One day I summoned my strength and set off on a walk from hut to hut. It was noon. In all the dwellings, on the earthern floors, on mats, on bunks, lay silent, inert people. Their faces were bathed in sweat. The village was like a submarine at the bottom of the ocean: it was there, but it emitted no signals, soundless, motionless.
In the afternoon we went with Thiam to the river. Muddy, dark gray, it flows between steep, sandy banks. No greenery, plants, or shrubs in sight. One could, of course, build canals here, irrigate the desert. But who is to do this? With what money? What for? The river flows as if for itself alone, unnoticed, of little use. We ventured far out into the desert, and the dark caught us as we were returning. There is no light in the village. No one has a fire going, because that would be a waste of wood. No one has a lamp. No one has a flashlight. On a moonless night like tonight, you can see nothing. You can only hear voices, here and there, snatches of conversations and calls, stories being recounted that I do not understand, words ever less frequent, softer, for the village, taking advantage of the bit of coolness, grows silent for a few hours and falls asleep.
Rising in the Darkness
D
awn and dusk—these are the most pleasant hours in Africa. The sun is either not yet scorching, or it is no longer so—it lets you be, lets you live.
It is twenty-five kilometers from Addis Ababa to the Sabeta waterfall. Driving a car in Ethiopia is a kind of unending process of compromise: everyone knows that the road is narrow, old, crammed with people and vehicles, but they also know that they must somehow find a spot for themselves on it, and not only find a spot, but actually move, advance forward, make their way toward their destination. Every few moments, each driver, cattle herder, or pedestrian is confronted by an obstacle, a conundrum, a problem that needs solving: how to pass without colliding with the car approaching from the opposite direction; how to hurry along one’s cows, sheep, and camels without trampling the children and crawling beggars; how to cross without getting run over by a truck, being impaled on the horns of a bull, knocking over that woman carrying a twenty-kilogram weight on her head. And yet no one shouts at anyone else, no one falls into a fury, no one curses or threatens—patiently and silently, they all perform their slalom, execute their pirouettes, dodge and evade, maneuver and hedge, turn here, converge there, and, most important, move forward. If a bottleneck occurs, people will participate harmoniously and calmly in diffusing it; if a traffic jam forms, everyone will set about resolving it, millimeter by millimeter.
The shallow river rushes over a cracked, rocky bed, descending lower and lower, until it reaches an abrupt threshold and from there falls over the precipice. This is the Sabeta waterfall. A small Ethiopian boy, perhaps eight years old, makes money from visitors by stripping off all his clothes and riding the swift current on his naked bottom down to the edge of the falls. When he comes to a stop right above the thundering abyss, the assembled crowd emits two cries: the first of dread, and the second, immediately after, of relief. The boy stands up, turns his back, and shows the tourists his bum. There is nothing rude in this gesture, no intended insult. On the contrary, there is pride, and a desire to reassure us, the onlookers, that because he has such a properly tanned hide on his buttocks—look, please!—he can slide down the riverbed, which bristles with sharp rocks, without harming himself in the least. It is true: his skin looks as tough as the soles of hiking boots.
The next day, the prison in Addis Ababa. Before the entrance, under a tin roof, a line of people await visiting hours. The government is too poor to provide uniforms for the police, the guards, and so on, and these barely dressed barefoot young men milling about near the gate are in fact the prison guards. We must simply accept that they have power, that it is they who decide whether or not to admit us; we must believe this, and must wait until they have concluded their deliberations. The old prison, built by the Italians, was used by Mengistu’s pro-Soviet regime for holding and torturing the opposition, and now the current authorities have shut behind these bars Mengistu’s closest entourage—members of the Central Committee, ministers, generals of the army and the police.
On the gate, a enormous star with a hammer and sickle, erected by Mengistu, and inside the prison, in the courtyard, a bust of Marx (it was a Soviet custom: portraits of Stalin hung at the entrances to the gulags, and statues of Lenin stood inside).
