In 1983 Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich issued an English version of Ryszard Kapuscinski's The Emperor, Downfall of an Autocrat, published originally in 1978. Of the fifteen reviews I have read, none was written by an Ethiopianist who might have been expected to know something about Ethiopia's most durable emperor (r. 1916-1974). In other words, the published reviews reflect ignorance about the book's subject, so much so that the critics, to a person, found that the book was not about Ethiopia, or even the emperor, but was about Poland and its then dictator Edward Gierek. They fell for the notion, origanlly invented by the book's bitter Polish readers, that The Emperor was an allegory I They comment, therefore, that Haile Sellassie's story merely “illustrates exactly how the mighty rule, and why, as a result, they fall.” Had I been asked to review Kapuscinski's book, I would have regarded the volume as a serious effort to explain Haile Sellassie and commented accordingly.

I would first have stated that Kapuscinski had written a flawed book because he had uncritically believed his informants, several of whom told tall tales about the short monarch. A few examples will suffice to clarify this point. One, Mr. Richard as he is called by several raconteurs, reported that the emperor had a little dog that was permitted to urinate on the shoes of courtiers and that there was a servant whose sole duty was to wipe the offending shoes dry. True, the emperor enjoyed small dogs, but he never would have permitted any animal to humiliate his courtiers. Second, Kapuscinski recounts that the emperor's sole teacher was a French Jesuit, who never was able to inculcate reading into his young charge. In fact, the young Haile Sellassie had several teachers, among them two Capucins but nary a Jesuit. His Ethiopian Capucin, Father Samuel, introduced his student to the classics of Ethiopian and Western philosophical literature and instilled in him a profound respect for reading and learning. Third, Haile Sellassie was, by all reports, a sedulous reader in Amharic, French, and, later, in English. He not only perused books but also reports, newspapers, and magazines. Furthermore, he wrote instructions and orders, giving the lie to Kapuscinski's absurd statement (8): “Though he ruled for half a century, not even those closest to him knew what his signature looked like.”