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Caesar in Abyssinia, published in 1936, was the first of G. L. Steer's three books about Italy's invasion, occupation of, and final removal from Ethiopia. Steer wrote the official history The Abyssinian Campaigns (1942) as well as Sealed and Delivered (1942) which is also being reissued in Faber Finds. Nick Rankin, in his introduction, describes Caesar in Abyssinia as Steer's 'remarkable - and partisan - account of the last great episode of armed colonial conquest in Africa, the Italo-Ethiopian war of 1935-36.' Italy had first tried to meld an Africa Orientale Italina in 1895. It failed with the humiliating defeat at the battle of Adowa in 1896. Mussolini was keen on revenge and creating a new Roman Empire abroad. In literary terms the war is best known through Evelyn Waugh's Waugh in Abyssinia and Scoop. Steer and Waugh were rivals and could hardly be more different in outlook. Nick Rankin says of their first meeting, 'their trains went in opposite directions, and so did their dispatches and politics.' Waugh championed the Italian cause, Steer the Ethiopian. Steer now seems not only more admirable but more right, too.
About the author
G. L. Steer (1909-1944) was one of the great war correspondents of the twentieth-century. Born in South Africa, educated at Winchester and Oxford, after an apprenticeship in journalism he went to Ethiopia in July 1935 to cover the forthcoming Italian invasion. He remained loyal to the Ethiopians and their emperor, Haile Selassie 'till the end' and helped in the latter's restoration to his throne in 1941.
Two of the three books G. L. Steer wrote about Ethiopia and the Italian occupation - Caesar in Abyssinia and Sealed and Delivered - are reissued in Faber Finds. He also wrote the official history, The Abyssinian Campaigns. His masterpiece, The Tree of Gernika, is reissued in Faber Finds as well.
The Tree of Gernika: a Field Study of Modern War is a first-hand account of the struggle of the Basque Autonomous Republic in the Spanish Civil War, from the burning of Irun to the fall of Bilbao. During this campaign Steer filed his most important dispatch about the destruction of Gernika (Guernica) by Nazi aircraft.
In the Second World War G. L. Steer worked as an army intelligence officer: he died on Christmas Day 1944 when he crashed an overloaded jeep in Bengal.
Nicholas Rankin worked 20 years for BBC World Service, winning two UN awards and ending up as Chief Producer. His previous books include biographies of Robert Louis Stevenson and the war-correspondent George Steer, Churchill's Wizards, a study of camouflage, deception and black propaganda in both world wars, and Ian Fleming's Commandos, the history of a WW2 naval intelligence unit. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in London and Kent.
Summary
Nick Rankin, in his introduction, describes Caesar in Abyssinia as Steer's 'remarkable - and partisan - account of the last great episode of armed colonial conquest in Africa, the Italo-Ethiopian war of 1935-36.' Italy had first tried to meld an Africa Orientale Italina in 1895.
