The soldiers shoot gazelles and any other animals with split hoofs that the Bible permits them to eat. They slit the throat of the animal and hang it upside down from the back of one of the trucks. They also kill hyenas, because they are God’s enemies, but they never touch lions. The King loves lions. He has live lions in the palace and paintings or sculptures of lions on everything from the national flag to the bolts on his gate. No public building is complete without the statue of a lion. When an English contractor building a major bridge on the Awash river neglected to place a sculpture of a lion on all of its columns, payment was withheld until the corrections were made. So the soldiers do not shoot lions.
Birds commit suicide. They fly in the way of the speeding trucks, miscalculating the vehicles’ speed, then collide with the windscreen and get smashed by the tires. Snakes crawl under the vehicles, thinking that they can negotiate a route, and get plastered to the gravel. A wide range of birds, from pygmy falcons to marabou storks, follow the convoy from high in the sky. They dive down, after the dust settles, to clean up the highway.
We reach our destination two or more days after we leave. Sometimes the local Somalis give us a reception, lining the streets and yelling something at us while extending a finger. Some even throw stones at us. The soldiers are never happy with the reception, but they are not allowed to kill the Somalis. They are permitted to fire a bullet in the air and then shoot at their legs. To save time, they shoot at their legs first and then fire in the air.
Once in town, we are housed in army barracks. We are always warned, before going out to market, of the harm that may come our way because the Somalis are not yet convinced that we are there to civilize them: to anchor them down to their sun-baked land; to appoint a chief from among them who speaks Amharic, and who would address them in Amharic while another Somali translates, until it is no longer necessary to have a translator, because all of them will be civilized and speak Amharic. Until that time comes, we are told to treat them with suspicion.
I never liked life in these places because there were so many things that children could not do. We could not play far from our home, for fear that the Somalis might snatch us and feed us to hyenas. We could not take candy from these strangers—if they somehow felt rich and handed us some—because it might be laced with poison. And we were to keep a respectable distance from their wells because, as everyone knows, there is a devil at the bottom that would swallow us alive.
* * *
THE EMPIRE WAS expanding quickly, but God couldn’t keep up on His promise to multiply the number of Amharas and populate the new frontiers. Christian Oromos were being drafted at an ever-increasing pace, and it fell on a few scattered Amharas, like Dad, to quickly Amharize the Oromos so they, in turn, could Amharize their kinsmen—the Somalis of Ogaden. Dad spent many more years in Ogaden, away from home and family, hopping from one town to the next, fulfilling the wishes of the Almighty in Heaven and the Emperor in Addis Ababa. The rewards weren’t generous. It was two long decades before he attained a respectable position.
The revolution found Dad in the seat of the Governor of Kabri Dahar, five hundred kilometres from Jijiga. The town was smaller in size than Jijiga, but no less significant: it was a major military base. The young revolutionaries weren’t sure how he got there in the first place, but with a name like Mezlekia (which means “one that carries through”), and from an era already past its days of glory, few doubted his reactionary background. The revolution was already whizzing by, throttle open wide, and it was unthinkable to slow its pace to look into the background of the likes of Dad. The revolutionaries decided on the spot that he would have to go the progressive way. No trials were held, no questions were asked.
Dad’s death would have remained a mystery, like those of countless others who seemed to vanish without a trace, had it not been for an army officer who was brave enough to bring the news to us. We learned from him that Dad, along with a few army officers with suspicious backgrounds, met his end on the firing grounds of the military base in Kabri Dahar. His remains were buried in one of the mass graves that mushroomed with the revolution.
A thief and a murderer sent to the gallows for his crimes was held in greater esteem by the junta and the public at large than a man done to death for political reasons. The murderer’s relations were entitled to his retirement benefits; his bank savings and investments were left intact. Friends and acquaintances of the condemned gave the bereft all the support they needed in their difficult time; candles were lit and bags of incense sacrificed by priests who spent countless hours praying for the departed’s immortal soul in an all-out effort to save him from eternal damnation. But a reactionary was an immediate outcast. No one could afford to be associated with him. A political death sentence passed on him was also passed on to his family, albeit slowly and painfully. With the breadwinner gone and the community’s support withdrawn, the condemned man’s family found itself in desperate circumstances.
Our plight did not end with loss of the breadwinner. That was only the beginning. As we were shunned by friends and relations, placed in the bad books of local officials, and denied credit by the neighbourhood merchants, we began simmering under the skin. It seemed a foregone conclusion to many that we were destined for the Grim Reaper.
But my siblings and I were not ready to join those already under the dry sod. Not yet. I took a part-time job at a tailor’s shop in the Muslim part of town, the only job I could find. Mam tried her hand at many crafts before deciding to brew arake. I would walk from door to door, selling the bottled liquor to retailers, mostly local prostitutes. It was not an immediate success. In the beginning, retailers looked at me with pity in their eyes as my family’s condition dawned on them, sampled the merchandise with slight suspicion before sorrowfully shaking their heads as if to say: “I wish I could be of more help, but I have to make a living, too,” and returning the bottle to me. But Mam was from the highlands, a region renowned for its high-grade commercial arake, and in the end managed to distill a clear bottle of the spirit that didn’t exude a forbidding odour. Those who offered to buy rarely had the money in hand. I would give them bottles on credit, checking back from day to day to see if they’d managed to dispose of it. They always managed to sell it eventually and I, in turn, got my money. No one ever failed to pay up.
