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Book Reviews 215 Dejene, Peasants, Agrarian Socialism and Rural Development in Ethiopia (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987). For the Norwegian/IDR project, see Svein Ege, ed., Ethiopia: Problems ofSustainable Development :A ConferenceReport (Dragvoll, Norway: University of Trondheim, College of Arts and Science, Ethiopia Research Programme, 1990). 2.Elsewhere, he complains about rural folks' tendency to answer all queries on local conditions by choosing the "moderate" option on the scheduled questionnaires (pp. 35-36). 3.Though Mesfin seems to be arguing from a "moral economy" perspective , he has elsewhere denied the validity of this concept for Ethiopia. See Mesfin Wolde-Mariam, Rural Vulnerability to Famine in Ethiopia: 1958-1977 (Addis Ababa, 1984), 17. 4.Against one British writer who also headed an NGO, Mesfin makes a direct, but unsubstantiated, charge of plagiarism (p. 14, n. 5). Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton Edward Rice New York: Charles Schribner's Sons, 1990. 522 pp. + xxi. In developing source critiques, biographies are often overlooked. This is particularly true regarding the heavily used European travel literature about Ethiopia. James Bruce, Cornwallis Harris, and Richard Burton, to select a few British examples, all attained fame by writing about their adventures, thereby captivating the imaginations of casual readers as well as serious scholars. Yet Africanists have rarely employed these biographies . Rather, most critiques, embedded in discursive footnotes or other obscure passages, are merely contemporary judgments about prevailing European character traits, such as 19th-century attitudes toward sexuality, race, and religion. What the better biographies offer is insight into the personalities of the travelers by comparing their oftentimes iconoclastic views with predominant European mores. Edward Rice provides such a service for Richard Burton—perhaps the most controversial, yet colorful, 19th-century explorer. In his book Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, Rice provides well researched evidence concerning Burton's chameleon-like persona—his ability to be oriental or occidental. Probing into Burton's formative years, Rice 226 Book Reviews shows how his peripatetic father dragged the family around Europe, providing opportunities for young Burton to learn other languages and, after achieving fluency, to assume different European cultural identities . His atypical education—he dropped out of Oxford—is most remarkable , for without mentorship Burton achieved acclaim as the preeminent Orientalist, being a linguist, eastern philologist and theologian, and cultural anthropologist. His conversions (the sincerity of them is much in debate) and his deep understanding of Islam with all the subtle distinctions between its sectarian theologies, allowed Burton to pass as a Sufi dervish. Rice makes it abundantly clear that Burton's travels to Mecca and Harar, as the first white man to enter these mysterious bastions of Islam, were not the reckless adventures of a person possessing a Byronic death wish—a characteristic he attributed to John Hanning Speke. Rather, Burton was fastidious in preparing for his expeditions, always attempting to anticipate each trial or predicament. Foreseeing an instance where his Sufi identity would be questioned, Burton developed a family genealogy as a "Pathan, born in India of Afghan parents" (p. 186). If doubts persisted about his command of Arabic, his knowledge of the Koran, and his eating, dressing, and ablution habits were intended to resolved any reservations. "Still very much the haji, in Arab dress, and wearing the green turban that was the privilege of those who had made the hajj" (p. 221), Burton channeled his energy, after returning from his celebrated trip to Mecca, by organizing an expedition to assess the Somali coast and penetrate into the forbidden city of Harar in the interior. Based largely on Burton's First Footsteps in East Africa; Or, an Exploration ofHarar, chapters 18 and 19 of Rice's book outline the discoveries and hardships that Burton encountered. Yet, and as a general criticism of biographies about literary fellows, Rice's third-person narrative loses the immediacy of the firsthand account. Gone is the exuberant, sometimes malicious, other times pedantic style of Burton that transports the reader into an exotic world far removed from his or her own.1 What Rice does provide is background into personality conflicts between Burton and many of his contemporaries—most notably Speke— as a microcosm of a larger societal conflict. Burton represented the aberrant individual struggling...

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