King of Kings

By Patricia Blake

THE EMPEROR

by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

164 pages; $12.95

"On the topmost throne of the world, we are 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 his subjects remained in boundless poverty and ignorance.

Among the few journalists who had been witness to the vagaries of Haile Selassie's reign was Ryszard Kapuscinski, 52. A widely traveled former correspondent for the Polish Press Agency, Kapuscinski was evidently impressed by the family resemblance shared by absolute rulers, whether they reign in Addis Ababa, Moscow or Warsaw. In fact, the real subject of his ambiguous, compelling memoir is not Haile Selassie's primitive autocracy. It is modern totalitarianism reduced to its primordial elements.

The 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, Kapuscinski 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 heads with laborious concentration. In the meticulous absorption of this eating there was an almost violent biological abandon--the satisfaction of hunger in anxiety and ecstasy."

A decade later, after a military coup had toppled Haile Selassie, Kapuscinski 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."

Strangely, all Kapuscinski's Ethiopian interlocutors speak in the same ironic voice; the reader will soon come to identify it as the author's own. Indeed, there are moments when Kapuscinski'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 you and me--it is not bad for national order and a sense of national humility that the subjects be rendered skinnier, thinned down a bit. . . The usefulness of going hungry is that a hungry man thinks only of bread . . . One should always beware of those who have a bit, because they are the worst, they are the greediest, it is they who push upward."

Kapuscinski has neither denied nor confirmed the hidden subject of his book. But there can be little doubt that his alternately acrid and hilarious portrait of Haile Selassie's kingdom was meant to provide a riveting view of two societies, as well as an unarguable point: Kings of Kings, whether royal or Communist, are seated on the backs of the people.

--By Patricia Blake This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.