Book: The Shadow King
Author: Maaza Mengiste
Publication Year: 2019
Genre: Historical Fiction
We have spoken before about the tendency to see Africa as a continent of war, disease and famine. Few African countries embody this mindset quite so powerfully as Ethiopia.
For anyone growing up in 1980s, the images of emaciated children are hard to forget. They filled news reports night after night for months on end. They led to Band Aid and Live Aid and a plethora of similar charity events that came in the thirty years afterwards, from Comic Relief to Live 8.
Yet Ethiopia has a long history beyond the events of the 1980s. The word ‘Ethiopia’ is believed to come from Greek, which translates as ‘burnt skin’ (the Greeks, of course, had a whole mythology to explain this). Originally, it was used to describe the people of Nubia, which stretched from southern Egypt into the Sudan and parts of modern day Ethiopia. The word is found in Homer, although he(?) uses it to refer to both Africans and the people of Asia.
For centuries, the name was used as a stand in for Africa and for dark skinned people in general. Romeo describes Juliet ‘like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear’ when first laying eyes on her. It is a word with a problematic history to be sure. And yet it is one that has been reclaimed and re-appropriated by the people of the modern state.
Ethiopia holds the distinction of being the only African country, other than Liberia, that was never successfully colonised. Liberia was created as a nation for former slaves, so it doesn’t really count in this regard. Despite concerted efforts by a number of countries, most notably the Italians, Ethiopia has remained relatively independent. Which brings us to Maaza Mengiste and The Shadow King.
The Shadow King takes place during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. The Italians won the war and occupied Ethiopia until 1941, when the British defeated them and managed the country until 1944. The Shadow King focuses on two characters on either side of the conflict: Hirut, an orphan in the employ of an Ethiopian officer and Ettore, an Italian solider and photographer of Jewish heritage.
Mengiste’s novel is somewhat stylised. Narrative passages are broken up by the Chorus, who tells us something of the history of the characters depicted. For women like Aster, the wife of Hirut’s employer, Kidane, it general involves sexual violence. Other pauses in the story give descriptions of photos taken by Ettore. Some pastoral scenes. Others of acts of violence committed by the invading army (Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze).
There are also regular, ‘Interludes’, which focus on the real life figure of Haile Selassie. Selassie was Emperor of Ethiopia from 1931 until 1974, when he was deposed (The Shadow King begins and ends in the time of the Emperor’s removal from office). These interludes are for the most part fictional accounts, but the events are real enough. As when Selassie fled into exile following the Italian victory and lived, of all places, in Bath in South West England.
As my own kind of Interlude, I would like to
note that The Shadow King makes no use of inverted commas or dashes to denote
speech. It’s a little strange at first, but you quickly get used to it. It
makes me wonder why we bother with these antiquated methods to identify direct
speech. Ninety nine percent of the time it is quite obvious from context clues.
Anyone who has ever read a book in Spanish, where dashes indicate not only direct
speech, but breaks in speech for information on and about who is speaking, will
know how confusing this can become. You end up counting dashes in order to work
out where the dialogue ends and recommences. At least French novels only use
one dash per instance of direct speech and leave the reader to work out the
rest. Yet as Mengiste shows, none of this is necessary. We use these speech
markers through convention rather than any kind of utilitarian function.
And now back to our regularly scheduled programme:
The Shadow King of the title is a peasant boy who bears a striking resemblance to Haile Selassie. At Hirut’s suggestion, he is dressed up like the Emperor and placed on a horse to both inspire Kidane’s troops and frighten the Italians.
The Shadow King is a variation on the idea of The Mock King. As James George Frazer outlines in his flawed but influential work of comparative mythology, The Golden Bough, the Mock King was someone of low status who temporarily took over the role of king or village chieftain during festivals or religious events. Often the person chosen was someone with severe mental impairment (what, in less sensitive times, would have been called the village idiot). Often they were killed at the end of festivities as a ritual sacrifice in place of the chief or king (hence, The Mock King). The practice, according to Frazer’s review of such ceremonies, took place everywhere from India to the Inca civilization. For reasons we don’t have time to get into here, James Joyce repurposed the Mock King as the Prankquean in Finnegans Wake.
As we saw with Nicaragua (see: Nicaragua), things like this rarely go according to plan. Hirut is captured, along with Aster, and imprisoned by one of the most notorious officers in the Italian army, known as the Butcher of Benghazi. They are stripped semi-naked and photographs taken by Ettore are turned into postcards and widely distributed to goad Kidane into a second attack.
Again, one thinks of the postcards of lynched black men sold, until depressingly recently, throughout the United States. “They’re selling postcards of the hanging[.]” as Dylan sings at the beginning of Desolation Row,. He probably saw such gruesome items for sale growing up in Minnesota.
The ploy works, but the resulting bloodbath benefits no-one. It is a small, fictional event in a much larger war. Hirut disappears into anonymity. Ettore is unable to return to Italy because of the unfolding genocide taking place across Europe. His own parents are taken away for slaughter by the Nazis. What few mementos he has of them are placed in a box and buried. Later, Hirut assumes guardianship of those items. They stay with her for thirty years as Ettore remains in Ethiopia, looking for her.
The Shadow King is a book about war and women’s role in it, both as victims and combatants. It is about a pivotal moment in the history of Ethiopia. The Italian invasion, like The Spanish Civil War, offered the first glimpse of what the rising tide of Fascism in Europe had in store for the world.
It is also, curiously, a book about the end of Haile Selassie’s reign as Emperor. It would see Ethiopia become a Marxist country and a client state of the Soviet Union. It would suffer more than most with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Russian communism (with the possible exception of Yugoslavia – see: Croatia). Africa always seems to bear the brunt of such global events.
Ethiopia today seems as unstable as ever. We saw when we looked at Eritrea (see: Eritrea) how Ethiopia has been in conflict with the smaller country for decades (Eritrea became an independent state in 1991). The Tigray War, 2020-2022, killed hundreds of thousands. There always seems to be a new war; a new famine for the people of Ethiopia (and Eritrea) to endure. For Africa’s second most populous country after Nigeria, this seems intolerable.
Is there a solution? I don’t know. I read books and I write about them. This is all just a bunch of unfiltered opinion.
Which is the problem. Everyone has opinions. Few seem to offer anything in the way of concrete solutions. Band Aid was the perfect name for what happened in the 1980s, because that's all it really was: A sticking plaster over a much larger wound. A wound that continues to fester long after the plaster came unstuck and sailed into to the dust.
The weather changes, the wind shifts. All we can do is move on.
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| Maaza Mengiste |
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