Decadent 19th century French poet and enfant-terrible who penned some highly arresting and narcotic visual stanzas in his teens only to give it all up and then promptly disappeared. The toast of literary Paris in his teens whose poetry was suffused with vague multi-layered premonitions and innuendos; all written in a style that influenced many and pushed forward the boundaries of poetic license.
Regarded as the first rock star! - Indefatigable, moody, explosive, undecipherable, genius. After 10 years he was finally tracked down living in a hovel within the stinking walls of the ancient city of Harare, Abyssinia (Ethiopia) as a gun-runner for the Ethiopian Emperor, Menelik. By his own accounts he found life in Harare abysmal; bored with the drudgery, the stupidity of the town’s folk and constantly irked by their insolence and thievery; sick of the food and sick of their language.
They too found him peculiar; a white man with no past, who muttered a strange language and wandered the fly blown streets of this outpost from civilization. Contemporary accounts however suggest he learnt the Quran and Arabic and that he was happy living in the shit hole that was Harare and lived rather comfortably too; taking in a local woman as a mistress, dabbling in photography and amassing a small fortune from the gun running. Also, he found time to explore the unknown ‘Ogaden’ region and even submitted a rather prosaic (by his own standards) journal to the Society of Geographers in Paris for publication. An extraordinary tale of an extraordinary life.
‘I is somebody else’ (Rimbaud)
‘I is somebody else’ (Rimbaud)
