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?’). I rang the military attaché at the Italian embassy, a general, and he consulted his archives. I rang Mr McAleavy, who got a bit shirty, and referred me to the author of a book he had read, a professor. The professor blamed it on his co-author, with whom he was no longer in touch, then referred me to a second professor. And out of all this came the fact that no Italian POWs were castrated after Adowa; in fact, the opposite may be said to be true, for their captors had provided them with women. But this was my introduction to Ethiopian history, a day on the telephone, and that over a single sentence. I feared The Barefoot Emperor, a whole book on the subject, would have me on the phone until Christmas.