The Emperor

I picked up this deceptively slim book by chance and read it in a long afternoon.

It charts the collapse of Haile Selassie’s reign in Ethiopia in 1972 but resonates far beyond that moment. Told in the voices of the people who served him, it’s a compelling and darkly comic portrait of a regime whose dreams unmoored it from reality.

It would give Vladimir Putin a sleepless night, if he had a conscience. 

All of Kapuscinski’s books are gems. He traveled Africa and other parts of the developing world as a Soviet journalist. The Emperor describes the rule and decline of the Ethiopian Emperor, Haile Selassie. The dry day-to-dry accounts of the emperor’s benign neglect for his people is chilling. Haile Selassie knew to keep those around him happy and not to worry about the people: “A man starved all his life will never rebel…. No one raised his voice or hand there. But just let the subject start to eat his fill and then try to take the bowl away, and… show more.