Knowing that those wretched animals, although graceless, could outrun the wind, I ran as fast as the gods permitted me, crashing through the thorny bramble and jumping over an open ditch with the reckless abandon of a feverish devil. I could hear the hyena as it trotted behind me, scattering gravel under its claws, and was painfully aware of its desire to clamp its steely jaws down on me, but I hoped to reach the glaring street lamp first so that the gods might see me and dispatch a policeman to intervene. I was a couple of steps from the doorway of the compound when I heard their laughter. There were now half a dozen hyenas within arm’s reach. As there seemed to be no time left for divine intervention, I jumped the last metre, crashing through the entrance with the savage determination of a blind goalkeeper.
Once I was safely behind the stone walls, I knew that I would live. I opened the door a crack to taunt the hyenas from my newly acquired position of safety, but they continued to run past me, multiplying in number. I discovered then, with a great blow to my pride, that they had not been chasing me after all. They had spotted a street dog farther up the road, and were closing in for the kill.
* * *
BEFORE THE FIRST year of school was finished, I was able to read, albeit with the tentativeness of a Sunday-morning drunkard, and to write, with the appropriate k for King and h for Haile Selassie. It would take the better half of the second year for me to fine-tune these skills. Before we were considered educated, however, we had to spend a few months on poetry.
In Ethiopia, poetry is second only to the achievements of kings. Poets are sought after and treated with great reverence by the ruling class. In ancient times, poets were invited to read at the king’s palace and light up the festivities at a feudal lord’s manor by composing odes that both celebrated triumphs over adversaries and advised the lord of the condition of his serfs.
The most popular form of poetry, known as the kinae, offers one message to the untrained ear and another to cultured listeners. The key to the kinae lies in the contradictory nature of the Amharic language. When assembled in sentences, these contradictory words interact, forming rather potent cocktails. Generations of oppression, without freedom of speech, gave birth to this tangling of meanings and intentions. If a man had been mistreated by a feudal lord or local chieftain, he would compose a kinae to read at a social event, a poem that was sweet and heart-rending to the untrained ear, but quite biting to the lord—one of the intended audience.
The peasants, by and large, were illiterate and unable to put together a recondite kinae, so the poets did it for them. A poet might compose a kinae to inform the lord that the taxes he had levied on his subjects were excessive, about the brutality of his son, who raped and plundered the locals, or as a plea for forgiveness on behalf of the man he had recently thrown into his private jail. The feudal lord was often trained in the interpretation of the kinae, but if he doubted his own judgment, there were always one or two monks beside him to shed light on the subject. Poets were usually exempt from the repercussions of their kinae, as lords were generally reluctant to be seen as monstrous persecutors of humble poets. Besides, the poet could always plead his ignorance, claiming that his intentions were misread, and offer apologies.
Memerae was at his best when reading us poetry. He would sit on his tortoise shell and read out loud two or three lines from a kinae, asking the class to give him the “bronze” or obvious meaning, as well as the “gold” or hidden meaning. He would allow us a few moments to reflect on the words, repeating the kinae twice or more as we struggled to unravel the words. Each kinae is like a small universe concocted of infinitely small magnets, each with a negative and positive force. We would dissect it with our little brains, and then present our view of how that particular universe functioned. Memerae was never angry at us for giving wrong interpretations; he simply emphasized where it was we should look for clues.
I remember a kinae that Mam told me as a bedtime riddle:
The bronze meaning is: We have waited long enough for Mr. Limadae to come home. It is now late in the evening. Please latch the door; I don’t feel at ease having to go to bed with the door still unlocked.
The gold meaning is: Now that you have decided to deny me what I had come to expect as my due, there is no point in keeping up this relationship. I am not a person who can easily forgive and forget.
