In Ethiopia with a Mule

by Dervla Murphy

  It is unusual to find a solitary compound amidst such rough territory and these people are really poor – a rare phenomenon in the highlands. Their only animals are a broken-down donkey and two ferocious curs and they have no grain, which means no talla or injara. At first I wondered if they were semi-outcasts from some non-Christian tribe, but then I noticed that they all wear the Matab – a neck-cord which signifies membership of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. A young couple live in one tukul and their hunger-dulled expressions remind me of Indian peasants in Bihar. They have three children, none of whom look likely to live much longer.

  As I approached the compound the wife was filling her water-jar, and when she saw me coming through the bushes she screamed and fled, though every day faranjs drive along the road a hundred yards above.

  I am being entertained in the smaller tukul by three old men who mistake me for a boy. A small saucepan of boiled haricot beans appeared for supper, but peasant hospitality is rarely daunted by poverty and my hosts insisted on sharing with me. I was so ravenously hungry that the nutty-flavoured beans seemed a food of the gods. However, conscience doth make martyrs of us all and I controlled myself after a fistful – though the grey-beards repeatedly urged, ‘Tegabazu!’ (Help yourself!) and ‘Mokar!’ (Try!). Unfortunately my emergency rations are at an end and as I write I rumble.

  Here the night air is almost warm, so I’m going to sleep unverminously beneath a sky of moon-bright clouds.

  24 January. Fasil Hotel, Gondar

  I woke early, after my first bugless sleep since leaving Derasghie. All around it was night and overhead stars still glittered between dark shreds of cloud – but in the east, above the mountains, a long strip of clear sky glowed like copper in firelight. Always that immediate moment of wakening after a night in the open has a very special quality, compounded of freedom and peace.

  The morning air was chilly, so while watching the dawn I remained in my flea-bag, being driven by a desperation of hunger to drinking dire Ethiopian brandy for breakfast. By 6.30 we were on our way and half-an-hour later I saw a group of men and boys driving laden donkeys off the road on to a steep, rocky track. Obviously they were going to Gondar market, so I followed them – and this short cut reduced the road’s fifteen miles by three. Apart from that first descent it was an easy track, and after four and a half hours’ slow walking across pastures, stubble-fields and ploughland we rejoined the main road, turned the shoulder of a mountain – and saw Gondar below us, cloaked in trees.

  Then an odd thing happened. All the morning I had been aware of the extreme tiredness of hunger and every slight climb had felt like an escarpment, but I hadn’t been conscious of making any extraordinary effort to keep going. Yet here I was suddenly stricken by what cyclists call ‘the knocks’, and for ten minutes I had to sit on the roadside, struggling to summon the strength to walk down that final slope. The extent to which those knocks may have been fostered by Ethiopian brandy in a vacuum remains a moot point; but the psychology of the incident is curious, for had Gondar been ten miles further away my knocks would probably not have developed until another ten miles had been covered.

  I had planned to stop first at the Post Office, but now even letters mattered less than food. Wobbling into the respectable Fasil Hotel I sat in the bar-restaurant, on a blue tin chair at a blue tin table, begged the startled barman to give me something – anything – edible, and within half-an-hour had put away a mound of pasta and wat, five large rolls, an eight-ounce tin of Australian cheese and six cups of heavily-sugared tea.

  Standing up from this banquet I saw a fearsomely repulsive figure behind the bar; it is a strange experience to stare at one’s own reflection for some moments without recognising it. When I did recognise myself I no longer wondered at that unfortunate woman fleeing last evening. If I saw any such apparition coming through bushes in the dusk I too would flee, fast and far. The combination of ingrained dirt, sun-blackened skin, dust-reddened eyes, sweat-matted hair, height-stiffened lips, blood-caked chin and sunken cheeks really did have an unnerving effect. I had been aware of losing weight, but I hadn’t realised just how emaciated my body was. At once I booked in here for a week, to fatten up before the next lap.

  When Jock had been stabled I went up to my room – preceded by a pair of servants solemnly bearing my dusty sacks – and the next two hours were spent in three successive hot baths. I had no clean clothes to put on, but as I went downstairs the mere fact of having clean skin made me feel positively chic.

