The 18th century Scottish “explorer” James Bruce, who lived in Ethiopia from 1769 to 1774, was one of the great European travellers to Ethiopia. His famous five-volume work Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile – in which he explains his greatness and proudly quotes his allegedly important conversations with Ethiopian kings, queens and other historic figures – was first published in 1790. It created much controversy – with many readers taking it as Gospel truth, while others believed it to be very largely fictitious. The book was nevertheless almost immediately translated into French and German, and was subsequently reprinted, both in complete and abridged versions.
But how, dear reader, did Ethiopians evaluate their Scottish visitor?
We are fortunate to be able to answer this question because another British traveller, Henry Salt, chanced to visit Ethiopia in 1809, thirty-five years after Bruce’s departure – and met an elderly Ethiopian scholar, Debtera Aster, who remembered the Scotsman well.
Salt recalls in his Voyage to Abyssinia (1814) that Debtera Aster was “in the habit of visiting” Bruce “every three or four days”. As for the traveller’s linguistic abilities, Aster states that Bruce “did not speak the Tigré language, nor much of Amharic”, but that on his arrival in Ethiopia he could already “read the [Ethiopic] characters”, and that “during his stay in the country” his knowledge “considerably improved”. However he was almost always accompanied by an interpreter called Michael, though Debtera Aster understood that Bruce also “occasionally spoke Arabic” with the Muslims of Gondar.
The aged Ethiopian went on to state that Bruce made two attempts to reach the source of the Abbay, or Blue Nile: The first failed, as the visitors were attacked by bandits, but the second attempt succeeded, after which Bruce’s party “returned back safely to Gondar”. Aster went on to reveal that Bruce had not travelled alone, as he attempts to pretend in his book, but in the company of “a young man” – almost certainly the Italian artist Luigi Balugani, whom Bruce (falsely) claims to have died prior to this time. Salt’s own opinion was that Bruce’s concealment of Balugani’s presence was “unpardonable”.
Bruce, Debtera Aster recalls, was “a noble looking man, … greatly noticed” by the then Emperor, Takla Haymanot II, who had made him one of his “baalamaals”, or court favourites. He rode horseback “remarkably well”, on a black horse of his own, though he also sometimes also borrowed one of the monarch’s steeds.
As for Bruce’s pompous claim to have been appointed Governor of the district of Ras el-Fil, on Ethiopia’s western border, Aster was emphatic that “no ‘no shummut’, or ‘district’, was ever given to him” – though “he was said to have often asked” for it.
Debtera Aster also rejected the Scotsman’s claim to have met Amha Iyasus, the then ruler of Shawa when the later supposedly visited Gondar. Amha Iyasus, Debtera Aster declared, in fact “never” visited the city during Bruce’s residence – though messengers from Shawa sometimes arrived with horses as presents for the Emperor.
Debtera Aster was no less critical of Bruce’s description of the Oromo leader Guangoul, whom the traveller described as “a savage” who wore “a wreath of guts about his neck, and several rounds of the same material about his middle. This account, Aster declared, was “strangely misrepresented”. He had himself been present in Gondar at the time of Guangoul’s visit, and recalled that the chief had indeed been “very appropriately dressed”, just like the Oromos whom Salt had later seen.
Debtera Aster also rejected Bruce’s much publicised story of a banquet of meat cut from a living animal. He declared that” he had never witnessed such a practice, and expressed great abhorrence at the thought”. He was likewise sceptical of Bruce’s account of the “licentiousness” of a state banquet. He declared this “greatly exaggerated”, an example of which was Bruce’s mention of “the company drinking the health of the party – a custom which Aster declared was “absolutely unknown” throughout Ethiopia.
Confirmation
Salt goes on to say that he had subsequently received other accounts of Bruce’s residence in Gondar – and that they “all tended in the strongest manner to corroborate” Aster’s statements, and, writing of the latter, he adds:
“he may have been mistaken upon some few immaterial points of his narrative, but upon the whole I have reason to believe it extremely correct”.
Despite his in some ways damning criticism Debtera Aster declared that when Bruce “quitted Abyssinia… he left behind ‘a great name'”
The problem, Salt concludes, was that Bruce started dictating his book a full sixteen years after his departure from Ethiopia. By that time, as his editor, Alexander Murray, delicately puts it, the author of the Travels apparently “viewed the numerous adventures of his active life as in a dream, not in their natural state as to time and place, but under the pleasing and arbitrary change of memory melting into imagination”.
And more than that, dear reader, no man need say.
(Originally published in Capital newspaper)
Richard Pankhurst 
Leave a Reply