by Paul Theroux
Outside this area of circling hyenas dozens more had gathered and were fighting each other and growling and chattering, and moving with their strange lame-looking leg motion. Hyenas that had gotten something to eat were chewing, and their chewing was loudly audible, for hyenas eat everything including the bones, masticating them with the snap and crunch of a wood-chipper.
‘If you give me money I’ll turn on my headlights,’ the taxi driver said.
I gladly handed him some money and was rewarded by the sight of a wild-eyed hyena, frightened and hungry, gnashing its teeth and then in the bright beams of the car’s headlights using its toothy jaws to tear the protruding piece of meat from Yusof’s mouth.
The next day, with children and some adults howling ‘Faranji’ at me, I left Harar. I didn’t take the word personally. They were mocking me as they would any foreigner. I was certainly better off than the Harari woman cowering in a doorway who was being beaten by a man with a heavy stick just inside Harar’s main gate. She was screeching loudly as the robed and turbaned older man, with a grizzled beard, whacked her across her body using the thick part of the stick. A woman squatting near her made a face and leaned away, so as not to be hit by mistake. No one else took any notice. When he was through, the man was a little puffed from this exertion – wailing on someone with a stick is heavy work. The woman howled and bowed down, holding her head, and the man walked away swinging his stick, in the manner of a husband who has just done his duty.
Men are beasts all over the world: that could have happened anywhere. But the lepers, hyenas, ivory tusks and garbage, complaining donkeys, open drains in the cobbled alleys, the tang of spices, the butcher covered with blood raising his cleaver to split a furry hump and reveal the smooth cheese of camel fat – and smiling crookedly to offer the fat as a gift – the moans of people’s prayers, the dark-eyed invitation to a shadowy hut, the howls of ‘Foreigner!’ All these explained why Rimbaud had been so happy here. He had liked Africa for being the anti-Europe, the anti-West, which it is, sometimes defiantly, sometimes lazily. I liked it for those reasons, too, for there was nothing of home here. Being in Africa was like being on a dark star.
7 The Longest Road in Africa
Back in Addis, I tried to plot a trip by road to the Kenyan border and beyond. Not difficult to plot – there was only one road – but in these uncertain times no reliable information. The farther you got from an African capital the worse the roads – everyone knew that; but harder information was unobtainable, and the more you inquired the vaguer people became. In such circumstances the cliché terra incognita was something real and descriptive. The border was distant; distant places were unknown; the unknown was dangerous.
Border towns in African countries were awful places, known for riff-raff and refugees and people sleeping rough, famous for smugglers and back-handers, notorious for bribery and delay, nit-picking officialdom, squeezing policemen, pestering money-changers, the greatest risks, and the crummiest hotels. There was either a new national language on the other side of the border, or the same tribal language straddling it – and a nasty border dispute because the dotted line ran through a divided people. Roadside customs and immigration were horrible bottlenecks, usually on the bank of a muddy river. People told me, Don’t go.
There were some buses to the southern towns of Dila and Mega, and occasional vehicles to the frontier town of Moyale, but Moyale was the edge of the known world for Ethiopians. None of them ever went into Kenya – why would they? The north of Kenya was just waterless desert and rutted roads and quarrelsome tribes, and a border dispute among the gun-toting Borena people, and worst of all the troops of roaming heavily armed Somalis known as ‘shifta.’ Just dropping the word shifta into a proposed itinerary was enough to make traveling Africans go in the opposite direction.
On what was now the longest road in Africa, some of it purely theoretical, from Cairo to Cape Town, there had once been a plan for a great transcontinental railway. Apart from his dream of diamonds and conquest, Cecil Rhodes’s imperial vision for Africa was of a railway line that would run from South Africa to Egypt, taking in Nairobi and Addis Ababa, Khartoum and Nubia. ‘Your hinterland is there,’ is the inscription under his bronze figure, pointing north on a pedestal in Cape Town. Sections of the northerly running railway line were built in Rhodes’s lifetime (a short lifetime – he died at the age of forty-nine). Later, track was laid to the copper belt in Northern Rhodesia as far as the Congo border. The Germans built a railway across their colony of German East Africa, later British Tanganyika, later still independent Tanzania. The Tanzanians, under the leadership of the muddled Maoist Julius Nyerere, soon had a line south from Dar es Salaam into Zambia, entirely the work of Mao-sponsored Chinese railwaymen, chanting the Great Helmsman’s Thoughts as they hammered spikes and fastened rails. This was 1967, at the beginning of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which Tanzania too embraced in a superficial and self-destructive way.
