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Black MischiefBlack Mischief was Evelyn Waugh's third novel. It was first published in 1932. It is still in print, with a recent edition issued in Boston by Back Bay Books in 2002 with ISBN 0316917338 Set on the fictional African island of Azania in East Africa. In the book it is off the coast of present day Somalia, although it is a thinly veiled reference to the then kingdom of Abyssinia, now Ethiopia. The novel chronicles the efforts of the English educated Emperor Seth, assisted by a fellow Oxford graduate Basil Seal, to modernize his Empire. After a civil war with his father, Seth the English educated grandson of Amurath, a Nestorian brigand who brought the tribes together as a nation, is the victor. Basil Seal turns up in Azania, and Seth turns to someone who he had felt socially inferior to in Oxford and makes him the Minister of Modernization. Plenty of frivolous ideas are then tried to modernise the kingdom such as issuing the tropical and barefoot army with boots and a "Birth Control Gala" which the Emperor's subjects take to be promoting greater fertility. This now controversial book helped to establish his reputation as a master satirist.
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