By Jane Lampman
The Christian Science Monitor
Can the ‘spiritual DNA’ of a community be altered?” That’s the question posed in a Christian video called “Transformations.”
Kenyan pastor Thomas Muthee is convinced that it can be. In 1988, he and his wife, Margaret, were “called by God to Kiambu,” a notorious, violence-ridden suburb of Nairobi and a “ministry graveyard” for churches for years. They began six months of fervent prayer and research.
Pondering the message of Eph.6:12 (“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world…”), they prayed to identify the source of Kiambu’s spiritual oppression, Mr. Muthee says. Their answer: the spirit of witchcraft.
Their research into the community revealed that a woman called “Mama Jane” ran a “divination clinic” frequented by the town’s most powerful people.
After months of prayer, Muthee held a crusade that “brought about 200 people to Christ.” Their church in the basement of a grocery store was dubbed “The Prayer Cave,” as members set up round-the-clock intercession. Mama Jane counterattacked, he says, but eventually “the demonic influence – the ‘principality’ over Kiambu – was broken,” and she left town.
The atmosphere changed dramatically: Bars closed, the crime rate dropped, people began to move to the area, and the economy took an upturn. The church now has 5,000 members, he says, and 400 members meet to pray daily at 6 a.m.
From just such experiences, a global movement of evangelicals has developed over the past decade that seeks to free cities and neighborhoods from social scourges even as it “takes them for God.”
Through “spiritual warfare” and an in-depth research effort called “spiritual mapping,” they aim to bring people to Christ and, in their words, “break spiritual strongholds” holding communities in their grip, whether they be vices, “false religions,” or “territorial spirits.”
The more aggressive, potentially confrontational aspects of these practices raise concerns within and beyond the evangelical community.
Spiritual warfare
C. Peter Wagner, head of Global Harvest Ministries in Colorado Springs, Colo., is in the vanguard of the movement. He defines three levels of spiritual warfare: “Ground-level” involves casting demons out of individuals; “occult-level warfare” involves more organized “powers of darkness” [They target here New Age thought, Tibetan Buddhism, Freemasonry, etc.]; and “strategic-level warfare” directly “confronts ‘territorial spirits’ assigned by Satan to coordinate activities over a geographical area.”
Spiritual warfare has been practiced most vigorously in other countries – particularly in Latin America and Africa – where the idea of demons has greater parlance. But its influence is growing in the United States, along with spiritual mapping.
Even as conferences on the subject attract larger numbers, these practices serve as a source of controversy. Among evangelicals, some question how much of a biblical basis there is, and just how far such prayer should go.
“A lot of people in the conservative camp say Scripture is fairly unclear about how aggressive one is to be, particularly in praying directly against demons or territorial spirits,” says Jonathan Graf, editor of Pray! magazine. “They say, ‘Just pray to God.’ But more charismatic believers say, ‘Scripture says we have all authority in Christ and can come against principalities and spirits, and we need to do that.’ ”
Mapping is the research tool – “the discipline of diagnosing the obstacles to revival,” and it answers the questions: “What is wrong with my community? Where did the problem come from? What can be done to change things?” says George Otis Jr. Mr. Otis, president of The Sentinel Group, in Seattle, produced the “Transformations” video and has written a handbook on mapping: “Informed Intercession: Transforming Your Community Through Spiritual Mapping and Strategic Prayer.”
He has visited cities worldwide and offers pastors a road map, including questions on the spiritual history and dynamics of their cities. They should gather, for example, detailed information on the status of Christianity, prevailing “social bondages,” historical events that caused trauma, predominant philosophies and religions, and human groups and demonic powers that pose spiritual opposition.
Otis points to vivid examples in the Americas:
*In Hemet, Calif., a new pastor began noting on a map sites where what he believed to be negative spiritual influences were located: controversial religious centers, cults, youth gangs, and the West Coast’s largest methamphetamine manufacturing facilities.
After years of research and targeted prayer, participants say, drug production has been dramatically reduced and corrupt police have been fired, gang members have converted, the “power of a demonic strongman” was broken, cults left town or were burned out, and Christians are in key leadership positions.
*In Cali, Colombia, home of the infamous drug cartel, pastors carried out a spiritual mapping campaign “gathering intelligence on political, social, and spiritual strongholds” in each of the city’s 22 administrative zones. They began holding all-night prayer vigils involving thousands in the soccer stadium.
When vigils were followed by periods without homicides and the arrests of major cartel leaders, “a new openness to the Gospel was felt at all levels of society,” and churches began to see “explosive growth.”
Larry Showalter, pastor of Ruggles Baptist Church in Boston, is now exploring mapping and spiritual warfare and says the ministers’ group he prays with weekly considers the spiritual dynamics of the city, though they haven’t yet done systematic research. What they’ve recognized, he says, includes a “rampant spirit of unbelief,” which tends to be fostered in the area’s universities.
“We would pray against that spirit, in the opposite way, for faith to rise up and to dominate,” he says. They also consider the social and religious history of the city. He hopes to revitalize The Boston Prayer Foundation, a city-wide ministers group, which could pursue mapping and spiritual warfare more vigorously.
Cause of controversy
While all evangelicals believe in the existence of demons, a great many are uncomfortable with the emphasis placed on them in spiritual warfare and mapping. “When you move into the area of why things occur in a city, some will say it’s just social or economic or cultural trends,” says Derrick Trimble, of the World Prayer Center. “Others will say that it has to do with demonic influences over an area.”
“The church is coming to a level of spiritual understanding in the area of warfare that is more mature than … in perhaps several centuries,” insists Glenn Sheppard, of International Prayer Ministries, Conyers, Ga.
Yet Phyllis Tickle, contributing editor at Publishers Weekly, who is familiar with the world of Christian publishing, says, “Within the evangelical Christian community, there is a good deal of looking askance when somebody says ‘spiritual warfare,’ though there is much lip service to it. There certainly is a hard core who … think that way, but the bulk do not.”
Russell Spittler, provost at Fuller Theological Seminary, in Pasadena, Calif., suggests that the practices flourish most among Pentecostals. “Pentecostals approach Scripture literally, so they see the world populated with demons. It is not a far step to start naming them, assigning them territories, devising prayer strategies. For Pentecostals, ‘spiritual warfare’ is not a metaphor – it’s reality.”
Outside the evangelical community, the discomfort rises quickly when prayer targets other religious groups with the apparent aim of eliminating their influence and converting members. Otis has written in Pray!, “We are not asking God to ‘make’ people Christians…. Such requests violate human free will…. What we are appealing for is a level playing field, a temporary lifting of the spiritual blindness that prevents [people] from processing truth….”
Yet just two weeks ago, the Anti-Defamation League was outraged at the Southern Baptist Convention’s promotion of a prayer guide urging members to pray for the conversion of Jews worldwide during the High Holy Days (see page 12).
“We are deeply offended,” says Abraham Foxman, ADL national director, “that it’s done on the eve of the most holy period on the Jewish calendar – and then to track and identify Jews by name! That means you target somebody by research.”
The impulse to convert is natural to people of faith, says Martin Marty, of the Public Religion Project. “The offense comes in what looks like the breaking of the rules of the game when you begin to target…. It’s when you name a proper name of someone devoted to God in a different way or even, you might say, to a different god, that people get their backs up. In a sense, you’re saying, ‘We’re not really at home with American pluralism’ – that sense that if we don’t want holy wars, we do well to be respectful of each other.”