Mengistu’s regime fell in the summer of 1991 after seventeen years in power. He himself escaped at the last minute by plane to Zimbabwe. The fate of his armed forces is extraordinary. With Moscow’s help, Mengistu had built up the most powerful army in sub-Saharan Africa. It numbered 400,000 soldiers; it had rockets and chemical weapons. Its opponents were guerrillas from the northern mountains (Eritrea, Tigre) and from the south (Oromo). In the summer of 1991, these rebel forces had driven the government troops into Addis Ababa. The guerrillas: barefoot boys, often children, ragged, hungry, poorly armed. Europeans began fleeing the city, expecting a bloodbath once the guerrillas entered. But something quite different occurred, something that could have been the subject of a film entitled “The End of a Great Army.” At the news that their commander had fled, this powerful force, armed to the teeth, collapsed in a matter of hours. Hungry, demoralized soldiers transformed all at once, before the stunned eyes of the city’s residents, into beggars. Holding a Kalashnikov in one hand, they stretched out the other, asking for food. The guerrillas took the capital essentially without a fight. Mengistu’s soldiers, having abandoned their tanks, rocket launchers, airplanes, armored vehicles, and artillery pieces, set off, each man for himself, on foot, on mules, by bus, for their villages and homes. If by chance you find yourself driving through Ethiopia, you will notice in many villages and small towns strong, healthy, young men sitting idly on the thresholds of houses, or on the stools of humble roadside bars. They are the soldiers of General Mengistu’s great army, which was to conquer Africa yet fell apart in the course of a single day in the summer of 1991.
...
The prisoner with whom I am speaking is named Shimelis Mazengia and was one of the ideologues of Mengistu’s regime, a member of the Political Bureau and a secretary of the Central Committee for ideological matters—in short, a kind of Ethiopian Mikhail Suslov. Mazengia is forty-five years old, intelligent. He weighs his words carefully as he speaks. He is dressed in light-colored sweats. All the prisoners here are in “civilian” clothing—the government lacks the funds for prison garb. The guards and the prisoners are dressed alike. I asked one of the guards whether the prisoners do not try to take advantage of the fact that they look like everyone out on the street, and escape. He looked at me with bewilderment. Escape? Here at least they have a bowl of soup, and if they were free they would be dying of hunger like the rest of the nation. They are enemies, he emphasized, but they are not madmen!
Anxiety, even fear, in Mazengia’s dark eyes. They are in constant motion, running this way and that, as if he were feverishly searching for a way out of a trap. He says that Mengistu’s flight was a shock to them all, that is, to the commander’s closest entourage. Mengistu worked day and night; he was uninterested in material goods, only in absolute power. To rule—that was enough for him. He had a rigid mentality, incapable of any compromise. Mazengia describes the massacres of the red terror, which ravaged the country for several years, as “the struggle for power.” He maintains that “both sides killed.” How does he judge his participation in the highest ranks of the fallen regime, a regime that brought so much misfortune, destruction, and death? (More than thirty thousand people were shot on Mengistu’s orders, and some estimates put that figure at more than three hundred thousand.) I remember driving in the morning through Addis Ababa in the late 1970s and seeing corpses strewn in the streets—the previous night’s harvest. Mazengia answers philosophically: History is an intricate process. It errs, advances and retreats, searches here, there, and sometimes gets trapped in a dead end. Only the future can judge, can find the appropriate measure.
He and 406 others associated with the old regime (the Ethiopian
nomenklatura
) have been here for three years already, not knowing what next—more prison? a trial? execution? freedom? The government is asking itself the same question: what do we do with them?
We were sitting in a small office, probably a guardroom. No one was listening to our conversation, and no one was pressuring us to end it. As is often the case in Africa, there was chaos all around, people wandered in and out, on the table next to us a telephone that no one answered rang continually.
At the end of the conversation I said that I would like to see where the prisoners were kept. I was ushered into a courtyard surrounded by a two-story building with arcades. Along them stretched cells, doors opening onto the courtyard. A throng of prisoners milled about. I observed their faces. They were the bearded, bespectacled visages of university professors, their assistants, their students. Mengistu’s regime had many followers from this milieu—mostly adherents of the Albanian version of socialism as practiced by Enver Hoxha. When Tirana broke with Beijing, in Addis Ababa Ethiopian pro-Hoxha activists shot at Ethiopian Maoists. For months, the streets of the city flowed with blood. After Mengistu’s escape, his army dispersed and went home, and only the academics were left. They were seized without great difficulty and imprisoned in this crowded courtyard.
Someone brought from London a Somali quarterly that had been published there in the summer of 1993—
Hal-Abuur: Journal of Somali Literature and Culture
. I counted: of the seventeen authors represented—preeminent Somali intellectuals, scientists, and writers—fifteen reside abroad. Here is one of Africa’s problems: its intelligentsia lives for the most part outside its borders, in the United States, in London, Paris, Rome. Remaining in their native countries are, at the bottom, masses of illiterate, downtrodden, utterly exploited peasants; at the top, the corrupt bureaucracy or arrogant, coarse soldiers (the lumpenmilitariat, as the Ugandan historian Ali Mazrui calls them). How is Africa to develop, to participate in the great transformation of the world, without an intelligentsia? Without its own educated middle class? Furthermore, if an African scholar or writer is persecuted in his own country, most frequently he will not seek shelter in another country on his continent, but in Boston, in Los Angeles, in Stockholm, or in Geneva.
