Yves-Marie Stranger - Ethiopia: through writers eyes

Can the Ethiopian change his skin can the leopard change its spots?

JEREMIAH 13:23

Jorge Luis Borges who once wrote a fable called The Immortal that began and circuitously ended inside the margins of Ethiopia set forth that all good authors create their precursors. In turn, following in his footsteps, one could venture to say that all countries worth their salt create their own geography from myths, old maps and wishful thinking.

Today, we may be sure Ethiopia is a country in north-east Africa, but the countrys borders have not always been so well defined. Depending on the whims and knowledge of writers and geographers, Ethiopia was at times made up of all of sub-Saharan Africa with a coastline that wandered from the Red Sea to the Atlantic Ocean or was solely the area circumscribed between the northern reach of Egypts desert, the confluence of the Blue and White Niles and the Atbara river. In a later incarnation, the country became a saintly empire administered by an anointed priest-king, known as Prester John: an empire so munificent and kaleidoscopic that it was found in the Congo, in Mongolia, in Syria and, finally, in the Christian kingdom of the hinterlands of the Red Sea. The Greek Bible had the spawn of Shem, Kush and Ham go and multiply in Egypt and Aethiopia a tale later reprised in a legend that has Axums first capital founded by none other than Ityopis, son of Kush. Later the Ethiopian Queen Kandaces eunuch is converted by the Apostle Philip on the road to Damascus and returns to convert queen and kingdom to Christianity. Research has revealed that biblical transcribers and interpreters had rendered Kandace from the Meroitic for Queen or Queen Mother. This title, in various guises and local languages, was used until the twentieth century to denote the Ethiopian queen.

It is this intertexual play carried out on a minds eye map, which is so fascinating to the amateur Ethiopianist, and to the visitor to Ethiopia. No country can be better grasped from the depths of an armchair, and a library is as good a place as any to make out the ancient contours of the land of Prester John, Mandeville and Rasselas, as well as the new outlines of a country that today is attempting with great vigour to shake off the modern myth it was saddled with of Korem and the 1970s famine, of the Dergs Red Terror, and of poverty and refugee camps. The BBCs John Buerk and Jonathan Dimblebys pronouncements on Ethiopia have had as much, if not more, resonance in the modern era as all of the Classical and Enlightenment authors put together. And yet when John Buerk began his famous intervention at dawn in Korem, he too harked back to the text and the myth, when he intoned on camera those now famous words: Dawn, and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of night on the plain outside Korem, it lights up a biblical famine, now, in the twentieth century.

One could be forgiven for thinking that these references are so many worn-out palimpsests now lying unused by the young, and certainly never used by Ethiopians themselves. But one would be wrong. For however bland and annoying those references to biblical imagery may seem to be the epithet biblical is etched on the land itself. For a country that has so many illiterates, the Ethiopians own knowledge of historical works, myths, and books referencing their country is quite astounding. As is their respect for the word, for rhetoric and their love of poetry. Since time immemorial, magic scrolls, consisting in wide-eyed angel sketches and verses from the Psalms of David, have been worn tightly rolled up in cartouches around necks to ward off the evil eye. And it is said that Emperor Zera Yacob (13991468) himself a scholar who penned various religious treatises so much believed in the power of the word that he promulgated that all his subjects should have I renounce Satan tattooed on their wrists.