Soon, Mam began taking trips into the highlands to sell tins of butter and smuggled bottles of perfume, returning to the markets of Jijiga with the much-desired highland arake.
Between Mother’s entrepreneurial endeavours and my after-school job at the tailor shop, we always managed to have something on the table, seldom needing to dig into the bank in the backyard. Times might have been hard, but as Mam often reminded us, it turned the family into a pack of cornered lions—fierce, resourceful, and stronger than ever.
EARLY TO RISE
WITH THE military junta ruling the roost, socialism became a buzzword, more fashionable than bell-bottom trousers and dog-ear-collar shirts. Communist literature, which no one had seen before, flooded the streets. To accelerate the cause, the postal system became more efficient in the weeks after the revolution than it had been in its fifty-year history. After a request for books on “Scientific Socialism,” a couple of weeks would pass, at most, before half of a library would arrive from China, and the other half from Moscow. And it was all free!
School work became secondary as we poured our time and energy into studying “Progressive Thought.” In classrooms, students began demanding justifications for the subjects being taught. “How do polynomial equations help the downtrodden masses break free of their age-old shackles?” a student would challenge his bewildered teacher. “What is the relevance of the Three Laws of Gravity to the revolution sweeping the nation?” another student would challenge. It was already well known that the students were more versed in Progressive Thinking than their teachers, and wished to prove that at every juncture. The teachers were simply out of their depth.
The two political parti
es that evolved during the creeping coup d’état started making inroads. No one had even heard of these parties before the outbreak of the revolution. The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP) made its existence known only in August of 1975, while I was in high school, and the All-Ethiopian Socialist Movement Party (Meison) wasn’t known until 1976. Both were formed by a community of exiles who returned to Ethiopia just in time to jump on the revolutionary bandwagon. The military junta allowed both parties, in the early days, to make their views known. Open debates were held on the issues and on the direction the revolution was taking. Those of us not yet primed with Communist outlooks were nudged into keeping the pace.
The EPRP—with its eye on the throne—maintained that political power should immediately be handed over to a civilian body. The Meison argued that the military junta should stay in power until the citizenry was well acquainted with the new ideology, further debates had been carried out, and a viable political party had emerged that would embody the conscious will of the people, and not just their emotions. The EPRP advanced the notion of an unlimited “people’s democracy,” whereas the Meison favoured a “controlled democracy,” led by a political party that would emerge later.
The military junta, like the man in the street, gravely pondered the debate. It quickly realized it needed to alter its policy from the original, vague form of “Ethiopian Socialism” it had embodied, to the Soviet style of “Scientific Socialism.” It also became apparent that the junta had to co-opt or destroy the civilian left if it intended to stay in power. The junta did both: after establishing an ideological school (Yekatit 66) and an advisory political body (the Politburo), the junta outlawed the EPRP, and co-opted the Meison—who were urged to aid the junta in developing their own brand of political party.
The Communist ideology and the EPRP’s policies gained a foothold when students from various parts of the country got together for a few months under the National Campaign for Development through Co-operation. The campaign was launched shortly before the junta nationalized all rural land. The intent was to fight illiteracy; prepare the peasants for the imminent land reforms; and, after the reform, help them organize grassroots organizations. Sixty thousand students, from Grade 11 to senior university fellows, were dispatched to the countryside to mobilize the peasantry. The students were to live and work with the peasantry, while the government helped with the grocery bills.
I was a Grade 11 student stationed at Jijiga at the time. Since the number of qualifying students from town was low, fewer than sixty, a good number of young men and women were assigned to join us from different corners of the country. There were no peasants to organize in Jijiga, and the Somali nomads were not keen on learning to read and write in Amharic—they preferred to fight Amharas. So we spent the days in group study sessions dissecting Marxist thought, taking each proposition apart, piece by piece, before putting it back together.
Initially, I was confused by much of the Communist outlook. I was, for instance, unable to understand how the Communist state could be a democracy when it was clearly stated, in black and white, that it was governed by the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” But, I was quickly reminded by my campaign partners, capitalism was also a form of dictatorship, only it was led by the bourgeois class. Even though there are multiple parties in a capitalist society, and people elect their leaders by secret ballot, the system is designed to serve the needs and interests of the ruling class, the bourgeoisie. Communism cuts through all the red tape of secret ballots and the multiple party hogwash by electing itself.
When I pointed out the contradictions in Lenin’s philosophy on the “self-determination of Nations” in a multinational society, I was drowned in criticism. Lenin grants that all nationalities, under a socialist multinational country, have a right to self-determination (including secession). But, he emphasizes, it is the obligation of the Social Democrats in such nations to fight against separation. As the Social Democrats were in the upper echelon of the regime, I wondered if this was not giving someone a piece of bread with one hand only to take it away with the other. But, I was reminded once more, under socialism all national questions are democratically addressed. And, since the aim of socialism is to create a stateless society where all nationalities can live and work on an equal footing, there is no justification for secession.
