While waiting for a transfer bus, I saw a young lady waving for a taxi. There were very few of the old Fiats around, and too many passengers, eager to escape the neighbourhood. People shouldered up against each other, shouting and shoving until the crowd had consumed the sidewalk and half of the road. The young lady seemed out of place; with grace and restraint, she raised her hand every so often to announce her destination and the fare she was willing to part with. One driver slowly trolled the road, ears perked, looking for a tempting deal. He pulled over a few feet away from her to pick up two passengers headed for Piassa and one for Arat Kilo. The cabby needed one more passenger. He reversed the car—running over one man’s foot and just missing a stray cat—to ask the young lady if she was willing to walk half of her trip. She declined, deciding to wait for another cab. It was a fateful decision.
Unbeknownst to the young lady, the small suitcase so carefully planted at her feet had been noticed by the vultures. They slowly circled, waiting for another cab to pull over and the driver to begin bartering with her. The lady was desperate and her frustration was obvious. Unable to meet the fare suggested by the cabby, she gave up and decided to start walking. But when she reached down for her suitcase, she clutched only a fistful of stale air.
I saw the robber walk calmly away, the small suitcase tucked inside his oversized coat. I wanted to do something, but the robber’s partner read my mind. He lingered behind, and flashed a foot-long knife at me from inside his jacket. I was persuaded to mind my own business.
The poor lady fell to the ground screaming, pulling at her hair and beseeching the gods and the Adbar to intervene. She pulled at the tattered clothes of passersby, begging for help, pleading with merchants to intervene and telling the world that the old, moth-eaten suitcase held her only worldly possessions, and that if they would only give it back to her she would never again set foot in that part of town. Her pleas, of course, were in vain.
When my bus finally arrived, it was full. A sea of human faces peered out of the windows at me, one huge creature with thousands of dark eyes and countless small mouths. The doors yawned wide, but no one emerged. I considered waiting for another bus, but given what I had just witnessed, I decided to squeeze in, becoming part of the hideous beast.
The bus smelt of generations of sweat and unrequited sex. Men rubbed their crotches against the rear ends of women in front of them. They breathed on the backs of the women’s necks and made lurid remarks. The women played dead—there was nowhere to go. Instead, they lowered their heads and prayed.
Just as I was beginning to lose myself in the din, the lewd murmurs and deafening noise of the engine were shattered by a ten-year-old boy who cried out that his mother had been run over by a speeding truck in Merkato that very morning, leaving her only son an orphan. He was now lost. Someone had placed him on the bus, but he didn’t know how to get home, or, for that matter, if he would ever get home again.
Some of the passengers looked at the boy askance, others with sympathy. All were distracted by his plight. When the bus pulled into the next station two of the boy’s friends got off first. One of the boys left with two purses, the other with, among other things, a pair of earrings that he had snatched, almost as an afterthought, from a girl at the front of the bus, savaging her earlobes in the process. No one intervened.
I was still reeling from the shock of the brazen thievery that infested Addis Ababa when I was confronted by yet another repulsive fact: the rampant sex trade.
The practice of prostitution in Ethiopia is as old as the country itself and as prolific as unanswered prayers. There remains some prejudice against prostitutes, but no more than that harboured against Catholics. In Jijiga, ladies of the evening confine their practice to bars and restaurants. The prostitutes are all waitresses—and the waitresses are all prostitutes. The bars and restaurants are located at the town centre, so the obtrusive presence of these working girls on the day-to-day life of the sinful populace is less pronounced. The only time that disgruntled housewives are forced to acknowledge the threat posed by the beautiful, young and exotic-scented competition is on Tuesdays.
For generations, men had convinced their wives that they contracted gonorrhea while sitting on a chair recently vacated by a patient. The priests agreed. But times had changed. It was now clear that the cause of this dreadful disease was the “early water” that prostitutes used to wash their private parts. This water was carelessly tossed out into the streets by hundreds upon hundreds of prostitutes each morning. Men, walking over such water, contracted the disease. Housewives demanded that the government create new policies to protect them from “early water.” They demanded immediate results. But the government had decided to peer under the skirts of the working women instead. The only economical way of controlling the devastating effects of gonorrhea was to make weekly hospital checkups mandatory for prostitutes, and Tuesday had been legislated as a perfect day to accomplish just that. Decent women stayed away from the hospital on Tuesdays, so no one would think that they showed their private parts to complete strangers.
The health officer in Jijiga was the most conscientious and the hardest-working man in town. His job didn’t end at the hospital. Each night he made the rounds, list in hand, looking for young women who had failed to appear at their checkup. In a single night, this officer collected hundreds of birrs in fines. He then put the money away in a safe place—where the government couldn’t find it. After all, he reasoned, if the government felt that money was owed to it, then it should damn well make the rounds itself!
The health officer in Jijiga was not insensitive, nor did he judge those men who slipped, under the cover of darkness, into the bars to have a private moment with one of the girls. But then again, he was one of them. Every night the health officer would walk from bar to bar, looking for new arrivals and sampling the merchandise.