By Jonathan Steele
I WAS LYING gravely ill in the flat of a Royal Air Force doctor in Addis Ababa when I first heard someone mention the name of Asrat Woldeyes, or simply Asrat as he was always known. Even in my semi-comatose state, the awe with which his name was used got through to me. “We must see if Asrat is free. He is the best,” a voice said. “Yes,” another chipped in, “Let’s get Jonathan over to the Black Lion.” Was this a pub, I wondered feebly, and who is Asrat?
Having appendicitis is no thrill wherever you are. Getting it in Ethiopia, seven hours’ drive from the nearest properly equipped hospital, makes it even less wise a choice of location. But the three other reporters I was with plied me with enough liquid to avoid total dehydration and we bumped back to the capital city, our famine assignment cast aside by my soft moans of pain.
Luckily for me, with several million people in dire need, Addis Ababa was unusually well-supplied with trained people from all over the world, ranging from nutritionists, paediatricians, and nurses to the RAF general practitioner who was there to help any aircrews if they fell ill while dropping grain to starving villagers in the drought-ridden highlands.
My appendix burst somewhere on the ghastly journey. While they kept me overnight on a drip to give me enough strength for an emergency operation, the discussion in the RAF doctor’s centred on where to send me. Although there was one hospital to which expats usually went for relatively minor problems, no-one doubted the Black Lion hospital was the best for any serious operation, simply because of Professor Asrat. The Black Lion was Addis Ababa’s largest public hospital, a multi-storeyed complex which was always full. Asrat was its chief surgeon as well as being by far and away the country’s best-known doctor, and the doyen of the country’s medical corps.
As was to be expected, the operation went well and as I recuperated in the days that followed I began to learn a little more about the man who had saved my life. He saw me regularly as he did his rounds, but was scrupulously fair in not devoting more time to his only foreign patient than he did to any other. He popped in briefly, inquired how I felt, and once satisfied that there were no problems, moved on.
It was mainly from the British ambassador, Brian Barder, who let me spend the last few days of my recovery in the embassy compound before I flew back to Britain, that I began to learn more about Asrat. He had studied medicine and surgery at Edinburgh University as one of the first Ethiopians to get a foreign degree, I was told. He could have stayed in the West and had a successful career, but was a strong patriot and chose to go home. He quickly rose through the medical faculty at Addis Ababa University while also working at the Black Lion, turning it into a teaching hospital.
Asrat came from the Amhara Christian Žlite which had long run Ethiopia and it was not surprising that he became the favourite doctor of the Emperor Haile Selassie. When the emperor and his entire political entourage were overthrown in 1974 by a group of left-leaning army officers, Asrat was re-confirmed in his university job. They even permitted him to go on treating the 82-year-old ex-monarch, by then a prisoner in his palace. Asrat’s professional competence was too great for the new regime to want to lose his medical knowledge.
After returning to Britain and making a full recovery, I returned to Ethiopia three months later just as the famine was coming under control. I met Asrat briefly to thank him, but he seemed to think it was unnecessary. He had only been doing his duty. We had a drink and parted, and I was soon swept up in other crises, including a six-year stint as the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent. With the Soviet Union crumbling there was little time to think about Africa, although when I read in May 1991 that the Ethiopian regime had lost power to a guerrilla army led by Tigreans and Eritreans, the traditional rivals of the Amhara, I did briefly wonder what had happened to Asrat.
Imagine my surprise when I learnt two years ago that he had been arrested and was considered by Amnesty International to be a prisoner of conscience. It turned out that he had decided to take on a political post about a year after the new regime came in. Worried by discrimination against his people, Asrat became chairman of the newly-formed All-Amhara People’s Organisation. This was enough for him to be sacked from his university post, along with 21 other professors.
Worse was to come. He was arrested in 1994 for holding a meeting at the AAPO office in Addis Ababa where he allegedly planned violent attacks against the state. Once in gaol he was tried on two other charges, and by the time I learnt of his difficulties he was facing a fourth set of charges. His supporters said Asrat was a victim of serial injustice, aimed at keeping him in prison for ever by adding new charges every time his previous sentence approached its end.
According to Amnesty, his prison conditions were worse than those of any other detainee. His gaolers feared his powers of argument and refused to let him speak to other prisoners. He was not held in solitary confinement in the physical sense. He slept on a mat on the floor in a barracks-type hall with scores of other detainees. But they were told not to communicate with him, or he with them.
Intrigued, I decided I would try to see Asrat, if only to do whatever I legally could to help him. No-one else in the world has ever so directly ‘saved my life’. The phrase sounds melodramatic. Was there anything I could do for him? The Ethiopian authorities were remarkably straightforward. I did not say I hoped to see Asrat until I had got a visa to enter the country, but they reacted favourably after the new British ambassador, Gordon Wetherell, put the case to the Security Minister soon after I arrived. Here was a British journalist with sentimental reasons for seeing Asrat. Why not let him?
By an irony, Asrat had just been transferred from prison to hospital after complaining of high blood pressure and failing sight in his right eye after a possible mini-stroke. The hospital the regime chose for him was none other than the Black Lion.
It was odd to be climbing the stairs to the eighth floor of the hospital to visit the man who was once its chief surgeon, and who now was a prisoner in the institution he had helped to build up. Six soldiers in khaki uniforms guarded the corridor. Supremely confident, Asrat invited the security man from the ministry who was escorting me to stay in the room. As the conversation moved from polite pleasantries and a discussion of his health to political issues, I saw the strength of character which had put Asrat behind bars and kept his spirits up while there.
“The government allowed us to have an opinion, so I had an opinion. And then this. It happened like a bang. I never dreamt I would be in prison,” he said, when I asked him how his chairmanship of AAPO had landed him in gaol. One of the charges was that he had called for the regime’s violent overthrow. I read the speech before I left London and it was certainly a piece of super-patriotism, praising the way the Amhara had stood up to Italian invasion and suggesting the new Tigrean-dominated regime were foreign occupiers. But it was not a specific call to arms.
Asrat laughed, saying he had always been a man who tried to save life. He had never favoured political violence. He reminded me that the present government, his current gaolers, had been happy to rely on his word when it suited them. The trial of the Dergue, the former regime, was still rumbling on in Addis and Asrat had been summoned from prison to testify in the case against those who had murdered the emperor. They are charged with suffocating the old man with a pillow.
Asrat was one of the last independent people to see him alive. It was about a month before he died. “Then I was sent to the war front as a surgeon on the normal three-week tour of duty. When I got back, I was intending to give the emperor a check-up but my son was upset that I had been away. So I took a long weekend and arranged to go in on Wednesday. On the Tuesday evening I suddenly heard my name being mentioned on the radio. The Dergue were saying they had not been able to find his doctor and the emperor had died. It was as though I was somehow responsible.” When he had last seen him, the emperor was in good health in spite of his age. As Asrat put it, the talk about not being able to find his doctor “was clearly a pretext to cover up the fact he was murdered”.
Asrat’s main differences with the new regime, which he happily expounded even though the security man was still there, were two fold. He did not like the way Eritrea had been allowed to become independent. (Shortly after I saw him, the two countries whose guerrilla armies had been close allies in the struggle against the Dergue, went to war themselves. Many see it as Africa’s most baffling and pointless war, fought by men who were once good friends and for the sake of a few miles of semi-desert.) Asrat also disliked Ethiopia’s new federal system, under which all political parties had to be associated with a region. “The All-Amhara People’s Organisation was designed to combat tribalism but it had to be done under a specific name. We wanted brotherhood for all Ethiopians but it was difficult to stand on a general platform when everyone was put under a different tribe. That was the paradox,” he explained.
