by Paul Theroux
But even at best African cities seemed to me miserable improvised ant-hills, attracting the poor and the desperate from the bush, and turning them into thieves and devisers of cruel scams. Scamming is the survival mode in a city where tribal niceties do not apply and there are no sanctions except those of the police, a class of people who in Africa generally are little more than licensed thieves.
Ethiopia had just ended its border war with Eritrea. Because of the rumors of that war, and Ethiopia’s neighbors of low repute – Somalia and the Sudan – and the paranoia of travelers, Addis had no foreign tourists. Empty hotels – wonderful for me to behold because I never made forward plans; just showed up, and hoped.
Not many Ethiopians took the train to Dire Dawa, and certainly not onward to Djibouti. Djibouti had a terrible reputation locally. Djibouti is one of the notches on the African coast, at the upper edge of the Horn, an age-old point of entry, and exit too – for centuries it was a slave port, then part of French Somaliland, and finally what it is today, a thorn in the side of Ethiopia, an independent republic. Its oppressive heat was not relieved by the scorching breezes off the Gulf of Aden, nor was there any terrain except the landfill look of reclaimed swamp, and baked architecture that was either Frenchified (biscuity, officious, departmental) or else Arabesque (pillared, scalloped, scowling). French soldiers still garrisoned there had made the place notorious for their enthusiasm for child prostitution.
‘Twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls!’ an aid worker told me. ‘Such scenes! The soldiers go to these terrible nightclubs and get drunk. You see them staggering around the streets. Drunkenness and prostitution – drugs, too.’
On such a trip as I was taking, the idea of witnessing such colorful depravity and dissipation seriously tempted me. But I settled on the trip to Harar, for I wanted to be traveling south within a few weeks – to Kenya and beyond.
The Dire Dawa train was leaving early the next morning. If I didn’t take it I would have three days to wait for another. I went to the station and bought my ticket, looked at the inside of the train – not bad, not good: most trains in Africa look as if they are on their way to Auschwitz – and the next day returned and boarded it. Apart from the departure time, there was no timetable. No one knew when we were expected to arrive in Dire Dawa. ‘Tomorrow,’ the best guess, was all right with me.
We started with a scattering of passengers and even later in the morning, after many stations, in the canyons and hills that lay east of Addis, we still had collected very few people. At some stations we lay idle for as much as an hour, and twice after dark in the middle of nowhere (but I could hear the wind rising in bare branches) the train dragged to a halt and did not move for several hours. During the day I had sat and read First Footsteps in East Africa: An Exploration of Harar, by Captain Burton. Night came on quickly. I slept stretched out on a wooden bench, pillowing my head on my bag and gritting my teeth, hating this trip and wishing it were over and glad that I was not going onward to Djibouti. Sometime after dawn, as the heat of the day was taking hold, the sun slanting into the train, we pulled in to Dire Dawa.
‘Seems a little empty.’
The city looked abandoned: silent houses, empty streets.
‘It’s a holiday.’
It was usually quiet in Dire Dawa, but even quieter the day I arrived because of this Ethiopian holiday, the 105th anniversary of the Battle of Adwa.
‘When we defeated Mussolini,’ a man named Tesfaye told me.
Not quite, so I read later. The Adwa victory, a sweet one for Ethiopians, an early anti-colonial one, was accomplished in 1896, when 20, 000 Italian soldiers hurrying into northern Ethiopia from Eritrea, met 90,000 ‘perfervid, battle-hungry Ethiopians,’ commanded by King Menelik II and his second-in-command, Ras Makonnen, who in this triumph over the foreign invaders were bonded in a father-son relationship. They were distantly related in any case, but that bond assured the elevation of Ras Makonnen’s eldest son, Ras Tafari – Haile Selassie I – to the throne.