We were never intended to compose a poem, as that requires years of disciplined training. Few ever aspired to write poetry, and when a student of poetry finally succeeded, he marked the end of his training by composing not only a kinae, but also something called a stranded poem. One can draw a jagged line through a stranded poem, from top to bottom, breaking it into two independent pieces. Each of these halves rhymes and has its own meaning; put together, the two pieces form a body that gives a third and entirely different meaning.
There was no celebration when our two years of school with Memerae came to a close. He simply told us that we were ready to begin our formal education, and sent us to public school.
ALULA’S MORALITY
ONE HAD TO be at least seven years old in order to enrol in public school. At the beginning of each academic year, the school director, Mr. Taddesse, would determine the ages of the newcomers and their eligibility to enrol. He stood in front of the flagstaff near the main gate, with the self-assured air of a bold lizard. Mothers stood outside the gates in a jagged line with the young ones, newly dressed in starched outfits. Their heads hung to their hands as the school guard let their children in, one at a time, to hear the verdict.
Mr. Taddesse wasn’t one to bother with birth certificates; he knew how easily they could be rewritten with a good handshake. Instead, he decided the eligibility of each child by asking us to touch our left ear with the fingers of our right hand, hand crossing over the crown of our head—without tilting. I was unable to touch my ear, but Mr. Taddesse let me register because he knew my parents.
The public school was a pleasant change from Memerae’s shed. The classrooms were in actual buildings: the concrete block walls were whitewashed and clean; the windows had glass panes, and we were allowed to open them; the floor was newly tiled and the roof was a corrugated metal sheet, without holes for the eagles to watch us through. We didn’t even need to bring our own stools, as the school already had tables and chairs. We had more than one teacher, and all of them had real legs. Everything in that school seemed to be well thought out, from the duration of each period to the punishments inflicted on the unruly.
My early days in public school were characterized by terror and torture at the hands of the very people who were supposed to be our nurturers. They seemed to believe that they had to exorcise all of our childhood demons with the whip. And so in each classroom there came to be a single object on which all of our vague childhood fears were focused—the “persuader.” The persuader was a whip fashioned out of a bull’s penis. After it had been soaked in oil for weeks, rendering it supple and strong, it had been mounted on a wooden handle. The whip made pain take on individual colours; for each wrong we committed, the whip inflicted a separate hue.
Only a philosopher can give the wrong answer and be lauded for his intelligence. We were rewarded with the persuader. Persistently incorrect answers earned you one good lash, skipping homework merited two lashes, a fist fight would get you three lashes, and a paper ball mischievously propelled towards the teacher would get you five lashes.
Not all wildness was punishable by the whip. If a boy pulled the hair of a girl sitting in front of him, the teacher would have him kneel before the class, hands stretched at his sides, for the rest of the period. If a boy slid a looking glass underneath a girl with the intention of peering under her skirt, the boy would be made to crawl across a gravel field on bare knees, back erect, brick balanced precariously on the crown of his head.
The school director was called upon whenever the lashings failed to show results. Our director, Mr. Taddesse, was imaginative in his punishments. He once threw a student bodily out the school
window. He was also known to crack children’s heads with a chalk duster that he threw with the ferocity of a maddened devil. Sometimes the punishments were meted out to suit his own personal needs. If, for example, he had work to be done in his garden or barn, for the rest of the semester the student would be sent to his home at the end of each school day. When his wife went to market she was invariably accompanied by one or two sulking schoolchildren who were made to carry her bags like coolies. In our minds the school director was the very personification and logical extension of the persuader, the bull’s-penis whip.
My attendance at public school turned out to be more a measure of my tolerance for physical punishment than of my academic excellence. The thrill of being in a real school had not yet worn off when I began feeling sick each morning at the thought of going to class. In the first three years, not a single month passed by without my shaking hands with the persuader. The purpose of this punishment was completely lost on me—if it was meant to be a corrective measure—because with each lash I received, I plotted vengeance.
