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 | | The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuscinski ISBN-10: 9780679722038 ISBN-10: 0-679-72203-3 ISBN-13: 9780679722038 ISBN-13: 978-0-679-72203-8 Paperback 1989-03-13 Vintage Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description 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. | ||
Amazon.com Review Haile Selassie, His Most Puissant Majesty and Distinguished Highness the Emperor of Ethiopia, enjoyed a 44-year reign until his own army gave him the boot in 1974. In the days following the coup, the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski traveled to Ethiopia and sought out members of the imperial court for interviews. His composite portrait of Selassie's crumbling imperium is an astonishing, wildly funny creation, beginning with the very first interview. "It was a small dog," recalls an anonymous functionary, "a Japanese breed. His name was Lulu. He was allowed to sleep in the Emperor's great bed. During various ceremonies, he would run away from the Emperor's lap and pee on dignitaries' shoes. The august gentlemen were not allowed to flinch or make the slightest gesture when they felt their feet getting wet. I had to walk among the dignitaries and wipe the urine from their shoes with a satin cloth. This was my job for ten years." (Well, it's a living.) Elsewhere, the interviewees venture into tragic or grotesque or downright unbelievable terrain. Kapuscinski has shaped their testimonies into an eloquent whole, and while he never alludes to the totalitarian regime that ruled his native Poland during the same period, the analogy is impossible to ignore. | ||
Reviews | ||
Interesting if not gripping An oral biography of Haile Selassie's reign. Not really a page-turner, but it's fascinating listening to all these people who used to work in his palace double-speaking about him; they're still scared to say anything negative about him, so they say things like "Stupid peasants! Can't they see that by not giving them food, His Ineffable Highness was encouraging them to focus on the simple joys of life?" Worth reading if you're interested in His Ineffable Majesty. Short, too. | ||
Hopelessly biased and regrettably misleading What is most astonishing in Kapuscinski's book is not the fact that it was written in a more than evident biased tone with no regard whatsoever to Ethiopia's history and achievements throughout the 20th century, it is rather the fact that the book was deemed to deserve many a positive review. A a journalistic work, it is poorly written and conveys the impression that all the author wished was to defame one of the most important heads of state of the past century and justify the revolution that overthrew him. As for the style, a second-hand copy of P.G. Wodehouse revisiting the Duke of Saint-Simon, it is a regrettable example of how cynicism may be employed as a replacement for the truth of historical facts. As an historical document, it is null. It must be reminded that Selassie was a dynastic monarch, not an opportunist, that he played quite an important role in the League of Nations and through his political ability secured the very existence of Ethiopia as a country. Also, to keep a fair perspective of his reign and of his time it must be recalled that until the 1930's much of Ethiopia was an unexplored frontier, where one would still find native warriors drinking their foes' blood and eating their hearts, as one may notice in one of Wilfred Thesiger early books. Briefly, the Emperor is a sad example of how widespread ignorance of African history makes possible that a badly written and poorly researched piece of political propaganda - serving both imperialist and communist interest -may be the object of so many undeserved prints, translations and awards. | ||
Deap Observation A great insight to a problematic past through the eyes of the directly effected. Selassie is seen as a God to some and an evil man by many, you can see both sides through these stories of real people who lived in Ethiopia during his reign. | ||
Insight into the imperial palace This book reminds me of two novels I have read, Autumn of the Patriarch by G. G. Marquez, and Rene Leys by Victor Segalen. They both are about the labyrinthine palaces of out of touch emperors, a sort of politics mixed with overtones of Gormenghast. The Emperor is not a novel, however, it is reportage -- the author was a Polish foreign correspondent who interviewed the palace attendants of Selassie after the Emperor had been deposed. It makes Selassie out to be a idealistic but somewhat corrupt aristocrat who was simply too tired to put up a fight against what became the savage Mengistu regime. I would differ from the other two reviews in different ways. First I wanted to say that even though he is critical, the author is in some ways sympathetic to Selassie. He realizes that at the beginning Selassie was a force for good. And I think saying that "if enlightenment means killing 50,000+ citizens of your own nation, I am again grateful that we in America have not yet had an 'enlightened' leader...." is sort of missing the fact that we've had leaders recently who have killed over ten times that many people, though they are citizens of other nations. But the other review is nationalistic and doesn't engage the book at all. I know that after the Derg and then Meles, many Ethiopians look back to Selassie as a "Golden Age" ruler -- and that is a useful myth. But although I think that there are probably some fanciful parts of the book, as far as I can tell this is mostly based on real interviews. Selassie was not a perfect ruler, and you can't criticize a foreign reporter for not buying into a nationalist myth. | ||
Haile Selassie I am amazed at how misguiding and angry the previous review is. It is well known that Haile Selassie being the leader of a non-aligned country, an anti-colonial advocate and a denouncer of the injustice of western nations perpetrated against third world nations was a victim of an intense propaganda by those nations. Books based on idiotic rumors and hearsays were written by people who are in no way related with this part of history. No world leader was more enlightened than Haile Selassie who was even awarded the title of Prince of Peace by the international orthodox church. Haile Selassie has not only abolished slavery in Ethiopia, but is the inspiration behind the organization of African Unity through which He helped resolve many African conflicts. This is just a few of His achievements and I would recommend the following books for a more intelligent look into his life: "The Mission", "Selected Speeches", "Le dernier Roi des Rois". I will end with this quote from "The Mission": "In the eyes of many today, his image appears blurred, but the most striking characteristic of Western public opinion, where the person of Haile Sellassie is concerned, is ignorance..." | ||