Absolutism

The Emperor and Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuściński

These two books could have been identical. Kapuściński intended them, apparently, as the first parts in a projected trilogy on absolute power. The Emperor in question is Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, king of kings, the Shah is Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran, shah of shahs. Kapuściński did not live to write the third — although how could he have done? Who could he have written about?

In practice the books are quite different. Most obviously on the question of style. The Emperor is a furtive book built on the decaying oral culture of a banished empire. After the emperor’s overthrow, Kapuściński travelled to Addis and skulked around, avoiding the forces of the Derg who ruled Ethiopia after its revolution and seeking out courtiers and retainers, burning a small candle for the old order of things.

He found them in squalor and bitterness, their clothes motheaten and their bodies worn. Through whatever magic of reconstruction Kapuściński saw fit to employ, the book largely consists of their monologues — anguished, hidebound — about the order which existed under the emperor, and could never come again.

The empire was an oral culture and a Potemkin one. Its ruler would wake every morning to be briefed by his spies on the plots which the night contained. He would never read a word, nor write anything down. He preferred to transact business entirely orally, with his advisors and ministers whispering separately into his ears. In the course of his morning walk around the palace in Addis, Haile Selassie would feed raw meat to his panthers, who were caged.

The court Kapuściński describes is one where extreme dysfunction is coupled with fanatical devotion, pretend or otherwise.

On dysfunction: the government would hold ‘hours’ of each day where issues were brought to the emperor and some action was generated by his mind, and written down by the Minister of the Pen — a glorified scribe who was, in this time, effectively head of the government. Few actions resulted from these daily rituals. And if things went wrong, they were blamed on the minister; for how else could an incorrect edict have come about, but from an incorrect or malicious transcription of the emperor’s will as the words flowed from his mouth onto paper through an intermediary?

Because the patronage of the emperor was all that counted, the crowds of officials and servants would crush and press in order that the emperor might see their faces. One glance, and they would be recognisable. One moment of recognition at a later date could mean advancement.

For a man to be deprived of office, or to go unseen by the emperor — each was death, socially, politically, emotionally. When a man became a minister he grew, physically. When he was relieved of office he shrank until he seemed either a husk or a shadow.

When the emperor is, later in the narrative, finally overthrown, the edges of the revolution itself are blurred. As the generals arrive to take over the government, the emperor congratulates them on their loyalty. He continues to do so until the book’s end, even though all the courtiers have left and he has been moved out of the palace. Each act, he maintains, is done in his name.

Kapuściński does not write, because it was not then confirmed, that the emperor was strangled in his bed by his overthrowers.

Shah of Shahs, meanwhile, is cobbled together from appearances. Kapuściński spends much of the book analysing photographs of Iran in ancient days and modern, which he either kept in a scrapbook or generated himself.

Unlike the other book, this is the tale of the shah’s overthrow rather than his reign. Shahs were frequently overthrown. This is one more story of how a society which hated its ruler was finally capable of deposing him — not to be replaced by another in his mould, but someone else anew.

Like the emperor, the shah talked of development. But unlike the emperor, the shah had the means to develop. When famine struck Ethiopia, the outside world was horrified, but the Ethiopians did not overthrow their ruler. Their society was not rich; there was only so much to go around; and in their extreme backwardness the emperor had a profound ally of centuries’ standing. The book, therefore, is about the corrupt emptiness of absolute power, which is terminated — almost off-stage — by revolution.

The shah meanwhile was spectacularly rich, and he was spectacular. He threw a great party on the anniversary of the founding of the empire of Cyrus. He imported military equipment in dollars measured by the billion. His country was drowning in oil, so he imported American oil engineers and French chefs to feed them. The shah claimed to want to build a ‘Great Civilisation’ — the capitalisations very much Kapuściński’s. His book is almost wholly about the revolution.

The shah’s reign is something Kapuściński likens to theatrical performance — a great confection, given by a theatre manager who does not know how to stage a play. At some point the men in the stalls grew bored of applauding, although the rich in the galleries continued their ovation.

The poor wanted political rights (although, ironically, those political inclinations if expressed were Islamist and likely to result in the religious totalitarianism of Khomeini and his successors). And the poor wanted money. Neither of which the shah could offer them. He promised ‘development’, like the emperor (who had implemented a daily ‘Development Hour’), but like the emperor development came insufficiently.

Later in Shah of Shahs the medium shifts again — to videotape, the footage of growing protests against the shah, followed by gunfire, followed by ritual funerals at which protests emerged. Kapuściński puts down his photographs and criticises the camerawork, and writes beautifully and deftly about the psychology of the crowd.

Revolutions only happen, he says, when the normal interaction between and individual and the authority of an absolutist state does not contain a third figure: that of fear. If the third man is lessened, the normal meeting of the first two does not go as it should. Upon being challenged in tyranny, the citizen ordinarily flees from the policeman. His fear freezes him with unspoken reference to torture and oblivion, and he leaves the scene.

But if he does not, the policeman walks back to his sentry box or his emplacement and begins to aim his rifle. The calculus has changed. Violence is inevitable, on a mass scale, and so too in reaction is revolutionary protest.

The past eleven years have shown elegantly enough how inevitable this cycle can prove.

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Questions have increasingly been asked about the ‘reporting’ claimed by these books. They are such literary documents, it is alleged, that they resemble novels in the form of non-fiction. The emperor’s courtiers are all referred to by their initials. They probably couldn’t have been contacted by any eager fact-checkers, even while they still were alive.

One defence of Kapuściński is that he wrote the truth even if he had to reconstruct it in his mind. No matter if the photographs didn’t actually exist. His observations accord so closely with reality that we the reader should elide the two.

There is some reasonableness to all this. The books, beautifully translated by Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand and William R. Brand, are so full of style and artifice that they generate period sound stages. They evoke an atmosphere — the cloying absurdity of absolute power — defying the laws of man, defying age, defying logic.

Perhaps this is right. But it would be ironic that one book made up of testimony that condemns the emperor’s courtiers out of their own mouths, where they do not utter a word to damn him, yet he is damned all the same, is in fact a construct; or if the pictures of the shah’s collapsing society — so true, so lifelike — were created in the mind of a Polish journalist in 1979, the veteran of twenty-seven previous revolutions, without leaving his hotel room in Tehran.