“Aren’t you Kebede Tasse?” he inquired.
“No, I am Nega Mezlekia,” I replied.
“In that case, this is for you,” he said, handing me a folded piece of paper.
I found the whole episode a bit theatrical, indeed, off-the-wall. But I was also curious. Before I could ask him who the paper was from and what it was regarding, the boy disappeared into a dust cloud.
I could not wait until I got home to learn the contents of the mysterious paper, so I hid myself in the meagre shelter of an abandoned truck and tore the paper open. I suspected that it might be from a secret admirer, as it was not uncommon for teenagers to send one another love letters through intermediaries—boys to girls, more often than not.
The message read: “Someone will be waiting for you at the northeast corner of the Ogaden Hotel at 5 P.M. on Wednesday. The subject will be wearing a white handkerchief on the left wrist. Tell the subject: ‘X’ wants to know the time (‘X’ being your initials). The subject only knows your initials. The password is: My watch is stolen. Destroy this note right away. Never tell anyone, not even your mother, about it.”
My heart skipped a beat. It is certainly going to be a momentous event, I said to myself. It all seemed like something out of a James Bond movie. There was an exotic quality to the experience, a certain originality. I’d had girls slip a promising note into my school bag before, but this was unlike anything I’d ever seen or heard of.
On the appointed day, I was in fine fettle. I put on the widest bell-bottom pants that I owned, which often tripped me as I walked; combed out my Afro hair at least twice a minute, so it looked like a well-trimmed hedge; and rehearsed my lines so well that I could pass for a junior version of James Bond.
The time came. And, indeed, there was a girl waiting for me, but she was much too plain-looking, and my spirits fell. I used to pass this girl in the streets of Jijiga without looking twice. I felt that I had been cheated of something—I don’t know what. But, I made an effort to be civil, and went through the secret code, which by now had lost its thrill. After passing the hurdle, she asked me if I knew what it was all about. I pleaded ignorance.
“You are being recruited to form a cell with me,” she noted, with an exaggerated air of authority.
Each cell is a link in one of the clandestine chains that hang from the EPRP like the tentacles of an octopus. A cell consists of four or five people who receive their orders through one individual, who is in contact with a higher cell. Each member of the junior cell would soon be required to set up another cell, thus expanding the base of the party exponentially. No one says no to such an invitation. The EPRP was an invisible and invincible “friend” whose displeasure was more fatal than a thousand bolts of lightning.
Cell members met in complete secrecy. They never greeted each other in public, and never told anyone, including their closest friends, who the other cell members were. The secrecy was meant to limit damage to the party. If one person was arrested and tortured by the regime, they could name only a few individuals: the members of their cell group, and their one contact to a lower cell. In effect, only a single piece of the octopus’s many tentacles would be amputated, leaving the body intact to pursue its normal life.
And so began my other life—unbeknownst to my childhood friend Wondwossen, and the rest of my buddies. The main duties of the cell were to ensure the broadening of the party’s social base by bringing as many others under its umbrella as possible; to disseminate the party’s line by spreading copies of the Democracia wide and far; and to point out anti-EPRP elements, so that the party could send its urban guerrilla units to do away with them.
As early as 1976, the EPRP had embarked on a nationwide campaign to eliminate their most obvious, as well as their perceived, enemies. The party spread terror throughout the land, as the bullet-ridden bodies of young men and women became a common sight on the streets. What it had lost in the form of open debate, it tried to win back at the end of a barrel. “Power! Power! Power!” became the three resounding mottoes of the party.
The fodder for the EPRP’s guns consisted mostly of members of the other civilian party, the Meison, who were now in league with the junta. But it also included kebele officials, political instructors from the newly established ideological school (Yekatit 66), and various revolutionaries whose points of view were not to the liking of the EPRP. A few innocent individuals were labelled as pro-Meison, and met with violent deaths, because of personal grudges. Not only was there no appeal, but there was no way to ever know who had pointed the finger.
