Notes from the Hyena's Belly

by Nega Mezlekia

  AN ENFEEBLED SUN

  IT HAD BEEN almost a year since I had seen Mam and the kids, and I didn’t know what to expect. We’d exchanged letters from time to time, but one couldn’t say much in letters, for fear of having them intercepted. My anxiety was mounting as I got off at the bus terminal. I headed up the hill for home, passing street dogs fighting over bare bones and children running around in tattered clothes. The year I’d stayed in Addis Ababa had magnified the poverty of the town.

  Turning the last corner, I felt a lump in my throat. Passing by the open door of the kitchen, I saw Mam sorting out split lentils as she prepared the day’s meal. Tentatively, she raised her head to look. Realizing it was me, she dropped the woven plate on the ground, spilling the pinkish seeds across the dirt floor. I ran towards her and fell into her embrace. We must have been crying loudly, because neighbours gathered at the door. I kissed each one of them, and then my siblings, who soon joined us. When the hullabaloo subsided, I noticed that Mam had lost a considerable amount of weight, her eyes were sunken, and her cheeks were hollow and pale. The children were so badly dressed and so emaciated that one could easily have mistaken them for waifs. Our new home was not much better than when I had seen it last.

  I soon learned that my younger sister Almaz was in jail—the victim of a blind roundup. After lunch, I went to visit her, accompanied by Mam. The detention centre was a large camp, fenced in by barbed wire, but the sheer number of children crammed together made it look like an undersized playground. A guard notified Almaz of her visitors, and she came running. We hugged, kissed, cried and laughed all at once. She must have been used to her surroundings, because she wanted to talk about many things, but I was apprehensive. A guard could easily decide that a visitor should stay. Promising to visit her soon, we left her standing at the fence.

  I liked Almaz a great deal, but she was much too rebellious. Once, while still in Jijiga, a boy from her school, emulating the adult men he had seen, attempted to show his appreciation of Almaz’s beauty by slapping her butt as she walked past him. Almaz was stunned. She couldn’t believe that anyone had dared violate her in this way, let alone this skinny boy. She grabbed the boy, who quickly became incomprehensible with shock, and dragged him forward by the collar. When he attempted to resist her, she let go—causing him to fall back into the dirt. Almaz then mounted him and started punching him and pounding his head into the ground. A huge crowd gathered, but everyone was far too amused by the turn of events to be of any help.

  When the boy got over his initial shock, he kicked Almaz from his chest. She fell on the ground, and as the boy attempted to run away, she grasped a handful of fine dirt and tossed it in his eyes. She had completely blinded him; he was now at her mercy. Fortunately for the boy, a man who was passing by intervened on his behalf. Almaz was finally held back, though the sheepish boy with tattered shirt and bloodied nose would have preferred it if she had killed him outright. Indeed, after the incident, he became the butt of his friends’ jokes, a broken young man who would have needed divine intervention to regain his dignity.

  When Almaz returned home that day, she was hailed as a heroine by Mam, who believed, despite tradition, that all women should follow Almaz’s example. It was a good thing Dad was out of town. At the time he was stationed in the town of Kabri Dahar, some five hundred kilometres to the south, coming home only three or four times a year. Almaz knew little of him, though she would soon experience his crude interpretation of discipline.

  On one of those rare occasions that our father was home, Almaz happened to break a neighbour’s window. Dad considered the whole episode to be quite unladylike and impudent. He instructed her to go into the backyard and select a branch for her punishment.

  When disciplining us, Dad would tell us to choose the branch that we deserved. It was his interpretation of democracy. The whole business was very tricky. We had to weigh the pros and cons of each branch, so that it was not too hard, for obvious reasons, yet not too flimsy either, so that he didn’t use the belt instead, which would have been by far the most painful. After carefully trimming the leaves from the branch, we would hand it to Dad, grip first.

