Cyber Ethiopia

Being a Review of miles Bredin’s recent book THE PALE ABYSSINIAN. A LIFE OF JAMES BRUCE. AFRICAN EXPLORER AND ADVENTURER, published by Harper Collins, London. James Bruce’s five volume classic "Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile" (Edinburgh, 1790) enabled English - and soon through translation, French and German - readers, to participate in Bruce's vividly told stories. They involved hair-raising escapes in North Africa, the Mediterranean, Ethiopia and Sennaar. The author, for many readers of his day, was an adventurer, and a raconteur of adventures (which many thought entirely fictitious!). Bruce's "Travels", which included the first detailed description of the Ethiopian capital, Gondar, was, however, also a major work of scholarship. The second volume consisted of an extensive history of Ethiopia, based

on the country's royal chronicles. These until then were available in the West only through the writings of the Spanish Jesuit Pero Pais, scarcely read outside the Iberian peninsula. The fifth volume was devoted to scientific engravings of Ethiopian animals and plants, drawn by Bruce's Italian assistant Luigi Balugani, though this the author ungenerously failed to acknowledge. Enoch Though ever to be remembered for his "Travels", Bruce had other claims to fame. He collected an immense amount of scientific information, preserved in the Yale Center for British Art, on the countries he visited. He also introduced the Western scholarly world to the apocryphal "Book of Enoch". This had survived only in a Ge'ez, or Ethiopic, version - and is indeed still included in the Ethiopian Bible. His importance moreover extended beyond Ethiopia, for he obtained valuable information on the Sennaar monarchy, in what is now Sudan. For all these reasons it is surprising that Miles Bredin's "The Pale Abyssinian" is only the third biography of Bruce to have been published in over two centuries. The first biography, by the Orientalist Alexander Murray, which is included in the second and third editions of Bruce's Travels (London, 1805, 1813), is a brief, but important, work. It reveals discrepancies between Bruce's original notebook and his subsequently published narrative. J.M. Reid The second, much fuller, biography, "Traveller Extraordinary: The Life of James Bruce of Kinnaird" (London, 1968), was written over thirty years ago by J.M. Reid, a journalist-cum-Scottish historian, but is not yet outdated. The author of the latest volume by contrast is a journalist with African experience. His first work was "Blood on the Tracks: A Rail Journey from Angola to Mozambique" (London, 1994). He first visited Ethiopia after the 1974 Revolution, when his fellow reporters gained renown by feeding the palace lions with "beef stroganoff and croissants from the Addis Hilton". The value of his book, aimed at the general reader, lies mainly in its new, but perhaps idiosyncratic, interpretations. Read him with care! Bruce must be read with care. Scrutiny of the Travels reveals that it was marred, as Murray showed almost two centuries ago, by inaccuracies and exaggerations. It is doubtful in particular whether its author in his conversations with rulers he met ever delivered the pompous monologues he claims to have uttered. If he had, he would probably not have gone so far on his travels. James Bruce - a portrait in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery Any evaluation of Bruce's life and writings must also take into account that his historic journey came to an end in 1773, but that he did not begin work on the "Travels" for a decade and a half. It was not until 1786 that he engaged a secretary, whom he sought to impress, and, ignoring his detailed notes, dictated most of the text entirely from memory. This, by that time, was clearly fading. Murray, in the 1813 edition of the "Travels", notes that Bruce "at the close of his life... seems to have viewed his former life as in a dream. Each interesting event found a glowing place in his descriptions, though indolence often prevented him from fixing, by his journals, the true time and place". Bruce's reliability was also questioned by a subsequent British traveller, Henry Salt, who visited Ethiopia twice a generation or two later. He was quoted by the novelist Walter Scott, who met him in 1815, as stating that Bruce "consistently exaggerated his personal consequence and exploits". "Discovery" Awareness that Bruce cannot always be taken at face value finds expression in Bredin's acceptance of two well-known facts: Firstly, that Bruce's claim to have "discovered" the