For a while it seemed that these terrorist actions were working. Power seemed a mere breath away. Then, the tables turned. The EPRP had underestimated their opponents’ capacity to organize a counterattack. The Meison members, kebele officials and other possible targets were issued handguns, and given unlimited discretionary powers. Kebeles set up local jails where they could detain suspects without charge or trial. The streets of Jijiga became ominous. The hyena was out of the cactus’s belly, and the sun itself refused to rise.
For their part, the Meison roamed the streets of Jijiga picking up pretty girls under the pretext of obtaining the background analysis of a suspect. These young women found themselves locked in a Meison member’s home until the “case was solved.” Women who did not co-operate were variously raped and tortured, and sometimes transferred to prison to serve an open-ended sentence. Some were killed.
Male suspects were often sent directly to prison, where they would remain until the individual responsible for their arrest decided otherwise. The legal system was in a state of paralysis and the police were reduced to the role of voyeurs, watching the machinations of the new regime. Those who were arrested had no form of recourse. They were at the complete mercy of Meison cadres.
I remember being rounded up with hundreds of other youngsters suspected of distributing pamphlets and painting anti-government slogans on the walls. When two members of the local Meison party were executed later that day, the government wanted vengeance and targeted our prison. At 3 A.M. I awoke. I heard two army trucks and a Jeep pull into the compound. The prison was an old converted warehouse and the trucks could be heard backing up to the door. Dozens of soldiers armed with machine guns leaped out of the trucks and lined up before the door. Two officials and four Meison cadres walked stiffly into the crowded jail, their faces hard and inscrutable. Suddenly the jail was a sea of frightened visages. Who among us would sleep our last night in the hyena’s belly? We were lined up, our countenances desperately practising anonymity. Do not see me, not me.
The cold faces of the cadres broke with pleasure. They were God-like and vaudevillian at once. They walked up and down the aisle of men, passing the closed silhouette of a man, only to turn back and extinguish that man’s momentary relief by ordering him onto the truck. The theatrics of death played themselves out over and over again that night, until the aisle of prisoners no longer practised anonymity. The dwindling line of men were tired, very tired. We resigned ourselves, waiting for the play to end, not caring whether we would exit to the truck and death or return to our cells, until that moment of survival instinct took over and the tired resignation rewrote itself into terror.
So you see, while I stood in the line growing bored at the play, I could hear the terrified cries of the other men chosen for the truck and knew in an abstract and even casual way that those cries could be, would be, mine, if the tired waiting ever stopped and the cadre pointed his finger at me. It was a knowledge all the men shared.
When all was done, some twenty teenagers were led from the prison, screaming and pleading for their lives. Some were political prisoners, some were pickpockets, some were thieves, and all were going to die. Any one of them could have been me.
* * *
BY MID-1976 it was impossible for any youth who was not embraced by the Meison to walk the streets of Jijiga. Imprisonment and torture were the norm, and execution was always imminent. The reprisals for killing individuals in the Me
ison were so severe that people questioned the wisdom of the campaign. Members of the EPRP and their sympathizers wanted desperately to arm themselves, but it seemed impossible. For one thing, membership in the EPRP had grown quicker than its resources. Secondly, the usual sponsors of war in Africa had already taken sides: the Soviets were backing the military junta; the Arabs were arming the Eritreans, whose policies differed from EPRP’s; and the Americans were preparing the deposed feudal lords for a return to power—while at the same time attempting to fill the void created in Somalia by the recent withdrawal of Soviet forces.
It was not only what one did that constituted a crime now, but what one refused to do. It became illegal to abstain from participating in government-initiated meetings and rallies—a crime punishable by an open-ended imprisonment. Failure to expose one’s past reactionary deeds (before someone else exposed you) and failure to practise criticism and self-criticism at the local kebele were considered proof of a person’s ongoing commitment to criminal activity. Failure to expose other reactionary elements in the community was a crime of reticence.
