Eritrean Revolution

Jeremy Harding

When the Emperor Haile Selassie was removed from the palace in Addis Ababa 13 years ago, the Ethiopian revolutionaries chose to drive him away in a Volkswagen. It was in some sense an eye for an eye – a humiliation of the man whose lavish style at court, maintained while thousands of peasants died in the famine of the early Seventies, had shamed the country. It was also a gesture of studied indifference. Henceforth it was of no concern what clothes the Emperor might or might not be wearing. The new regime would be pursuing a tough Marxist agenda in which the King of Kings had no place beside the agricultural collective, the village assembly and the literacy campaign.

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[*] Macmillan, 274 pp., £27.50 and £9.95, 0 333 41993 6.