Notes from the Hyena's Belly

by Nega Mezlekia

  We laid the casket on a freshly harvested bed of green grass, in the meagre shade of some tattered beige canvas. We had to give Mam’s soul time to bid farewell to her last earthly home, to the Adbar, and to entrust the safekeeping of her kids to the good spirits in the neighbourhood. Before sunset, we carried her remains to the final resting ground.

  * * *

  THE ORTHODOX Christian Church had always intrigued me. The funeral rites conducted by the Lord’s House reflected the status an individual held in society. Services ranged from simply covering the casket with earth to complex burial ceremonies that sometimes lasted half a day. A day-old baby would be interred without so much as a visit from an ordained priest, who argued that the baby was far too young to have committed any grievous sin. I agreed that an infant should be exempted from Original Sin. In fact, I am still a firm believer in letting everyone off for at least one sin.

  At the other extreme was the burial of a feudal lord. Even the dead could tell when a feudal lord was about to join their ranks. From the moment the Church learned about the death of one such worthy soul until the time the casket was placed in the ground, the church bells rang relentlessly, and you could be sure that every priest, monk, deacon and beggar within hearing distance would come running to escort the deceased to his eternal home.

  The ceremony begins in the inner chamber of the temple, before slowly moving outdoors, where holy men stand around the open grave, their ranks seven rows deep. The senior priest reads carefully chosen passages from the Holy Bible. As he pauses to take a breath, the deacons pitch in, singing hymns and clinking incense burners. They raise a wall of aromatic smoke that hides the coffin from view, and they drown out the songs of the cemetery birds with their own. Soon, the priest picks up his solemn intonations again. He grows hotter and hotter as the sun rises above him, and finds it more difficult to breathe as the smoke accumulates. He continues his prayers, peeling off layer after layer of clothes to ventilate himself, before finally rolling on the ground as the excitement of the holy message becomes completely unbearable, tearing at his hair with maniacal fury until he passes out cold.

  At that moment, just as the mourners audibly sigh their relief, believing that the ceremony has finally ended, another priest picks up where the last left off. The sun takes its toll on the mourners. Slowly, one by one, they wilt. The elders faint. Young women labour in the open field giving birth to children they hadn’t conceived. The men run out of patience completely. They grumble out loud, winking at the priests to express their displeasure. Having failed to interrupt the service, they whistle in protest, throwing insults at the holy men. Finally, if they are kept long enough, they will stone the priests and deacons. The holy men run indoors, only to resume their ceremony behind the protective stone walls of the compound.

  At last, in anger, the crowd sends an armed man after the holy men. This man will hold them up, robbing the priests of their Bibles, prayer sticks, incense burners, crucifixes, robes and toothbrushes. He binds them up in the cellar, locking the door behind him and tossing the key in a bush. Finally, the service comes to a close as the remains of the feudal lord are unceremoniously tossed into the ground by an army of angry men.

  In Ethiopia, when an event creeps along at a painfully slow pace, people often say that it has taken “as long as the burial of a feudal lord.”

  The Church sent out one stuttering priest and two pubescent deacons to attend to Mam’s funeral. I thought the ceremony had just begun when the holy men gave the word to lower the casket into the ground.

  If one could judge the type of life the deceased had led by the size of the funeral, it appeared to me that Mam had come down in the world. There were a mere handful of people at the cemetery, and all of them were blood relations. Gone were the hundreds of families who once flocked to visit us when we lived in Jijiga. Those glamorous creatures who travelled hundreds of kilometres to console Mam over the death of a family dog, or to congratulate Father on his recent promotion, had disappeared from our lives without a trace. Even the birds had joined the conspiracy. Looking up at the trees, I could see weaver birds quarrelling among themselves, or tending to their little huts, unmindful of the one worthy soul the gods had created in this universe, who was being interred in the cold, impersonal ground beneath their very feet.

  We could no longer afford a headstone, so a makeshift crucifix was placed at Mam’s grave. At the end of the school year, when I returned to visit her, the marker had been lost, the little earthen mound had been worn away by the highland rain, and desperate weeds had reclaimed the lot.

  Now, I’d lost Mam for good.

  THE HYENA’S TAIL

  I FINISHED SCHOOL at the end of the 1980 academic year and was employed by Addis Ababa University as an assistant lecturer for the Alemaya College of Agriculture. It was a time when every college graduate was assured of a decent job.

  I welcomed the opportunity of working for the university. The pay was competitive and the position, like all other government employment, was for life. Aside from the fact that it guaranteed me an opportunity to pursue graduate studies, the university offered free accommodation for its staff in Alemaya—an indispensable benefit in those difficult days.

  The year I got a position at the university, I helped my sister Meselu and her family move to Dire Dawa, a forty-five-minute drive from Alemaya. The two of us agreed that four of my siblings would stay with her and I would bear the full financial burden for raising them. It would be much easier for her to keep an eye on them, as three of them were going to enrol in the public school where Meselu would be teaching. The high school my other brother would attend was a stone’s throw away from her office.

