‘So who are you?’ asked Getahun.
I told him.
‘Do you have a paper?’
‘No, but they’re sending word by radio.’
He fell silent, and later he went on talking with Marcos. We were in the drought zone. In the place where the Ethiopian government was organizing camps for the starving and the thirsty, for those who had managed to save themselves from death. A few people, like Getahun and Marcos, were fighting their own war here for the lives of the dying nomads.
Every morning Getahun went to the camp to urge the people to go out into the desert. We’ll dig a canal, he would say, the water will flow, the corn will grow. They did not know what a canal looks like or how corn grows. A murmur would go around the crowd and Getahun would turn to the interpreter to ask what they wanted.
They do not want corn. Their diet is meat and milk. They want camels.
But don’t you see, Getahun would say, your camels died off.
Yes, that is true, it all happened by the will of Allah.
The crowd then melted away, disappearing somewhere into their shelters, into the bushes, collapsing into the shade. Getahun did not give up. So he began from the beginning, every day. There was inexhaustible patience on both sides — his explaining and their listening. Weeks passed and nothing happened. They received a daily ration of a half-kilogram of corn. They ate part of it, because they had nothing else, and they set some of it aside without telling anyone and sold it on the black market: they were saving up for camels. Whoever managed to save up the price of a camel, or even a few goats, would disappear into the desert. Often this meant certain doom, death from thirst, never seeing anyone again, but nature was stronger than the instinct of self-preservation. For them, life meant movement, conquering space, and when they stayed in one place they withered up and died.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Emperor Menelik of Ethiopia extended his control over regions to the east and south of the territory that traditionally made up the land of Ethiopia. One of his conquests in this campaign was the province of Ogaden, which the Ethiopians today call the province of Harer and which the Somalis call Western Somalia. Since the inhabitants of Ogaden are Somali nomads, Somalia demands the return of the province.
The border between Ethiopia and Somalia exists only on the map; in fact it can be crossed at will, as long as one does not come into contact with an outpost of one of the armies, and these outposts, few in number, lie at intervals of dozens of kilometres. Neither of these countries has the means or sufficient military forces to guard its border rigorously. It is possible to drive one or two hundred kilometres into the depths of Ethiopia without being detected. The same is true on the Somali side. Fixed points are scarce in this terrain: a few small, impoverished settlements, clay shelters lacking light and plumbing. Whoever holds a settlement controls the entire surrounding territory.
Ogaden is a great semi-desert, a gigantic frying pan in which the sun-scorched air sizzles all day long and the principal human exertion involves the search for shade and a breeze. To find shade is to hit the winning number in the lottery. To find a breeze is to know the taste of joy. To last out a whole day in the sun there seems like a task beyond the strength of man, and in earlier days the most ingenious forms of torture included stripping a white person naked and leaving him alone with the sun.
The total surface area of Ogaden (Ethiopian and Somali combined) is equal to that of Poland. This territory can boast of one more or less tolerable road — which is, nevertheless, too demanding for passenger cars. That road is suitable only for all-terrain vehicles, desert trucks and tanks. There is also one river: the Wabe Shebele Wenz, full of dangerous and voracious crocodiles. Anyone who controls that road and that river can call himself the lord of Ogaden.
The night watch returns at dawn and the day patrols set out into the desert. The officer says that the border is near and that Somalia could attack at any moment. He doubts that they would mount a frontal attack, with the whole army, because the terrain is too rough to wage a regular war. Most often, they send in loose units of soldiers made out to look like partisans. If there are only a few, he regards the situation as normal. If there are many, he regards it as war. Here, the front is always and everywhere.
I ask if these units could overrun a settlement like Gode or K’ebri Dehar.
No, he says — there are strong army garrisons in the settlements, there are tanks and artillery, and the partisan units have to be small because otherwise they would have trouble transporting water. They can attack tiny villages or vehicles on the road, nothing more.
I ask if he remembers the last war.
He says that he does. I also remember. It was 1964. I was in Somalia then. I was sitting in Hargeisa, with no way of reaching Mogadishu. The only stately building in all Hargeisa was the former residence of the British governors. Hargeisa became a large city in the dry season — it had water, which the nomads with their flocks were always chasing. In the spring, when the pastures started to turn green, the city emptied out and turned into a third-class desert stopping-place. Life concentrated around the only petrol station in town. You could get tea there and listen to the radio. From truck drivers passing through — a rare sight — you could find out what was going on in the rest of the country, as well as in the outside world: in Djibouti and Aden. I went there every day, hoping to encounter a truck that would take me to Mogadishu. For a week the road was empty and nobody appeared. Finally, suddenly, a column of twenty new Land-Rovers emerged out of a cloud of dust. They were driving from Berbera to Mogadishu. I asked the drivers to take me. We drove for five days across an appalling desert, through a dead no-man’s land, in clouds of dust that billowed not only behind the vehicles, but also from underneath them, so that the drivers lost all visibility. They did not drive single file, but in a row, across a fiery plain without roads, without people. You could see only your nearest neighbours on the left side and on the right; everything else had vanished into the clouds of dust.
I did not see water for five days. Our only drink, or indeed nourishment, was tart, bitter camel’s milk. We acquired that milk from nomads we met along the route. They appeared suddenly out of nowhere. They were wandering with their flocks of camels, goats and sheep in search of pastures and wells.
The terrain that we were driving across was the border of Somalia and Ethiopia, the heart of the Ogaden. Since instead of marked roads there were only lonely rocks and solitary acacias there for the drivers to take bearings from, I asked them exactly which country we were in. They did not know with certainty. That means that, in their opinion, we were in Somalia, since they believed that their country covered the whole desert. Nevertheless, they drove the whole time in anxiety and tension, fearing that we could improvidently stray into the depths of Ethiopia and end up in enemy hands. From time to time we came across fresh signs of the continuing war: burned and devastated settlements, human and animal skeletons picked clean by vultures and scattered around poisoned wells. Whose settlements were they? Ethiopian or Somali? I could not tell. With the wells poisoned, there was no sign of life. The drivers swore vengeance against the Ethiopians, called the Prophet as their witness, and cursed the Emperor in the vilest of words. I rode with my heart in my mouth, dreading an Ethiopian ambush, because our fate could be dreadful. Again we passed abandoned settlements of thatched mud huts, smashed, testifying to fierce, ludicrous fighting. Once, we slept in such a place. At night the hyenas moved in, smelled carrion and raised their mad sneering laughter.