By zigging and zagging, and taking a ferry across Lake Victoria, it was possible for a solo traveler like me, with a bag and a map, to go by rail from Cape Town to Nairobi. But north of Nairobi the tarred road gives way to mud, the buses stop running at Isiolo, and after that it is just a rocky road, and hyenas, and colorful Rendille tribesmen, wearing armlets and loincloths, carrying spears and sabres, and forever fussing over their elaborate coiffures. As soon as the road surface turned bad the bandits appeared, shifta carrying AK-47s, classic highwaymen. The road from Nairobi to the border was reputed to be the emptiest in Africa. That was where I was headed.
No one had any information about that road in Addis, and there wasn’t much available about southern Ethiopia either. People would say they had been to a certain town in the south and then, when I questioned them further, they would go blank. Even the Kenyans went blank. Visa requirements had changed. I would need one. I went to the Kenyan Embassy and was told by a sulky Kikuyu woman at a desk that I would have to wait three or four days for the visa.
‘Why can’t I have it today or tomorrow?’
In a scolding tone, she said, ‘Mr Ochieng, the visa officer, must not be distubbed!’
‘And why is that?’
‘He is busy.’
‘But I am busy too,’ I said mildly, ‘and I want to visit your wonderful country.’
‘You will have to wait.’ She picked up a telephone and flicked her fingers at me in a bugger-off gesture.
But I did not leave. I buttonholed diplomats and inquired about the road. Of the three officers at the Kenyan Embassy I spoke to, none had gone by land from Addis to Nairobi across the common border. A Kenyan man in a three-piece suit seemed insulted that I should suggest it.
‘We fly,’ he said.
One Kenyan woman confided that she disliked Ethiopians. ‘They are proud,’ she said. She meant racist. To annoy other Africans, Ethiopians sometimes said, ‘We are not Africans.’
With time to spare in Addis, I looked around. No tourists in the country meant that the antique shops were full of merchandise, both treasures and fakes, in the form of old Amharic Bibles made by scribes and monks, with hand-painted plates, silver crosses that looked like giant latch-keys, paintings on cloth stolen from churches, icons, chaplets, Korans, amber beads, venetian beads, ivory bangles and armlets, spoons of horn and iron, and wooden and leather artifacts from every tribe in the country – elaborate stools, milk jugs, spears, shields, Konso funeral posts depicting the lately departed with a carved penis protruding from the forehead. Mursi lip plugs, penis sheaths and cache-sexes, little metal aprons that Nuer women wore at their waist for modesty’s sake.
An Asiatic man screaming at an Ethiopian woman in a curio shop one day caught my attention. The woman apparently owned the shop, or at least worked there.
‘You give me for 400 birr!’ The man was moon-faced and his tone of voice was harsh and bullying. But he wore a white shirt and tie and looked fairly respectable, which made his anger all the more disconcerting.
‘No. Six hundred birr. Last price.’ The woman turned away.
Shaking with rage, the Asiatic man said, ‘No! Four hundred! I come back! You give me!’
I listened with interest, for one of the curiosities of travel is hearing two non-native speakers of English venting at each other in English. The dispute went back and forth for a little while longer, the man growing shriller and a pinkness blooming in his cheeks as he became enraged and incoherent. Finally, wordless, he left in a minivan with some other grim-faced Asiatics.
Four hundred Ethiopian birr was $47, 600 birr was $72.
The shop was empty. I said to the woman, ‘I’ll give you 600. That seems reasonable.’
‘It is a good price. Best price. I sell him some before for 500 but it low quality. This maximum quality.’
‘What is?’
