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Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Birgit Englert | On the (Im)possibility of Writing a Travelogue 141 illustration, that is, to “enlighten” or “to light up” a text’ (Walchester 2019: 127), Ramos makes clear in his introduction that the drawings in this book [can] only be called “ethnographic illustrations” in the very broadest of terms. They are not intended to illustrate any particular passage of the text. Rather, they illustrate the personal and cultural limitations of my gaze and are evidence of my visual fascination with an intensely different world. (Ramos 2018: 6) For Ramos, sketchers belong to a category of their own. As he notes: A sketcher adopts less of an imperialist attitude to “representation” than a photographer, a film- maker, a journalist, or an anthropologist. As the travel sketch is more constrained (by the urge to sketch, the poverty of the materials used and the limitation of the technique) and for that very reason freer from the demands of mimesis, it does not even pretend to “describe” or “reproduce” any particular reality as experienced or observed. (Ramos 2018: 2) The ‘imperfection’ of the sketch thus becomes an advantage in the sense that the impossibility of representing the world ‘as it is’ is evident at first glance. The potential to be misunderstood and to be taken as wanting to offer explanation and representation is thus considerably reduced — something Ramos claims ethnographic texts are unable to do as they ‘can never escape the overpowering will to “mean” — that is, to reduce alien realities to one’s own words and catego- ries’ (Ramos 2018: 2). By resorting to the technique of sketching, Ramos aims to avoid giving the impression that he can offer anything beyond glimpses into what caught his attention while travelling in Ethiopia. Ramos’s book(s) Of Hairy Kings and Saintly Slaves: An Ethiopian Travelogue was published in 20187 and is an English translation8 of the Portuguese book Histórias Etíopes. Diário de Viagem, which appeared in 2010. This book was itself ‘a deep re-writing’ of a book with the same title that had been published in 2000 (personal communication with Ramos, 20.9.2020). An Ethiopian Travelogue was published in the UK by Sean Kingston Publishing, which specializes in anthropology. As the high price of the hardcover book (60 pounds in the UK, 90 dollars in the US) clearly indicates, the book is primarily targeted at an academic readership.9 The Portuguese versions were published by the Lisbon-based publishing houses Assírio & Alvim (2000) and Edições Tinta da China (2010), respectively. In the following analysis, I will mainly focus on the English version that was published in 2018, although I will identify the ways in which it differs from the previously published Portuguese versions. The ‘Histórias Etíopes’ (‘Ethiopian Histories’) of the Portuguese versions are echoed in the words of the first part of the English title: Of Hairy Kings and Saintly Slaves, although neither kings nor slaves are visually depicted on the cover image of the English edition. It is composed 7 So far, the book has been discussed in two reviews, albeit from an anthropological (Lam 2019) and a historical perspective (Wion 2019), respectively, and without focusing on the book as a piece of travel writing. 8 The translation into English was made by Christopher Tribe. Cf. <https://www.seankingston.co.uk/pubframe.html#RAMO01.> [accessed on: 21.09.2020] 9 Cf. the publisher’s website: <https://www.seankingston.co.uk/pubframe.html#RAMO01.> [accessed on: 21.09.2020]