  The news of our arrival had already spread and quite a crowd was awaiting me in the bar – which embarrassment became understandable when I learned that Leilt Aida has recently been telephoning the Chief of Police every evening, to enquire if we have yet arrived in Gondar. One member of my ‘Reception Committee’ was the Director of the Gondar Bank, who kindly offered Jock the hospitality of his back garden during our stay here; and he also promised to organise a daily supply of grain.

  When I went to the Post Office to telephone Makalle I collected a belated Christmas mail; so the rest of the day was spent ‘attending to my correspondence’.

  * Oats are never cultivated in the highlands, despite the enormous livestock population, and in most areas the common wild oats are weeded out of a grain crop before it ripens – or, if the farmer hasn’t had time to weed, they are thrown away after winnowing. But in this area they are sometimes mixed with barley to make talla or injara, though no one uses them alone as a food.

  * Reverence for the Tabot is one of the main emotional links between Ethiopian Christianity and Judaism. A solemnly revered tradition says that when the Emperor Menelik I – son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba – was returning to his mother’s country from Israel his father ordered the first-born son of the High Priest of the Temple in Jerusalem to accompany him. Then the High Priest’s son decided to steal the Ark of the Covenant, containing the original Tables of the Law which Moses received on Mount Sinai, and to bring it to Ethiopia – where it is still preserved at Aksum. The young man’s reason for taking such a curious decision is obscure. Possibly we are meant to infer that he had a vision of Ethiopia’s future glory as a Christian country and felt that the Ark might most suitably be deposited on the holy highland soil. At all events a Tabot, representing the Ark, has always been cherished on the altar within the sanctuary of every Ethiopian church.

  * Despite the greater popularity of mules highlanders have always used horses in battle, because of their superior speed, and many of Ethiopia’s most famous warriors were known by their horses’ names rather than by their own, since the foot-soldiers usually adopted the name of their leader’s horse as a war cry.

  6

  Gondar

  25 January. Fasil Hotel, Gondar

  THIS RESPECTABLE ITALIAN-BUILT hotel is good value at twelve-and-sixpence a night. Now owned by a rich Gondare, it is a meeting-place for neatly-dressed students and civil servants who gamble with dice or cards, play billiards, or talk by the hour while drinking bottled beer. None of the good-humoured, slow-witted staff speaks English, but they all try – rather unsuccessfully – to be helpful. My room is about the size of the average tukul and has running cold – and sometimes hot – water, a large window that opens wide, a disconcertingly soft bed with fresh linen, a bed-side lamp, table, chair, chest of drawers and wardrobe. It was spotless until the arrival of my lamentable sacks, from which showers of fleas at once sprayed on to the floor and bed in search of pastures new.

  After a large breakfast of coffee, rolls and Israeli jam I set out to do a ‘preliminary survey’ of Gondar. The Italians had planned to make this city the capital of their African Empire and many large, featureless buildings remain as monuments to Mussolini’s ambitions. The Post Office, bank, Army Headquarters, Police Headquarters, government offices, provincial court-house, spacious private houses, shops, hospital and cinema are all the sweets of occupation; without these Gondar would only have the ruins of its Royal Compound to distinguish it from Debarak. Even
now the major – though not the most obvious – part of the town is the usual conglomeration of small shacks lining dusty, stony laneways.

  Within the past few years the number of Gondar motor-vehicles has increased considerably, though horse-gharries are still used as taxis. The electricity operates all night, as in Asmara and Addis, but Ethiopian time is kept. This means that 12 a.m. is our 6 a.m. – a logical system, since the new day does begin at dawn, rather than when one is going to bed. Weeks ago I changed my watch, for mental arithmetic was never my forte and in some areas all passers-by ask the time. (This questioning is a game to be played with faranjs; no highlander cares whether it is three o’clock or four o’clock, and the sun keeps him informed about the main events of the day.)