Asrat clearly relished talking, and for almost an hour he ranged over the political landscape and his place in it without any visible fear of the government which was keeping him under lock and key. I barely had to prompt him with questions. A week after my first visit I was permitted another conversation. His only companion in his private cell-cum-ward was a short-wave radio on which he listened to the BBC World Service. I brought him some books but his eyesight was poor and he could hardly read.
Other visitors to Ethiopia began to ask to see him, including members of the European Parliament, like Glenys Kinnock. Diplomats from several Western embassies took turns in visiting. I wrote Asrat’s story up in a long piece for the Guardian Weekend magazine but for various internal reasons it was not published until November last year. By then pressure from Amnesty International and various lobby groups was growing. On Christmas Day I received a phone call, saying Asrat was being released on health grounds to get medical attention abroad. Within a few hours he would be on a plane to London.
It was wonderful to visit him on Boxing Day if only for half an hour. Once again he was in hospital, though this time a free man. A dozen people crowded into his room at the Wellington Hospital in north London, and others thronged the lobby. I could see he was indeed a celebrity in his community. Asrat was tired, ill and jet-lagged, but he remained his usual smiling and resilient self.
The next day he flew to the United States to visit relatives and go to the hospital in Texas where he had had bypass surgery many years earlier. All seemed to go well and he was sent home to a nephew in Pennsylvania. Only a few weeks later he complained of pains, was admitted to a local hospital, and died.
It was a sad and sudden end to a story which had seemed to be looking up. At least Asrat died in freedom, though not in the country to which he had given so much. I cannot say I repaid him by saving his life, but if my article helped in the campaign which gave him a few months of liberty, it is more than I expected.
Jonathan Steele is an Assistant Editor of The Guardian and has been a foreign correspondent for roughly thirty years. In 1985 he covered the great famine in Ethiopia.
By Lee Nichols
Ten thousand meters is a pretty long distance to run (6.2 miles, for us Americans). But it’s nothing compared to the distance, both figurative and literal, that separates the lives of Haile Gebreselassie and Leslie Woodhead.
The former is, quite simply, the greatest long-distance runner in history. Standing at only 5’3″, Gebreselassie isn’t someone you would immediately associate with Michael Jordan, but it’s a valid comparison — like Jordan in basketball, Gebreselassie isn’t merely a great athlete. He is one who has completely redefined his sport and set a standard that may not be duplicated for decades.
He has risen from rural poverty in Ethiopia and broken world records at every track distance from 2,000 to 10,000 meters. And not just broken them, but completely smashed them, lowering them not by fractions of a second but down to times considered unthinkable even a decade ago.
In 1992, he won the World Junior Championships (for runners under 20 years old) at both 5,000 and 10,000. The next year, at track & field’s biennial World Championships, he won the 10,000, a feat he would duplicate in 1995 and ’97. He has also won world championships in the wintertime sport of indoor track, at 3,000 meters in 1997 and both 1,500 and 3,000 this year.
And — most importantly to Leslie Woodhead — Gebreselassie, at age 23, was the 10,000 champion at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta.
Woodhead is also a star, but in the world of documentary filmmaking. The British director, screenwriter, and producer has created films on subjects that are literally all over the map, specializing in documentaries that focus on the daily lives of people in Africa, China, Nepal, and the South Pacific. He spent 20 years shooting five films about the nomadic Mursi people of Ethiopia, which won him the top award of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1992.
Among his most noted works are films about China’s Cultural Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and since the mid-Eighties he has done a series of docs for HBO, including pieces on the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the Lockerbie air disaster, and the Soviet shooting of a Korean passenger jet. He is currently the executive producer of dramatized documentaries for HBO.
His previous work in Ethiopia intersected nicely with his current feature film, Endurance. Released by Walt Disney Pictures in limited locations throughout America — including Austin — Endurance is the story of Gebreselassie’s life, from plowing fields and raising cattle in the remote village of Asela to international celebrity as the greatest runner from a region of the world famous for dominating the sport.
Haile Gebreselassie |
Woodhead teamed up in 1995 with acclaimed sports documentarian Bud Greenspan, award-winning producer Edward R. Pressman, and The Thin Red Line director Terrence Malick with the intention of doing a documentary about the incredible distance-running traditions of East Africa. It was decided that the film would focus on the winner of the men’s 10,000 in Atlanta, whoever he might be — and he would almost certainly be either Gebreselassie or one of the three Kenyans in the race.
The resulting film is an unusual blend of documentary and not-quite screenplay: The film re-creates Gebreselassie’s childhood using Ethiopian villagers, including many of Gebreselassie’s relatives, not so much acting as simply re-creating the normal activities of their life for the camera. Gebreselassie plays himself as an adult, and the film finishes with Greenspan’s actual footage of the Olympic race.
Speaking to The Austin Chronicle from Holland, Woodhead (who is currently working on a two-hour special for the BBC about the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-81), took a few minutes to chat about Endurance.
Austin Chronicle: Of all the topics in the world that you could have picked for a documentary, why this one?
Leslie Woodhead: The original idea was not mine, but Terrence Malick’s, a fellow citizen of yours in Austin. He has a tremendous passion for long-distance running, and he wanted to make a film on why so many come from East Africa. He had always longed to do that. He found my documentaries on East Africa, and got in touch with me and asked if I’d like to direct it. I hadn’t done a cinema documentary before; I’m a TV person.
I’m fascinated by that part of the world, and I’m fascinated by someone who does something we normal humans can’t imagine doing. I got hypnotized by that. The main part of my life has been in ethnographic documentaries, and I’m fascinated by the culture that makes so many great runners. That’s all I had going into it.
AC: Your film topics seem to be all over the map. What causes you to zero in on a certain topic?
LW: I’ve often wondered that myself. My film subjects have been as various as Tony Bennett and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and East African cattle herders and the Srebrenica massacre. I come from a tradition of zeroing in on the particular, and from that we can get the big picture. This subject fits that. I just want to record the years that I’m on the planet, and I’ve been lucky to find people who allow me to do that. I grew up in the British documentary tradition, which makes hundreds of films a year for British television.
Leslie Woodhead |
AC: Unlike Europe, the United States is a notoriously weak market for track & field. Americans generally don’t follow the sport except in Olympic years, and the average sports fan over here has never heard of Gebreselassie. Do you have high expectations for this film in the U.S., or are you aiming for bigger success in other countries?
LW: It’s just really difficult to tell. I was surprised in the first place that Terrence wanted to fund it anyway. It’s a strange creature of the community of cinema. I guess I wouldn’t have got it done if not for him. He found people who would enable it to happen. [Eventually, this process led to] Disney Studio chairman Joe Roth, who’s also a running nut. It came down to the passion of a few individuals. What has surprised me is that it has screened to hard-assed documentary crowds at festivals and touched a chord with people who know nothing about running and couldn’t care less about it. They just like the story of overcoming tremendous difficulties. It transcends the specifics of just running. Most who have seen it so far aren’t into running. Somehow, in a way I don’t understand, it touched a chord in various people.
AC:The storytelling is very simple. Is this movie intended more for children, or was that just a particular style you wanted to use?
LW: I am heavily influenced by Robert Flaherty, who pretty much invented documentaries in America in the Twenties. Terrence Malick is also very influenced by him. Without knowing it, it turned into a Flaherty film. Most people can’t imagine such a culture [as rural Ethiopia] with so few material goods, so I wanted to clear out any complex detail that would make it difficult to understand. I wanted them to feel the life rather than have the facts about it.