It has been said that only a self-educated man truly worships his teacher. I loathed mine. The culmination of my frustration occurred during my fourth year in school, at the age of nine. The focal point was my teacher in the course called “Morality.” Mr. Alula was, by far, the oldest teacher that I had ever had—he was about sixty. He was five feet eight inches tall, heavy-set, and his head was completely bald except for the scant white hair that salted the periphery of his scalp. He came from the northern highlands, and therefore had both the accent and the manners of an outsider. He was also the only man in town to own a slave, from the Wollamo ethnic group, whom he had brought along from his home town.
Mr. Alula taught us that it was immoral to answer an elder while looking him in the eye; to neglect lending a hand to your teacher’s wife as she came from the market with a handful of bags; and to swear in the name of our father when the father of all, King Haile Selassie, was still on the throne. He also made sure that we led our lives by the moral standards that he set for us. The class usually began when Mr. Alula introduced a student who had broken one of the many sacred moral precepts he had so painstakingly drilled into us. Sometimes the lesson revolved around a rule that he had neglected to teach us. Knowledge of such a rule, he assured us, would have been bred into any child from a decent family.
“Ahmed,” he would call, commanding that student to stand up: “I saw you throwing a ball yesterday over the head of an elder. I should not be surprised if you are struck down by lightning any day now.”
“Aster,” he would say, turning to a girl in the front row, “I also saw you yesterday: you were running in the street. What a shame to such a decent family as yours. A lady never runs. A lady walks humbly with her eyes on the ground.”
“Nega,” he would continue, after pausing for a few seconds, “I do not know if you are human, or a walking chimpanzee. Don’t fool yourself into thinking I did not see you during recess today. I watched as you made a loop out of your belt, slid your feet into the loop, and mounted the utility pole using your belt as a bracket. I can’t say anything to you, because you are completely hopeless, but I will speak to your father on the way home.”
On such days, I would rush home before him to release our dogs from their secluded shelter. The dogs were huge, semiwild, and as aggressive as famished caracals. They seldom barked, but everyone in the neighbourhood knew that they were merciless to trespassers.
I would wait for Mr. Alula outside the compound and, when I saw him turn the corner, I’d step inside. I’d whistle for my dogs to come and stand by my side, then open the gate of the compound at the first knock, and step back so that Mr. Alula could take note of my company.
“Is your father home yet?” he’d ask.
“No.”
“Your mother must be home,” he’d say. “Call her for me.”
“She’s not home either.”
Suspicious of my story, he would say: “I will go in and check for myself. Put a leash on those dogs for me.”
“I can’t,” I’d respond.
“And why not?”
“Because … because they don’t obey me.”
“But,” he would contradict, “I can see them standing by your side. Is this one of your mischiefs, or has the Devil got into you?”
I would keep quiet as Mr. Alula stood his ground. Unsure of what to do next, he would shift his eyes from the dogs to me, and back to the dogs. Unwilling to be outwitted by a nine-year-old boy, he would gather his courage and take a tentative step forward. The dogs would glance at me for guidance and, noticing that I wasn’t smiling, they’d assume it was war and dart out at the trespasser. Mr. Alula would pull his leg back just in time, his whole body trembling from the near-death experience. I’d continue to stand my ground, defiantly. Mr. Alula would wave his index finger at me, and the finger would shake so badly it threatened to come loose from his hand. Trembling, he’d warn me that I would get my due.
Mr. Alula usually managed to reach my parents eventually. Mam was never happy to see him, but she was always polite. She would hear his complaint in detail and watch as his hands vividly mimed the scene, showing her just how I had done this thing or that. Mam would thank him for his angelic supervision, but as soon as he was out of earshot, she would wish him immediate death. Mam’s opinion was that Mr. Alula was a spiteful man who hated children, not only because he had none of his own, but also because he had been hammered on the head by a melancholic devil.
