A French physician in Cairo, Poncet travelled to Gondar in 1699 to treat Emperor Iyusa I for a skin complaint, and returned via Massawa. He provides the reader with the “only published account of Gondar at the height of its splendour” (Pankhurst).
Poncet’s account is particularly important as his account of the social, political and economic situation of Abyssinia is made through secular eyes rather than those of a missionary: “he was more concerned to describe what he saw than to contemplate its meaning or implications. In short, his scientific eye was trained to seek out the ‘facts;’ speculation he left for more pensive minds … His account of Ethiopia exemplifies a period during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries when European interest in non-Western, non-Christian peoples was remarkably sensitive to and accepting of cultural difference. Poncet could not escape entirely the baggage of his Occidental heritage, yet his observations were ethnographic in scope as he sought to describe Ethiopia and Ethiopians on native, as opposed to European terms” (Love).
There was a political aspect to his journey too. Poncet had been reluctantly recruited by the French consul in Cairo and, “not only acted on behalf of his country but also as an agent for the Catholic Church. The French Consul instructed Poncet to determine if the conditions were present for the return of the Catholic Church to Ethiopia, and to ascertain the possibilities of the extension of French influence into east Africa” (Natsoulas). He wasn’t particularly successful in this endeavour though his did manage to cure Emperor Iyusa I.
It wasn’t until James Bruce published his narrative in 1790 that the next western account of Ethiopia appeared.
Love, R.S., “A French Physician at the Court of Gondar: Poncet’s Ethiopia in the 1690s” in Journal of the Western Society for French History, Vol. 31, 2003; Natsoulas, T., “The Failure of Early French Expansionism in Africa: The French-Jesuit Effort in Ethiopia at the Turn of the 18th Century” in Journal of Ethiopian Studies, Vol. 36, No.1 (June, 2003), p.5; Pankhurst, 8.