‘Ivory.’ She looked closely at me. ‘You give me 600?’
‘New ivory or old?’
‘New! Tusks! Big ones!’
Any trade in ivory was illegal, and so I pursued the subject. Ivory from poached elephants was available in large quantities, so I had heard; but though I saw chunks of it in shops, I never saw tusks and didn’t know the market price – indeed, though I had been told the trade flourished in Harar and elsewhere, I had no idea that I could just walk into a little store in Addis Ababa and say: How about some elephant tusks, please?
‘How many tusks do you have?’ I asked.
‘How many you want?’
‘Let’s say, quite a few.’
‘I have much. Fifty, sixty. Each tusk ten kilo, average. When you buy?’
Imagining a half ton of ivory stacked on the ground, something that would satisfy the greed of Mr Kurtz, I said, ‘Would these be Ethiopian elephants?’
‘Ethiopian.’ Ityopian, she said, the usual pronunciation for the Greek word meaning ‘the Burned Ones.’
The Ethiopian elephant, Loxodonta africana orleansi, is a severely endangered species – so endangered that an elephant sanctuary had been established at Babile, near Harar, to protect the creatures. Keeping the elephants in this special area made it much easier for poachers, and this place (as well as Kenya) was the source of the ivory.
So, when you come back? You come today?’
I havered and said, ‘I have a little problem. I’m sending the ivory to the USA and that’s illegal.’
No problem. You got friends?’
What kind of friends?’
‘Embassy friends. Diplomat people. They buy it,’ she said. ‘That man you see shouting? He Third Secretary in Korean Embassy.’
‘So embassy people buy ivory?’
Yah. Chinese. Japanese. They buy it.’
I see. They put it in the diplomatic bag and ship it home?’
‘Yah. No one look.’
‘The American Embassy might not want to ship a thousand pounds of elephant tusks in the diplomatic bag.’
‘Yes, you ask them, you ask them,’ the woman said, now getting a bit impatient with my questions.
Just to satisfy myself I looked around Addis and asked for elephant ivory at two other shops. The only quibble was: How much do you want? Four years before the price had been 200 birr ($23) a kilo. Now, elephant tusks were harder to find and in great demand, so the price had risen. And there would come a day, not far off perhaps, when there would be no more elephants, although no shortage of devious diplomats, stuffing diplomatic bags with contraband.
‘No, I don’t think we can help you send any elephant tusks back to the States,’ the Information Officer at the United States Embassy in Addis said. He chuckled glumly and made a note to alert CITES, the Campaign on International Trade in Endangered Species. He was Karl Nelson, who had served in the Peace Corps in the early to mid-sixties in the Philippines; at that same time I had been a volunteer in Malawi.
‘How was Malawi?’
‘It was heaven.’
‘I loved the Philippines, too,’ Karl said. He had been a teacher, he had married a Filipina, had taught in the Pacific island of Yap for eleven years, had wandered the world a bit, and then joined the foreign service. He was exactly my age, and our lives had been somewhat parallel. He said, ‘I joined late. I didn’t make anything of my life,’ but he was wrong: he had a happy family, he loved his wife, he had raised five sturdy, successful children.
‘You say you’ve just come from the Sudan?’ he said. ‘And I know you’ve written about India and Singapore.’
‘I lived in Singapore for three dreadful years.’
‘You’ll appreciate this, then,’ he said. ‘A Sudanese, an Indian and a Singaporean were asked, “In your opinion, what is the nutritional value of beef?” The Sudanese said, “What is nutritional value?” The Indian said, “What is beef?” and the Singaporean said, “What is an opinion?’ ”
I laughed and realized I was in the company of a man whose manner of discourse was jokes and anecdotes. When his turn came in a political discussion with a bunch of bores, he would say, ‘Bush walks into a delicatessen and says, “I’ll have a sandwich.” Fella says, “What do you want on that?” Bush says …’ And Karl would make his point. They were jokes with a point, but gentle, and usually deflationary, intended to demonstrate the absurdity of the proposition being debated.
