Crossing Ethiopia: A 1972 photographic journal retracing the last march of Emperor Tewodros to Magdala

More than forty years ago, John Snyder, author, photographer and aspiring movie maker, with his wife, a Canadian history professor, and an Ethiopian translator set off across 535 kilometers (332 miles) of remote Ethiopia to retrace the route taken by Emperor Tewodros to confront the British Army in 1868.

They traveled by foot, mule and battered Land Rover. The author recorded the expedition with stunning black & white photographs taken with his large-frame camera. The photographs depict a landscape and a people hardly changed from the time of Emperor Tewodros.

Tewodros, emperor of Ethiopia 1855-1868, had the audacity to imprison 67 Europeans, including various missionaries and the British consul.

His refusal to release the hostages provoked Victorian England to send in an army of 63,756, an overwhelming response by the great colonial power affronted by a remote African country. It was this dramatic event, and the climactic battle of Magdala, that John Snyder recounts in the text accompanying these remarkable images of a time that has now gone by.