  Almaz’s reaction was to stand erect before Dad, staring into his eyes. Mam, knowing Almaz’s disposition well, held her breath, arms folded to her chest. We, the children, rose from our seats and pressed our backs against the wall. After what seemed an eternity, Almaz appeared to acquiesce, and left for the backyard.

  As soon as Almaz had stepped out of the door, Mam started pleading with Dad, begging him to forgive Almaz, who was, after all, only thirteen. She argued that Almaz was unfamiliar with Dad’s ways, as he had been away for most of her childhood. Dad was unrelenting.

  A few minutes later, Almaz made her grand appearance. She strode up to father, and dropped a leaf the size of a butterfly in his ashtray. She stood defiantly before him, head high, hands at the waist, staring right into his eyes. The silence was deafening. Mam put her hand to her mouth to stifle a scream. We retreated farther into the corner, away from the line drawn between Almaz and Father. Dad’s mouth had gone slack with astonishment; his eyes bulged. When he composed himself, he leaped from his seat to strangle Almaz, but before he had passed around the huge dining-room table to where Almaz stood, she was gone—she had disappeared from the room, and was running from the compound.

  She spent the next two days with her godmother, the landlady next door. On the third day, Mam and Almaz’s godmother organized a group of four elders to intervene. The elders spent most of the afternoon behind closed doors with Dad, while Mam, the neighbours and a few close relations waited anxiously outside, hoping and praying that Dad would relent.

  After many agonizing hours, the door to the living room opened. One of the elders stepped out and asked Mam to enter. The elders had established that Almaz was obviously under the influence of the Devil. What else could have made her so outrageously defiant? They advised Mam to take her to a medicine man before she was permitted to re-enter her home.

  The next day Mam took Almaz to a renowned medicine woman who lived in the Somali-speaking part of town. In her incense- and ood-scented chamber, the woman interviewed Mam alone, before admitting Almaz for a cursory examination. The medicine woman peered at Almaz’s palms and eyelids, then grabbed a handful of coffee beans from a container beside her, piling them on the small table in front of her. The medicine woman asked Almaz to split the roasted beans into two piles by running a knife through them. Quietly, the medicine woman counted each pile of beans, making a mental note. Almaz was asked to split the coffee beans twice more before the medicine woman was able to establish, unequivocally, what was the matter with her.

  “Your daughter has crossed the path of the Devil at the garbage dump during the high sun,” the medicine woman pronounced, addressing Mam, who was sitting in the dark.

  It was well known that humans had to take care to avoid the dump site during the high sun, the time between midday and three o’clock in the afternoon when the devils came out of hiding to feast on rubbish, sing and dance on ashes, and mock the gods. Those who had business in the area gave the dump site a wide berth, never once looking at the dump, no matter what was heard emanating from its confines. If you so much as glanced at the garbage pile during this ominous time, the devils would slap you across the face, twisting your features beyond recognition.

  No one had actually been hit by one of these devils—but that was because no one had ever been foolish enough to look at the dump site, even when the devils called them by name. If you heard your name called, you had to recite aloud the long-established sacred words, while speeding up your pace. Almaz had clearly ignored these fundamental rules.

  The medicine woman recommended sacrificing a rooster. It has to be a gebsima, the holy woman pronounced—a unique type of fowl, black, with white grains evenly sprinkled on its shiny feathers. Although a common sacrifice, gebsima roosters were hard to come by. Mam and I spent half a day in the market without success. We then wal
ked from home to home, asking over the fence of each compound if anyone was willing to sell a gebsima rooster. Twice, Mam had to decline, because she suspected that feathers had been plucked out of the rooster to make it look like a gebsima. Once, Mam was very irritated because a woman attempted to sell her a black fowl that she had splashed with white paint; Mam exposed the fraud by spitting on the feathers of the rooster and rubbing it with her fingers. But before the day was out we’d found the fowl, with the acceptable height of comb and of the right age—which Mam was able to establish by the length of the spur on the rooster’s feet.