Adwa was crucial in other ways. It was first of all a wipeout. Trying to group for an attack in the rocky landscape near Adwa, the Italians became lost and disoriented. The Ethiopians, outnumbering them more than four to one, surrounded them, harried them with spears and arrows and killed more than 15,000 and wounded or captured the rest. They also had rifles – 2000 of them were Remingtons that Rimbaud had sold to Menelik in Entotto in 1887. Though he did not live to see it, Arthur Rimbaud, former poet, played a part in this historic African victory. As a battle of natives against invaders, Adwa was on a par with the Sudanese dervishes destroying the British square. So famous was Adwa that it inspired Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa Movement, known then as ‘Ethiopianism,’ as well as the Pan-African consciousness that helped transform British, French and Portuguese colonies into independent republics. The last successful African campaign that had won decisive battles against any European nation had been Hannibal’s.
Italy’s defeat and humiliation were especially bitter, since the Fascists, swayed by the Mitty-like rule of Mussolini, saw themselves as new Roman legionnaires reestablishing a great empire. Hurt pride filled the Italians with a desire to take revenge on the Ethiopians. They succeeded in this conquest in 1935, when they invaded Ethiopia, much better armed, illegally so (with poison gas), killing tens of thousands of warriors, who were battling with the same weapons they had used forty years earlier.
The whole world was united in condemning the Italian adventure. Winston Churchill summed up this contempt in a speech in London, at the end of September 1935, when, as he wrote later in The Gathering Storm, he ‘tried to convey a warning to Mussolini, which I believe he read.’ The warning was one orotund sentence, rolling onward on the devastating sonority of its clauses:
To cast an army of nearly a quarter of a million men, embodying the flower of Italian manhood, upon a barren shore two thousand miles from home, against the good will of the whole world and without command of the sea, and then in this position embark upon what may well be a series of campaigns against a people and in regions which no conqueror in four thousand years ever thought it worthwhile to subdue, is to give hostages to fortune unparalleled in all history.
Yet this deadly absurdity was exacly what the Italians perpetrated. What Churchill did not know – what few people knew – was that the Italians were planning to speed and simplify their campaign by using phosgene gas. Italy had signed the 1928 Geneva Protocol against employing poison gas in warfare. Yet in 1935 Mussolini urged his generals to drop phosgene bombs on the Ethiopians, to win ‘by whatever means’ (qualsiasi mezzo).
The Italians began their attack by bombing Adwa – scene of their humiliation – and drove southward. Twenty-four planes, five of them carrying gas bombs, dropped poisonous phosgene on Ethiopian troops in the Ogaden desert. When atrocity stories of dubious authenticity emerged from the battlefields – how Italian captives had been crucified, decapitated, and castrated by the Africans – more gas bombs were dropped. Even shooting dum-dum bullets, the news of which also outraged the Italians, the Ethiopians didn’t have a chance. Haile Selassie was toppled from his throne and sent into exile. A Fascist viceroy was installed in Addis Ababa. The Italian King Victor Emanuel, now styling himself ‘emperor,’ had two semi-precious stones in his crown, Ethiopia and Albania.
Adwa, the Italian defeat which had provoked that second invasion, was being celebrated in Dire Dawa – which is to say that the people of this small town were given a day off from work. But there wasn’t much work in the best of times, just coffee picking and qât chewing. There were no parades. The town was deserted. Dire Dawa, Amharic for ‘Empty Plain’ – a more appropriate name than its former one of New Harar – lay small and horizontal on the hot pale scrubland beneath the big brown hills. The town built on dust and sand was only as old as the railway, a century. It was the stopping-off place for Harar and – much more important – the point of transshipment for the qât crop from Aweyde, about twenty miles up the steep road to
Harar.
The informal economy of this area of Ethiopia was based upon the growing of this mildly narcotic qât (Catha edulis), pronounced ‘chat’ or ‘jat’ in Ethiopia, a bush that in leaf shape, color and size looks like a laurel hedge. The other Ethiopian cash crop, of high-grade coffee, also grown here in the hills around Harar, was in demand but negligible in profit compared to qât. This daze-producing bush was so highly prized in the non-boozing Emirates and the other states in the Persian Gulf that Dire Dawa’s airport was very busy with the comings and goings of small transport planes. For the greatest buzz, qât had to be fresh when it was chewed.
