I am sending Mr. Flad to Europe. I am seeking skilled artisans. I shall gladly receive all artisans who come to me. If they stay, I shall ensure that they live happily. If they wish to return to their country once they have taught their skills, I shall pay their salary and let them leave, happy and with an escort.
(Girma-Selassie and Appleyard, 336)
It was also Tewodros’s eagerness to introduce European technology into his country that shaped his relations with the missionaries, particularly the Protestants. His relations with the Catholics were never happy. This was partly the result of the greater influence that Catholicism had come to exercise in northern Ethiopia, and the threat that this posed to Tewodros’s own authority. Partly, too, it arose from the closer identification of the Catholics with a secular power, France. The conflict between Catholicism and Orthodoxy came to be dramatized in a personal antagonism between Giustino De Jacobis and Abuna Salama. Tewodros’s ‘concordat’ with the latter inevitably placed him against the former. De Jacobis was expelled from Ethiopia in 1854, and his Ethiopian followers were persecuted. Thereafter the Catholics and the French became enemies of Tewodros and worked towards his downfall. In Agaw Neguse of Semen, nephew of the defeated Dajjach Webe who had been a patron of the Catholics, they found a domestic ally. Adopting the title of negus to bolster his pretensions, Agaw Neguse began a policy of active collaboration with Paris and the Vatican, going to the extent of offering the French the port of Zula, south of Massawa, in return for arms. The suppression of his rebellion and his own death in 1860 deprived the French and the Catholics of a strategically located and enthusiastic ally.
With the Protestants, Tewodros had more amicable relations. The influence of the Protestants Bell and Plowden and the educational background of Abuna Salama in the Church Missionary Society have been adduced as factors in this relationship. Protestant strategy, which aimed at the internal reform of the Orthodox Church rather than at conversion, also helped. The more practical orientation of the Protestant missionaries, such as their programme of introducing crafts like joinery and masonry, must also have made them more attractive to an emperor bent on introducing European artisanship. At any rate, the rapport between emperor and missionaries attained such degrees of intimacy as partaking together of holy communion. Two of the missionaries, J. Mayer and Theophil Waldmeier, married Ethiopians. Waldmeier, a steadfast admirer of Tewodros even when the ruler’s later excesses made him a solitary figure, gave passionate expression to the Protestant image of Tewodros as a Reformation prince:
Where is another king to be found, who in spite of his power and greatness in self-denial disdains all comforts, luxury and good-living? . . . We all firmly believe that the Lord has proclaimed this man with His strength, and that subsequently He will use him still more as an extraordinary instrument for the physical and spiritual well-being of his entire people.
(Crummey, Priests and Politicians, 126)
Yet, however enthusiastic the Protestants might have been towards Tewodros, they were not prepared for the task that the emperor had in store for them: the manufacture of heavy armaments. They had to be coerced into it. As far as their evangelical activity was concerned, it was confined on the emperor’s order to such non-Christian communities as the Falasha, although occasionally they could count among their converts such close associates of the emperor as his chronicler, the ecclesiastic Dabtara Zanab. In the end, the emperor did not spare the Protestant missionaries when he turned against the Europeans. It was indeed one of these missionaries, Henry A. Stern, who, because of his rather indecent references to Tewodros’s parentage, fanned the flame of the emperor’s anti-European fury. A number of the missionaries were subsequently among the captives at Maqdala.
2.2 The prisoners of Emperor Tewodros II. Captain Cameron, the British consul, is first on the right; Hormuzd Rassam, the envoy who was sent to negotiate the release of the prisoners but ended up joining them, is seated second on the left; the missionary Henry Stern is standing first on the left
The end of Tewodros
Both domestically and externally, therefore, Tewodros was confronted with a gloomy picture. Internally, he faced nation-wide opposition and rebellion. From the Europeans whom he had expected to come to his aid, he received only indifference or insolence. The frustration of his lofty objectives led him to seek extreme solutions. In exasperation, he spared neither friend nor foe. His indiscriminate violence aggravated his situation. At home, it multiplied his enemies. Abroad, it moved the British to action – against him. They were indifferent to his demands for assistance, but not to his imprisonment of Europeans.
Internal opposition to Tewodros’s authority had started as early as 1855. In the subsequent decade, Tewodros was to spend most of his time moving in haste from one province to another, faced with a fresh outbreak of rebellion before he had succeeded in putting down the previous one. In Gojjam, Tadla Gwalu, a member of the local dynasty, remained a permanent thorn in the flesh. Closer to the emperor’s seat of power, Tesso Gobaze of Walqayt threatened his authority to the extent of once even occupying Gondar. In Lasta, Wag Shum Gobaze – the future Emperor Takla-Giyorgis (r. 1868–1871) – raised the standard of rebellion after he had seen his own father executed by Tewodros. In Shawa, ever-defiant Sayfu Sahla-Sellase and also Bazabeh, the man whom Tewodros himself had appointed, rose against him. Likewise, the emperor’s appointee in Wallo, Dajjach Liban Amade, was joined by an even more implacable opponent, Amade Bashir, to make that province Tewodros’s political graveyard.
Both the reverses of his political fortune and his own spiralling violence depleted his own ranks. By 1866, as a result of desertions, his army, which had once numbered about 60,000, had been reduced to some 10,000 men. Tewodros had been forced to restrict his movements to the Dabra Tabor–Maqdala axis. Soon, even this stretch of territory was put at the mercy of the growing rebel forces. Towards the end of 1867, Tewodros was forced to abandon the old capital, Dabra Tabor, and establish his last stronghold in Maqdala. This retreat symbolized the ultimate frustration of his dream. The man who had dreamt of uniting all Ethiopia came to be confined to one isolated amba, a hilly stronghold. In his final letter to Sir Robert Napier, leader of the British and Indian forces in 1868, Tewodros himself called it ‘this heathen spot’ (Holland and Hozier, II, 42). Yet, although it marked the nadir of his political and military fortune, Maqdala also symbolized the spirit of defiance which was to endear him so deeply to future generations. Three places could be said to have epitomized his life: Qwara, Gafat and Maqdala. The first served as his initial political and military power base; the second symbolized his modernizing zeal; the third became his last refuge. It was in this refuge, in the act of suicide which has provided both traditional and modern artists with a popular motif, that the forlorn emperor denied the British the satisfaction of capturing the man against whom they had sent such a huge expedition.
The expedition itself had been sent after a fairly long parliamentary debate in Britain. Its objectives were the liberation of the European captives and the punishment of Tewodros. The force led by Sir Robert Napier was 32,000 strong. In historical writings, the exploits of the expedition have been given a prominence incommensurate with their historical importance. In actual fact, the fate of Tewodros had been sealed before the British started their journey to the interior. The war had been won by the British before a shot was fired. Not only was Tewodros deserted by his followers, but some of his enemies had decided to do everything possible to expedite the march of the British troops. The British thus obtained most valuable support from Kasa Mercha of Tegre (the future Emperor Yohannes IV), who ensured that the expeditionary force would be supplied with the provisions and the means of transport essential for its march; indeed, the expedition proved to be the first army in Ethiopian history which was prepared to pay for its food. Kasa’s collaboration with the British arose partly from the fact that he shared the almost universal disaffection