  Almaz stayed behind in Asebe Teferi. The sibling rivalry that is usually apparent in large families had deepened between Meselu and Almaz into a bitter animosity. As soon as Mam was laid in the ground, they stopped talking to each other. I never quite understood what it was they fought about, but it seemed that just about anything could trigger acrimony between them. Mam used to say the only siblings God intended to be lifelong friends were cheetah cubs, and that everyone else would have to work hard at it. It was a piece of advice that went to the grave with her.

  Adding four heads to her own young family was not easy on Meselu. Though her husband was quite understanding, I could sense that her own child, who was about the same age as Henok, felt neglected. I tried to help. Visiting them once a week, I brought gifts and sweets to the kids, before spending the night out with Meselu’s husband. Soon I found myself not only settling sibling squabbles, but also acting as a marriage counsellor. One day, Meselu’s husband asked me to dissuade her from quitting her job. “Even with both our incomes and the money that you send us, we can hardly afford to eat meat once a week,” he said.

  I asked Meselu why she had decided to give up her position, knowing full well the job market was as barren as the grocer’s shelf, but she simply shrugged and said she’d lost interest. There is only so much one can say to a fully grown adult, so I decided not to pursue it any further. I took my leave, telling them that I would not be able to visit the following weekend.

  Instead, I received a visit that next weekend from a distraught Meselu. She demanded I increase their monthly allowance. I was already spending almost half of my net income on my siblings, and could hardly afford to buy a jacket for myself after six months of scrimping. She had her own thoughts as to where I could trim my expenses. “The money that you send to Almaz is wasted,” she said, “because not only has she given up school, but she has already delivered a baby out of wedlock.”

  I remained frozen to my seat, my eyes bulged and my temple throbbed. Beads of sweat formed on my upper lip and slowly rolled down my chin. When I looked up to the open window, I caught a glimpse of Mam in her mourning cloth and I cried. I wept for what seemed like hours, not knowing whether it was because I missed Mam or because of the endless misfortune that seemed to plague our family.

  The next day, after seeing Meselu
off, I took the bus to Asebe Teferi. During the four-hour ride, I asked myself how I could have failed to notice her growing belly. I had visited her no fewer than three times in the last year. Then it dawned on me; I remembered the loose-fitting dress she’d worn all that time, which, combined with a plumpish figure, had completely obscured her pregnancy.

  My anger had not abated by the time I got off the bus. I’d rehearsed what I would say to her: “Neither you nor anyone else should expect me to support you for the whole of your life. I gave you a helping hand so you could stand on your own two feet.” Knowing she had nowhere else to turn, I reminded myself not to be too hard on her. Almaz is terribly short-tempered; no one could predict what she might do to herself. She was also intelligent enough to realize her mistake, so I was confident she would break down in front of me and promise not to put herself in a similar position again.

  What awaited me was a smiling Almaz, proudly displaying her infant in her arms. My anger quickly gave way to pity. Here was a young woman who lived in a world where even those who were well placed on the economic and political ladder found the future depressingly uncertain, yet she believed somehow that having a baby, even out of wedlock, would be a welcome distraction. I could only plead with her to go back to school while Grandma looked after the baby.

  * * *

  THREE YEARS HAD passed since I’d assumed the responsibilities of heading the family. My career was at a standstill. I was the only one of the original crew who remained on campus. The rest were abroad pursuing graduate studies. Scholarships from the Eastern Bloc countries were as abundant as sand. I refused to accept any of them, arguing that I didn’t wish to learn a language I’d have no use for. The medium of instruction in all of these universities was the local language.

  I wrote to most of the American universities and a handful of European ones, in vain; the West denied us scholarships. I’d been reminded by the college dean, more than once, that if I didn’t strike out on my own by the end of the academic year, I would be sent to one of the Eastern Bloc countries. No excuse would be admissible.

  I’d been brooding over my gloomy future, lost in a dazed bewilderment, when one breezy afternoon in May 1983 I got a telegram that would ultimately change my life: a long-since-forgotten application to a Western university had finally been accepted. Four hundred candidates from seventeen countries in four continents had written an entrance exam for admission into the University of Wageningen, in the Netherlands. Fifty were admitted, including myself. Moreover, I had been offered a full scholarship, including airfare.

  August 3 was to be my departure date. My preparations for the trip started immediately. I arranged for my siblings to receive a monthly allowance, in my absence, from the salary that I would still be paid. My good friend Mitiku, who was also on staff at the college, agreed to watch over the young ones for me.

  The departure day quickly arrived. It was rainy, and freshly hatched insects buzzed in the clean air. While waiting for my ride to the airport, a small bag in hand, I thought of the peace of mind awaiting me in Europe, and remembered a story Mam had once told me about a young Prince.

  * * *

  THE PRINCE IN question was very rich, and lived in the Kingdom of Gondar. But he’d taken to gambling at a fairly young age, losing all of the money he’d inherited. Only the estate remained in his hands and that was because the Church prohibited hereditary lands being put up for sale.

  One night the young Prince dreamed he saw his fortune in the Kingdom of Shewa. Early the next morning, he set out for that distant empire. Before reaching his destination, bandits ambushed him, robbing him of what little money he had, taking his clothes and horse, beating him mercilessly, and leaving him for dead. Fortunately for the young Prince, a passing monk took him to a nearby monastery and nursed him back to health and vigour.