Haile’s own family played many of the villagers, and they all improvised the dialogue. I wanted them to say things as they saw it, rather than as I saw it. They replicated their own lives that way.
AC: Endurance is really a biography rather than a documentary. Given that your history is in documentaries, what made you want to do it as an acted-out, scripted movie?
LW: There’s no script. When Gebreselassie won the race, we just followed him back to Ethiopia, and he gave his life story back into a tape recorder. We just used headlines into which the locals improvised their own story. It was like filming a documentary, just observing them living their lives, gathering the harvest, tending cattle, and such. Just life going on. Even the funeral scene [for Gebreselassie’s mother, who died of cancer when he was nine], even though there was no body, people went through those events as if they were real, and we just let it go on and took pictures. We didn’t ask them to do anything. It reminded me of the way we do anthropological documentaries. I’m usually doing documentaries of a political nature, so a lot of my life has been spent on documentary re-creations, and this was an intersection of my usual interests, although this was different from anything I’ve done before. I kind of made it up on a daily basis.
AC: How much of a challenge was it to fit the filming in with Gebreselassie’s professional schedule?
LW: It was really difficult. We were lucky, because in the months after the Olympics he took time off. Even so, he kept his training going, morning and afternoons, and we had to film around that. And it was difficult to detain him for filming, but he was very gracious. The slow-motion pace of filming is not natural to someone who runs all the time. It was frustrating for him, but he was also fascinated by it, and had suggestions on how to do it better. His main motivation is patriotic, and he wanted to show that his nation is not only about problems. He wanted people to see the achievement and celebrations that don’t normally reach the outside world. He also wanted to show the documentary in Ethiopia and show his countrymen good news about Ethiopia.
When we did another month of filming in spring of ’97, he was much harder to come by. He was training hard then.
AC:What kind of challenges did filming in rural Ethiopia pose?
LW: It was difficult to bring in the logistical needs of the film crew. We had to make sure equipment wouldn’t be smashed to pieces. They have brutal roads, with lots of dead animals and crazy driving. They [the crew’s Ethiopian handlers] were keen that we wouldn’t travel the roads at night because of bandits, they wanted us to get out before nightfall. Once we didn’t make it, but we didn’t get stopped. It was demanding to get food for the crew and phone lines to Hollywood. It was a constant grind.
AC: Tell me about the difficulties of filming Gebreselassie in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital.
LW: He’s the most famous man in Ethiopia. It was like trying to film Paul McCartney in London. We could only film for a little bit before he would be recognized and swarmed with fans.
AC: I read one criticism of Endurance which complained that you didn’t spend enough time on Gebreselassie’s professional career. Why did you run through that portion of his life so fast? Why not mention his successes leading up to that Olympics, and that he was the pre-race favorite?
LW: That’s a fair observation. I was interested in the big sweep. It’s not a sports documentary. It tries to move into different territory, from being a kid in a tough environment to the big podium. To do all of his career just wasn’t the film that we wanted. It’s like attacking Bonnie and Clyde for not doing a social history of the area. It would be tough to cast it in detail.
AC: So you went to Atlanta just looking to film an African winner of the 10,000? Could this movie just as easily have been about Paul Tergat [of Kenya, who won the silver medal]?
LW: Absolutely. In fact, Pressman Films optioned half a dozen runners going in. We met with them, and would have gone with any of them if they had won. I hoped it would be Haile, because we liked him and I knew Ethiopia. I rooted like heck for him.
AC:Did you know anything about Haile’s career before you decided to do this?
LW: No. Absolutely not. I found out about him once I got involved with the story, but I knew nothing of his extraordinary achievements. We worked on the film for nine months before Atlanta, and by then we knew a lot and were learning a lot about long-distance running and learning who the stars were and its history. Just like with our filming in Bosnia, we had to get up to speed in a hurry. One of the fascinating aspects of doing a documentary like this is colliding with an aspect of life that you know nothing about.
By David Hirst in Tsorona, on the Eritrean-Ethiopian border
Guardian
Six weeks after the battle of Tsorona, the bloodiest yet of this desert ‘border’ war, Ethiopian soldiers still lie unburied on the baking plain, just yards from Eritrean trenches; an occasional breeze, otherwise welcome, brings only the stench of decomposition.
A fifth of Eritrean combatants are women. ‘I was born in Addis Ababa [the Ethiopian capital],’ said Agib Haile, 21. ‘Ethiopians are my friends. I love them so much. It was horrible.’
The horror, it seems, was less in what Eritreans themselves suffered – though she lost her closest friend – than in what they inflicted on the enemy.
The Ethiopian commanders’ strategy was simple. Deploying tens of thousands of barely trained recruits along a 3-mile front, they drove them forward, wave upon wave, with the sole mission of blowing themselves up on minefields until they had cleared a path to the Eritrean front line for better trained infantry, mechanised forces and armour.
In the third or fourth wave, about 5,000 peasants came with them, their mules and donkeys bearing food and ammunition for an Ethiopian breakthrough.
It didn’t work. The doomed men hardly raised their weapons, but linked hands in a despairing communal solace in the face of certain death from four sources: mines, perfectly aimed artillery, the trenches and their own officers in the rear, who shot them if they turned and ran.
This was the horror of which Ms Haile and her companions spoke, of mowing down the oncoming horde till their Kalashnikovs became too hot to hold, their fingers raw from unclipping grenades.
Hidden agenda emerges
It is not really a ‘border’ war at all. Eritreans have long suspected a broader ‘hidden agenda’. The evidence for at least a steadily unfolding incremental agenda grows increasingly plausible. The chief impulse behind it is Tigrayan ethno-regional nationalism: the attempt of a small component of the multi-ethnic Ethiopian state to assert itself, at the expense not only of neighbouring Eritrea but all other nationalities inside it.
Eritreans and Tigrayans together brought down the Ethiopian Marxist-Leninist dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1991. The Eritreans opted for their long-cherished goal of secession. The Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) seized power in Addis Ababa.
But that decision to stay within the Ethiopian polity was at odds with the goal of Eritrean-style independence that the TPLF had long proclaimed. It never formally repudiated its 1976 ‘independence’ manifesto, under which Tigray was to have access to the sea. Although it was not spelled out, that access could only be via Eritrean territory.
The collapse of the Mengistu regime was so complete that, with Eritrean help, the Tigrayans could take over and dominate the Ethiopian state. They ended the ‘chauvinist’ supremacy of ethnic Amharans through whom the Emperor Haile Selassie and then Mengistu had ruled.
In theory they replaced it with ‘unity based on equality’. In practice their multi-party system, constructed on rigidly ethnic lines, was but a thin democratic facade for a Tigrayan supremacy that was even more extreme than that of the Amharans.
‘The essence of democracy is majority rule,’ said a former ambassador to Addis Ababa. ‘But here we have 4 million Tigrayans lording it over 18 million Amharans, and 20 million Oromos – always the most oppressed.’
Tigrayans dominated the administration, security services, police and army. Bitter memories of Amharan ‘chauvinism’ seemed to pervade and envenom their new sense of mastery.
The Ethiopian state in their hands, they persisted, if surreptitiously, with a Tigrayan agenda. The right of secession was enshrined in the constitution while they diverted state resources to their own people and region, and enlarged Tigray province at the expense of others.
In 1997, when the border troubles with Eritrea began, this marked a new threshold in the unfolding agenda. The TPLF published a new ‘political map’ of Tigray that incorporated some of the territories – Eritrean according to sacrosanct colonial boundaries – over which the two states are now at war.