source of the Nile is unjustified in that the Jesuits had done so a century and a half earlier - not to mention the no less relevant point that the local people had always known that it was there. Secondly, that virtually all the drawings Bruce claimed to have drawn were in fact drawn by Balugani. This is recognised in a recent botanical study by P. Hulton, F.N. Hepper and I. Friis, which bears the significant title "Luigi Balugani's Drawings of African Plants" (Rotterdam, 1991) Though, thus, in places aware of the difficulty of accepting Bruce's version of events, Bredin too often follows the "Travels" uncritically. He thus claims, too credulously, that the traveller, on arrival at the Red Sea port of Massawa, "spoke French, Italian, Portuguese, Greek (modern and ancient), Latin, Hebrew, Chaldean, Syriac, Geez, Amharic and Arabic", as well as some Tigrinya. Our author should have considered the contrary evidence - if only to dismiss it - of two Ethiopians who had known Bruce, and were later interviewed by Salt. The first, Haji Hamed, declared that Bruce "did not understand well Amharic or Tigré [i.e. Tigrinya] and did not speak more Arabic than I do, but had with him an interpreter named Michael" (George, Viscount Valentia, "Voyages and Travels", London, 1809). The second critic was "Dofter Esther", an elderly cleric, who observed that the traveller "did not speak the Tigré language nor much Amharic". "Voyage to Abyssinia" (London 1814). Bredin elsewhere follows Bruce in claiming that he was appointed commander of the royal cavalry, participated in the battle of Serbraxos, and was later appointed governor of Ras el-Feel. All three statements are open to question, for they were unanimously rejected by no less than five of Bruce's Ethiopian contemporaries interviewed by Salt. (Viscount Valentia, "Voyages and Travels"). Our author (likewise accepts Bruce's story that the body of the murdered Emperor Joas had been exhumed at Gondar, and "allowed to rot with no shroud" to cover it - until he (Bruce) thoughtfully had it buried. The alleged neglect of the body, which went against traditional Ethiopian practice, is contradicted in Bruce's own notes which state that the body was "covered, and a tent placed over it". Bredin, when faced with contradictions in the "Travels", sometimes uses his powers of invention to overcome them. To cite one instance: Bruce, describing an outbreak of smallpox, reportedly in 1770, claimed that Welled Hawaryat, the son of Ras Michael Sehul, the powerful ruler of Tigray, was treated by a monk, carrying a "large cross and a picture", who gave him a concoction made of "some characters written with common ink upon a tin plate", and "washed off by a medicinal liquor". This cure was, as we may imagine, a fiasco. The patient, according to Bruce, speedily died - though in the next volume he claims that he later treated the young man, who recovered. Ras Michael, he asserts, thereupon took Bruce by the hand, "and said, Welled Hawaryat (that is the name of his son) is well, you are very kind". Faced with this contradiction, Bredin avoids the apparently to him irrelevant question as to whether the patient lived or died. He maintains neutrality on this issue, and fobs us off with the neutral statement that Bruce saw the monks administering, not "characters... washed off by a medicinal liquid", as Bruce records, but "ink and a sacred portrait". However, the two versions of Bruce, no less than that of his new biographer, are at least debatable, for Welled Hawariat, according to the Ethiopian royal chronicle, had died a decade or so earlier, on 22 May 1760. If that is true, he was by the time of Bruce's visit, well beyond treatment of any kind. Bredin's overall account of Bruce's journey seems strongly influenced by Graham Hancock's best-seller "The Sign and the Seal: The Quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant" (London, 1992). Hancock was the first to argue that Bruce, as a freemason (and hence an heir of the renowned Templars), did not go to Africa to "discover the source of the Nile", as he repeatedly claims in his book, but instead - wait for it! - to find the Ark of the Covenant. This holy artifact, according to both writers, was abducted from Jerusalem during the reign of King Mannaseh (687-642BC), and taken to Aksum. There, Ethiopian tradition claims, it still resides. A symbolic replica, known as a tabot (which Bredin incorrectly refers to by the Ge'ez plural form tabotat) is an essential feature in every Ethiopian Orthodox church, and is taken out annually at the festival of Timkat, or Epiphany.