The emperor sent one of his trusted men, former Russian officer Evgeny Senigov, with us to Kaffa, who became a true Ethiopian. The Negus gifted him a plot of land in Dauru, near Addis Ababa, and often invited him to his palace. There, Senigov met an Amharic beauty who soon became his wife. This was noted by the German traveler Friedrich Bieber in 1905 in Addis Ababa, as he prepared for his famous expedition to the 'land of god-kings.'

According to an autobiography stored in the Archive of Foreign Policy of Russia, Evgeny Senigov was born in 1872 into a well-off noble family. He graduated from a real school in St. Petersburg and studied at the Moscow Alexeyev Military School from 1892 to 1894, after which he was commissioned as a second lieutenant and sent to the Turkestan Line Battalion in the Fergana region, where he served from 1894 to 1897.

After retiring, in 1898 Senigov went to Ethiopia as part of a military mission and began serving Emperor Menelik II. The emperor sent him to the governor of Kaffa, Wolde Giorgis, to have European witnesses to his conquests. In Kaffa, Senigov became the commander of the right wing of Wolde Giorgis's army and in April 1904 accompanied Friedrich Bieber, who is considered the 'discoverer of Kaffa' in Europe.

Enchanted by the nature of Africa, Senigov decided to stay in Ethiopia and create a 'democratic commune' on one of the islands of Lake Tana. He was not the first European seeking a 'natural' life in nature. Ethiopia attracted him, as it did French Saint-Simonians Edmond Combe and Maurice Tamizier, although he likely did not know about them. Senigov was more of a Tolstoyan than a Saint-Simonian or narodnik. He wore Ethiopian clothing, married a local girl, and lived in a hut, considering European houses and shoes to be excesses.

Senigov aimed to make his commune self-sustaining by growing tobacco and selling it through Russian merchants from Dagestan. In the early years in Addis Ababa, he actively worked on creating the commune, investing all his earnings as an artist into it. His works were popular among the nobility and Europeans in the Ethiopian capital. However, the commune project failed. Senigov traveled extensively around the country, collecting legends, recording stories about local customs and traditions, and painting a lot.

His Tolstoyan ideas failed, but this did not embitter him. He remained an honest and selfless person. In 1921, Senigov left Ethiopia and headed to Russia but was detained by the British in Egypt. In 1924, he wrote that he had been on the road from 1921 to 1923, and since 1923 had been struggling in Moscow. His further fate is unknown. Some of his paintings and Ethiopian diary are kept in the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Future research may shed light on the life of this unusual man.