A book by Hugues Fontaine named MENELIK was released on February 9th at an event held at Louvre Hotel. The book has more than 300 pages and 420 photographs, maps and documents showing Ethiopia during MENILIK’s time from 1868-1916, and is written in three versions: French, English and Amharic. Its publication was supported by the Swiss Embassy in Ethiopia, in particular for the Amharic edition, with the aim of offering the Ethiopian
public a sum of 410 photographs, illustrations and maps that document Ethiopia under the reign of Menilik II through the eyes of explorers at the end of the 19th century. As photographic technology became simpler, many of these travellers equipped themselves with a travel camera and recorded “views and types” of the country they discovered, photographs of the landscape and its inhabitants. The book aims to provide researchers with first-rate sources, the fruit of assiduous research in public and private collections. As Stéphane Richemond wrote in his review for the Prix de l’Académie des sciences d’outremer, “Hugues Fontaine’s latest work is not a history book but a book of images, often unpublished. They do not illustrate history. It is history that comments on them.”