  Almaz and Mam went back to the medicine woman with the rooster in hand, and the fifteen birr in cash, which, as the lady required, had been wrapped in a clean white handkerchief by a veritable virgin. In her unique language, the medicine woman prayed over the rooster, and handed it to Mam along with a kitab for Almaz to wear around her neck. The kitab, a small leather pouch containing a holy fetish to ward off the evil eye and diffuse the effects of the Devil, had to be worn until adulthood. Only the medicine woman knew what was inside it. Attempting to open the tightly stitched pouch to peek at its contents would immediately void the potency of the medicine—so its secrecy was held in great reverence.

  Dad refused to slaughter the rooster, as he was still mad at Almaz. Since the Bible forbade women to slaughter animals, I, the next oldest man in the family, had to take over the job. The rooster was slaughtered at the entrance of the main house, and Almaz was made to walk over its blood.

  Dad didn’t forget the humiliation that Almaz had caused him. A few days later he once again attempted to bring her into line. This time, however, he didn’t ask her to fetch a branch. He grabbed her by surprise and had unbuckled his belt before she realized what he was about. Almaz bit his hand and fled the compound. She didn’t return until Father had left Jijiga, a week later.

  * * *

  AFTER MOVING TO Asebe Teferi, this same disposition earned Almaz the respect of neighbours and acquaintances alike. She once confronted a man who drank himself into a stupor, nightly, before beating his wife. The man was old and frail, and though his wife was far younger and stronger, she had never dared to protest his abuse. Almaz, wild as she was, couldn’t stand to hear the woman’s cries any longer. She knocked on the door of their house one night, and when the man stepped out she grabbed him by the collar and shook him up, promising to break every bone in his body if he raised a hand against his wife again. Her admonition not only sobered the man, but stayed his hand. She had, in a single stroke, solved decades of feuding between the couple, becoming a legend in the process.

  * * *

  THE OVERALL environment in Asebe Teferi was, all things considered, much less tense than before. The people did not have that same look of tightness about the face and neck as they walked through the streets. One could see youngsters strolling about the roads, some of whom were even dressed fashionably. It seemed that most of the threatening political opponents of the regime were dead, in exile or rotting in prison, and the going was good for those in power.

  A few days after I settled in, an old friend of mine, Tesfu, called on me. Tesfu had been my high-school teacher back in Jijiga, but because of his youth and political convictions we were more like buddies than student and teacher. I told Tesfu that in the four days I had been home I had ventured out just once, to visit my younger sister in jail. The memory of my last encounter with the Meison cadre was still fresh in my mind, and I did not want to take any more risks.

  Upon hearing this, Tesfu laughed out loud and assured me that things were not as they used to be, that the storm had finally subsided. He told me about a number of people we both knew who had been imprisoned when I left for Addis Ababa, but were now free and reinstated in their previous jobs. He also told me that there were no more executions—political rehabilitation was now in vogue. Reactionaries were now enrolled in Marxist-Leninist re-indoctrination programs, where they were encouraged to practise criticism and self-criticism, then baptized as full-fledged comrades. They were even allowed to mix with the general population, their past sins ostensibly forgotten. To make his point, Tesfu invited me out for a drink and introduced me to a number of people, some of whom I was certain belonged to the Meison party. To my surprise, Tesfu had also become a member.

  * * *

  TESFU REMINDED ME of another lost soul: a European adventurer who had gone astray in the Nile Delta. Fatigued from walking in the desert for many, many days, and burned by the unforgiving African sun, the young man sought solace in the Nile River. But he had the presence of mind not to jump in the river before finding out about the condition of the water. He consulted a shepherd boy sitting on a boulder. “Are there any sharks in this part of the river?” asked the European.

  “No,” answered the shepherd.

  The European took off his clothes and dipped into the refreshing water. He swam, carefully avoiding the tree trunks and bushes carried by the majestic Nile. The shepherd boy threw the stranger a glance from time to time as he brushed his teeth with the chewed end of a twig.