I went to the university in Addis Ababa. It is this country’s only institution of higher learning. I visited the university bookstore, which is this country’s only bookstore. Empty shelves. No books, no periodicals—nothing. It is this way in most African countries. Once, I remember, there was a good bookshop in Kampala, another (three, even) in Dar es Salaam. Now—everywhere, nothing. Ethiopia is the size of France, Germany, and Poland put together. More than fifty million people live here; in several years there will be sixty million of them, in a dozen or so, more than eighty million. And so on.
Maybe then?
If only one?
In my free time, I walk to Africa Hall, a great ornamental structure on one of the hills upon which this city is built. The first African summit meeting took place here in May of 1963. I saw Nasser here, Nkrumah, Haile Selassie, Ben Bella, Modibo Keita. Very big names at the time. In the hall in which they met, some boys are now playing Ping-Pong; a woman is selling leather jackets.
Africa Hall—it reflects perhaps a corollary of Parkinson’s Law untrammeled and triumphant. Whenever I arrive in Addis Ababa, I always notice the same thing: a new building is being erected near Africa Hall, each one more magnificent and luxurious than the one before. Political systems come and go in Ethiopia—first a feudal-aristocratic one, then a Marxist-Leninist one, currently a federal-democratic one. Africa too is changing, growing poorer and more wretched. But all this is of no consquence; the imperturbable and victorious law of the constant expansion of the seat of Africa’s rulers—Africa Hall—operates freely and without constraints.
Inside—corridors, rooms, conference halls, offices piled with papers from floor to ceiling. The papers are spilling out of cabinets and files, falling from shelves. Desks are squeezed in tightly everywhere, and behind them sit the most beautiful girls from all over Africa.
Secretaries.
I am looking for one particular document. It is called “Lagos Plan of Action for the Economic Development of Africa 1980 2000.” African leaders convened in Lagos in 1980 to consider solutions to the continent’s crisis. How could Africa be saved? And they resolved on this particular plan of action—the bible, the panacea, the grand strategy for development.
I search and inquire, but to no avail. Most of the workers here have not even heard of any such plan. Others have heard of it, but they know nothing more specific. Others have heard of it, know a bit about it, but still do not have the text. They can give me copies of the resolution concerning how the production of peanuts in Senegal might be increased. How the tsetse fly should be combated in Tanzania. How the drought in the Sahel can be curtailed. But how to save Africa? This plan they do not have.
Several conversations in Africa Hall. One, with Babashola Chinsman. He is vice director of the United Nations Development Program. Young, energetic, from Sierra Leone. One of those Africans upon whom fate has smiled. A representative of a new global class: members of Third World nations occupying seats in international organizations. A villa in Addis Ababa (official), a villa in Freetown (private, which he rents to the German embassy), a private apartment in Manhattan (because he doesn’t care for hotels). A limousine, a driver, servants. Tomorrow, a conference in Madrid; three days from now, one in New York; a week from now, another in Sydney. Always the same, the eternal, subject: how to relieve hunger in Africa.
The conversation is pleasant, interesting.
Chinsman: “It is not true that Africa is stagnant. Africa is developing; it is not merely a continent of famine.
“The problem is larger, worldwide. One hundred and fifty poorly developed countries are leaning on twenty-five developed ones, in which, moreover, there is recession and a stagnant population growth.
“It is extremely important to promote regional development in Africa. Unfortunately, the obstacle is a backward infrastructure: unsatisfactory means of distribution, bad roads, insufficient trucks and buses, a poor public transportation system.
“This inadequate transportation network results in ninety percent of the continent’s villages and towns living in isolation—they have no access to the market, and thus no access to money.
“The paradox of our world: If one figures in the cost of transporting, servicing, warehousing, and preserving food, then the cost of a single meal (typically, a handful of corn) for a refugee in some camp, for example in Sudan, is higher than the price of a dinner in the most expensive restaurant in Paris.
“After thirty years of independence, we are finally beginning to understand that education is important for development. The farm of a literate peasant is ten to fifteen times more productive than the farm of an illiterate one. Education alone, without any additional investments, brings material benefits.