Dire Dawa looked like the sort of French colonial railway town I had seen in rural Vietnam, for its lowness and its squareness and its stucco and its dust, the sort of town on any railway line built 100 years ago by Europeans. Indeed, this one had a European pedigree: the Swiss engineer and adviser to King Menelik, Alfred Ilg, had planned it along with the Djibouti railway. Ilg, who also did business with Rimbaud, accused the exile of secretly having ‘a sunny disposition.’
Alfred Ilg planned and oversaw the building of Dire Dawa in 1902 to serve the railway from Djibouti. Fifteen years later the line was extended to Addis Ababa. Dire Dawa was a Swiss-French notion of what a respectable African town ought to look like: one-story tiled-roof houses of yellow stucco, most of them cracked, with a precise geometry of streets, with a little plaza here and there – one honoring a dung-streaked statue, another a patriotic plaque and a dusty cannon. Dire Dawa’s trees had died in the last drought, but the leafless limbs and twisted trunks remained.
At the heart of Dire Dawa was the market, an important center of commerce, and even on this national holiday a few people were selling fruits and vegetables – bananas, lemons, potatoes, carrots, piles of leafy greens, all of the produce from higher up in the region nearer Harar. Nothing grew in the hot dusty soil of Dire Dawa.
Walking through the market, wondering how I might get a ride to Harar, I came upon a big black woman in a red dress hawking bunches of herbs. To start a conversation I asked her what they were, and she laughed and said, ‘No English! Galla!’
‘No Galla,’ I said.
But as I turned to walk away she said, ‘Habla Español?’
Spanish was not a language I expected to hear from a market woman of the Galla people in northeastern Ethiopia, though every now and then I met an older Ethiopian, Somali or Sudanese who was fluent in Italian – the result of a mission school education or communicant of an ethnocentric pastor, such as Father Cruciani in Aswan.
‘You speak Spanish?’ I asked.
‘Of course,’ she said in that language. ‘I learned it from the Cubans.
There were many Cuban soldiers here in the time of the Derg. I liked them, and they liked me. We had good times. That was when we had another government. The Cubans all went away.’
‘I suppose they left some children behind?’
‘I think so! They liked us very much.’
The Cuban episode occurred when Mengistu Haile Mariam took over in 1974, and declared a Marxist state, renamed streets and squares, killed Haile Selassie and his entire family and erected ridiculous obelisks here and there, displaying the crimson star of socialism. Tens of thousands of Ethiopians were imprisoned without trial. This was also the period when Ethiopia was in the news for its terrible famine. The name Ethiopia became synonymous with tyranny and starvation. Food was airlifted by western charities but Ethiopia’s official friends were Cuba and the Soviet Union. Cuban aid included soldiers, doctors and nurses. All you saw then was footage of rickety children and enfeebled adults, the walking wounded – and these are the lucky ones.
After another famine in 1984–5, and the pressure of opposition parties, the Derg was finally overthrown in 1991, and Mengistu hopped a plane to Zimbabwe and was allowed to reside there on condition that he keep his mouth shut. Ethiopia dropped out of the news, but life went on, the rains brought fresh harvests, war was declared on the secessionists in the province of Eritrea, a war that had ended (triumphantly for Eritrea) with a ceasefire just a few weeks before I arrived at Dire Dawa station one very hot morning in February.
Except for the misleading road squiggles on a very poor map, I had no idea where Harar was or how to get there; no knowledge of Amharic, knew no one in the province – or indeed in the whole of Ethiopia. I was aware of the fact that Harar was more than a mile high in the Chercher Highlands. I was the classic traveler, arriving bewildered and alone in a remote place, trying to be hopeful, but thinking, What now?
I stopped several Ethiopian men and asked, ‘Is there a bus to Harar?’
Grinning with bad news, they said: ‘No bus today.’
Stepping into the shade, for the day was very hot and the wind off the plain scorched my face, I saw an Italian-looking woman in the modern habit of a nun (brown cowl, brown dress, serious shoes). She was carrying a bag and walking with the sort of self-contained and single-minded directness of a punctual person determined to be on time for a meeting.