Though they were allies during their common ‘liberation’ struggle, the Tigrayans harbour a traditional animosity towards the Eritreans which came out with crude vehemence in semi-official rhetoric. They accused the Eritreans of looking down on them – which many do.
All-out war looming, Tigrayans mobilised the Ethiopian state on their behalf. The army, overwhelmingly Tigrayan, was vastly enlarged, to some 250,000 men, with the recruitment of other nationalities.
Mengistu’s Amharan generals were released from prison, and Amharan officers re-enlisted. But Tigrayans still furnish 80% of officers; other than as ‘advisers’, there are few Amharans above the rank of captain.
Politically, they adopted the full pan-Ethiopianist discourse, in a so far largely successful attempt to win over the Amharans – many of whom were never reconciled to the loss of Eritrea – as their new allies of convenience.
By the time the war resumed in February, on a larger scale, Tigrayans had begun to speak openly of bringing down the regime of President Isaias Afewerki and replacing it with a ‘transitional government’ drawn from a small dissident group defeated by the president’s followers early in the liberation struggle.
Here, at Tsorona, it was no longer a question of border claims. Tsorona was the natural pathway to the Eritrean capital, Asmara. Prisoners of war say they were given instructions on how to get there. Obviously, with a puppet regime installed in Asmara, the TPLF could have imposed what is probably its maximalist territorial agenda – access to the sea at the port of Assab – while gratifying the pan-Ethiopian irredentism of the Amharans. It would have been a great triumph.
Threat of losing face
But Eritrea, with its superior military skills, has so far foiled such ambitions. Ethiopia’s prime minister, Meles Zenawi, and his TPLF face a dilemma: to retreat with grievous loss of face – within Tigray and the rest of Ethiopia – or pursue the war with the risk of greater setbacks. They still seem bent on the second course.
Nothing illustrates its unsustainability like the horrors of Tsorona. If the conduct of war is a measure of a government’s fitness and ability to rule, then Tsorona is a terrible indictment of the TPLF. It was Oromo peasants it selected as human minesweepers, and Tigrayan officers who shot them from the rear. Yet it showed hardly less contempt for its own people. Local Tigrayan villagers were pressed into that suicidal baggage train, and mainly Tigrayan soldiers died in the tanks that were entrusted to no other nationality.
Not surprisingly, resentments are reported to be deep and growing. It is far easier for Eritrea to exploit the simmering hatreds of oppressed Ethiopian nationalities than for Ethiopia to exploit a discredited, unrepresentative Eritrean opposition. With the supply of arms to Oromos and others, it has apparently begun doing so.
If, under international pressure, the TPLF compromises, it could, Eritreans believe, save itself and Tigrayan ascendancy over the Ethiopian state; if it does not, sooner or later Eritrea is likely once more to act as a catalyst of great upheavals within its giant neighbour.
Dr. Richard Pankhurst
May 14, 1999
1 Ethiopian-Indian Relations in Ancient and Early Medieval Times
Contacts between the lands which became to be known as Ethiopia and India date back to the dawn of history. The two countries, though geographically remote from one another, had largely complimentary economies. Ethiopia was a source of gold, ivory and slaves, all three of them in great demand in India. India by contrast produced cotton and silk, pepper and other spices, all in great demand in Ethiopia, as well as some manufactured articles consumed by the elite.
1.1 Trade Winds
Communications between the two countries, or regions, were facilitated by the Trade Winds. These blew, in the summer months, from north to south in the Red Sea, and then, across the Indian Ocean, from south-west to north-east. Winds, in the winter months, blew in the opposite direction. Such winds were important throughout the age of sailing boats, for they thrust vessels from the Ethiopian coast to that of India in the summer, and brought them back in the winter.
Commerce between Ethiopia and India also owed much to the fact that the seas between them formed part of a major international trade route, which linked the Mediterranean – and Roman – world with that of the East, including China.
1.2 Ancient Times
Indian contacts with the Red Sea coast of Africa are poorly documented for very early times, but probably date back long before the Christian era. In the first century AD the record, however, gains clarity. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a Graeco-Egyptian trade manual, states that Indian trade with the Red Sea area was largely based on Ariaké, i.e. north-western India, as well as the Gulf of Cambay, Barugaza, or modern Broach, and, to a lesser extent, Limuraké, or country of the Tamils.
Indian commerce, according to the Periplus, extended to many localities situated to the west of the sub-continent. At the mouth of the Red Sea the island of Sokotra, then known as Dioskouridou, was thus frequented by some Indian traders. This island, most of whose inhabitants spoke a tongue akin to Ethiopia’s classical language Ge‘ez, traded, the Periplus states, with both Limuraké and Barugaza, and was permanently settled by a number of Indians.
Further west, on the Horn of African coast, the great port of Malao, today’s Berbera, likewise apparently dealt in a large quantity of cloth, almost certainly imported from India.
1.3 Adulis
Adule, or Adulis, the main port of the Aksumite empire, which was situated further west again, within the confines of the Red Sea, also traded extensively with India. The Periplus, discussing this ancient Ethiopian commerce, explains that “from the inner parts of Ariaké” were imported:
* Indian iron and steel
* The broader Indian cloth called monakhé
* Cloth called sagmatogénai.
* Belts
* Garments called gaunakai
* Mallow cloth
* A little muslin
* Coloured lac”
1.4 Archaeological Evidence
The importance of such trade is confirmed by archaeological evidence. Aksumite coins have been discovered, over the years, in several parts of south-west India, while a hoard of Indian Kushana money was found in the vicinity of the northern Ethiopian monastery of Dabra Damo.
1.5 The Coming of Christianity, and Changing Alphabets
On-going contacts across the Indian Ocean had an incidental, but crucially important, consequence in the religious and cultural field. Frumentius, a Christian youth from Syria bound for India, was shipwrecked off the Ethiopian coast, around 330AD, and was subsequently instrumental in converting the Aksumite realm to Christianity.
The period immediately following the coming of Christianity witnessed interesting cultural developments, which took place at roughly the same time on both sides of the Indian Ocean. The writing of the Ethiopian language, Ge‘ez, and of the Indian, Brahmi and Kharoshi, evolved in an almost identical manner, by the addition of small signs, or other modifications, to the basic consonantal letters, to express vowel sounds. The Ethiopian and Indian alphabets were thus both transformed into syllabaries. How these changes took place, and whether they were related to each other – as one may suspect, cannot, however, be established.
Contacts across the Indian Ocean, which were clearly important throughout this entire period, found expression, a century or so later, in the visit to India of a Bishop of Adulis, by name Moses. He travelled to the sub-continent in the company of a Coptic bishop from Egypt, to examine Brahmin philosophy.
1.6 Kosmos Indikopleustes
Continued commerce between Ethiopia and India was later documented, in the early sixth century, by an Egyptian trader-cum-monk, Kosmos Indikopleustes. He records that the Horn of Africa, which he calls Barbaria, produced frankincense, as well as “many other articles of merchandise”, which were exported to India. He adds that Taprobane, i.e. Ceylon, was visited by merchants from Adulis.
Further evidence of the significance of Aksumite trading with India is embodied in a Greek text, written by another Egyptian writer of the time. It states that the early sixth century Aksumite emperor Kaleb, when carrying out an expedition to South Arabia, in retaliation for the massacre of Christians at Nagran, made use of a number of vessels from India, as well as from several other countries.
