What Should You Include in an Encyclopedia?
Michael Manley holding the Rod of Correction
The crowds kept pouring in until a multitude took shape. Above them stood this modern day Joshua who promised to uplift them from poverty. At long last, deliverance was at hand. The year was 1972 and Jamaicans had had enough. A decade after independence, standards of life had not only failed to improve, many felt things had gotten worse. The mood caught the airwaves. Top hits like “Everything Crash,” by The Ethiopians, got the ball rolling as early as 1968 and by the early seventies Delroy Wilson’s song “Better Must Come” hinted at a final, even desperate, attempt at remaining hopeful. There were reasons to be optimistic: the upcoming national election would pit the incumbent Hugh Shearer against a former trade unionist by the name of Michael Manley, whose soaring popularity was not unlike Barack Obama’s meteoric rise. For one thing, there was his charisma and oratory, which his no-nonsense promise of Democratic Socialism made all the more appealing to the disenfranchised masses. It was Yes We Can with a sprinkle of Now Is The Time. But words were not enough, this much he knew. So the crowds were treated to a mesmerizing display: Manley waving his wooden baton, at times like a stern headmaster, minutes later like a frenzied prophet of Scripture.
His was no ordinary stick, at least not for the masses sweating in the stuffy heat. It was dubbed “The Rod of Correction” and sympathizers from his People’s National Party would sing its mystical properties. The fortunate were allowed to kneel under it, even kiss it. Such was its appeal that it earned Michael Manley the sobriquet of Joshua, who with one mighty strike would once and for all set things straight. The show went beyond carnival politics. As the frontrunner opposition figure, Manley flew to Ethiopia with the keen awareness that a journey to this ancient African empire would boost his popularity beyond measure. In the Jubilee Palace of Addis Ababa he met with the Emperor Haile-Selassie, who recalled his 1966 visit to Jamaica. On that occasion, tens of thousands had turned out to receive the monarch at the airport and the crowds ran amuck wherever he went. Golden medallions were awarded to the outcasts of the day: the fierce-looking Rastafarians who worshipped him as a divine figure. It was a staggering reversal of fortunes. Fresh in their memories were the words spoken on national radio by Prime Minister Alexander Bustamante in 1963, when he had called on citizens to “Bring all the Rastas dead or alive! If the jail can’t hold them we will dig trenches in Bogue cemetery and bury them.” As for his handpicked successor Donald Sangster, the Ethiopian emperor gave him not a medallion but a more practical gold-coated cigarette case. Sangster died of lung cancer twelve months later. Mystery was in the air.
Michael Manley received a gift from the emperor: a wooden staff from the Imperial Ethiopian Navy which back in Jamaica became the saintly Rod of Correction. The Ethiopian halo was such that as the polling day got closer, Prime Minister Hugh Shearer decided he was not going to be outwitted, so he too made a flash trip to Ethiopia – but crucially failed to come back with any gift. Michael Manley was swept into power. The case of the Rod of Correction is an example of Ethiopia’s aura in the Americas –a 20th Century twist on the Prester John fables of medieval times.
At long last, scholars and those interested in this East African country can rely on a monumental categorization of the so-called Orbis Aethiopicus – the field of Ethiopia, the Horn of Africa to which it belongs and the greater regions with which it has been in contact – Jerusalem being a case in hand, as well as parts of the Arabian Peninsula. But because the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica (EAE) is a first of its kind, those responsible for coordinating and editing the five volumes have had to deal with the challenge of deciding who and what deserved an entry in the first place.
In this regard, all is not well in academia land, since there are a number of absences in the online Encyclopaedia Aethiopica that call for reflecion. These absences deserve criticism in as much as they undermine its overall magisterial scope, but also because of the possibility – however slight – that they are due to something more than a simple lapse. If forgotten under the thousands of entries and submissions, a future correction seems relatively straightforward, but if their omission follows a deliberate decision, then a deeper introspection is required.
The Encyclopaedia goes out of its way to mention each and every European missionary who set foot in the country – which it should. But try searching for Ethiopian missionaries abroad and you’re in for a surprise. If their deeds involved places of higher consideration – the Holy See and Jerusalem, for instance – then they can claim a foothold, but heaven forbid they took their zeal across the Atlantic, to an African-American world thirsty for their evangelism. They have all but been left in the academic cold.
The same biased inconsistencies apply to foreigners who never set foot in Ethiopia but took delight in writing about it. Chief among them was Hiob Ludolf, considered the father of Ethiopian studies: he managed to combine accurate linguistic dictionaries with positively hallucinating essays on two-headed Ethiopians bathing in diamond-studded rivers, or giant sheep whose tail had to be dragged on a wooden cart. Samuel Johnson used Ethiopia as a conceptual narrative in the acclaimed Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia. He too never even got close to the country. Should they be cast out of the Encyclopaedia’s pages? Of course not, they are part and parcel of the rich and varied historical heritage of Ethiopia – one part of it being the Orientalist fascination it has generated abroad. But when Caribbeans took to penning their own mystical treaties under the spell of Ethiopia, they were shunned by the Encyclopaedia. This is unfortunate, because the Ethiopian winds blowing through early 20th Century America had direct implications for the country.