The women, from the morning on, prepare the meal. I say “the meal” for one eats once a day, and terms such as breakfast, dinner, or supper are not applicable: one doesn’t eat at any predetermined time, only when the meal is ready. This occurs most frequently in the late afternoon. And one always eats the same thing. In Abdallah Wallo, as in this entire region, it is rice with a sharp, spicy sauce. There are rich and poor in the village, but the difference in what they eat lies not in the variety of dishes, but merely in the amount of rice. The poor man will have only a scant portion, the rich man a heaping bowlful. But this distinction holds only in years of plenty. A drought of long duration pushes everyone down to the same leveclass="underline" the poor and the rich alike eat precious little, if they don’t simply die of hunger.
Preparing the meal takes a woman the greater part of the day — the whole day, really. She must set out first thing in search of wood for the fire. There are no trees anywhere, the land was deforested long ago, and searching for slivers, splinters, and sticks on the savannah is an onerous and time-consuming task. When she finally collects and brings back a bundle of firewood, she must set out again, this time for water. In Abdallah Wallo the water is nearby, but elsewhere she would have to walk for kilometers to get it, and in times of drought she must wait for hours until the water truck delivers it. Having fuel and water, she can begin cooking the rice. But not always: she may first have to buy it in the market, for she rarely has enough money to purchase a supply of it. And then, on top of all this, noon arrives, and with it hours of such debilitating heat that everything stops, grows numb, dies down. The bustle around the fireplace and the pots likewise subsides. The whole village appears deserted, all life drains from it.
One day I summoned my strength and set off on a walk from hut to hut. It was noon. In all the dwellings, on the earthern floors, on mats, on bunks, lay silent, inert people. Their faces were bathed in sweat. The village was like a submarine at the bottom of the ocean: it was there, but it emitted no signals, soundless, motionless.
In the afternoon we went with Thiam to the river. Muddy, dark gray, it flows between steep, sandy banks. No greenery, plants, or shrubs in sight. One could, of course, build canals here, irrigate the desert. But who is to do this? With what money? What for? The river flows as if for itself alone, unnoticed, of little use. We ventured far out into the desert, and the dark caught us as we were returning. There is no light in the village. No one has a fire going, because that would be a waste of wood. No one has a lamp. No one has a flashlight. On a moonless night like tonight, you can see nothing. You can only hear voices, here and there, snatches of conversations and calls, stories being recounted that I do not understand, words ever less frequent, softer, for the village, taking advantage of the bit of coolness, grows silent for a few hours and falls asleep.
Rising in the Darkness
Dawn and dusk — these are the most pleasant hours in Africa. The sun is either not yet scorching, or it is no longer so — it lets you be, lets you live.
It is twenty-five kilometers from Addis Ababa to the Sabeta waterfall. Driving a car in Ethiopia is a kind of unending process of compromise: everyone knows that the road is narrow, old, crammed with people and vehicles, but they also know that they must somehow find a spot for themselves on it, and not only find a spot, but actually move, advance forward, make their way toward their destination. Every few moments, each driver, cattle herder, or pedestrian is confronted by an obstacle, a conundrum, a problem that needs solving: how to pass without colliding with the car approaching from the opposite direction; how to hurry along one’s cows, sheep, and camels without trampling the children and crawling beggars; how to cross without getting run over by a truck, being impaled on the horns of a bull, knocking over that woman carrying a twenty-kilogram weight on her head. And yet no one shouts at anyone else, no one falls into a fury, no one curses or threatens — patiently and silently, they all perform their slalom, execute their pirouettes, dodge and evade, maneuver and hedge, turn here, converge there, and, most important, move forward. If a bottleneck occurs, people will participate harmoniously and calmly in diffusing it; if a traffic jam forms, everyone will set about resolving it, millimeter by millimeter.
The shallow river rushes over a cracked, rocky bed, descending lower and lower, until it reaches an abrupt threshold and from there falls over the precipice. This is the Sabeta waterfall. A small Ethiopian boy, perhaps eight years old, makes money from visitors by stripping off all his clothes and riding the swift current on his naked bottom down to the edge of the falls. When he comes to a stop right above the thundering abyss, the assembled crowd emits two cries: the first of dread, and the second, immediately after, of relief. The boy stands up, turns his back, and shows the tourists his bum. There is nothing rude in this gesture, no intended insult. On the contrary, there is pride, and a desire to reassure us, the onlookers, that because he has such a properly tanned hide on his buttocks — look, please! — he can slide down the riverbed, which bristles with sharp rocks, without harming himself in the least. It is true: his skin looks as tough as the soles of hiking boots.
The next day, the prison in Addis Ababa. Before the entrance, under a tin roof, a line of people await visiting hours. The government is too poor to provide uniforms for the police, the guards, and so on, and these barely dressed barefoot young men milling about near the gate are in fact the prison guards. We must simply accept that they have power, that it is they who decide whether or not to admit us; we must believe this, and must wait until they have concluded their deliberations. The old prison, built by the Italians, was used by Mengistu’s pro-Soviet regime for holding and torturing the opposition, and now the current authorities have shut behind these bars Mengistu’s closest entourage — members of the Central Committee, ministers, generals of the army and the police.
On the gate, a enormous star with a hammer and sickle, erected by Mengistu, and inside the prison, in the courtyard, a bust of Marx (it was a Soviet custom: portraits of Stalin hung at the entrances to the gulags, and statues of Lenin stood inside).
Mengistu’s regime fell in the summer of 1991 after seventeen years in power. He himself escaped at the last minute by plane to Zimbabwe. The fate of his armed forces is extraordinary. With Moscow’s help, Mengistu had built up the most powerful army in sub-Saharan Africa. It numbered 400,000 soldiers; it had rockets and chemical weapons. Its opponents were guerrillas from the northern mountains (Eritrea, Tigre) and from the south (Oromo). In the summer of 1991, these rebel forces had driven the government troops into Addis Ababa. The guerrillas: barefoot boys, often children, ragged, hungry, poorly armed. Europeans began fleeing the city, expecting a bloodbath once the guerrillas entered. But something quite different occurred, something that could have been the subject of a film entitled “The End of a Great Army.” At the news that their commander had fled, this powerful force, armed to the teeth, collapsed in a matter of hours. Hungry, demoralized soldiers transformed all at once, before the stunned eyes of the city’s residents, into beggars. Holding a Kalashnikov in one hand, they stretched out the other, asking for food. The guerrillas took the capital essentially without a fight. Mengistu’s soldiers, having abandoned their tanks, rocket launchers, airplanes, armored vehicles, and artillery pieces, set off, each man for himself, on foot, on mules, by bus, for their villages and homes. If by chance you find yourself driving through Ethiopia, you will notice in many villages and small towns strong, healthy, young men sitting idly on the thresholds of houses, or on the stools of humble roadside bars. They are the soldiers of General Mengistu’s great army, which was to conquer Africa yet fell apart in the course of a single day in the summer of 1991.