‘You’re going to Nairobi by road?’ he said and laughed his wheezy laugh. ‘Well, of course you are. Flying there would be too simple for you. It’ll take a week or more – you’ll have a terrible time. You’ll have some great stuff for your book.’
‘My idea is to get to the border. African borders are full of revelations. Have you been to the Ethiopian border at Moyale?’
‘No. So please write your book, and then I can read about it.’ Then he added, ‘Did you know, in any group of half a dozen Ethiopians, five of them will have been in prison?’
Is this a joke?’
‘This is an invitation,’ Karl said. ‘I want to introduce you to some people.’
We had lunch at his house in a back street of Addis, a bungalow behind a high wall, with a flower garden and bird houses and a dovecote. Five Ethiopians and two Filipina women doctors, who were also Catholic nuns. The nuns, friends of Karl’s wife, who was in the Philippines, were in Addis for a few days. They lived in a remote part of Ethiopia, where there was a large Muslim population, and their mission was providing medical treatment to Muslim women, an altruistic and thankless task which, judging from their uncomplaining dispositions, they performed cheerfully.
One of the Ethiopians was a woman who had worked at the embassy for many years. She said, in a tone of resignation, ‘Women have no status here. They are pushed aside and beaten.’
The four men were all writers, editors, and journalists. Each of them had been in prison. One had been jailed under three successive regimes, a total of twelve years. ‘I was even in the emperor’s prison – the palace jail!’ It was something of an accomplishment to have annoyed both Haile Selassie and the Derg, the monarchists and the Marxists. Another man had been in prison for most of the Derg years. The two other men had the same story. None of these men had ever been formally charged or brought to trial, just tossed in jail and left to rot.
Ethiopians are vague on western, that is, Gregorian calendar dates because their calendar is four years behind the western one (and of course the Jewish one is 2000 years ahead, and the Muslim one 600 years behind). When I asked an Ethiopian the date of something that had happened in the past he began to count on his fingers. To the best of his calculations, Nebiy Makonnen, an ex-prisoner of about fifty, had been languishing in Central Prison from 1977 until 1987 – ten years anyway.
‘It was politics. I was on the wrong side.’ He laughed at the very idea of charges or a trial. He had simply been picked up one day and thrown in the slammer, where – and he a man who was used to reading and writing – there were no books, nothing to write with, nothing to write on.
‘I would go crazy in jail,’ I said.
‘You would learn patience,’ he said.
&n
bsp; ‘That’s true!’ the other ex-prisoners said.
‘One day, after I had been there about a year, a man was brought in by the guards. He had been searched but somehow they had missed the book he was carrying. It was Gone with the Wind. We were so happy! We were all educated men. We took turns reading it – of course, we had to share it. There were 350 men in my section, and so we were allowed to have the book for one hour at a time. That was the best part of the day in Central Prison – reading Gone with the Wind.
‘I decided to translate it. I had no paper, so for paper I smoothed out the foil from cigarette packs and used the back side of it where there was paper to write on. A pen was smuggled in. I wrote very small. And I was Entertainment Officer, so every night I read some of my translation to the other prisoners.
‘But still I had to share the copy of the book – I could only have it for one hour. The translation took two years. I wrote it on 3000 sheets of cigarette foil. One by one, I folded these up and put them back into cigarette packs and when the prisoners were released they took them out of prison – just tucked them in their shirt pocket.’
Nebiy remained in prison for seven years. On his release, he looked for the 3000 sheets that contained his translation of Gone with the Wind. Locating them and gathering them took him two years of travel and inquiry. At last, he published his translation of the novel and this is the translation that Ethiopians read.
‘What’s your favorite part of the book?’
‘I don’t know. I read it over and over for six years. I know the book by heart.’
At the end of Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, the captive Tony Last is condemned to sit in a jungle clearing and read the works of Dickens, over and over, to his crazed captor, Mr Todd. It is improbable, so it is funny. But Nebiy Makonnen’s story was much better, and its hilarity more horrible for being true – six years squinting at Scarlett O’Hara in an Ethiopian jail.
After that, whenever I met an Ethiopian man over thirty or so I asked whether he had been in prison, and the answer was usually yes.
