Word: emperor
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...still seated on our rear ends," observed Montaigne in the 16th century. Just how ludicrous are the presumptions of temporal power was illustrated in 1974 by the dethronement of the King of Kings, Elect of God, Lion of Judah, His Most Puissant Majesty and Distinguished Highness the Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie. Few 20th century rulers have reigned with more imperial assurance and panache. A charmer, a demagogue and a despot with an implacable will to power, Haile Selassie had contrived for 44 years to present himself to the world as an enlightened monarch and a forward-looking statesman while...
...Emperor offers a trenchant portrait of a 1963 conference of African leaders in the Ethiopian capital. During a gargantuan banquet for more than 3,000 guests in the Emperor's palace, Kapuściński ventures outdoors to an area where dishwashers are throwing out leftovers from the banquet tables. A strange sound issues from the far side of the garbage dump. "I noticed that something was moving, shifting, murmuring, squishing, sighing, and smacking its lips . . . In the thick night, a crowd of barefoot beggars stood huddled together . . . I watched the crowd devour the scraps, bones, and fish...
...decade later, after a military coup had toppled Haile Selassie, Kapuściński made the last of his many trips to Addis Ababa. With the help of a former official, he set out on a series of surreptitious expeditions to uncover the deposed Emperor's courtiers and persuade them to tell him about Haile Selassie's way of life and mode of rule. They confided tales of unbounded slavishness, greed, corruption and palace intrigue...
Most titillating are the stories recounted by Haile Selassie's personal aides, like the keeper of the dog Lulu, which regularly irrigated the shoes of officials who danced attendance on the Emperor. Recalled the keeper: "I had to walk among the dignitaries and wipe the urine from their shoes with a satin cloth. This was my job for ten years." The function of another aide was to act as the monarch's animated timepiece, bowing several times as "a signal to His Perspicacious Majesty that one hour was ending and that the time had come to start another...
...author's own. Indeed, there are moments when Kapuściński's fugitive images of Haile Selassie seem to merge with his visions of Stalin and other Communist leaders who have inflamed the writer's political fantasies. Little wonder that when The Emperor was published in Poland in 1978, this story of an evil autocrat surrounded by craven functionaries was read as an allegory of Communist rule. Who but Stalin, for example, might have justified a famine in the words attributed to an apologist for Haile Selassie: "Between...