Dad was always glad to see Mr. Alula. He would invite the teacher in and open a full bottle of fine arake for the occasion, which the two of them would drink as they talked through the night. Dad had a very high regard for morality, and believed that Mr. Alula was the most moral person in town. After all, Mr. Alula was from the northern highlands, the seat of all great kings, the place that holds all the virtues of the old kingdom intact—and Dad, well, he was just a second-generation settler in the Islamized east, with an incomplete knowledge of the ethical conduct of pure Amharas. And what’s more, Mr. Alula owned a slave—further evidence of his high moral standing.
Mr. Alula maintained a strong moral view on all things from everyday affairs to how the kingdom was run. No matter what issue Dad brought up, Alula had the solution, one that even his enemies could not dispute. For instance, when Dad mentioned the recent uprising of a Somali tribe close to Jijiga, Mr. Alula argued that the King’s soldiers should not be sent. He reasoned that the army’s business was only to defend the frontiers of a nation from invading enemies; that the rebellious Somali tribesmen, although unruly, were citizens of the nation; and that if the army were once allowed to indulge in internecine strife, there would be no end to the dilemma. He convincingly argued that it was immoral for the King’s musketeers to raise arms against this troublesome tribe.
The moral solution to this perpetual problem, continued Mr. Alula, gulping down his arake and wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his jacket, was to dispatch another Somali tribe against them. The two tribes must already be ripe for a fight, perhaps because of an argument over grazing land, a dry water hole or the direction of the wind. A couple of truckloads of chat and half a dozen camels sent to the tribal chiefs would do the trick. The friendly tribe would raid the hostile tribe, burn their settlement to the ground, and bring them to their knees. To the casual observer this might seem immoral, but that would be because he was only a casual observer.
A couple of years would pass, and the defeated tribes-people would rebuild their home. They would resume paying taxes and allow safe passage throughout their territory to the King’s musketeers. The most moral thing for the kingdom to do, then, would be to forgive back payment of the taxes, provide some camels and goats to the tribal chiefs as a form of indemnity, and offer the kinsmen a few boxes of rifles to better protect themselves next time. Indeed, Alula argued, not many rainy seasons would pass before the friendly tribespeople rebelled, making it necessary to dispatch their old enemy to bring th
em into line; thus making the initial immoral act completely moral.
Mr. Alula felt strongly about animals, especially dogs. He had three dogs himself, and like all the other dogs in the community they were kept for protection, chained behind his house, where no outsider could see them; better yet, where the dogs could see no one except familiar household members. This kept their animal instincts and fighting spirits high. He had a contract with the local butcher so that each morning the head and heart of a bull were delivered, fresh, to the dogs. He made certain that each dog received the correct proportion of meat, brains and heart, and that there was not a single morsel of bull’s lung in their meal. (Everyone knows that bull’s lung completely robs dogs of their vitality—the lung is for cats.) And he supplemented his dogs’ diet, every now and then, with wild bee maggots, to hone their savage intuitions.
Mr. Alula’s passion for dogs was so high, in fact, that it extended beyond his own charge. He strongly believed that if your neighbour neglected his Christian duty to look after his dogs—if he didn’t chain them during the day, feed them, and water them—then it was up to you to do the right thing, and kill the dogs.
In Mr. Alula’s words: dogs running wild are a menace to a neighbourhood; they dig through the fences and grates of your compound, making your property vulnerable to hyenas; they hound your chickens and sheep; they steal the food from your dog’s mouth; and, as though that wasn’t enough, they spread rabies. His solution was to give them pieces of meat laced with potent poison.
It might appear, on the surface, as if you are punishing the dogs. In actual fact, it is your neighbour who pays for his negligence. Without the protection provided by his dogs, his property is vulnerable not only to burglars and sorcerers who would sneak in under the cover of night and plant some ominous fetish in the compound, but to hyenas as well. Dogs seldom provide an impenetrable defence against determined hyenas, but they alert their owner so that he can make a timely intervention before the barn is raided.
Notes from the Hyena's Belly Page 4