  When the Prince was up and walking, the monk decided to unburden himself of the question that had weighed heavily on his mind. “I couldn’t help but notice that you are not a man used to physical labour—your delicate hands and feet are testimony to that,” the monk noted. “What brought you to this part of the kingdom?”

  “I had a vivid dream in which someone told me that my lost fortune would be replenished here in your kingdom,” the Prince replied.

  The monk laughed out loud until tears ran down his face. “Your Highness, I’ve had no fewer than seven dreams in which I saw wealth and fortune laid out on a piece of land in Gondar, and you came all this way because of just one,” the monk replied. He went on to describe the field where the fortune was hidden, which to the astonishment of the young Prince was his own property.

  The monk saddled a horse for the young Prince, a mule to carry food for the trip back to Gondar, several bags of seeds and a flask of water. He also gave the visitor what little money he had, saying that when the Prince had recovered his fortune he could give the sum to anyone who came asking for his help. The monk helped the Prince through his difficult times. He wanted the Prince to do the same for someone else in need.

  No sooner had the young Prince arrived home than he grabbed a hoe and shovel and set out for the field the monk had described. For the next two months, the young Prince turned the soil, sometimes with the help of the community, until all fifty hectares were completely ploughed. But there was no sign of the fortune the monk had promised. Confused and very disappointed, the young Prince looked to a local sage for an answer to the mystery.

  The young Prince told the sage the whole story, beginning with how he’d lost his entire fortune due to his gambling affliction. The sage heard him out with patience and care before passing judgment. “The monk is a wise man,” he began, “and was right to say that there is a fortune hidden in your land. But to find it, first you must sow the seed which he gave you, then wait for seven months, before cashing it in.”

  And so the young Prince not only found a small fortune in farming, but also got over his gambling habit, for he was far too busy working the field to be distracted by such a sin.

  * * *

  I BELIEVED THAT, like the young Prince, the solutions to my problems would be found in my own backyard. While the trip abroad would give me a well-deserved hiatus, I hoped that things would have changed for the better by the time I finished school in two years, and that my homecoming would begin a new chapter in my life.

  A BRIEF EPILOGUE

  WHEN I LEFT Ethiopia, the junta seemed to be teetering on the brink of a long-overdue grave. Militiamen who had been sent out to fight the relentless guerrillas had been defecting at an alarming rate; the economy was in a shambles; and the farmer was refusing to toil on the co-operative farms, preferring to spend his time in the backyard garden, which aggravated the food shortage. When the long-expected famine was finally blown into the open in 1984, I believed, like many, that something would have to give in Addis Ababa. After all, the final straw that had brought the aging emperor tumbling down exactly a decade earlier was a famine of similar magnitude.

  Pictures of the famine were broadcast the world over, and aid poured into the country. The junta raised $100 million and voted on how best to spend it. Their answer to the famine was to purchase crates of vintage champagne, exotic food and an assortment of gifts from Europe, and to throw a lavish party to celebrate the tenth anniversary of their coming to power. I did not think the high brass would live for long after this monumental scandal. I expected some liberal elements in the army to sense the popular discontent and remove the bigwigs from power.

  But it was not to be.

  As the year 1985 progressed, I started having second thoughts about returning home. But where to go? The Dutch, whom I’d come to know, are the most cultured people one could ever meet. They’d been civil to me throughout the two years, but I suspected that once I decided to overstay my welcome, my reception would be entirely different. Refugees’ prospects are very limited in Europe. I had seen far too many drifters living in the streets of Amsterdam and Paris to ever contemplate setting up home on the conti
nent. A man in my position had to look to the New World for sanctuary.

  I’d been brooding over my indeterminate status when, one afternoon, I came across an article in a newspaper: Nigeria had deported ten thousand Ghanaian migrants from its territory. Well, what of it, I said to myself; if a black African country could do such a thing to its neighbours with impunity, what could I expect of a people who did not look like me? As to whether or not I would be thrown aboard the next ship home, I figured I would soon find out.

  I obtained a visitor’s visa to Canada. To raise money for the trip, I sold the home equipment I’d accumulated over the years, items which, like most returning African students, I had hoped to take home with me. In May of 1985, I boarded a plane to Toronto.

  When my two-week visa expired, I slunk into an immigration office in Hamilton and whispered my intentions. I was shown into a small cubicle by an officer with an untamed moustache who gave me a form to fill in before he walked out, mug in hand. I realized immediately what was about to happen: I had seen the very same plot in movies. The officer would return with a colleague, the two of them would play good cop/bad cop, ask me about my ulterior motives, punch me in the stomach, dress me in pink overalls, lock a chain around my ankles and wrists, and dispatch me to a detention centre in a windowless van.

  But the officer came back alone, and smiled as he apologized for taking so long. He took my passport, giving me a slip of paper that said I was entitled to health insurance, could seek a job, and could even obtain financial assistance if I needed it. Wishing me good luck, he bade me goodbye. On the way out, I glanced at my feet, to see if I was walking on the ground.