Volume 4, Number 8 · May 20, 1965
The Lion of Judah
By Neal Ascherson
Haile Selassie: The Conquering Lion
by Leonard Mosley
Prentice Hall, 288 pp., $6.95
Originality is the quality of Ethiopia, originality in most of its profusion of meanings. To begin with, geography. Other countries have more or less evened up or worn down the irregularities of their physical creation, but the Abyssinian traveler, sloshing through mud, then stumbling down the impossible sides of a canyon into a quite different climate and up again over the sharpest rocks into a thorny desert, still has to cope with a landscape which bears the marks of being a first—and rather over-enthusiastic—try. There is, again, the originality of local Christianity, which Evelyn Waugh found all too close to the first catacomb experiments at a church of mystery, before his own church evolved something more Latin and public. There is the supposed originality of the race itself, as regards Africa, an anthropological fallacy which once inspired the struggling Negroes of America and the West Indies, and still inspires the sect in Jamaica which calls itself 'the Rastafarians.'
Review, 1723 words
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