Yet she smiled and paused when I said hello.
‘Excuse me, do you speak English, sister?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you tell me the way to Harar?’
She sized me up and said, ‘You are alone?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Then you are very lucky. Come with me – I am going to Harar,’ she said. ‘Ah, here is my driver.’
Saved, I thought, perhaps because the day was auspicious, my mother’s ninetieth birthday. Within a few minutes – blessing my dumb luck, blessing this Samaritan – I was seated in the back of a Land-Rover and being driven through the back lanes of Dire Dawa to the bumpy winding road that rose into the hills that were so dusty and windblown that the air and the sky were tawny too.
‘I am Sister Alexandra,’ the nun said. ‘From Malta.’
She turned out to be a great talker, sitting sideways in the front passenger seat, occasionally addressing the driver in Amharic, not looking at me, but now and then calling attention to a curious feature of Ethiopian life, such as the shepherds with their flocks of goats, or the children playing with such contentment that they wrestled and rolled in the middle of the road, while the cars – ours for example – detoured around them.
‘You see, they are not afraid. They are quite free here,’ Sister Alexandra said, and waved to the frolicking kiddies.
She did not seem surprised that I should want to visit Harar, she wondered whether I had been to Malta (I had, on my Pillars of Hercules trip). At first we made small talk, about her family, her girlhood, her law studies, her choosing to be a nun, her missionary instinct; and then I understood that she was circling around one subject, a theme she returned to from time to time, which was, ‘I have been loved.’
She was much younger than me, just about forty, full of life and that Maltese vivacity that is so compulsive it is adjacent to hysteria – I had had a glimpse of it in the way she had walked, with a passionate purposefulness, in Dire Dawa. Not a dry dull nun at all but a full-blooded one with a tale to tell.
‘I had a fiancé, I was studying to be a lawyer,’ she said. ‘I have always been very free – my father encouraged me to believe in freedom. I was happy, I was going to go into a law partnership with my brother. I had a ring, I even had a date for the marriage.’
Children were lying flat in the middle of this mountain road on a hairpin turn, tickling each other and laughing, absolutely heedless of the fact that cars were speeding past them.
‘No, it is their playground!’ Sister Alexandra said. I had not said anything but she had anticipated an obvious question. Then she said, ‘I began to have thoughts of being a nun. I prayed for guidance and when I was twenty I made the decision.’
‘What did your family think?’
‘They were shocked. Shocked!’ In her solemn dramatic way she seemed to enjoy the memory.
‘And your fiancé?’
‘My fiancé wanted to send me to a doctor in Italy t
o see if I was insane.’ Now she smiled. ‘Or had a mental problem.’
‘I suppose he was worried.’
‘He was sick with worry and very disappointed. The wedding was cancelled, everything called off! My family – well, you can imagine. They didn’t understand. Only my father saw what was in my heart. My fiancé was desperate. I loved him but I knew I had a vocation. Before I took my final vows in Addis he flew here to Ethiopia and pleaded with me.’
‘He didn’t change your mind?’
‘He didn’t change my mind, no,’ Sister Alexandra said. ‘But he gave me a ring.’
I looked at her fingers: no ring. That was understandable, for a nun had to turn her back on the world of materialism and secularity and become a bride of Christ.
‘My fiancé went away. For nine years he lamented,’ Sister Alexandra said.
Now we were entering the heart of the highlands – very dry, rubbly, chilly, windblown, the brown block-like houses, the robed people walking on skinny legs or else squatting in front of mats selling withered vegetables. I cracked open the window and sniffed the cool air.
‘He found a woman and married her and had two children. I did not even get in touch with him. I thought about him – of course, I thought about him a great deal. But I knew he had his life and I had my life.’ She reflected on this. ‘From time to time I heard about him. Well, Malta – you have been there …’
‘Just an island. I know islands a bit.’
‘Malta is a small place. No secrets, much talk,’ she said.
We were high enough in the highlands to feel the chill. The people here wore billowing clothes and were wrapped up well, with scarves and cloaks and headgear, pressing into the wind.
