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Evelyn Waugh was a very famous novelist, known for his acerbic humour. He wrote effortlessly and without pretention, and he had that self-deprecating Oxford humility which leads you to underestimate him if you’re not careful. For Evelyn Waugh was not just brilliant, he was brave. He was a war reporter – his book Scoop (1938: #60 of the Guardian’s best novels of all time, a wonderful account of a hapless war journalist amidst the frenzied news-mongering of the newspapers’ foreign correspondents) was based on his personal experience reporting the war in Abyssinia for The Daily Mail. Reprints of his travelogue Waugh in Abyssinia (1936) which recorded that experience, however, tend nowadays to come with a warning, e.g.: “This book was written in 1936 therefore some of Waugh's pro-colonial and pro-Italian views can be a little awkward nowadays”. ‘A little awkward’ is a massive understatement; Waugh was right-wing politically, writing for a newspaper that spoke well of Mussolini and Hitler, and imbued with the imperialist racism and supremacism of the time. Waugh book’s is interesting because he was an Italian apologist, and supported the Italian invasion, but to get at its insights you have to be able to cope with racist throwaways such as “a lot of black fuzzy heads' and “Vinci the wop minister'. Plus a lack of empathy: after describing what we would regard as the horrors of war, he comments only: “Sad. Still all this will make a funny novel so it isn’t wasted.”
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NEVERTHELESS, Waugh does say some things worthy of notice:
Waugh could not stand the other war correspondents, whom he described as desperate to send back any story that would chime well with their readers, and prepared to make stories up if necessary. Neither did he accept the standard view of the Abyssinians and their Emperor as the noble victims they were portrayed as in that press. He saw no Abyssinian ‘Empire’ to go with the ‘emperor’, merely a "vast and obscure agglomeration of feudal fiefs, occupied military provinces, trackless no-man's lands roamed by homicidal nomads." So the Abyssinian solders are described as “ragged and dilapidated, some armed with spears but most of them with antiquated guns”. Waugh was horrified to see a enslaved person given as a tip, and to visit a prison where inmates were manacled amidst their own excrement to the walls of tiny hutches. He also visited the Moslem town of Harar and learned about the discrimination Moslems faced in Christian Ethiopia: “Moslem schools were being squeezed out; Moslem law was overruled by Abyssinian; a Moslem who turned Christian was promoted, a Christian who turned Moslem flogged.' In fact the local Muslim sheikh welcomed the Italian invasion, looked forward to the bloodthirsty defeat of the Abyssinians, and wanted Harar to be made part of the British Empire. Waugh presents Emperor Haile Selasse as “a highly complex character”, whose mind was “pathetically compounded of primitive simplicity and primitive suspicion, of traditional Christian righteousness … and traditional savage hostility to European standards”. Where Haile Selasse had gone wrong, thought Waugh, was that he had been fooled by the Treaty of Versailles into thinking that he was safe, that he was an equal amongst the nations of the League, and that the Italians were his friends and protectors. "After that he was left with no cards to play except international justice, collective security and the overweening confidence of his fighting forces. He played the first two astutely enough; the third turned out to be valueless." Neither did he see the Italians as the cowardly war-criminals British opinion of the time would have them. When the Ethiopians announced that Italy had started the war by bombing a Red Cross hospital at Adwa (3 October), Waugh denied that there was a hospital there. During the war – although fully aware that the Italian were bombing Red Cross facilities – he provided an affidavit asserting that he had seen Ethiopian soldiers using the Red Cross flag as a ‘human shield’. And when, after the war, Waugh visited Abyssinia again, he enthused about Italian rule there: “The Italian occupation of Ethiopia is being attended by the spread of order and decency, education and medicine, in a disgraceful place”. Mud tracks and shacks were being replaced by metalled roads and plans to rebuild the capital. Underestimate the new fascist Italy at your peril, was Waugh’s message.
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Waugh’s comments will come hard to our modern ears, where we reject colonialism, where the fascists are ‘baddies’, and where the Italian invasion is universally represented as an atrocity accompanied by atrocities. But it does no harm for historians to study ‘an alternative opinion’. There are no ‘goodies’ or ‘baddies’ in the real world; ‘their side’ always has many good people and fine aims; ‘our side’ frequently betrays our principles. And most of all there is no established objective and final ‘correct’ history. There are as many ‘histories’ as there are researchers, and as an historian your job is to survey them, weigh them, and then use them to help you apply your own interpretation of the facts.