In Addis Ababa, the sex trade spilt over the bounds of bars and restaurants. Office secretaries, schoolgirls and married women alike indulged in the wayward practice. It was an overtime job, an extracurricular activity, a way to feed one’s children. The government turned a blind eye; the health officer was told to keep an eye on reactionaries instead; and wantonness was officially recognized as the most affordable form of democracy—the only form of public intercourse, in fact, that didn’t send the regime into one of its violent tantrums.
It even helped the tourist trade. Arab men clad in desert garb and bathed in oceans of whiskey staggered from hotel lobby to hotel lobby in search of a peerless pimp. They had generations of lust to quench, for at home they were forbidden to even talk to a woman, or see her face, let alone admire her sensuous ass. They wanted them young and old, fat and skinny, with dark skin or green skin, with large breasts or many breasts, and the pimps obliged.
Schoolgirls were persuaded to cut classes so they could earn a fast buck. Baby-faced teenagers with angelic smiles, their mothers’ warnings still ringing in their ears, giggled and dilly-dallied in the back alleys of the big hotels until they were picked up by some unkempt, bow-legged animal. They broke the seventh commandment, not merely for earthly desires, but also for the grandest cause: the motherland. The girls needed a new pair of Levis and the junta needed some more munitions.
I wished I had been born in another universe.
* * *
ADDIS ABABA UNIVERSITY was the only institution of higher learning in the country. It had once been known as Haile Selassie I University in honour of its founding father, the deposed emperor. After the revolution, like many other institutions with names that recalled the bygone era, it shed its imperial skin.
The university had four major campuses spread out across the capital city, offering a sober and pleasant contrast to the surrounding ruckus. The main campus was centrally located on a high plateau, surrounded by important government and foreign offices. It was fenced in by three-metre-high stone walls manned by security men in beige uniforms, the university insignia on their jackets and caps. The university was no ol
der than I was, but it appeared to have matured faster, earning the respect of many in the process.
The student dormitories, cafeterias and all other amenities were located on campus, and their services were free. There were no tuition fees, let alone boarding or lodging expenses. Even the blankets, bedsheets and toilet paper one used were issued at no expense to the student. To make sure that there was no mistaking the nationality of those involved in designing and building most of the university, the various gadgets and fixtures within them had the “American Standard” imprint on them. There were three red-brick, four-storey apartment buildings for the men. The women had a smaller building and a few detached houses. Men and women lived in separate residences, but managed to steal into each other’s quarters for quick and discreet acts of coitus.
There was a grand library on the main campus. It was a very modern hexagon, enclosed by six-metre-high glass, which, to the horror of the school officials, the highland birds refused to acknowledge as a legitimate wall. The architecture and construction of the building had long been the wonder of the town. It was obvious that the hands responsible had issued from another universe—that it was not something a two-legged, short-tempered and plain-skinned creature, such as a human, could either conceive or compose.
The library was named after that famous fallen American president, John F. Kennedy. A statue of the young man, shoulder-high, was placed in the building’s small lobby. His famous quotation—“Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”—was engraved on a metal plate. For the emperor to dedicate this remarkable building to a foreigner was, indeed, a noble gesture, high in the white clouds, and had very little to do with the fact that Mr. Kennedy paid for the building.
The main campus was graced with flowerbeds, water fountains (although seldom splashing water), exotic trees and carved stones, each deliberately placed by careful hands. The lion was everywhere. One couldn’t go from one building to another without bumping into a full-sized statue of this venerable animal. There was a sense of divine permanence about the Administration Building, which sat facing the main gate. Its columns were cathedral-like; its stairs were carved from expensive stones; its banisters dwarfed the railings of a respectable bridge. The ceilings were high and painstakingly decorated, and huge chandeliers looked heavily down on the mortal souls who were permitted to walk beneath them. It had once been a palace, the original home of Menelik II, King of Kings of Ethiopia.
* * *
I TOOK A DORMITORY room on the main campus. My classrooms were in the science faculty, at Arat Kilo, four kilometres away. There were dormitories, a cafeteria and other amenities at Arat Kilo, but I chose to stay closer to the people I knew, students from my hometown. It wasn’t that I longed for familiar faces and reassuring smiles, but that I felt I needed to know where they were and what they were up to, as the times required.
For the young and free-thinking youth of Ethiopia, 1977 was an exceedingly ominous year. Addis Ababa was shaken by a political tremor, and threatened to erupt with a ferocity of biblical proportions. The sun shone, but the sky was dark; the wind blew, but nothing moved. Many stayed indoors. When they ventured out, it was with the painful knowledge that they might never again see the light of day. It was a time when many young people simply vanished into thin air.
Army trucks and Jeeps were everywhere. Hostile soldiers wearing war gear were perched on these death traps, one leg hanging over, ready to pounce on anyone betraying fear. The trucks coasted downhill, engines shut off, to sneak up behind unsuspecting citizens. Militiamen peered into the face of each passing youth, reading his political aura, looking for signs of betrayal.
Many were picked up and thrown into the back of a truck. No one asked questions. If one was innocent enough to warrant release, it would be established in a week or two; so why hurry? In the meantime, it was safer to stay off the streets, out of the revolution’s way.