1.7 Shared Culture
Such ancient contacts across the Indian Ocean seem to have found material expression in certain elements of a shared culture. These include the cultivation, on either side of the ocean, of both cotton and sugar; the presence in the two regions of zebu, or humped, cattle; the existence of “African” lions in the Gujarat area of north-west India; the erection of fairly similar megalithic stones, in for example Ethiopian Gurageland and the Indian Naga hills; the use, by weavers, of almost identical looms in both countries; similar dress (the Ethiopian shamma and the Indian sari); and highly spiced food (Ethiopian barbaré and Indian curry).
1.8 Medieval Times
Trade between the Ethiopian region and India in the medieval period is relatively well documented. The Portuguese traveller, Tome Pires, writing of Cambay in the early sixteenth century, tells of the arrival there of “Abyssinians”, as well as Arabs, and describes the area’s trade with the main Gulf of Aden ports of Africa: Zayla and Berbera. His Bolognese contemporary, Ludovico di Varthema, likewise reports that Calicut was visited by merchants from Ethiopia, besides others from Arabia, Persia, Syria and Turkey.
1.9 Aden
Much of this trade centred at this time on the notable Arab commercial city of Aden. Varthema described it as “the great rendez-vous” for “all ships” coming from “India Major and Minor,” Ethiopia and Persia. The Venetian merchant Andrea Corsali likewise called Aden “the principal port of Arabia and Ethiopia”,while Barbosa reported that “many ships” arrived there from both Zayla and Berbera. Aden’s importance was also recognised by Brother Thomas, an Ethiopian visitor to Venice, who spoke of it as “the emporium of India” and “the gateway for all the spice and cloth and other things” brought by land to the then temporary Ethiopian capital, Barara. (Don’t, dear reader, ask where this was!)
Some Indian trade with Africa seem also to have passed by way of the Maldive islands, These were described by the fourteenth century Arab writer Dimashki as a stopping place for ships going to “Abyssinia”, besides Hormuz, Yaman, Mogadishu, and Zanj.
1.10 Massawa, Zayla, and Berbera
The three principal ports handling Ethiopian and Horn of African imports from India were then, as for centuries to come, Massawa, on the Red Sea, and Zayla and Berbera, as we have seen, on the Gulf of Aden coast.
Massawa, by this time already the main port of the Ethiopian highlands, was a place of sizable Indian trade, an was mentioned by the Portuguese, who report seeing “two Gujarat ships” there in 1520. Articles from India imported through the port were on sale, according to the Portuguese traveller Francisco Alvares, at the great market of Manadeley, in southern Tegray, where he saw “merchants of all nations”, among them “Moors [i.e. Muslims] of India”.
Zayla, according to Varthema, was likewise a place of “immense traffic”, especially in gold and ivory, which were exported to India, as well as to Persia, Arabia and Egypt. Indian goods imported through the port were taken, by camel caravan, to the “great mercantile city” of Gendebelu, where the Ethiopian monk Brother Antonio states that commodities were “brought from the whole of India”.
Berbera was visited, according to the Portuguese, Duarte Barbosa, by “many ships”, which carried “much merchandise” from Aden and Cambay, and returned with large quantities of African gold and ivory. Indian articles imported at the port were transported inland by camel, Corsali notes, to Ethiopia, which he termed “the country of churches”. The importance of this trade route was confirmed by Brother Thomas, who states that merchandise taken from Berbera to Shawa came from “Aden, Persia, Combaia [i.e. Cambay], and India”.
Some imports from India sometimes also reached the Ethiopian highlands by way of the Indian Ocean coast. Brother Thomas claims that “much merchandise” was brought there on ships of Cambay, and were later carried by caravan to Barara.
1.11 Penetrating the Ethiopian Interior
Indian imports, through one port or another, penetrated far into the Ethiopian interior. The chronicle of Emperor Zar’a Ya‘qob (1434-1468) tells of that monarch presenting silken vestments to the great monastery of Dabra Libanos, while Tome Pires observed that “the most prized things” in Abyssinia included coarse cloth from Cambay, as well as silks, also from India.
Emperor Galawdéwos (1540-1559) later declared that the people of Damot, in the far south-west of the country, gave gold “in exchange for inferior and coarse Indian cloth”. Textiles then, as in Aksumite times, in fact constituted Ethiopia’s principal on-going import from India.
Indian silks throughout Ethiopia were highly regarded by all who could afford them, Emperor Lebnä Dengel (1508-1540) for example was described, by Alvares, as “dressed in a rich mantle of (gold) brocade, and silk shirts of wide sleeves”. His consort, Queen Sabla Wangel, according to the Portuguese warrior Miguel de Castanhoso, was “all covered to the ground with silk, with a large flowing cloak… she was clothed in a very thin white Indian cloth”. The Abun, or head of the church, was likewise often dressed, Alvares says, in “a white cotton robe of fine thin stuff”, called casha, in India, “whence it came”.
2 Ethio-Indian Trade, and Slaves, in Medieval Times (1)
Jewels were another costly import from India, destined largely for the richest Ethiopian churches. Emperor Galawdewos’s chronicle states that several places of worship destroyed by the soldiers of the Adal conqueror Ahmad Gragn had been thus decorated with “precious Indian stones”.
Pearl-encrusted thrones from India were yet another costly import. They were imported for several monarchs, among them Emperor Dawit (1314-1411) and Emperor Na’od (1404-1508), who are known to have presented them to the churches of Tadbaba Maryam, in Gaynt, and Zemedu Maryam in Lasta, respectively.
2.1 Art
Evidence of Ethiopian interest in India is apparent in medieval Ethiopian art, and literature. A painting in the church of Yemrahanna Krestos, in Lasta, depicts an elephant with an Indian-style mahout, or driver, and a howdah, or seat, with two passengers. A similar motif is found in the church of Dabra Salam, near Atsbi in Tegray.Both scenes probably illustrated the travels in India of St Thomas, which were well known to Ethiopian Christians versed in the history of their faith. The holy man, his teaching and martyrdom, are featured in both the Gadla Hawaryat, or Contendings of the Apostles, and the Ethiopian synaxarium.
2.2 The “Kebra Nagast”
Medieval Ethiopian awareness of India is similarly apparent in the country’s national epic, the Kebra Nagast. It contains sundry, possibly apocryphal, references to ancient Ethiopian and other relations with the sub-continent at the time of the Queen of Sheba, and later.
2.3 The Hapshis (Ethiopian Slaves) of India
The long-standing trade between Ethiopia and India was accompanied by a considerable export of Ethiopian slaves. Such men, women, and children came to be known in India as Hapshis, a corruption of the Arabic word Habash, or Abyssinian. The word was, however, used loosely, apparently for any slaves from Africa, or their descendants. Denison Ross, a British scholar of Indian affairs, less familiar with Africa, observes that Habshi was “a term indicating Abyssinian, but no doubt includes other negroid races from Africa”. Though the word was, as he says, nodoubt applied to non-Ethiopians from East Africa, it is, however, highly unlikely that negroid people, i.e. West Africans from the Niger area, were ever taken to India.
Hapshis played a major role in Indian history, for, as Ross declares, “like the Turks who founded dynasties throughout the Muhammedan world these Hapshis usually began as slaves, and seem to have shown the same wonderful capacity, as did the Turks, for rising from slavery to the highest positions”.Several indeed established ruling dynasties, the history of which lies outside the scope of this, and the ensuing, article.
Hapshis are known to have arrived in India as early as the thirteenth century. The first Hapshi of whom we have record was a slave called Jamal ad-Din Yaqut, who is reported to have won the favour of Queen Radiyya (1236-1240), in the kingdom of Delhi.
