Genius as Madness: King Tewodros of Ethiopia and Sayyid Muhammad of Somalia in Comparative Perspective

The idea of a comparative look at Emperor Tewodros and Sayyid Muhammad came to me almost impulsively, without forethought or premeditation. This occurred when, due to intervening events, I failed to make it to a conference titled the "Horn of Africa between History, Law and Politics," held in Rome in December 2002. I am the poorer for not participating in a scholastic symposium which, under the leadership of the able and scholarly Professor Irma Taddia, surely would have benefited me greatly.

For years I have hoped that students of the Horn, indigenous as well as expatriate, would aim for a regional exploration of common themes and problems in the Horn, in order to produce a broad-brush picture of the entire area rather than being content with the customary single-country approach that tends to characterize Horn-of-Africa studies. The brief sketch that follows on two great heroes of the Horn represents the prelude to a work in progress which, at the moment, remains too slow to progress.

It should be said at the outset that the historiography of comparative history confronts us with a number of challenging problems. It requires, among other things, an intimate knowledge of each of the subjects individually before any attempt at comparison can be undertaken at all. While I am comfortable in making a historical judgment on the Sayyid, having been in his company for four decades, I am definitely out of my depth with respect to Emperor Theodore, my acquaintance with him being almost entirely based on casual gleanings from the secondary accounts of scholars such as Bahru Zewde, Donald Crummey, Harold G. Marcus, Richard Pankhurst, Dame Margery Perham, Sven Rubenson, and Taddesse Tamrat.

Obviously there are striking parallels in the lives and times of these two extraordinary personalities. First, both men started up their respective turbulent careers as enterprising banditti, or bandits who built their fame and fortune on the frontiers of the Ethiopian empire. Both robbed, looted, and smuggled on a scale unparalleled even in the cataclysmic history of the Horn. Tewodros operated in the lowlands of Kwara, due west of Lake Tana. "In this no-man's land," Harold G. Marcus tells us, "lived many smugglers who carried contraband to and from the Sudan, and Shifta (brigands) who were running away from authority or demonstrating their displeasure with the government."¹ Always at home in the borderlands, Tewodros specialized in despoiling Muslim "infidels." So, he earned his reputation as the scourge of Muslims, and in doing so, prospered spectacularly.

For his part the man who came to be known as the "Mad Mullah of Somaliland" forged his Dervish state in the Ogaadeen on the eastern frontiers between Ethiopia and the fledgling British Somaliland Protectorate on one side and Italian Somalia on the other. He, too, was a great robber, who rapidly developed an insatiable appetite for plundering the tribes under the protection of the Christian infidels. Moreover, he operated in the Ogaadeen on the eastern frontier of the Ethiopian empire. Sir Douglas Jardine describes the Ogaadeen as "an accursed no-man's land." "The Abyssinians," he goes on to say, "fearing alike the fevers of the lowland climate and the martial qualities of the tribesmen, have steadfastly declined to administer in this zone despite the most urgent representations of our Government."²

For their part, the highland Ethiopians, with their clement weather and quite cultivation of teff, recoiled with horror from the parching bush lands of the Somali Ogaadeen: "It was a country, they said," as Dame Margery Perham reports, "for the Somalis, the infidel, for the hyenas, not for the Christian."³ I like the elegance of this rendition, especially the juxtaposition of "Somalis, infidels and hyenas." In these wild lands, the Dervishes, as the Sayyid's followers styled themselves, looted and despoiled both Somalis and Christians ruthlessly and indiscriminately, thereby making themselves "a force in the land to reckon with," as Kassa (Tewodros's precoronation name) had done in the West.

Second, both Muhammad and Kassa were born to a dormant traditional society...