Insight into a thankfully lost world

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	• The Emperor Ryszard Kapuscinski Vintage, 1989 - 176 pages average customer review:based on 32 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

An ethnography of power

The Emperor by Kapuscinski is a strongly compelling piece of literature based on modified interviews with a number of court staff and servants who observed first-hand the power structure Haile Selassie maintained at the height of his power and his subsequent downfall during a military overthrow in 1974.

Ryszard Kapuscinski, a Polish journalist and writer, kept two note books. One was for journalistic purposes and the other was for more ethnographic purposes that would serve as primary source material for his literary works. The Emperor falls into the category of literature since it is a collection of the recollections of persons who were observers to the power structure established by Selassie. These condensed and edited interviews are interspersed with short summary statements by Kapuscinski. Thus the work resonates with such works as In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.

There are several incidents reported in the book from various sources that contradict each other or seem like exaggerations. One of these is the story of how Selassie walked in the zoo every day, feeding wild beasts with choice meat, while various ministers jumped from behind trees to encounter Selassie and to give him briefs on various government ministries. Another story is how a little pet dog would pee on the shoes of court officials who were required to show no emotion while a servant dried off their shoes with a towel. The best example of contradiction is whether Haile Selassie could read and write. Early in the book we hear from court staff that policies and reports are read to Selassie and that he is never seen reading a report or signing a document. This leads the observer to assume that Haile Selassie can not read or write. Yet later in the book the single house servant left to Selassie by the military revolutionary government, a valet, tells of Selassie reading diligently every morning after he returns from Mass. This is the strength of building a narrative from multiple perspectives over time. The richness of the events from various observers comes together to draw a picture of the man and the events around his downfall. Some of the sources contradict each other, which is a good thing, since it reminds us continually that we are reading subjective memories of servants that are often old memories which have been eroded or enhanced. But from these fragments emerges an impressive work of literature that plots the maintenance of power and the disintegration and disorientation that surrounds the loss of power or the shift in a power base during a revolution.

During his reign Selassie used several time proven techniques for maintaining power. These include establishing a monopoly on information so that only the Emperor had the full picture of many issues. He also fostered competition and paranoia among his immediate subordinates so that they would spy on each other and report on each other. This allows him to maintain control and suppress any growing discontent among the powerful elites. The weakness of these strategies is that the reports of elites are highly selective and Haile Selassie badly underestimated the impact of a national famine on the world's impression of his leadership. Many of the elites saw famine as a simple fact of life for the poor and did not connect it to concentration of resources in the hands of a few elites. Likewise, the revolution came not from his splintered elites but from educated, middle class, military officers who were extremely wise in dismantling Selassie's government while claiming loyalty to the end to maintain public opinion never shifted against the revolution.

This is a thoughtful book, reflecting many truths about maintenance and loss of power from a broad range of subjective observers.

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Insight into a thankfully lost world

To most Westerners as well as deluded Rastafarians, Haile Selassie was a humane, gentle, enlightened leader of an unfortunate nation. To those close to him, he was an iron-fisted despot, who surrounded himself with second rate officials readily pitched against each other, who tolerated and positively encouraged corruption; he was the emperor who salted hundreds of millions of dollars into overseas bank accounts while many millions of 'unworthy scrags' in his own domain starved to death.

This book is a collection of first hand accounts, well actually third hand as they have passed from Amharic to Polish and finally to English, from the people who surrounded the Emperor in the dying days of the autocracy.

Some of the accounts are barely credible when judged by today's standards, while others display that delightful African balancing act between naivete and hilarious irony. For example the official who condemned the foreign press for suggesting that Selassie had salted away up to four billion dollars. Preposterous! And in any case it was no more than a few hundred million!

Sadly the only participant we could not hear from is the Emperor himself, what a joy it would be to get an honest commentary from the one who fought so hard to maintain a 3000-year oppression. Who sought development only to find himself at the mercy of foreign patrons who insisted on bringing modern ideas of human rights into his domain, and in the process ending it.

A brilliant book!

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Truth or untruth is the question

I've always wondered how much of the negative accounts regarding Emperor Selassie's reign and downfall was factual.
It was interesting to read how his greatest enemies were in his household and inner circle.
Purchased a copy for a friend so we could chat about the contents.

A Minor Classic

Why is this book so famous? Regarded by many as a classic of journalism, this piece of literary journalism seems terribly slight to me. Updike is quoted on the cover as finding the piece poetic, which it is, I suppose, but poetry is not journalism, and I am suspicious of poetic journalism which seems to be more about style than about substance. Nothing here is substantiated. Did interviews actually take place? Did the author visit Ethiopia or write this from his Soho loft? Who knows? Is is fun to read in some sense; clearly, whether factual or literary, the world of the Lion of Judah has a wonderfully unreal Wizard of Oz feel to it. At the same time, the Kafkaesque world is something like Edwardian England or pre-revolutionary Russia - that is, it is very yesterday and therefore takes on a never-never land feel. The fact is that a visit to Roosevelt's house in Hyde Park, New York reveals a world as eccentric and bizarre to the modern world as that of Haile Selassie. Stories of Churchill running around the mansion in the buff, puffing on a cigar, with FDR crawling on the floor preparing for fire, has the same sort of surreal "great men" exposed cast to it as this book. Why we take these men seriously but not African despots is a worthy subject of study. Evelyn Waugh was one of the first to find everything in the third world worthy of a belly laugh; this book adds to the genre of exotic "wogs" and their "oriental" eccentricities. It is a terrible repetitious book; as in an episode of "Dallas," we see the life of his inner court, but are left totally ignorant of the life lived by the people. One senses that the full story has not been told.