Hapshis subsequently arrived in many parts of the sub-continent. The largest concentrations were, as to be expected, in the areas with which there was the most considerable trade with the Ethiopian region, i.e. in the north-west, especially Gujarat and the Gulf of Cambay. Hapshis were also established to the east of the sub-continent, in Bengal which was also engaged in extensive Red Sea trade. The local ruler, Sultan Rukn ad-Din (1459-1474), was reported to have no less than 8,000 Hapshi slaves, some of whom rose to high positions.The Deccan, on the west coast of India facing Africa, likewise had a sizable Hapshi population, who were first reported in the area at the time of Bahmani Sultan Firuz (1397-1422). He employed some of them as his personal assistants, and others in his harem.
2.4 Alvares, He Said
The importance of the Ethiopian slave export trade, which constitutes the background to Hapshi history, was duly recognised by Alvares. He noted, of the 1520s, that Ethiopian slaves from Damot in particular were “much esteemed by the Moors”, i.e. Muslims, and that “all the country of Arabia, Persia, India, Egypt, and Greece” was “full of slaves from this country”. Such slaves, he says, “made very good Moors [i.e. Muslims] and great warriors”.
2.5 Ethio-Indian Contacts of the 16th and 17th Centuries
Ethiopian-Indian contacts, which dated back, as we have seen, to ancient times, were enhanced, in the late fifteenth century, by the coming to the sub-continent, and to Red Sea waters, of the Portuguese. The latter were perceived by Ethiopian rulers as fellow Christians, and potential allies, from whom military assistance could be obtained. Ethio-Portuguese contacts took place thereafter almost entirely by way of India, the sub-continent’s western coast becoming to all intents and purposes a stop-over on the route between Ethiopia and Europe. The first Portuguese traveller to Ethiopia, Pero da Covilha, who arrived there during the reign of Emperor Eskender (1478-1494), and the subsequent Portuguese diplomatic mission described by Alvares, likewise travelled by way of India.
2.6 Mathew, the Armenian, and Empress Eleni
Ethiopians and others making their way to Europe in this period also usually travelled via India. Mathew, the Armenian merchant despatched by Empress Eléni to seek Portuguese assistance in view of impending Adal/Muslim pressure, thus went to Goa, whence he sailed to Portugal.
2.7 Ethiopian Travellers to India
The first Ethiopian of whom we have record to undertake the trans-continental journey to India and Europe was Brother Anthony of Lalibala, who later proceeded to Venice, where he was interviewed by the Italian scholar Alessandro Zorzi in 1523.
Only a few years later Emperor Lebnä Dengel despatched six young Ethiopians to study in India. Four of them apparently arrived in Goa, “two to be taught to be painters, and two others to be trumpeters”. Whether they in fact ever returned to their country or not is unrecorded.
2.8 Christavao da Gama
A generation or so later, at the height of Ahmad ibn Ibrahim’s invasion of the Christian highlands, a Portuguese military force, led by Christovao da Gama, intervened, in 1541, on the Emperor’s behalf. It was reportedly accompanied by “over seventy persons trained in all trades, namely cross-bow makers, blacksmiths, carpenters, masons, shoemakers, and other handicraftsmen”. Their impact, if any, on sixteenth century Ethiopian technology has still to be analysed.
Subsequent contacts across the Indian Ocean led, during the reign of the Mogul Emperor Akbar (1556-1605), to the arrival in India of what his chronicle described as a “sea elephant”, i.e. an elephant from overseas. It came to him from the ruler of Gujarat, which, as we have seen, was one of the areas of India in closest relation with Ethiopia.This leads us to suppose that the animal was probably of Ethiopian, or at least East African, origin.
2.9 The Jesuits
The growth of Jesuit influence during the reign of Emperor Susneyos (1607-1632), and his adoption of the Roman Catholic faith, witnessed a rapid expansion in Ethiopian contacts with Portuguese India. The monarch was reportedly much interested in the sub-continent, about which he asked the Jesuit missionary Pero Pais numerous questions. Susneyos likewise took an apparently even greater interest than previous Ethiopian rulers in Ethiopian rulers in Indian imports. He is thus described, by the Jesuit Manoel de Almeida, as wearing “a white Indian bofeta”, and elegant Indian slippers, one pair of which was given to him by the Jesuit Manoel Barradas, who presented similar footwear also to the Emperor’s son Fasilädäs, and brother, Ras Se’elä Krestos. Susneyos likewise had a bed, or couch, decorated with “coverlets and blankets” from Diu, Cambay, and Bengal, and a silk umbrella, which also came to him from India.
2.10 A Crucifix and Chain
Susneyos also had a crucifix and chain, made by an Indian goldsmith, which reportedly filled him with joy, and sent for “seed pearls from India” which he subsequently wore in his crown. The country was apparently recognised as a source of jewels, as suggested by Hiob Ludolf’s Ge‘ez lexicon of 1681 which contains a reference to an a’enaqwe hendake, or Indian jewel.
Other acquisitions from the sub-continent reported at this time included a copper or bronze bell, which was hung at the Emperor’s great church at Gorgora, by Lake Tana,papaya trees, which, according to Pero Pais, “yielded very good fruit”, and Indian figs, which were likewise said to be “very good’.
2.11 Highly Prized Animals: elephants, zebras, and a parrot
Several highly prized animals also travelled between Ethiopia and India in this period. The voyage of “a small elephant from Abyssinia” is reported in the Memoirs of the Mogul emperor Jahanger. They recall that the beast, was “brought by sea in a ship”, in 1616. Its ears were reportedly larger than those of Indian elephants, and its trunk and tail longer.
At least one Ethiopian zebra was also taken to India. Susneyos is reported to have sent it as a present to the Basha of the Red Sea port of Suakin, whence “a Moor from India”, purchased it for two thousand sequins to take to Mogul Emperor. This, or another such animal, is described by Jahanger himself. He recalls that it arrived at his court, in 1621, and, though an ass, was “exceedingly strange in appearance, exactingly like a lion” – by which he probably meant a tiger; and had an “exceedingly fine line” round its eyes. The creature seemed so strange that some people thought that it had been coloured by hand, but the monarch rejected this view, stating that it was in fact “the painter of fate”, who had “left it on the page of the world”. The animal was so remarkable, and highly regarded at the Indian court, that at least two paintings of it were drawn by the Mogul artist Ustad Mansur.
The reign of Susneyos witnessed the arrival at the Ethiopian court of a parrot. It was called dura, apparently a corruption of duri, the Gujarati name for this type of bird. The Ethiopian royal chronicle states that it came from Hend, i.e. India, spoke “hend”, presumably Hindustani, or some other language of India, and several other tongues, but was, unfortunately, subsequently eaten by a cat. God bless its soul!
3 Ethio-Indian Trade, and Slaves, in Medieval Times (2)
3.1 Susneyus, Fasiladas,Yohannes, and Iyasu
Emperor Susneyos’s attempts to convert Ethiopia to Roman Catholicism, which had led to much bloodshed over the years, duly collapsed, after which he abdicated, in 1632. He was succeeded by his son Fasiladas, who expelled the Jesuits, and restored the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. This resulted in a major switch in the country’s foreign policy. Ties with the Catholic West were severed, and efforts made to establish new ones with the East. Contacts with India, which owed much, as we have seen, to the Portuguese, nevertheless continued – but took on a new, anti-Catholic, form. Fasiladas, seeking to gain the friendship of the Mogul empire, accordingly despatched his Armenian agent Murad to India, to congratulate Emperor Aurangeb on his accession in 1658.