  The Fasil Hotel restaurant serves only pasta and wat, so at lunch time I went to the Tourist Hotel to continue my camel-campaign of feeding up in preparation for the next lap. The Ethiopian Tourist Organisation’s newly-published guidebook had informed me that ‘the Itegue Menen Hotel in Gondar has a fairly good restaurant and tennis-courts as well as a swimming pool, though the latter is usually empty. Rates are rather high.’ However, I thought ten shillings reasonable for a four-course, Italian-cooked lunch that included unlimited green salad* and tomatoes, fresh butter (made near Asmara) and Port Salut that was not at all travel-weary.

  The Itegue Menen Hotel is large, comfortable, attractively decorated and efficiently run by Italians: yet somehow it seems pathetic. Ethiopians frequently complain about their lack of accommodation for tourists, but today there were only four other visitors in the enormous restaurant – Americans who had flown from Addis and who provided me with much free entertainment. To them the Itegue Menen is such a primitive hostelry that they recoiled with yelps of horror from the salad, and before the meal one woman asked for soda-water in which to wash her forks and spoons.

  After lunch I returned to my room – borrowing some books and visiting Jock on the way – and since then I have been diligently reading up the history of Gondar.

  26 January

  This morning I ‘did’ Gondar’s Royal Compound – for two hundred years the centre of the Imperial Court of Ethiopia.

  In 1632 the Emperor Susenyos was forced to abdicate, having antagonised his subjects by allowing Portuguese Jesuits to convert him and by authorising the conversion of the Empire. He had already founded a capital at Gorgora, after his armies had been driven north by invading Galla tribes; but Gorgora is on the malarial north shore of Lake Tana, so his son Fasilidas moved the ‘city’ to the foothills of the Semien plateau, called it Gondar, forbade any foreigners to live in it and built himself a square, two-storey, Portuguese-inspired castle with a round tower at each corner.

  Fasilidas died exactly three hundred years ago and was succeeded by his son, Yohannes I (The Just), who is described by my government-sponsored guidebook as ‘a deeply religious person. … He gave all Catholics the choice of renouncing their faith or being expelled to wander the deserts of the Sudan.’ During his reign Muslims were also banished from Gondar and the people’s feeling for the sacredness of the Emperor, which had been weakened by Susenyos’ defection, was fully restored.

  Yohannes was succeeded in 1682 by his twenty-year-old son Iyasu I, known as The Great. Iyasu was a learned scriptural scholar, the finest horseman of his day, a lover of ceremony, a collector of jewels, a champion of the rights of the exiled princes on Amba Wahni and a reformer of corrupt customs collections. He also diluted the official xenophobia, made two unsuccessful attempts to establish diplomatic relations with the French court and firmly reasserted the authority of the Crown over the Church.

  However, Iyasu was too great for the good of his own line. Ethiopia in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was not yet ready for a ruler who sat in a castle studying the scriptures, fingering jewels, reforming the administration and expressing a reluctance to shed blood. Gondar was the Empire’s first city since the decline of ancient Aksum and by the time of Iyasu’s accession the capital had become dangerously ecclesiastical and detached from the realities of highland life, which were no less harsh then than they had always been. The nobles used Iyasu’s peaceful twenty-five-year reign to build up strong armies and high ambitions; and then the Emperor’s son, Takla Haimanot, joined them in a conspiracy to depose his father, who was compelled to become a monk in a Lake Tana island monastery – but was murdered a few months later, lest he should attempt to regain his throne.

