FOREIGN PARTS

in most of Europe. Biblical is the word. National Geographic recently produced a map showing the impact of human beings on Africa. Predictably the Sahara Desert and the Congo Basin are almost blank. South Africa and huge conurbations glow with roads and buildings, mines and factories. And Ethiopia shows the same intensity of human impact as dense urban settlement. Yet from an aeroplane window the Ethiopia highlands can look like the Alps in the sun. You have to walk the ground to see how crowded the landscape is. Every tree is known and owned, every rock has been touched. For centuries Ethiopia has been tilled and fought over, dug and gouged. Rather than cutting stone to build churches, the Ethiopians carved them into the rock, underground or by tunnelling into cliffs, building in reverse. In search of these churches, Philip Marsden walked from Lalibela to Akusm, the Zion of Ethiopia. They are extraordinary, many of them deliberately cut off from the earth by sheer cliffs, with trap doors in rock ceilings that are accessible only by cowhide ropes or rusty chains. Their inhabitants are enigmatic: astounding in their discipline, devotion to God and resilience, yet unable to reach out to outsiders with a biblical message of universal love for humanity. They seem to be a remnant of the church of the Dark Ages, where monasteries were a refuge, an escape to find salvation away from the evil of the world. Counter to fashion, Marsden writes sparsely, with little about himself. His sentences are tiny clear brush strokes building a picture. His reactions to things are understated; he feels a little thirst here, momentary awe there, but I know little about him by the end of the book. However, I do know a lot more about Ethiopia, and it feels like the Ethiopia I have glimpsed. Unlike that of the rest of Africa, Ethiopia’s history – kings and wars and legends – is its own. The book begins with a thumbnail history of the country (just 439 words), starting with the founder, descended from Noah, and the royal family, begotten by the union of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon. Ethiopians were already part of the Judaeo-Christian tradition when the Brits were running around in woad, worshipping bits of wood. Ethiopia is an ancient civilisation whose Coptic Christianity goes back to the fifth century. Protected from Arab invasions and Western venturers by its inaccessible mountains, it developed a distinct Christian and monastic tradition of its own. It joined the

Europeans in carving up Africa in the nineteenth century, and saw off the Italians at the battle of Adwa in 1896, one of the few clashes with outsiders in the nation’s history. As Marsden shrewdly points out, however, the victory ‘sealed Ethiopia again, froze its spectacular traditions and earned it another glorious century of isolation’. Ethiopia’s seclusion has also left the Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions far more entwined and tolerant of each other than in the rest of the world. I have always felt that being Christian, Muslim or Falasha Jewish in Ethiopia was like being Baptist, Methodist or Anglican in Britain. There are no outside political factions to exploit religious differences. Indeed, Marsden finds a Muslim village and reminds us that the Negus, the Ethiopian ruler, gave sanctuary to Muhammad’s companions when they were persecuted in Medina. The beauty of this book is that Marsden does not interpret, he reports. He is eyes and ears, recalling faithfully what he is told by the monks and priests in their own words. So we learn that in the history of one of the monasteries 150 people once arrived with clubs and ropes to drive out a holy man, who ‘turned their clubs into leopards and lions and tigers and their ropes into snakes. The 150 were killed by those beasts and [the man] saw them and they were lying on the ground like dead flies.’ Then there is another holy man, who was so holy that he prayed for twenty years without sitting down. His right leg rotted and fell off and is now preserved in the monastery of Debra Libanos. Obligingly, as if writing a tourist guide, Marsden informs us: ‘once a year on his feast day, it is taken out and pilgrims are permitted to drink the water used to wash it’. Just occasionally he slips in a slice of philosophy or theology from somewhere else to show that Ethiopian concepts are no less profound or unique for all the country’s isolation from the mainstreams of European and Arab theology. Ethiopia’s isolation has allowed outsiders to build up myths, such as those of Prester John, the beleaguered Christian priest king, sought by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century; and of Emperor Haile Selassie, sought by Rastafarians, who regarded him as divine (Selassie was amused but embarrassed by their attentions and gave them land quite a long way from the capital). The truth of Ethiopia is of such mythic proportions that I am not sure if this book will add to outsiders’ understanding or baffle them even more. To order this book at £11.99, see order form on page 78

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LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006