The mad emperor and his cannon

I approached this book with some trepidation, fearing it would be a load of old bollocks. For my one previous experience of Ethiopian history had been the following sentence in my daughter’s GCSE textbook, when, describing their defeat of a modern Italian army in 1896, the author, Tony McAleavy, wrote, ‘The Ethiopians castrated the Italian prisoners of war taken at Adowa.’

Not a history book you will note, but a textbook, so a whole generation of schoolchildren would read something that could affect forever their attitudes to Ethiopia and Africa. So why had I not heard of this atrocity? There were over 1,000 Italian POWs after Adowa — can you imagine what the effect on European public opinion would have been had 1,000 repatriated eunuchs turned up in Italy ? It was clearly tosh, but how was I to prove it was tosh?

I rang the Ethiopian embassy, and spoke to a shaken press attaché (‘Are they telling schoolgirls this?’).