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"The Prince" in Ethiopia...

Ryszard Kapuscinski has lead a remarkable life, much of it related in his autobiographical work, "Ebene." In part by inclination, in part by necessity, he saw so much more of Africa, in particular, than literally scores of Western journalists on 5-star hotel expense accounts. Coming from a country in what was once called the "Eastern bloc," Poland, his much more basic expense account did not provide a comfortable, air-conditioned bed each night, and the gossip at the bar. And he, as well as we are richer for that. Kapuscinski also managed to locate himself in the right place at the right time -- the "Holy Grail" of good journalists --and was able to report on the fall of the Shah in Iran, as well as the collapse of Portuguese rule in Angola in 1974. But the story of the reign and fall of the "King of Kings," Haile Selassie, in Ethiopia, also in 1974, is my favorite book.

A man with as many august titles as Haile Selassie might object to a reference as lowly as a mere "Prince," but I am referring Niccolo Machiavelli's classic work on rulers and their judicious, cynical use of power. For that is the essence of Kapuscinski's work, and I think it is a serious mistake, which some other reviewers made, to assume this is only about "totalitarian regimes."

Kapuscinski says that via a vital contact who used to work in the regime of Haile Selassie he was able to interview a number of his former functionaries who had survived the purge (and executions) after the revolution. Via these interviews, he reconstructs a telling, comic, and tragic portrait of palace life. The book's format is these interviews, along with the author's own words in italicized sections. Other reviews, notably Smith-Jones criticized this technique, and certainly literally, he is correct. Clearly Kapuscinski has placed these interviews in a standard style and format, including the use of pompous titles for Selassie. No doubt too there was some embroidery, but the essential points on the human condition ring true. In particular I was struck by the manner in which Selassie gathered "intelligence" on his country -- by walking in the garden each morning, and having his three intelligence heads hiding behind bushes, then running up behind the Emperor, whispering all the events of the last 24 hours. Each of the three hated the other two, and feared they might reveal something that he had not. Selassie is silent in this whole process. When I read this book for the first time I was working for a true megalomaniac who gathered his "intelligence" in a similar fashion - through mutual antagonistic sources.

Kapuscinski's short book is rich with similar anecdotes on the maintenance, and finally the delusions of palace life. A small sampling include the fact that Selassie himself was once "in the crowd," hoping the current Emperor would recognize him; folk singer Miriam Makeba was brought to Ethiopia to sing at an African Congress for the sum of $25,000; the sad fate of the first attempted coup against him by the Neway brothers in 1960; the learning of a second language, that of evasion, the art of saying nothing, which all citizens accomplished (p94)-- as an epigraph for the later Kapuscinski quotes Stendhal "Courtiers of all ages feel one great need; to speak in such a way that they do not say anything"; and the manner in which the revolution was finally accomplished -- always in the "name" of the Emperor.

As for parallels with America's own condition, consider that when the peasants were starving up north, the Palace felt the most important aspect of the relief effort was that the Emperor show "his concern;" as opposed to taking any effective actions. Sound like New Orleans? Ethiopia's treasure was used time and time again to support the "dignitaries." Sound like a Wall Street bailout?

On a personal note, I spent 5 days in Ethiopia in 1984, still have a baseball cap I was given celebrating the "10th Anniversary of the Ethiopian revolution." Sadly though, Mengistu proved to be just as much a rapacious thug. At the time the country was firmly in the communist orbit--large billboards proclaiming allegiance to Marx, Lenin et al. We were passing a building with a very ordering line of a couple hundred people waiting. A guard saw our white faces, unusual at the time in the country, came to get us, placed us at the head of the line, and that was how we saw the extensive collection of exhibits in the "Haile Selassie crimes museum."

Given an assumed liberty or two in style, this is the best book we will ever have on the rule and delusions of one of the world's unique leaders.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Haile Selassie, King of Kings, Elect of God, Lion of Judah, His Most Puissant Majesty and Distinguished Highness the Emperor of Ethiopia, reigned from 1930 until he was overthrown by the army in 1974. While the fighting still raged, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Poland's leading foreign correspondent, traveled to Ethiopia to seek out and interview Selassie's servants and closest associates on how the Emperor had ruled and why he fell. This "sensitive, powerful. . .history" (The New York Review of Books) is Kapuscinski's rendition of their accounts?humorous, frightening, sad, groteque?of a man living amidst nearly unimaginable pomp and luxury while his people teetered netween hunger and starvation.

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