Black Land by Nurhussein Nadia;

Author:Nurhussein, Nadia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2019-07-04T00:00:00+00:00

In addition, the fictionalized Menelik of Abyssinia is much more intimidating and violent than the version presented in To Menelek in a Motor-Car. For the most part, he is depicted dispensing justice in a particularly cruel and vicious manner. When the aforementioned “rebellious chief” is captured, Menelik vows to “send him back piece at a time and when all the parts shall have arrived in the public market place of his native village, I wish my own hand, shall feed his body to the Hyenas, as a warning to any and all who shall attempt to defy the mandates of Menelik, the second King of Kings of Ethiopia.”51 When a merchant is “convicted of dishonest dealing,” Menelik decrees that his “right hand will be severed at the wrist” (as Bentley observed passively in To Menelek in a Motor-Car, amputation “seemed to be a favourite form of punishment in the country”).52 This traditional and immediate form of judicial violence is all we see from Menelik in Abyssinia. Abyssinian modernity is represented instead by the structured and Westernized military training of the younger generation: the character of Tegulet remarks that his nephew Bolasso, who has studied abroad, is teaching his soldiers “something modern in the way of European tactics.” Bolasso recognizes that the Abyssinians’ “proudest boast is that our institution [sic] have remained unchanged since the days of her Imperial Highness, the Queen of Sheba,” resulting in a nation that is “many centuries behind the civilization of the present age.”53 Rather than present an image of a forward-thinking monarch, as To Menelek in a Motor-Car attempts to do, Abyssinia—the popularity of which may have lent increased force to its ability to shape impressions of the emperor—gives us a Menelik characterized by an Orientalist barbarism.

Impressions of Tewodros, even more than those of Menelik, conform to the sort of Oriental savagery associated with the Abyssinian monarchy in the late nineteenth century, as I suggested in chapter 1. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported toward the end of the Anglo-Abyssinian War that “Theodorus’ defiance of England was the wanton act of an ignorant savage,” demonstrating that Ethiopians cannot be said to “approach nearer to the standard of civilization than any other nation except Egypt and Morocco, on the African Continent,” as was sometimes claimed.54 Similarly, Putnam’s rejected Tewodros’s expectation of parity and participation on the world stage: “He overrated himself … and the relation of Abyssinia to the rest of the world,” an indication of “oriental arrogance.”55 Perhaps attempting to deflate this egotism, Punch facetiously floated a plan to capture Tewodros—effectively reversing Tewodros’s own violation in imprisoning the British legation—and display him in England as a “circus African” in order to make up funds lost in fighting the Anglo-Abyssinian War. The proposal, as Jeff Rosen writes, would turn Tewodros into “the centrepiece of a live exhibition that would tour the country”:

First catch your Negus, of course; but having caught him, bring him away and constitute him an exhibition. In so doing there would be no need

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