I decided not to ask any more questions.
The EPRP’s point of view was discussed behind closed doors. It was receiving wider acceptance, not because of its well-thought-out and co-ordinated themes, but because many harboured strong prejudices against the junta. The army men had always been looked down on by the civilians, because of their modest academic and family backgrounds, and the intelligentsia felt insulted at having to take orders from these men of war. The other factor propelling the youth towards the party was their desire to conform. University students in every campaign appeared to identify themselves with the policies of the EPRP—the party still in the making. If such learned people chose the EPRP over the alternative, who were we, simple high-school kids, to argue otherwise? In later years, after the EPRP had made its violent appearance upon the stage, there would be a more sinister reason to abstain from challenging the party’s outlook. These intellectual gangsters would prove to be a far more horrific threat to dissenters than the enemy in uniform—the junta.
The campaign produced results that were directly contrary to the regime’s policy. The students, in many parts of the country, rallied the peasants against state officials, the police and administrators—most of whom were landowners. As a result, a number of students were put to death. With its resounding motto of “Ethiopia First!,” the military junta’s initial policy was a shade apart from other forms of African socialism, being more nationalistic than universal. The students, however, had already been exposed to the teachings of Marx, Lenin and Mao, and were attempting to use these imported ideas as principles of organization and education. The students’ efforts to jump the junta’s gun and urge the peasants to form collectives was in direct opposition to the will of the regime. Their attempt to oust former landowners from their midst created chaos, catching the junta unawares. By the end of 1975, the regime decided to recall the students to the cities.
The campaign in Jijiga was the first to fall apart, as a result of some minor political differences with the officers in charge, compounded by a lack of direction and purpose to the mission. Barely four months after setting up camp, everyone boarded the bus for home. No form of reprimand was initiated by the regime. The political waters were still once more, and the junta hoped that the incident would be forgotten, without causing further ripples.
* * *
SCHOOL WAS STILL out, and I spent the following months feverishly reading Marx, Lenin and Mao. I amassed more knowledge in those few months than I might have in years of study at some respectable institute in Moscow. I still had a few misgivings about the viability of communism and its various canons, but I kept these doubts to myself. Indeed, Marxist philosophy is filled with noble ideas—a classless society in which no one is economically exploited by another, a society where “Everyone works according to his ability and is provided for according to his needs,” a society where there is no form of discrimination or favouritism, a society where … It was quite a neat package, but I suspected that it had been delivered to the wrong universe. I was willing, however, to take part in this grand experiment.
By late 1975, underground study groups were flourishing. One couldn’t walk past a youth in the streets of Jijiga without getting an invitation to a group discussion. Wondwossen was in my study group, along with two other boys of my age, and a younger girl. We gathered each afternoon, behind closed doors. The week was divided in two: three or four days were spent on individual readings, and the rest of the week was spent in group discussion. For the discussion sessions, we prepared presentations that would each last a couple of hours, followed by questions and answers, and intense debate. Occasionally, members of another study
group were invited to join us, so that we kept abreast of the tidal wave of Communist thought.
Shortly after the EPRP made its debut in August of 1975, the party’s official publication began to spread like wildfire—underground, of course. The paper, Democracia, was handwritten, signifying its humble beginnings. From the outset, Democracia unleashed a torrent of abuse against, and a condemnation of, the junta and its civilian allies. Any measure the regime undertook, including land reform, was considered short-sighted and a failure. No form of compromise with the rulers of our nation would be considered, unless it resulted in the complete and immediate surrender of power to a civilian party—namely, the EPRP.
My colleagues and I, like most young people at the time, spent many evenings making duplicates of Democracia by hand. We scattered them in back alleys and market stalls, dodging the men in uniform who patrolled the streets—just like we had in the old days, as we painted slogans on the walls. Unlike the old days, this infraction carried a death penalty. But the law was something to be observed only when you had nothing better to do.
We were acting out of personal conviction. I was not a member of the EPRP, nor were any of my close friends. An invitation to join the party seemed imminent, though no one knew how or when it would come. The EPRP remained invisible, with no head office, and no delegates to contact. Only the overwhelming work done in its name testified to its existence.
GROWING PASSIONS
IT WAS A BLUSTERY day in Jijiga. The wind devils were everywhere. Birds no longer dared to fly among the gusts of wind that lifted rooftops into the sky, so that one could see corrugated metal sheets and discarded tin cans hovering overhead. A grid pattern was laid over the sky and supported, every thirty metres, by whirlwind columns. People ran indoors. Those remaining in the streets covered their faces with pieces of cloth. A ten-year-old boy dashed past me on an aging Peugeot bicycle. He stopped three metres from me, in the middle of the street, regarding me carefully.
Notes from the Hyena's Belly Page 12