THRUSTING BRASS
WHEN IT FINALLY dawned on me that it wouldn’t be too long before I was done away with, I decided to join one of the many armed insurrections in the country. Some dissenters sought asylum in neighbouring countries. Others found it prudent to stay home and wait it out. My good friend Wondwossen and I decided to enlist with the insurgents in the southeast—the “Western Somali (Ogaden) Liberation Movement”—because we had a common enemy in the junta and the front operated close to Jijiga. We were barely eighteen.
* * *
WONDWOSSEN AND I were separated in age by three months. I was the older. While growing up, however, he looked much older than me, being at least a foot taller most of the time and having the appearance and composure of an adult by the time he was twelve. His father was a military officer who was driven about town by a military chauffeur. Wondwossen’s father was so highly decorated that the stars themselves seemed to flow over his shoulder. Wondwossen’s mother, Mrs. Aster Tekle, had been born into an aristocratic family. She was driven by the same chauffeur, whether she ventured out to shop or to visit her friends and relations. Two additional men in army uniforms served the family. One guarded the main gate of their home and the other ironed Wondwossen’s father’s uniform until the khaki outfit was so stiffly starched that it could stand alone.
Wondwossen was a prayer child. He was born after years of prayers to all the known saints, the good spirits and the Adbar, and after a small fortune was spent on medicine men and fortune-tellers. It wasn’t that Mrs. Aster Tekle had been cursed with barrenness. She already had three healthy, beautiful girls whom the neighbourhood admired. She had even given birth to two boys, but both had died in the crib; the boys did not seem to have the will to live. Mrs. Aster Tekle needed a holy man who could talk to the unborn and the dead in order to find out why she could not raise boys.
There was never a shortage of such holy men in Jijiga, who found it much easier to communicate with the unborn and the long dead than with the living. After all, the ones who existed between the different universes had nothing to fear or hide. The unborn and the dead are not afraid of loansharks, who chase the living from dusk to dawn; they do not run from the police, because the police don’t chase after what has not crossed their path; and they haven’t slept with someone’s wife, and so are not worried that there is someone lurking in the shadows to cut off their penis.
Mrs. Aster Tekle found the right holy man camped under the bridge at the end of town. He was on a long journey to Madagascar. Nobody knew where Madagascar was, but it was where all the travelling medicine men headed. We thought that strange place must be less than two hundred kilometres from Jijiga, because they were all back in town within a month or two. It was a rare opportunity to come across a wandering holy man. They were the most sought-after because they had the most up-to-date knowledge about the dead and the unborn. They charged a king’s ransom for their services, but everybody knew the money was not for their own personal use. It was for the spirits they served. The wandering holy men lived on prayers.
Mrs. Aster Tekle was asked to bring a three-year-old female sheep, five kilos of clarified butter in a sealed tin container and a box of choice ood. The holy man lit one of the ood sticks, took a pinch of the dust of the dead from a pouch about his waist, and sprinkled it on the ood, while raising it high above his head to draw the spirits closer. Then he closed his eyes for a full hour as he wandered in spirit between the universes. Mrs. Aster Tekle shuffled in her seat, feeling ill at ease, wondering what the spirits were communicating to the bearded learned man.
“Your marriage is cursed,” beamed the holy man, suddenly opening his eyes. “Someone on your husband’s side of the family has thrown a spell on you not to raise a boy.” Close relations often cursed one another this way, to prevent inheritors. It was a common practice especially in the northern highlands, where farmland is a communal property and each boy born to one or another family in the community is seen as a threat, since he is entitled to a share of the land when he grows up. Mrs. Aster Tekle, however, was not a farmer. It must have been out of sheer habit that someone cast the spell on her. Mrs. Aster Tekle sobbed, for this lone old man had confirmed to her what she had always suspected, that her enemies were her husband’s relations.
“But,” the wise man added with a learned confidence, “the cure is not out of reach. You will soon bear a boy and when you do, let everybody think that it is a girl. Never divulge this secret to anyone, including his father. On his fourth birthday, throw a big party, alert all the neighbours, the gods and the spirits to attend the occasion, and announce its sex. Nothing will touch that boy again.”
