[su_vimeo url=”https://vimeo.com/84273170″]
The most startling moment in “If Only I Were That Warrior”—and there are many startling moments—might be when Giuseppe, an Italian agronomist and military history enthusiast, offers a short catalogue of “Italian” habits adopted by Ethiopians in the years since the Fascist occupation of Ethiopia. From Italians, the Ethiopians took their “love of food and coffee” and the “social bustle in the evenings,” Giuseppe tells us.
It’s strange that a history buff and specialist on tropical agriculture should be so obviously unaware of the terrible irony of this statement: Coffee originated in Ethiopia. Giuseppe’s slip, though it is the most surreal, is hardly the most horrifying example of contemporary deafness to history that surfaces in “If Only I Were That Warrior.”
