The grim profiteer, seething with frustration and self-pity, is one of Rimbaud’s most successful fictions. The complete picture is so far from the traditional image of failure that it calls for some explanation. In some cases, simple ignorance of nineteenth-century Abyssinia is to blame, combined with an indiscriminate use of unreliable versions of Rimbaud’s letters. It is also worth mentioning the fact that the only explorers who are credited with their discoveries are those who boast about them loudly and in the right places.
But perhaps the main reason Rimbaud’s achievements have been ignored is that abject misery was felt to be the proper reward for someone who abandoned the profession to which his critics also belong.
The first sign that Rimbaud was fully engaged with his new world appears in a letter written in January. He and Pinchard had ordered a camera and some developing equipment from Lyon.4 They wanted to take photographs of the region and its inhabitants for a book on unknown Abyssinia. They also sent off for a naturalist’s kit, as Rimbaud explained in his letter:
I shall be able to send you some birds and animals that have not yet been seen in Europe. I already have a few curiosities and I’m waiting for an opportunity to send them.
Why this should be interpreted as a poet’s childish fantasy, and why Rimbaud’s collaborator, Pinchard, is never accused of similar stupidity, is a mystery. Abyssinia was rich in unidentified species. Rimbaud would certainly have seen the crooked horns of the mountain nyala – unknown to the outside world until 1919: it was the last large mammal to be named by zoologists. The Highlands also sheltered healthy populations of Simien jackals and their favourite prey, the giant molerat, both unknown in Europe. Rimbaud’s birds might have included Rouget’s rail, the raucous wattled ibis and the white-eyed gull – a creature first spotted by the bateau ivre: ‘tossing on my sides the quarrels and droppings of yattering, blond-eyed birds’.
It is hard to imagine what Mme Rimbaud might have done with a wattled ibis or a giant molerat, but at least they would have proved that Arthur was up to something serious.
Special derision has been reserved for Rimbaud’s requests for books and instruments. A month after arriving in Harar, he was sending off another of his supposedly demented lists of desiderata to a manufacturer of precision instruments in Paris. (‘What was this devil of a man thinking of?’ asks a recent French biographer.)5
I should like complete details on the best manufacturers, in France or elsewhere, of mathematical, optical, astronomical, electrical, meteorological, pneumatic, mechanical, hydraulic and mineralogical instruments. I am not interested in surgical instruments. [. . .] I have also been asked to obtain manufacturers’ catalogues of mechanical toys [not, as one translator has it, ‘sports equipment’], fireworks, conjuring tricks, working models, miniature constructions, etc.
Any Rimbaud biographer who finds this sort of exhaustive planning ridiculous cannot be trusted to have undertaken proper research. This is what Enid Starkie had to say about Rimbaud’s surge of enterprise:
With his usual impulsive eagerness and his customary lack of a sense of proportion, he imagined that he would be able to master all the crafts, in a short space of time, from popular treatises. [. . .] It is pathetic to see these puerile efforts at self-instruction on the part of a man of twenty-six, who at school had carried all before him and then, in a fit of arrogance, had despised scholastic learning and had decided that all book knowledge was worthless. [. . .] Now, regretting his past waywardness, he turned, like a gullible reader of advertisements, to the most popular and most inefficient form of instruction.6
Many of Rimbaud’s critics have a professional interest in believing that skills and information can be acquired only in the form in which they are officially dispensed. But universities do not have a monopoly on knowledge, though they may have patented certain forms of packaging. Even the examinations once administered by Enid Starkie are not proof against a Rimbaldian strategy of prolonged idleness followed by a short spell of intense, cynical cramming.
Rimbaud’s furious stocking of information is neither irrational nor particularly unusual. It is not unknown for visitors to certain parts of Africa to be inspired with grandiose schemes of technical and administrative improvement. In Harar, there was a severe shortage of skills: carpenters and masons were scarce, and a visit to the blacksmith meant a three-hour trek through hostile country. Any sort of expertise was worth a fortune. Since 1879, a young Swiss engineer, Alfred Ilg (later a friend of Rimbaud), had been advising King Menelik in the kingdom of Choa, 250 miles west of Harar, and was already laying the foundations of modern Ethiopia.7 In 1883, an engineer on a French expedition, hoping for trade concessions, astounded the King with a miniature locomotive and steamship.8 Rimbaud’s mechanical toys might have been used as trade items or to turn hostility into curiosity. Bardey had discovered that firecrackers, for instance, were a good initial defence against rampaging natives.
While the readers of poètes maudits often identify with the poets themselves, critics and biographers tend to identify with the parents. Rimbaud does not appear to have kept his mother’s letters, but it seems clear from his replies that she would have approved of Enid Starkie. Two years later, Rimbaud was still trying to explain himself:
As for the books, they will be very useful to me in a country where there’s no information and where you end up as stupid as an ass if you don’t spend a little time going over your studies. The days and especially the nights are very long in Harar. These books will be a pleasant way to pass the time, since, it must be said, there’s no public meeting-place in Harar. One is forced to stay indoors all the time. [. . .]