A year later, Mrs. Aster Tekle gave birth to a healthy child. Curious neighbours, friends and suspicious relatives were invited for the naming event, at which Mrs. Aster Tekle insisted on picking the unusual name Kutu for her daughter, a name that does not betray the gender of the child.
On Kutu’s fourth birthday, the family organized one of the most memorable events in the city. All of their neighbours, acquaintances and relatives, the local authorities, and the good and bad spirits were invited. Some four hundred guests, twenty-two street dogs, seven stray cats and five famished eagles came to attend the party. The tent they erected in the compound for the event was overflowing with guests, and many had to stand out on the street. The food, from seventeen different menus, was dished out until even the street dogs said Enough. Drinks flowed like water. People did not know what the occasion was, so they drank to their own health until they became hopelessly sick. Finally, when the guests thought that this would be the one mystery Jijiga would never solve, Mrs. Aster Tekle appeared with Kutu in hand. Kutu was dressed in boy’s clothes, her hair trimmed short.
Mrs. Aster Tekle asked the audience for a moment of silence. Struggling with tears of joy, she revealed the secret that she had held under a tight lid for four long years. “Kutu is a boy,” she announced, standing on the highest platform in the compound. The news was repeated twice, but the only reaction heard from the audience was the shattering of glass, as cups fell from their hands and broke into thousands of pieces.
Nobody moved. Older women who had spent their tender years struggling against insurmountable odds to bear a boy, only to deliver countless daughters, shed silent tears. They had been cheated by the gods and the Adbar, and they were unforgiving. The young, unmarried girls saw justice in this little drama, for now they knew that they too could beat fate at its own game.
The silence hanging over the crowd like suspended rainfall suddenly broke. The guests were drowned in enchantment. They cried, embraced each other, laughed and stumbled through the crowded tent in sheer jubilation, stepping over a kitten and two roosters whose bodies had all but melted into the colourful floor cover of green grass and wildflowers. They were happy because the evil spirits had been deceived. No one could touch this boy, for a four-year-old is beyond the re
ach of the baby-snatchers.
And so Wondwossen, once Kutu, was again introduced to us, this time as a boy—a fact we refused to believe until he removed his shorts and unequivocally confirmed, once and for all, what his mother had taken such pains to hide. For many years that followed, we teased Wondwossen, calling him Kutu to make him cry. Eventually, he came to laugh it off.
Heartened by her success, Mrs. Aster Tekle attempted to have a second son. She successfully conceived and delivered a boy when Wondwossen was five and, like his older brother, the new boy was announced and dressed as a girl. Sadly, he did not live long enough to see his first birthday. Many concluded that the evil spirits had finally cottoned on to the ruse.
* * *
THOUGH WONDWOSSEN lived farther away from my home than the other boys of my acquaintance, he turned out to be the one whose company I always kept. All of my memories of childhood adventures and of wild behaviour are inextricably caught up with memories of Wondwossen. Whether I found myself at war with Mr. Alula, the Morality teacher, or caught in an endless struggle with the kingdom for advocating land reform, Wondwossen was always by my side.
As children we built our toys together. We built cars and airplanes that neither rolled smoothly nor flew, out of scraps of tin that we meticulously flattened, cut and shaped. We would make slingshots from elastic bands and wooden handles and venture out together at dusk, hunting doves, lapwings, cuckoos and cranes as they returned to the city from their flights abroad.
When we grew older, we sought happiness in the most daredevil adventures. We sneaked into restricted military compounds, crawling through barbed-wire fences, carefully treading the thorny fields, avoiding the land mines scattered along the camp’s perimeter to prove our own invincibility. Sometimes, we were caught by the military police and subjected to severe physical punishment. The lesson—that life was an entrapment to the young, and bliss to the dying—was not for us, but for the world around us.
Notes from the Hyena's Belly Page 13
