupation and winning a say in the disposal of defeated Italy’s colonies. His painstaking, nitpicking, behind-the-scenes role in that drawn-out operation left Haile Selassie forever in his debt. It also guaranteed him a permanent, less-than-affectionate place in the memories of modern Eritreans. ‘Him?’ an Eritrean government minister snorted derisively when I mentioned Spencer’s name. ‘You mean the biggest liar of the lot.’
While British officials smoothly appropriated what took their fancy in the Horn, the diplomatic machinery that would determine Eritrea’s messy destiny had been grinding slowly forward. Once Italy signed the 1946 Treaty of Peace, formally renouncing all claims to its African colonies, the fates of Eritrea, Libya and Italian Somaliland, all under temporary British administration, remained to be decided. The four victorious Allied powers sent a special team to the Horn to decide what was best, giving themselves a one-year deadline to reach a unanimous decision. They wanted the matter done and dusted. Yet an agonizing six years would pass between Italy’s formal surrender and the i
ntroduction of a new system of government in Eritrea.
The problem was that no country that expressed a view on Eritrea’s future at the international meetings Spencer and his superiors attended in Paris, Geneva and New York came to the issue pure in heart. The stakes seemed too high for that. The war’s end was bringing about a new world configuration. Europe’s exhausted imperial powers had started their long decline, while the new kids on the block–the United States and Soviet Union–were testing their superpower muscles. Mankind was moving from a world view moulded by European colonial interests to a global arrangement dictated by US–Soviet rivalry, in which the twisted logic of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ would eventually reign supreme. History’s players were elbowing for position, casting suspicious glances at one another as a new pecking order was established. Those responsible for deciding the future of Italy’s colonies would vacillate, change their minds and execute the most dramatic of policy U-turns as they tried to work out how to benefit from this complex repositioning.
As a defeated Axis power, Italy initially seemed to stand little chance of pulling off its dearest wish and winning back its colonies under the guise of UN-allocated trusteeships. But Rome found some unexpected allies in its attempt to reestablish a presence on the Horn. Haunted by the fear that its own African colonies would claim independence if Eritrea was allowed to break away, allergic to anything that smacked of an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ plot, France rallied to the Italian cause. So did the Latin American nations, which felt duty bound to support a fellow Catholic country. Together they accounted for a third of the membership of the newly-established United Nations.
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