The Emperor’s Curse.
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On a freezing Saturday morning in January, my wife, son and I made our usual trip to our local market. Amongst the vegetable stalls, butchers and cheesemongers, there are several food stalls, including a South Indian dosa seller who offers the best chai I’ve tasted (apart from in Sikh temples).
The owner, a lovely guy from Pondicherry, recognised us, waved and grinned. He hadn’t see me since before Christmas. This time though, he beamed a wide smile and pointed at my face, where a longer-than-usual beard was covering my chin.
“Haile Selassie!” he said with a laugh.
“Haile Selassie?” I said. “The Ethiopian emperor?”
“Yes!” he replied, “You look like Haile Selassie, King of Kings!”
This is not a flattering comparison, although there is undoubtedly some resemblance.
My wife found it amusing too. “Isn’t he mentioned on lots of reggae records?” He is. Haile Selassie is considered a deity and the Messiah among many followers of the Rastafarian religion.
Two days later, I received the monthly newsletter from a book group in South London. I joined the group years ago, never attended a single meeting, but stayed on their mailing list as I often find it a great source of book recommendations.
That month’s book? ‘The Emperor’ by Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński, a reportage on the decline and fall of Haile Selassie’s empire, published in 1978.
Well, I can’t walk past coincidences like this. I bought a copy and finally got around to reading it a couple of months ago.
It’s an extraordinary story told in a dreamlike narrative that blends non-fiction and creative interpretation. It is essentially a collection of interviews that Kapuściński had with former courtiers in the royal palace, anonymised for their protection and woven into a chronological narrative of how the Empire collapsed.
There is something fable-like about it, a timeless story about power, corruption and madness. The courtiers are endlessly pitted against each other in ever-changing factions. Haile Selassie keeps them constantly guessing and second-guessing what is going on, competing for his favour, which also changes constantly.
He maintains several different networks of informants, so that rival factions are informing to him about each other. Thus, no-one is quite sure of what is going on, apart from him - at least until his downfall when the delicate house of cards collapses.
It is an endless mind-bending game of creating and managing divisions, keeping people divided enough that they cannot overthrow the Emperor, but loyal and coherent enough that they can maintain his Empire.
“His August Majesty chided the bureaucrats for failing to understand a simple principle: the principle of the second bag. Because the people never revolt just because they have to carry a heavy load, or because of exploitation. They don't know life without exploitation, they don't even know that such a life exists. How can they desire what they cannot imagine? The people will revolt only when, in a single movement, someone tries to throw a second burden, a second heavy bag, onto their backs. The peasant will fall face down into the mud - and then spring up and grab an ax.
He'll grab an ax, my gracious sir, not because he simply can't sustain this new burden - he could carry it - he will rise because he feels that, in throwing the second burden onto his back suddenly and stealthily, you have tried to cheat him, you have treated him like an unthinking animal, you have trampled what remains of his already strangled dignity, taken him for an idiot who doesn't see, feel, or understand.”
— from ‘The Emperor’ by Ryszard Kapuściński
There is a strange and powerful devotion to the Emperor, derived from a belief that he is a divine being, a descendant of Solomon and David. He is referred to with numerous different titles: His Imperial Majesty, the Great Leader, Lord of Lords, His August Majesty, Elect of God.
Every time the Emperor travels overseas, which he does often, he frets about revolt in his absence. Each trip involves a careful selection of people from his circles, ensuring those who might conspire are separated or kept close to him. Courtiers meanwhile, jostle to be included on these lavish trips, a sign they believe that they are in favour.
What feels perennial about the story is what I experienced when I read it: a sense of growing and endless paranoia, fear, desperation and madness that surrounds dictatorial power. There is a sense of exhaustion in how occupied Haile Selassie is with maintaining his own power, far more so than serving his people, which becomes evident when widespread famine in the south become known whilst the Emperor and his retinue live in luxury.
How, then, is one to confront this threatening creature that man seems to be, that we all are? How to tame him and daunt him? How to know that beast, how to master it?
There is only one way, my friend: by weakening him. Yes, by depriving him of his vitality, because without it he will be incapable of wrong. And to weaken is exactly what fasting does. Such is our Amharic philosophy, and this is what our fathers teach us. Experience confirms it. A man starved all his life will never rebel. Up north there was no rebellion.
No one raised his voice or his hand there. But just let the subject start to eat his fill and then try to take the bowl away, and immediately he rises in rebellion. The usefulness of going hungry is that a hungry man thinks only of bread.
— from ‘The Emperor’ by Ryszard Kapuściński
He is an increasingly isolated, lonely figure who trusts no one apart from one old confidant, a man who later is amongst the first to betray him.
‘What’s it all for?’ is one of the questions the book invites but never answers. Despite the vast power and wealth at the Emperor’s disposal, it never sounds or feels like a peaceful or enjoyable life, yet it is one he has pursued from a young age and is now seemingly trapped in.
Inevitably, it all comes tumbling down, the famine providing the final straw, the ‘second bag’ that the people cannot tolerate. The Emperor is gradually deposed in a coup that surgically takes his courtiers one by one before removing him from power.
At the age of 83, Haile Selassie was strangled to death in his bed by several of his formerly loyal military officers.
The book and Haile Selassie’s story are a sobering and profound commentary on power, the hunger for it that is never satisfied, the Sisyphean task of holding on to it like a handful of slippery eels, the inability to truly enjoy or be at peace with the riches and privileges that have been accrued.
What’s it all for?
Accumulating power is like spinning hundreds of plates, a task that imprisons us with the paradoxical task of maintenance. The eye can never be taken off what is at the periphery, the mind can never rest with what is in sight or out of it, the heart strains and withers.
The more power we amass for ourselves, the more we want to preserve it and, ultimately, we can only do so with our own labour - for if we have not learned to share it, asking others to preserve our own power can only last so long and always relying on immense amounts of fear and greed.
Eventually, the cult either architects its own demise or turns on its leader.
This is surely a parable for all of us, too, an invitation to consider what power we seek and possess, whether we are sharing it or clinging on to it, whether we are imprisoning ourselves by attempting to stay where we are, inoculated from gravity and the tides.
What if we just gave power away, endlessly? What would that look like?
After all, individual power is merely an illusion; the greatest powers are those that we are surrounded by, the forces of time and nature which we are both part of and subject to.
None of us escapes this power, not even the King of Kings.
“The first urgent necessity is that those who have economic and political power, no matter how large or small, regain their freedom to use the heart when making decisions that affect the lives of others.”
— Arkan Lushwala
Tipping Point: navigating collapse and crisis.
“Tradition doesn’t mean fixity. In fact, it means the exact opposite. It means something that will grow, that is a gift. Literary tradition means being handed something. I ‘give over’, ‘trans do’. And so a tradition is something which we are given and which we in turn use and will always make fresh and different.”
The always insightful Iain McGilchrist on the Planet: Critical podcast, discussing our need for meaning, spirit and belonging.
About me.
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