By Chris Prouty
The demonstrators holding placards outside the Royal Court Theater in London on 16 March 1987 were made up of Ethiopians and Ras Tafarians (the sect originating in Jamaica that reveres Haile Sellasie I.) They were protesting the denigration of the deceased monarch of Ethiopia in the play, “The Emperor,” which was about to open in the 50- seat, Theater Upstairs. They warned theatergoers not to believe everything they heard in the play.
Putting historical figures and events on the stage or in film has been common since both art forms began. The question becomes “Is it good theater?” not “Is it true?” In this case it was very good theater, and played to sold-out houses.
As the historian C. Vann Woodward has said, “….Far surpassing works of history as measured by the size of their public and the influence they exert, are the novel, stage works, screen and television… From these sources millions derive…conceptions, interpretations, convictions… about the past.”
My aim here is to focus on dramatic efforts in the English-speaking and romance-language worlds whose content was inspired by Ethiopia. Ethiopian playwrights and filmmakers are not included and the ubiquitous “Queen of Sheba” genre will be slighted. Country of origin obviously colors the slant of the creative effort.
ITALY
The Italians peripherally involved in Ethiopia since the 15th century and deeply involved from 1885 onward account for many contributions. “La Figlia di Ras Alula” was presented in Milan in 1885. A romance between “Sheba” (not the name of any of Alula’s daughters) and an Italian explorer is the background against which Alula is the heartless villain and Debebe the admirable collaborator with Italy. It ends with the actual event of the ambush of 550 Italians by the forces of Ras Alula. The next year, a five-act play about a Catholic missionary in Ethiopia, “Il Seminarist in Africa” was performed and in 1890, Corazzini’s play “Pantera nera; scene Abissine.” Twenty years elapsed after the defeat of Italy at Adwa (1896) before another drama based on Ethiopia was created. It was the story of the Ethiopian converted to Catholicism, Gabra Mika’el.
After the conquest of Ethiopia in 1935-’36, Italian filmgoers saw “Il Grande Appello” which was shot entirely in Ethiopia and Djibuti. It was the story of a father, Bertani, an innkeeper and gunrunner in Djibuti, who had deserted the mother of his son, Enrico, years before. Enrico turns up as a radio operator with the Italian army in Addis Ababa. Obese, unkempt, disloyal father, Bertani, is contrasted with youthful patriot son who is wounded in an Ethiopian attack by weapons traced to Bertani’s arms sales.
“Scipione, l’Africano” won the Mussolini prize at the Italian film festival of 1937. This was an allegory comparing the Punic Wars to the war in Ethiopia, with the Carthaginians depicted as impotent aristocrats contrasted with the benevolent and dynamic Roman legions. Years later, in 1979, “Eboli,” adapted from Carlo Levi’s novel with an anti- fascist theme, showed a village lad going off to the Ethiopian war; he is singing the tune, “Facetta Nera” in which there is the verse, “I’m coming to love you, little Ethiopian girl.” Mussolini had banned this song because it implied miscegenation. A film about Father Gugliemo Massaia, important to Emperor Menilek, was made, but the print has been lost.
An Italian-French production called “Una Stagione all’Inferno” (Season in Hell) was filmed in 1970-’71, half of it in Ethiopia. It told the story of the French poet Artur Rimbaud, as an arms merchant dealing with Menilek II and Empress Taytu. Terence Stamp played Rimbaud. Mulu Mesfin played Empress Taytu, Debebe Eshetu acted Menilek, and Wogayehu Negatu was cast as Ras Mekonen – one of the rare times that Ethiopian actors were employed by foreign film makers. The film was a flop.
FRANCE
Two dramas about Emperor Tewodros were performed in France, one in 1868 and the other in 1869, both drawing on the British expedition to Magdala. Seventy years later, in December 1935, the word “Ethiopia” resounded on the French stage. At the “Festival Noir” Louis Aragon read “Ethiopia” by the American poet Langston Hughes.
GERMANY
With all the colorful German characters that have walked through Ethiopian history, it is disappointing that there is only one play on record, “Der Prinz von Abessinien,” performed in 1913.
GREAT BRITAIN
Only “The Emperor” mentioned earlier has appeared, although a million pounds was invested and lost in an effort to make a film about the 1868 Napier expedition.