Fasiladas’s son Emperor Yohannes I (1667-1682) attempted to continue his father’s pro-Eastern policy. He accordingly despatched a further expedition to India, which reached Delhi in 1671, with presents, it was reported, to a value of 10,000 rupees.
Contact with India was also pursued by Fasilädäs’s grandson Emperor Iyasu I (1681-1706). He despatched at least two missions there. One was led by his Turkish trade agent Haji Ali; the other by a Greek, who around 1700 travelled to Surat, and Bombay.
These pro-Eastern, and anti-Western, initiatives by Fasilädäs and his descendants, though important, failed to overcome the Christian-Muslim divide, or to generate anything like the interest in Ethiopia earlier displayed by the Jesuits.
3.2 Indian Building Activities
This period of Portuguese hegemony, and its aftermath, witnessed considerable building work by Indian craftsmen in Ethiopia, most notably in the erection of palaces, churches and bridges. Almeida reports that, early in the seventeenth century, “an intelligent person from India discovered a kind of fine, light and as it were worm-eaten stone”, similar to what he had seen used in the Baroche district of Gujarat to make into lime. Susneyos and his chiefs are said to have “valued it highly”. The emperor, with the help of his brother Se’elä Krestos, accordingly had “many beautiful churches built of stone and lime”.
A few years later, “some stone-masons came from India, whence they had been brought by the Jesuits”. They were employed by the Emperor at his then capital, Dänqäz, where he “built a palace of stone and lime”, which Almeida describes as “a structure that was a wonder in that country and something which had never been seen nor yet imagined, and it was such as would have value and be reckoned a handsome building anywhere”.
Indian masons at this time were also involved in bridge-building. Almeida recalls that, shortly after the discovery of “stone for making lime”, the Emperor gave orders for the erection of a bridge over the Blue Nile at Alata, which was put up by “a craftsman who had come from India”. An almost identical account was given by another Jesuit author, Jerónimo Lobo, who states that Susneyos had a bridge erected over the river, by “stone workers who had come to him from India”. The identity of the craftsman, one of very few foreigners ever to be mentioned by name in an Ethiopian royal chronicle, is revealed in that of Susneyos, which refers to him as a Banyan called Abd el Kerim.
3.3 Ludolf, He Said
The significance of the Indian builders of this period was later endorsed by Ludolf. He observes that the Jesuits “carry’d an Architect with them out of India, and having found out Lime, unknown to the Habessines for so many Ages, built their Churches and their Colledges of Stone and Mortar, and encampass’d them with High-walls, to the amazement and dread of the Habessines, lest they should in time be made so many Impregnable Forts and Castles”.
3.4 Remained in the Country
After the expulsion of the Jesuits, in 1632-3, many of the Indians they had brought with them to Ethiopia probably remained in the country. They doubtless continued their building work, and thus came to be employed in and around the city of Gondär, which Emperor Fasilädäs established as his capital in 1636. A Yamani ambassador, Hasan ibn Ahmad al Haymi, who visited it a decade or so later, in 1648, reported that the “master-builder” of the principal palace, known to this day as the Fasil gemb, was a great house of stone and mortar, and “one of the most marvelous of buildings, worthy of admiration, and the most outstanding of wonders”. It had been erected, he says, by “an Indian”. This statement was long afterwards corroborated, quite independently, by the eighteenth century Scottish traveller James Bruce. He observes that “the palace was built by masons from India”, and by “such Abyssinians as had been instructed in architecture by the Jesuits”.
3.5 The Banyans of Massawa
By the seventeenth century there is evidence of a substantial presence, at the Red Sea port of Massawa, of a substantial number of Indian merchants, and craftsmen. Many of these traders, generally referred to Ethiopia as Banyans, were people of substance, as indicated by the Jesuit missionary Baltazar Telles. He recalls that his colleagues, in 1634, borrowed no less than 800 “pieces of eight” from them.
Much of the trade between Ethiopia and India at this time was based on the port of Surat. It was a common sight, at the close of the seventeenth century, according to the French traveller Charles Poncet, to see vessels from that port at Massawa.
The number of Banyans at Massawa, if we can believe Bruce, later declined. He states that, though “once the principal merchants” at the port, they had, by his day, been “reduced to six”. They were, he adds, silver-smiths and “assayers of gold”. They also made earrings, and other ornaments, for the people of the interior, but gained only “a poor livelihood”.
3.6 Ethiopian-Indian Trade in the 17th and 18th Centuries
Ethiopian trade with India, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was still considerable. An Armenian who visited the court of Emperor Susneyos in 1612 reported that no less than ten caravans, eight of them large, arrived there every year with “all sorts of Indian clothing”. The Jesuit missionary Almeida noted shortly afterwards that much of Ethiopia’s gold was exported to the sub-continent to purchase “clothing from India”.
Almeida also emphasises similarities between Indian and Ethiopian clothing of the period, which, it should be emphasised, doubtless owed much to the fact that they were both of Indian origin.
Ethiopian nobles, he states, were “something like Banian cabayas”, which consisted of “a surcoat, or long muslin tunic, not open all the way but only to the waist and held in by tiny buttons”. This dress was made up of “small collars and very long sleeves so that they lie on the arm as if they had been folded. They call them camizas. They usually make them of Cambay bofetas”. The term camiz could well have been borrowed from the Hindustani/Tamil word cameeze, itself a loan-word from the Arabic and Portuguese. Noblewomen, according to Barradas, were likewise dressed in “silk or other fine material from India”, over which they placed “ample mantles of silk bordered with various colours”, also from India.
Massawa’s principal imports were later also described by Bruce, who emphasised that they included many articles from India. These comprised “blue cotton, Surat cloths, and cochineal ditto, called Kermis”, as well as “fine cloths from different markets in India”.
3.7 Indian Influences on Indian Art
Contacts with India, in this period, seem to have had interesting, though by no means extensive, influences on eighteenth and early nineteenth century Ethiopian Christian art, a detailed discussion of which lies outside the scope of this study. The Virgin Mary is thus occasionally depicted in an unmistakably Indian posture; Guardian archangels in the interior of churches are often seen wearing Mogul-type clothes; some manuscript illustrations of buildings seem of Indian inspiration.
3.8 Conclusions
Ethiopia’s contact’s with India, and the East, though less well documented than those with the West, were important, and long-enduring. The economies of the two regions, were to a significant extent complimentary, and commerce between them was facilitated by the trade winds. The sub-continent was thus a major source of cotton, silks, and spices, and various luxury items, among them pearls. Ethiopia, by way of return, supplied India with such exports as gold, ivory, and slaves. This commercial pattern, first evident in ancient times, continued substantially unchanged, into the medieval period. Contacts across the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, though largely based on trade, also had a much wider dimension, and found expression in many cultural similarities between the two countries, not merely, as often noticed, in that of food and dress.
The advent of a European power, Portugal, in the fifteenth century, and the subsequent Jesuit-inspired introduction of Roman Catholicism, led, paradoxically, to the forging of closer contacts between the areas of Africa and Asia under discussion. The period which followed witnessed in particular the coming to Ethiopia of numerous Indian craftsmen, among them builders and masons. Indian building activity, though at first largely fostered by the Jesuits, continued after their expulsion in the early sixteen thirties, and found final expression in the founding of the first of the great Gondar castles.
The expulsion of the Jesuits was followed by Ethiopian efforts to continue, and revamp, the county’s Indian connections, through the opening up of diplomatic relations with the Mogul empire. The initiative was not successful, but age-old commercial contacts between the two countries continued throughout the period under review.
