The curse of drivers traveling to Onitsha became the salvation of the residents of Oguta Road, and of this entire neighborhood. It was further proof that every evil thing has its defenders, because everywhere there are those whom evil sustains, for whom it is an opportunity, life itself.
For a long time, people did not allow this hole to be repaired. I know this because when years later I was telling someone in Lagos with great emotion about my adventure in Onitsha, he replied with an absolutely indifferent tone of voice: “Onitsha? It’s always like that in Onitsha.”
Eritrean Scenes
Asmara, five o’clock in the morning. Dark and cool. Suddenly two sounds soar simultaneously over the city: the powerful, low chiming of the bell from the cathedral on Via Independencia and the drawn-out, lilting calls of the muezzin from the mosque nearby. For several minutes these two sounds fill the air, combine and reinforce each other, creating a harmonious and triumphal ecumenical duet that shatters the quiet of the sleepy streets and awakens their inhabitants. The voice of the bell, rising and falling, is like a sonorous accompaniment, a lofty and bracing allegro punctuating the fervent Koranic suras with which the muezzin summons the faithful to the first prayer of the day, called salad as-subh.
Deafened by this morning music, I walk cold and hungry through the empty streets to the bus station: I am planning to go to Massawa today. Even on the large maps of Africa, the distance between Asmara and Massawa is barely the width of a nail, and in reality it is not great, only 110 kilometers, but it takes a bus five hours to traverse it, descending from an altitude of 2,500 meters down to sea level — the Red Sea, along which Massawa lies.
Asmara and Massawa are the principal cities of Eritrea, the youngest African state, with a population of only three million. It had never in the past been an independent state, being first a colony of Turkey, then of Egypt, and in the twentieth century of Italy, England, and Ethiopia successively. In 1962, the latter, having already forcibly occupied Eritrea for ten years, declared it an Ethiopian province, to which the Eritreans responded with an anti-Ethiopian war of liberation, the longest-running war (thirty years) in the history of the continent. When Haile Selassie ruled in Addis Ababa, the Americans helped him fight the Eritreans, and when Mengistu overthrew the emperor and seized power for himself, the Russians did. You can see the relics of this history in the great park in Asmara, where the war museum is situated. Its charming and hospitable young director, Aforki Arefaine, is a poet and guitarist, and a former guerrilla. He first shows me American mortars and guns, and then a collection of Soviet tommy guns, mines, rocket launchers, and MIGs. “This is nothing!” he says. “If only you could see Debre Zeyit!”
It wasn’t easy, because securing permission is complicated, but I finally did see Debre Zeyit. It is several dozen kilometers outside Addis Ababa. You drive along country roads, passing a series of military checkpoints. At the last one, the soldiers open the gate to a large enclosure at the top of a flat hill. The view from this place is unlike any in the world. Before us, as far as the eye can see, all the way to the distant, misty horizon, lies a flat and treeless plain — and it is completely covered with military equipment. To one side, stretching for kilometers, are fields of artillery pieces of various calibers: unending avenues of medium and large tanks; enclosures stacked with a veritable forest of antiaircraft guns and mortars; hundreds upon hundreds of armored trucks, small tanks, motorized radio stations, amphibious vehicles. And on the other side stand enormous hangars and warehouses, the hangars full of the body parts of still unassembled MIGs, the warehouses brimming with crates of ammunition and mines.
What’s most shocking and astonishing is the monstrous quantity of everything, the improbable accumulation, the piles of hundreds of thousands of machine guns, mountainous-terrain howitzers, military helicopters. All of this wended its way for years by sea from the Soviet Union to Ethiopia, Brezhnev’s gift to Mengistu. Not even a tenth of these armaments could actually be operated by people in Ethiopia. Why, with this many tanks, you could conquer all of Africa, and with fire from all these guns and rocket launchers reduce the continent to ashes! Roaming through the still streets of this city of motionless steel, where dark, rusty barrels stared at me from everywhere and around whose every corner caterpillar tanks bared their massive metal teeth, I thought about the man who, dreaming of conquering Africa, of staging on this continent a showpiece blitzkrieg, constructed this military necropolis. Who could this have been? Moscow’s ambassador to Addis Ababa? Marshal Ustinov? Brezhnev himself?
“And did you see Tira Avolo?” Aforki asked me once. Yes, I saw Tira Avolo. It is one of the wonders of the world. Asmara is a beautiful city, with an Italian, Mediterranean architecture and a delectable climate — an eternal warm and sunny spring. Tira Avolo is Asmara’s luxurious residential neighborhood. Magnificent villas submerged in flowering gardens, royal palms, tall hedges, swimming pools, lush lawns and decorative borders, an inexhaustible parade of plants, colors, and scents — a veritable paradise on earth. When the Italians left Asmara in the course of the war, Tira Avolo was taken over by Ethiopian and Soviet generals. No Sochi, Sukhumi, or Gagra can rival Tira Avolo in climate and comfort. So half the High Command of the Red Army, having been forbidden access to the Côte d’Azur or Capri, spent their holidays in Asmara, simultaneously helping Mengistu’s forces fight the Eritrean guerrillas.
The Ethiopian army regularly used napalm. To protect themselves, the Eritreans dug shelters, camouflaged corridors, and secret hiding places. With time, they had constructed a second, underground country — literally underground, a clandestine, covert Eritrea, impenetrable to strangers, which they could traverse from one point to another undetected by the enemy. The Eritrean war, they themselves proudly emphasize, was no bush war, no destructive and wasteful spasm of plunder whipped up by warlords. In their underground state they had schools and hospitals, courts and orphanages, workshops and gunsmiths. In a country of illiterates, each warrior had to know how to read and write.
The Eritreans’ pride and achievement is now their problem and their drama. The war ended in 1991, two years later Eritrea became an independent nation, and now this small country, one of the poorest in the world, has a hundred-thousand-strong army of young, relatively well-educated people it doesn’t know what to do with. Eritrea has no industry, agriculture is devastated, the towns are in ruin, the roads wrecked. One hundred thousand soldiers awake each morning with nothing to do; most important, they have nothing to eat. And it’s not just the soldiers. The fate of their civilian friends and brothers is similar. All you have to do is walk through the streets of Asmara during dinnertime. The officials of the fledgling nation’s few institutions are hurrying to little neighborhood restaurants and bars for a bite to eat. But the crowds of young people have nowhere to go — they don’t work and are penniless. They walk around, peer into shop windows, stand on street corners, recline on benches — idle and hungry.