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This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Excerpt from To Menelek in a Motor-Car: With 72 Illustrations From Photographs and a Map, by B. Bentley In the ordinary course of events, a preface is inserted in a book in order that the reader may have the satisfaction of beginning by a good long skip. No doubt the usual skip will be made, but in this case it will not be a long one, for I only propose to say a few words of pleading in extenuation of sentence, by explaining how the following pages came to be written. Bede Bentley and I happened to be sharing the same house and both to be rather run down in health, so that a pipe and a yarn after dinner was the utmost exertion that we were capable of for some time. I seemed to have always been a generation in front of Bentley, for the boys of my generation were leaving the various Catholic schools when he went to Beaumont. I went to Africa while Umbandine and Lobengula and Paul Kruger were very much alive, and before railways were thought of in the Transvaal, or Chartered Companies even hinted at. Bentley went there to assist in removing Paul Kruger, and found many changes, for Mashonaland and the Matabele country of my knowledge had disappeared, and in their place Rhodesia had appeared. It was the same thing with India and other parts of the world, always ten years or so of change; and ten years in new countries is equal often to a few centuries in old. I had never been either to Somaliland or Abyssinia, and I grew much interested in his trip, which from explanatory comparisons with parts of Africa that I knew well I was able to understand. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The first book to explore how African American writing and art engaged with visions of Ethiopia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries As the only African nation, with the exception of Liberia, to remain independent during the colonization of the continent, Ethiopia has long held significance for and captivated the imaginations of African Americans. In Black Land, Nadia Nurhussein delves into nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American artistic and journalistic depictions of Ethiopia, illuminating the increasing tensions and ironies behind cultural celebrations of an African country asserting itself as an imperial power. Nurhussein navigates texts by Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Pauline Hopkins, Harry Dean, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, George Schuyler, and others, alongside images and performances that show the intersection of African America with Ethiopia during historic political shifts. From a description of a notorious 1920 Star Order of Ethiopia flag-burning demonstration in Chicago to a discussion of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie as Time magazine’s Man of the Year for 1935, Nurhussein illuminates the growing complications that modern Ethiopia posed for American writers and activists. American media coverage of the African nation exposed a clear contrast between the Pan-African ideal and the modern reality of Ethiopia as an antidemocratic imperialist state: Did Ethiopia represent the black nation of the future, or one of an inert and static past? Revising current understandings of black transnationalism, Black Land presents a well-rounded exploration of an era when Ethiopia’s presence in African American culture was at its height.