Last week we caught a glimpse of reformist ideas in Menilek’s Ethiopia, and quoted a little from Afawarq Gabra Iyasu’s Amharic textbook, published in Rome in 1908, which bore the innocuous title “Guide du Voyageur en Abyssinie”. Let us now look further at that work, in which a European-educated Ethiopian and a foreigner are supposedly …
Difficulties with Menilek’s Currency The issue of the Menilek currency, which was initiated in 1894, was especially difficult in view of the fact that even the Maria Theresa dollar – an innovation then already three-quarters of a century old – was still not circulating well. The British ethnographer Percy Powell-Cotton recorded at the turn of …
We saw last week that Menilek’s court had very different ideas on the question of technological innovation. One such view was expressed by Ras Makonnen to the French traveller Hugues Le Roux, who suggests that the Ras was alarmed by the possible dangers of European contacts. According to the Frenchman, the Ras observed: “The Emperor …
Menilek’s reign witnessed the taking of a number of important steps to ameliorate the country’s difficult communications, as well as to reduce its isolation from the rest of the world. Bridge-Building on the Awash River, and the Tamchi The first of these innovations was the erection of a bridge over the Awash river, in 1886, …
Emperor Menilek’s Conservative Courtiers Though Menilek was reputedly a firm friend of progress, most of his courtiers are said to have been old-fashioned in attitude. Thus a British scientist, J. I. Craig, reporting on a visit to Ethiopia, said of the Emperor, “He is highly intelligent, and … ready enough to avail himself of the …
Ethiopia’s first great innovating monarch was, it is generally agreed, Emperor Tewodros, or Theodore II (1855-1868). The British writer Clements Markham referred to him as no less than the “most remarkable man” of nineteenth century Africa. Likening him to Peter the Great of Russia, he added: “They were both born kings of men, both endowed …
The conservative character of traditional Ethiopian life, which we are considering in these articles, found expression in the opposition of the Ethiopian Church to the use of tobacco and coffee. “Enemies of the Church” Tobacco and coffee might have been expected to have spread widely in the Christian areas of the country, as in the …
We saw last week that Ethiopia’s traditional self-sufficiency at first isolated it from the impact of the Industrial Revolution, which took place in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Ethiopian Import Picture: In the North Ethiopian imports by the early nineteenth were, however, by no means negligible. A fair picture of …
Social mobility in medieval Ethiopia, as we saw last week, was rigidly circumscribed by tradition. Christianity, which was conceived of as a religion with a place for all men, perhaps prevented the emergence of anything approaching the caste system of Hindu India, and even preached the desirability of slave-owners emancipating their slaves, if converted, on …
We saw last week that Ethiopian society, confronted with the advent of the Jesuits, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, displayed little interest in copying their ways, as well as a strong hostility towards accepting their religion. Missionaries Also Uninterested It should at the same time be emphasised that the missionaries were also …