This week as I write this, the BBC had to apologize after it badly misquoted

4 min readNov 28, 2020

Evelyn Waugh would have a field day with what’s happening in Ethiopia right now. The talented author of Brideshead Revisited and Scoop was a racist little creep sent out by a rightwing, pro-Fascist newspaper in 1935 to cover Mussolini’s invasion. Just to give you an idea of the man, he wrote home to a friend, “I have got to hate the ethiopians more each day goodness they are lousy & i hope the organmen gas them to buggery [sic].”

Then as now, the government in Addis Ababa didn’t want the horror or embarrassment of a foreign correspondent getting killed at the front, so it kept reporters bottled up in the capital. But while the concern for safety is admirable, in the absence of facts, reporters and “analysts” will let their imaginations roam. They’ll often perform alchemy on rumors and turn them into substance, and they’ll speculate their way into doomsday and all of Africa on fire.

Back in 1935, a whole truckload of foreign correspondents came and went, abandoning Addis in the summer because the war still hadn’t broken out and wouldn’t until October. Ethiopia got the best and worst of journalism then. Waugh, who was a shameless liar as well as a bigot, filled his slim account of the war with falsehoods (titled with the weak pun Waugh in Abyssinia). At the opposite end of the spectrum was a young South African named George Steer who figured out how to visit the Ogaden to see what was really going on. He genuinely cared about Ethiopians and risked his own life years later, working with British and Patriot forces for the Liberation.

And today, just like in 1935, there seems to be a hell of a difference between the reality on the ground and what is circulating in the mainstream Western media. I am not suggesting there are Waughs still waddling about, causing trouble, but if you check the air, you can pick up the scent of a post-colonial condescension.

For instance, news operations in the West still park the background to this conflict in cover-your-ass language: Abiy claims that the TPLF attacked first or has been “accusing it of attacking two federal military camps in the northern region.” Except we now know for a fact — even if all the details can’t yet be confirmed — that the TPLF attacked first because one of its spokespersons openly bragged about it during a television broadcast.

Sorry, Not That Sorry

This week as I write this, the BBC had to apologize after it badly misquoted Abiy in a tweet that was left up for four hours. Reuters tweeted a story about Ethiopia with footage of the wrong country. Okay, mistakes do happen. But you have to wonder sometimes how much is honest error as opposed to being too lazy to give a damn. Last week, Al Jazeera ran a story that casually mentioned “Adwa was the site of an Ethiopian war victory over the Italians in 1839.”

Groan. The battle of Adwa was in 1896. Hey, it’s only celebrated every year in the nation and in Ethiopian disaspora communities around the world. And the story carried the byline of a correspondent in the capital.

So, can you really blame Ethiopians — whatever their background, whatever their politics — for getting fed up with how their nation and region are depicted? It’s been five days since that story was posted, and Al Jazeera still hasn’t corrected it, even though it’s been the source of jokes on social media (Note: they finally ran a correction on November 27). Imagine if you screwed up the date of the French Revolution or the year the American Civil War ended? We’d be talking hours, not days for the repair.

Meanwhile, humanitarian organizations certainly don’t lead by example. Gerry Simpson, an associate director with Human Rights Watch, likes to crank out tweets about Ethiopia with stock photos from Middle East wars and Somalia. Because hey, one part of Africa looks so much like the other, right? You can even confuse it with a different continent. Who’s going to know? At a guess, I’d humbly say the more than 100 million people who live in the country.

Then we have the instant shoot-from-the-hip assessments of others. Former UN ambassador Susan Rice, whom many in Ethiopia still loathe for her gushing praise of Meles Zenawi, decided to forego any nuance altogether and declare this:

This week as I write this, the BBC had to apologize after it badly misquoted

Written by Yfouzi Mc