UNITED STATES
In 1918 a feature film called “The Savage Woman” was made by silent film star Clara Kimball Young. A ludicrous plot unfolds involving Prince Menilek falling in love with an abandoned French girl whom he believes is “his” Queen of Sheba. He gives her up to the Frenchman who has also fallen in love with her.
The stage debut for Ethiopia opened in January 1936, “George White’s Scandals,” in its 12th year as a singing, dancing and comedic melange. The week it opened, Haile Sellasie was on the cover of Time magazine as “Man of the Year.” The hit of the show was a skit by “Sam, Ted and Ray.” “They are three Ethiopian hoofers,” Time wrote, “one of whom impersonates the emperor, singing “Boy, our country am menaced; what is we gwine do?” Negro dialect, as this was called, reflected the national perception that if Ethiopians were people of color, they talked like American “negroes.”At that time this cliche about the way American black performers talked was not recognized as offensive. A regular column in a black newspaper was written in this dialect, and one of them began, “Good mawning, Mistah Selassie.”
In rehearsal in New York at the same time was a production called “Ethiopia.” It embodied a new theatrical idea, the “Living Newspaper.” The exact words of Mussolini, Hoare, Eden, Laval and Litvinoff would be used and the play would end differently each night according to the news from the war front in Ethiopia. Suddenly, on 24 January 1936, the production was canceled. One performance was given for the press that day and at the final curtain, Elmer Rice, director of the Federal Theater Project announced his resignation in protest against censorship from Washington. He had requested a transcript of President Roosevelt’s “neutrality” address and was refused with the rebuke that the words of living heads of state could not be used on the stage. This was nonsense. The American president did not want to offend either the appeasers or the aggressors.
NBC radio presented a one-hour drama on 23 November 1938, based on the threat to the American legation in Addis Ababa in 1936. As Italian forces neared the capital, angry mobs threatened any white person who appeared on the streets. Unable to contact the nearby British legation, the Americans sent a message on short-wave radio which was picked up in the Philippines, relayed to Washington, thence to London, Cairo, and the British in Addis Ababa–within half an hour. Sikh soldiers were dispatched to the American legation. This radio play, “Messenger of Peace,” pointed out the obvious– communications are basic to the conduct of foreign affairs.
Fleeting references to Ethiopia appeared in the movie “Too Hot to Handle” when the character played by Clark Gable admits faking the burning of a hut for a newsreel of the Italian invasion; and in 1942, Humphrey Bogart in “Casablanca” is portrayed as having smuggled arms to Ethiopia. Two feature films with an Ethiopian angle have been “Shaft in Africa” (1973) and “Exorcist II: the Heretic” (1977). In “Shaft” the actor Richard Roundtree helps to stop slave traders and in “Exorcist” James Earl Jones plays an Ethiopian doctor. Simulated scenes resembling Debre Damo and Lalibella were used and Ethiopians living in Los Angeles played Amharic-speaking roles, with Fiseha Demetros receiving a credit as “young monk” and as “African technical consultant.”
The television series “St. Elsewhere,” throughout 1985-’86, had a doctor character who often referred to his voluntary relief duty in Ethiopia. In March 1987, ABC offered a two hour television about a relief worker in Ethiopia, “We Are the Children.” It was marred for those knowing Amharic by having “Ethiopians” speaking Swahili.
The Ethiopian immigrant experience may become a new category. Sean Harris and Joe Englert of Washington, DC have just made “Woobie’s Geography Lesson,” an 84-minute video chronicling the adventures of “Wube” (played by Wube Assefa) as he stumbles through a series of ill- fated encounters with women, bosses and loan sharks in the Adams- Morgan area of Washington.
If, as the historian asserts, people learn more history from movies and dramas, the public still has a lot to learn about Ethiopia. Will there be a film about 20,000 orphans in a children’s village told in the style of “Boys Town”? Will the hi-jacking of a relief convoy make an Ethiopian “western”? Will the trek of an Ethiopian dissident through the Sudan make a “Great Escape”? The creative writers of films and plays may yet be inspired despite the devastating realities of present-day Ethiopia.
This article is adapted from a paper the author gave at the International Conference of Ethiopian Studies in 1988 in Paris.
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Chris Prouty is the author of Empress Taytu and Menilek II: Ethiopia, 1883-1990. (Red Sea Press). She is currently working on a catalogue of documentary films about Ethiopia.