To help you weigh Waugh’s interpretation, here are two contrasting reviews:
Source A“When Mr.Waugh set foot in Abyssinia, covering miles of deserts and lowlands, he finds no trace of war … Mr.Waugh comments wryly on the attitudes of press correspondents who, in spite of there being no major occurrence, are busy typing out and cabling carefully enhanced ‘materials’ to demanding editors. "Everyone was waiting for Italy at her own convenience to begin the war" and for the airplanes to emerge and strike. Propagandists comprise the only active group Mr.Waugh finds in the country; they are busily involved in anti-Italian campaigns and in issuing news bulletins against the aggression. In essence, they effectively suppress news from Italy. An incident of "considerable importance" occurs in Adowa, where a hospital was said to have been destroyed, resulting in heavy casualties… Before long, however, it is discovered that no such hospital stands anywhere in the land of Adowa! Waugh receives cables from London and New York: "Require earliest name life story photograph American nurse upblown Adowa", to which Mr.Waugh enthusiastically replies: "Nurse unupblown"! The editors in Europe and America who had invested huge amounts of money on the coverage of invasion are becoming impatient with what little they received in return. The Emperor of Abyssinia has taken flight, surprising the world. Disenchanted press and film crews start packing. Mr.Waugh finds his way out. The concluding part of the book narrates Mr.Waugh’s reappearance in Harar and his observations on post-war Abyssinia. Contrary to his expectations, the city greeted the author as though nothing untoward had happened. "It was a revelation to me", Mr.Waugh wonders, "to see how little damage a bomb does". He even recognizes healthy traces of development. The market was going merrily. The roads were being built. In Asmara, he comes across a school, established by Italians. He sights Italian soldiers playing with Abyssinian children. The author writes: "The Italians had accomplished in six months a task which they had expected to take two years… It was a severe test of morale and they stood up to it in a way which should dispel any doubts which still survive of the character of the new Italy." The failure of peace preserving bodies like the League of Nations to end unlawful interruptions in a vulnerable country like Abyssinia reveals the necessity of military power. Mr.Waugh’s reflective analysis of the transformation of the Abyssinians socio-economic and cultural conditions while in Italian hands elevates the book from the rank of a travel account to that of a classic with considerable historical significance. Precisely for this reason, like any other works of innovation, the book was received with controversy and criticism at the time of its publication. Waugh in Abyssinia aims to redefine and broaden the role and vision of a correspondent. As such, it highlights some of the fundamental qualities that he or she should possess: an impartial attitude, a commitment to facts, a humane approach and an unbiased understanding of world affairs. Waugh in Abyssinia is an honest reportage that should be celebrated for its brilliant reflections and insights as well as for the author's unique approach.” G. Marudhan, writing in Critique (2002)
Source BWhile Evelyn Waugh's stylistic brilliance is acknowledged, he also churned out racist satires and "reportage" on Ethiopia in the 1930s. He did his worst damage in Waugh in Abyssinia, a book that inexplicably is still reprinted by publishers often with no introduction that puts the work in historical context. In the 1930s, Ethiopia fascinated many as an independent country that had fended off all the colonial powers… Ethiopia had joined the League of Nations. Emperor Haile Selassie was trying to modernize his country when Mussolini decided it was time for payback and that Italy was entitled to its "place in the sun" with Britain, France and other colonial powers. The resulting diplomatic crisis prompted Britain to send its fleet into the Mediterranean and Mussolini to threaten another world war. In a betrayal as important as the one of Czechoslovakia later, Britain and France sat on their hands as Fiat tanks rolled into the Ethiopian hills. The Great Powers even offered Mussolini a deal to take half the country (plus the means to gobble up the rest). Italian planes used mustard gas on barefoot soldiers and bombed Red Cross hospitals. What is still around, unfortunately, is Waugh's account, which grew out of his time as a war correspondent for the right-wing Daily Mail of London. From the beginning, the modern reader knows he's in trouble. Waugh offers an apologist essay defending imperialism and a distorted version of Ethiopian history. Waugh calls Ethiopia "barbarous and xenophobic" and claims "slavery and slave-holding were universal." In fact, Haile Selassie was legally phasing out slavery at the time. Some modern readers consider the book a witty commentary on the practices of journalists, for Waugh paints his fellow reporters as a bunch of liars and scoundrels. The facts demonstrate Waugh as one of those liars. He argues in his book that the bombing of a Red Cross hospital at Adwa on the eve of the war never happened. But there are eyewitness accounts of people fleeing into the hospital, and the attack prompted Haile Selassie to protest to the League. Since the bombing of other Red Cross installations throughout the war is not in dispute, Waugh's account is suspect. A reader would get an altogether different picture of Waugh if they knew him better. Waugh wrote to a friend that "I have got to hate the ethiopians more each day goodness they are lousy & I hope the organmen [a racist term for Italians] gas them to buggery." The Ethiopians eventually lost, and Haile Selassie came to Geneva to shame the League of Nations in a powerful speech. Waugh concludes his account with idyllic scenes of road-building and Italian soldiers greeted by Ethiopian children. The Italians "now found themselves faced with opportunities and responsibilities vastly greater than their ambitions at the beginning of the war... It was a severe test of morale and they stood up to it in a way which should dispel any doubts which still survive of the character of the new Italy." The character of the new Italy was shown by Mussolini in May 1936 when he ordered that Selassie's administrators and foreign-educated class be summarily shot by troops entering the capital. It was shown again in 1937 after an attempt to kill the Italian viceroy when Black Shirts went on a rampage of murder and arson through Addis Ababa, slaughtering thousands. Jeff Pearce is a freelance journalist, novelist and writer. His book: Prevail: The Inspiring Story of Ethiopia's Victory over Mussolini's Invasion (2014) tells the story of Ethopia’s defeat, eventual victory (1941), and how the conflict influenced modern propaganda, the post-war African world, and modern peace movements.
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