…
The prisoner with whom I am speaking is named Shimelis Mazengia and was one of the ideologues of Mengistu’s regime, a member of the Political Bureau and a secretary of the Central Committee for ideological matters — in short, a kind of Ethiopian Mikhail Suslov. Mazengia is forty-five years old, intelligent. He weighs his words carefully as he speaks. He is dressed in light-colored sweats. All the prisoners here are in “civilian” clothing — the government lacks the funds for prison garb. The guards and the prisoners are dressed alike. I asked one of the guards whether the prisoners do not try to take advantage of the fact that they look like everyone out on the street, and escape. He looked at me with bewilderment. Escape? Here at least they have a bowl of soup, and if they were free they would be dying of hunger like the rest of the nation. They are enemies, he emphasized, but they are not madmen!
Anxiety, even fear, in Mazengia’s dark eyes. They are in constant motion, running this way and that, as if he were feverishly searching for a way out of a trap. He says that Mengistu’s flight was a shock to them all, that is, to the commander’s closest entourage. Mengistu worked day and night; he was uninterested in material goods, only in absolute power. To rule — that was enough for him. He had a rigid mentality, incapable of any compromise. Mazengia describes the massacres of the red terror, which ravaged the country for several years, as “the struggle for power.” He maintains that “both sides killed.” How does he judge his participation in the highest ranks of the fallen regime, a regime that brought so much misfortune, destruction, and death? (More than thirty thousand people were shot on Mengistu’s orders, and some estimates put that figure at more than three hundred thousand.) I remember driving in the morning through Addis Ababa in the late 1970s and seeing corpses strewn in the streets — the previous night’s harvest. Mazengia answers philosophically: History is an intricate process. It errs, advances and retreats, searches here, there, and sometimes gets trapped in a dead end. Only the future can judge, can find the appropriate measure.
He and 406 others associated with the old regime (the Ethiopian nomenklatura) have been here for three years already, not knowing what next — more prison? a trial? execution? freedom? The government is asking itself the same question: what do we do with them?
We were sitting in a small office, probably a guardroom. No one was listening to our conversation, and no one was pressuring us to end it. As is often the case in Africa, there was chaos all around, people wandered in and out, on the table next to us a telephone that no one answered rang continually.
At the end of the conversation I said that I would like to see where the prisoners were kept. I was ushered into a courtyard surrounded by a two-story building with arcades. Along them stretched cells, doors opening onto the courtyard. A throng of prisoners milled about. I observed their faces. They were the bearded, bespectacled visages of university professors, their assistants, their students. Mengistu’s regime had many followers from this milieu — mostly adherents of the Albanian version of socialism as practiced by Enver Hoxha. When Tirana broke with Beijing, in Addis Ababa Ethiopian pro-Hoxha activists shot at Ethiopian Maoists. For months, the streets of the city flowed with blood. After Mengistu’s escape, his army dispersed and went home, and only the academics were left. They were seized without great difficulty and imprisoned in this crowded courtyard.
Someone brought from London a Somali quarterly that had been published there in the summer of 1993—Hal-Abuur: Journal of Somali Literature and Culture. I counted: of the seventeen authors represented — preeminent Somali intellectuals, scientists, and writers — fifteen reside abroad. Here is one of Africa’s problems: its intelligentsia lives for the most part outside its borders, in the United States, in London, Paris, Rome. Remaining in their native countries are, at the bottom, masses of illiterate, downtrodden, utterly exploited peasants; at the top, the corrupt bureaucracy or arrogant, coarse soldiers (the lumpenmilitariat, as the Ugandan historian Ali Mazrui calls them). How is Africa to develop, to participate in the great transformation of the world, without an intelligentsia? Without its own educated middle class? Furthermore, if an African scholar or writer is persecuted in his own country, most frequently he will not seek shelter in another country on his continent, but in Boston, in Los Angeles, in Stockholm, or in Geneva.
I went to the university in Addis Ababa. It is this country’s only institution of higher learning. I visited the university bookstore, which is this country’s only bookstore. Empty shelves. No books, no periodicals — nothing. It is this way in most African countries. Once, I remember, there was a good bookshop in Kampala, another (three, even) in Dar es Salaam. Now — everywhere, nothing. Ethiopia is the size of France, Germany, and Poland put together. More than fifty million people live here; in several years there will be sixty million of them, in a dozen or so, more than eighty million. And so on.
Maybe then?
If only one?
In my free time, I walk to Africa Hall, a great ornamental structure on one of the hills upon which this city is built. The first African summit meeting took place here in May of 1963. I saw Nasser here, Nkrumah, Haile Selassie, Ben Bella, Modibo Keita. Very big names at the time. In the hall in which they met, some boys are now playing Ping-Pong; a woman is selling leather jackets.
Africa Hall — it reflects perhaps a corollary of Parkinson’s Law untrammeled and triumphant. Whenever I arrive in Addis Ababa, I always notice the same thing: a new building is being erected near Africa Hall, each one more magnificent and luxurious than the one before. Political systems come and go in Ethiopia — first a feudal-aristocratic one, then a Marxist-Leninist one, currently a federal-democratic one. Africa too is changing, growing poorer and more wretched. But all this is of no consquence; the imperturbable and victorious law of the constant expansion of the seat of Africa’s rulers — Africa Hall — operates freely and without constraints.
Inside — corridors, rooms, conference halls, offices piled with papers from floor to ceiling. The papers are spilling out of cabinets and files, falling from shelves. Desks are squeezed in tightly everywhere, and behind them sit the most beautiful girls from all over Africa.
Secretaries.
I am looking for one particular document. It is called “Lagos Plan of Action for the Economic Development of Africa 1980 2000.” African leaders convened in Lagos in 1980 to consider solutions to the continent’s crisis. How could Africa be saved? And they resolved on this particular plan of action — the bible, the panacea, the grand strategy for development.