The jails and prisons were teeming with panic-stricken children whose parents didn’t even know their whereabouts. Such information was given out only on a need-to-know basis, and, the junta argued, the family members didn’t need to know. I feared the jails in Addis Ababa even more than I had feared the war I had left behind, as there was no one in town to come looking for me.
Since the kebeles were ready to dispatch one across the bourn at the slightest provocation, I kept an eye on my hometown boys, making sure that I was not being sold out. I lived like a distraught gazelle on an East African steppe. I had to know where the lions were before risking settling down to graze, or taking the tiniest and most casual of steps towards a drying water hole. I sought them out with every breath. I searched for their scent. I stood facing them, watching their every move, while nibbling at a blade or quenching my thirst. That was nature’s cruel interpretation of living in harmony—and harmony was what I needed most.
I shared a dormitory room with three other boys. Two of my dorm mates were from Jijiga, and the third was from Addis Ababa. The name of this other boy was Asfaw, but he preferred being called Alex.
Alex was something of an oddity, like those objects that every violent flood sweeps along its exacting course, only to spit out later, intact. He had survived the revolution’s tidal wave for three tumultuous years without ruffling a feather, and vowed to stay on high ground, not smearing his delicate cowboy boots, until the storm had subsided. Alex thought little of anyone else, and held young radicals as the lowest of the low. He harboured an innate contempt for revolutionaries and their obnoxious ideals and considered the revolution a misconceived conspiracy, organized by barefoot peasants and half-witted militiamen to rob him of his imported hippie life.
Alex seldom spent the night in the dorm. He rarely came to school at all. The university was too modest for his grand ambitions—he was on his way to America. He had two sisters and a brother in that rich country, and they had already found him a good university. It was only a matter of time before he said Adios! He assured us that even as he spoke his father was looking for the right palms to grease, so his son could get an exit visa. He had already bribed half of the military bigwigs, and had only to cover the rest. Of course, by the time he had finished, he would have to start over again, because the first palms would once more be dry and parched. It was an endless cycle, but, Alex assured us, he was a man of endless means.
Alex dressed and walked like an American. He even spoke like one. Alex’s English had an unmistakably American accent, a clear indication that he had been born on the wrong side of the Atlantic. Alex knew the names of all the American states and their capital cities. He knew where to find the tallest buildings in that vast country, the longest bridges, and the trendiest shops and nightclubs. He knew America better than the Americans, which pained him all the more since he was the one condemned to live in Ethiopia, not the Americans.
Alex was the only one in town who could speak Amharic that the Duke of Edinburgh could easily follow without his humble translator butting in. When talking about his weekend, for instance, he would say:
Piassa I met a girl Jolly Bar cappuccino cake Ras Hotel we made love for six hours!
Alex occupied the bunk bed above me, but since he seldom spent the night in the dormitory, I used his bedsheets as spares.
* * *
I WALKED THE four kilometres to the science faculty twice a day. With each trip, my chances of disappearing into the unknown became more statistically significant. School had started in September, and by November, barely days after I had arrived in the big city, the political volcano that had long been rumbling beneath us finally blew its top. The calamity was beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. The streets, public parks and market stalls were littered with the open-mouthed dead.
The bullet-riddled bodies of children, with notes describing their contrived crimes carelessly pinned to their tattered shirts, greeted us every morning. Their crimes were ill-defined. The tags always read the same: “This was a reactionary! The Red Terror Shall Flourish!”
I watched on the common room TV as the chairman of the junta gave his public address on November 12, 1977. He explained: “The Red Terror was launched to curb the ever-increasing White Terror being waged on us by the EPRP.… In the preceding year alone over a hundred government officials and officers were done to death by this underground terrorist group.” The kebeles were urged to be merciless against reactionaries, to intensify the “Red Terror.”
Beginning in September 1976, the underground party, the EPRP, had intensified its campaign of terror against government officials. The bullet-riddled bodies of kebele administrators, political cadres and teachers in the junta’s ideological school were left in public places. The government denounced the action as the “White Terror.” Mass imprisonment and torture followed. Some were done to death in places where the terror was most severe. When nothing seemed to help, the junta decided to conduct a nationwide cleansing campaign—anyone who could not readily produce a badge of allegiance could meet with a swift and immediate death. The “Red Terror” was born.
I was used to seeing the dead. I had partaken in wars and seldom shuddered at the sight of mutilated remains. Murder itself is not repulsive, only the lack of justification for it. When society deems carnage justifiable, it organizes a parade to celebrate the occasion, heaping praise on the murderers, addressing them as crusaders, martyrs and patriots; it engraves their names on expensive stones and lays their remains to rest in public places, weaving their achievements into the national anthem and placing their likeness on our currency. No one would pause to reflect on what these idols of ours had actually done to claim our respect.
I was no different from my fellow man. What caught me off guard was not the mere sight of the bullet-riddled bodies of children, but the very arbitrariness of it. I knew that those boys and girls were no more guilty of any crime than I, or indeed millions of others.
Notes from the Hyena's Belly Page 24