I’m sending a cheque for a hundred francs, which you can cash and then buy me the books listed below. The money spent on the books will not be wasted.
The former glory of the Collège de Charleville was still a shining example of what the imperial education system could achieve.
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Like most Europeans in Africa, he also kept a local woman.2 According to one account, the woman came from the Argoba tribe, which inhabited the country between Harar and Bubassa and was said to be descended from sixteenth-century Portuguese settlers. In southern Abyssinia, female companions were often purchased from a dealer or a parent, usually for practical purposes – cooking, housekeeping, nursing and language-learning.
The languages Rimbaud mentioned so dismissively in his letter as mere intellectual clutter were vital tools for expanding the trading empire and staying alive.3 Rimbaud is known to have spoken or to have had some working knowledge of Arabic, Amharic (now the official language of Ethiopia), Adarinya (or Harari), Oromo (or Galla) and Somali. He may have spoken Argoba (a close relative of Amharic) and Tigrinya: the Bishop of Harar told Evelyn Waugh that Rimbaud lived at one time with a woman from Tigray. According to an anonymous source who interviewed several of Rimbaud’s acquaintances in 1911 and 1913 (and who can now be identified as an expert on Ethiopian languages called Marcel Cohen),4 he also spoke a language called Kotou. He may have been the first and last European to do so since the language was extinct by 1937. It is no longer listed among the ninety-nine languages and 200 dialects of Ethiopia.
In most cases, a small vocabulary would have sufficed. The explorer Jules Borelli, who travelled with Rimbaud in 1887, was able to construct a list of useful phrases in three Ethiopian languages without much difficulty, though perhaps with Rimbaud’s help: ‘They struck him with their spears, he is dead’, ‘Can you see the elephant?’, and – an exclamation which can hardly have lent itself to the use of a phrase-book – ‘Here comes the rhinoceros: let us flee!’5Rimbaud was now entering one of the most productive and engrossing periods of his life. Under his jurisdiction, the Harar agency became the base for a remarkable series of expeditions that would open up an unknown part of Africa to traders, explorers, political spies and missionaries.
This is by no means apparent if Rimbaud’s letters are treated as the only source. Without Alfred Bardey, for example, nothing would be known of Rimbaud’s historic trip to Bubassa; and without the Italian explorer, Pietro Sacconi, there would be no record of his three-day journey north, with Sacconi and Righas, to investigate rumours that Menelik, King of Choa, was about to invade Harar.
According to Sacconi, they left at dawn on 13 June 1883 and rode towards the Ahmar Mountains through long, flat valleys dotted with olive trees, mulberry bushes, euphorbias and mimosas. They passed unknown lakes, galloped through hostile Itou-Galla villages, clutching the reins in one hand and a revolver in the other. Eventually, they reached Warabeili where famished refugees were hiding from the genocidal horde of King Menelik. The boko showed them the tree where Lucereau had been killed. They took a photograph of it and returned to Harar without stopping to eat or drink, as Sacconi explained:
To travel through the Gallas, the first requisite is speed. We have to pass like meteors, because, if they are given time to think, we’re done for. Woe betide the traveller who sends someone on ahead!6
An even more remarkable expedition can only be detected with the aid of a detailed chronology. Rimbaud appears to have returned to Harar in the spring of 1883, not from Zeila, but from the French coal station of Obock.7This would mean that he was the first European to cross the ferocious Danakil region from north to south without completing the journey as a corpse. The year before, a man called Arnoux, who had introduced European civilization to the Kingdom of Choa in the form of guns and brandy, was stabbed to death at Obock by Danakil tribesmen. The same tribe was responsible for twenty European deaths between May 1881 and October 1883. Even in 1927, the region was described by an American explorer as ‘terra incognita’: the north-eastern part ‘probably could not be reached without a force of at least a thousand well-armed men’.8The wanderings of the drunken boat are familiar to most French schoolchildren, but many of Rimbaud’s pioneering journeys are completely unknown. This is partly due to Abyssinia itself. Until the late 1930s, maps of southern Ethiopia were hopelessly out of date even before they were printed: villages disappeared, rivers dried up, whole tribes were massacred, forced to migrate or sold into slavery by their neighbours. The descendants of some of the Galla tribes known to Rimbaud now live in northern Kenya. Some dots and lines on early European maps were nothing more than stories told by camel drivers. This is why some scholars who could recite the numbers and street names of Rimbaud’s homes in Charleville have written about his African adventures without always knowing where he was.
Rimbaud himself was doubly discreet. He had no interest in planting flags or naming geographical features, and he was wary of broadcasting his movements. Since merchants were dependent on the good will and protection of native slave traders, and since Britain was ostensibly devoted to eradicating the slave trade, it was important not to be too precise. Letters were often opened by spies or consular officials, especially Rimbaud’s letters, which were deemed by one political agent to be ‘the most detailed and reliable’ to come out of Abyssinia. Even in 1897, Alfred Bardey was reluctant to release some of Rimbaud’s documents in case they constituted a security risk.9
From Rimbaud
by Robb Graham
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