  Completely refreshed, the European came out of the water. While drying himself with his shirt, he decided to unload what had been weighing heavily on his mind for quite a while. He casually walked up to the shepherd boy. “Excuse me,” the European interrupted the nomad’s daydream. “Excuse me, but how can you be so sure that there are no sharks in the river?”

  “Simple,” answered the shepherd boy, radiating generations of wisdom. “There are no sharks where there are so many crocodiles.”

  * * *

  UNBEKNOWNST TO TESFU, the Meison’s days were numbered. The military junta had been cultivating its own brand of party for a long time. Barely a year after my encounter with Tesfu, the Meison would be outlawed.

  I maintained irreconcilable differences with the military junta, because I was convinced that Ethiopia had no future under their leadership. In less than five years our country had been reduced to lawlessness; the legal structure had been completely destroyed; and the cultural and educational institutions had been transformed into propaganda machines.

  The confiscation of private businesses during the revolution had made the country taboo for foreign as well as domestic investors. The roads remained unrepaired, the school buildings unfinished, and the hospitals had deteriorated because the West refused to lend us money. What little money the government was able to generate was spent in stabilizing its precarious position. Ever since the junta had taken power, the defence budget had steadily increased, until by the 1980/81 budget year it swallowed a staggering 51 percent of the year’s US$835.8-million budget; education and culture (the regime’s euphemism for propaganda) was allocated 13.2 percent of the budget, whereas agriculture, the backbone of the nation’s economy, received a meagre 2.9 percent. Meanwhile, the real income of manufacturing workers had been heading down at an average rate of 5.5 percent per annum.

  I realized that the nation was in a transitional stage and that some downturn of the economy and standard of living was to be expected. The problem facing the country was, however, not a temporary setback but a fundamental one. The high brass had misread the label, and given the wrong dose of “Scientific Socialism.” What the junta overlooked was the fine print stating that Ethiopia, which had a largely underdeveloped economy, was in the “National Democratic Revolution” (NDR) stage identified by the mature socialist nations as the first tier on the road towards “Scientific Socialism.” During the precarious NDR stage, both capitalism and socialism were supposed to be fostered under the watchful eyes of the revolutionary state, whose job it was to regulate them and set limits on the level of private investments.

  Was there anything positive about what the junta had done, a weary reader may wonder? How about the land reform, which had obviously liberated millions of peasants from the clutches of greedy feudal lords?

  The land reform was, indeed, the most courageous of all the measures taken by the junta. I remember shedding tears of jubilatio
n that the sacrifices that we had made were not completely in vain. I was awed that such an ancient and arrogant feudal structure could be dismantled in a single, brave stroke. With many of my peers, I held my breath, expecting a massive reaction from the deposed landowners, and we sighed in collective relief when it failed to materialize. The peasants had won the war without shedding a drop of their own blood; the prize was laid at their bedsides, served up for them on a silver platter.

  Why, then, three years after the fact, did the peasants still wait to celebrate their victory? Why did so many of them openly protest that while the old feudal chains may have been broken, they had been replaced by much more refined ones?

  The land reform granted the peasant a “possessory” right of the land he tilled up to a maximum of ten hectares. He was the sole owner of the fruits of his labour. He paid no excessive tributes and did not have to shine the boots of the junta. But there were some minor hitches.

  With the old feudal lords gone, the administration of rural lands fell into the hands of the twenty thousand peasant associations that sprang up all over the countryside to serve the seven million former tenant families. The peasant associations distributed the land, politicized the peasant and, when the motherland called, armed and mobilized him. But the land grants were not as generous as was initially thought, and an average of 1.5 hectares was allotted to each family.

  The peasants’ grievances were not so much with the shortage of land as with the uncertainty surrounding their allotments. The peasant associations continually subdivided and reallocated parcels as newly eligible young peasant families came forward, making it difficult for the peasant to develop his lot. Why would he spend his time and money on building terraces, fertilizing his fields and digging water reservoirs if someone would soon take the land away from him?