  Fifteen years of anarchy followed. After a two-year reign Takla Haimanot I was murdered and succeeded by his fifty-year-old uncle, Theophilos, a brother of Iyasu I, who lived long enough to kill the nobles involved in the assassinations of his brother and nephew. These included Iyasu’s widow, Queen Malakotawit, who was hanged with one of her brothers and their chopped-up bodies thrown outside the palace gates to the hyenas. Three years later Theophilos died – tamely, of a fever – and the throne was seized by a provincial noble named Yostos, whose mother had been a daughter of Yohannes I and who is said to have been poisoned in 1717, after a six-year reign. Yostos was succeeded by a twenty-year-old son of Iyasu I, Dawit III, who was certainly poisoned in 1719, though he had endeared himself to the people by ordering the stoning to death of three Capuchin missionaries who somehow infiltrated into Gondar. Dawit III was a fanatical adherent to the Eustathian sect of Ethiopian Christianity, which believed that the Unction of the Holy Spirit which Christ received at his baptism united his human and divine natures; and this view was opposed by the monks of Debra Libanos, Ethiopia’s most revered monastery, who maintained that the Unction was the grace of the Holy Spirit given to the human nature of Christ at the moment of the union of his two natures, and having as its effect the restoration of human dignity lost by the fall of Adam. One wouldn’t expect such a rarefied debate to provoke the baser – or indeed any – human emotions; but shortly before he was poisoned the young Emperor took umbrage at the monks’ impertinent arguing with their ruler and sent a contingent of his ferocious Galla troops to massacre the lot. Controversies of this kind still enliven Ethiopia’s theological scene, though they no longer lead to massacres.

  The next Emperor, ’Asma Giorgis, was yet another son of the virile Iyasu I. (It was not necessary to be a legitimate son to succeed to the throne; acknowledged royal blood sufficed. Neither primogeniture nor legitimacy counted for anything and all the numerous sons of an Emperor shared in the privileges of their descent.) ’Asma Giorgis is always known as Bakaffa (The Inexorable) and during his ten-year reign he ruthlessly subdued the nobles and kept them down by filling all important governorships and offices with men whom he could trust because they were dependent on him. (The present Emperor follows a not dissimilar policy for much the same reasons.) Yet Bakaffa’s severity did not prevent him from becoming one of the favourite heroes of highland folk-history: his name recurred often in the chantings of the shepherds I camped with and many are the tales told of his courage and cunning. He had a habit of travelling in disguise – to gauge popular feeling and use this special knowledge against the nobles – and on one of those journeys he fell ill in a Galla village and was nursed by the beautiful daughter of a local chieftain. Her name was Glory of Grace, and she became the famous Empress Mentuab.

  Unlike most Ethiopian emperors Bakaffa remained faithful to his wife and produced no wide selection of heirs. He died in 1729, leaving an infant son as the Emperor Iyasu II, and Mentuab as Regent. Then came the final phase of dissolution. Mentuab’s nepotism enraged the nobles and she was too weak to control their many rebellions and conspiracies. Iyasu II, when he grew up, was mockingly known as ‘The Little’, in contrast to his grandfather ‘The Great’, and the people despised him for his expensive artistic tastes. Eventually he was taunted into leading a campaign against Sennar and almost the entire Imperial army was massacred.

  Meanwhile Ras Mikael Sehul of Tigre was becoming the strongest man in Ethiopia. He ruled the whole country north of the Takazze, and even dominated the port of Massawa
h, through his influence over the Muslim Naib. He grew immensely rich on customs dues, and could control the importing of firearms and see to it that his own army was better equipped than anyone else’s. When Iyasu II died in 1753 Ras Mikael was ready to spring.

  Mentuab had married Iyasu to a Galla princess disarmingly named Wobit; and now Wobit elbowed the old Dowager Empress aside and took it upon herself to rule in the name of her young son Joas. Soon the Court had been virtually taken over by Galla officials, and the Galla tribesmen who had accompanied these chieftains to Gondar were camping nearby in their thousands. Chaos followed, and by the time Joas had come of age the highlanders were in such a state of anti-Galla rebellion that the desperate young Emperor was driven to appealing to Ras Mikael for help. The seventy-year-old Tigrean at once occupied Gondar, defeated but failed to annihilate the Gallas, married Mentuab’s daughter by her second husband, murdered Joas, brought another (septuagenarian) son of Iyasu the Great to the throne, found him too ineffectual and poisoned him, enthroned his son Takla Haimanot II instead and had so many dismembered corpses of traitors thrown on the streets that protein-emboldened hyenas became a danger to the public. (It is difficult to determine what constituted treason at this stage, but doubtless Ras Mikael knew.)