Between Addis Ababa’s airport and the city center runs a straight, wide boulevard called Bole Road. When I visited in 2012, more than a decade after Asad went to live there, the city’s construction boom had lined it with office blocks and residential towers and shopping centers made of glass and steel. At ground level, cafés opened onto the street and well-dressed people sipped coffee and chatted. Clothes stores, restaurants, and spas filled the upper floors.
On the flanks of these buildings, sometimes beginning just meters away, were dense shacklands, stretching back for miles. Wandering off the boulevard, one saw that it was a thin spine of wealth, embedded in the flesh of Addis’s poverty. Seen from above, it must make for an extraordinary scene: these shiny beacons of the new Ethiopian bourgeoisie streaked across a landscape of deprivation, as if they had been erected to show the poor the look and the smell of power.
Not far from the airport, one turns left off Bole Road down another wide boulevard, the presence of new glass buildings now much thinner. A couple of kilometers on, the boulevard narrows, then disappears entirely, and you are suddenly in a warren of very narrow streets, each lined with markets and crammed with pedestrians. The sound of Amharic now mingles with Somali. Every second stall sells clothes, the shirts and jeans and hoodies all displayed on white-skinned mannequins, dozens of them standing in a row.
This is Bole Mikhael, one of two neighborhoods in which Addis’s Somali population has settled. To speak to Ethiopians in Addis about Bole Mikhael is an education. Most have never set foot there and have no desire to. They speak Amharic and the Somalis do not. Why go to a place in your own city to be among people too arrogant to learn your language? The Somalis, they say, are loud and rude and entrepreneurial to the point of craziness; they will talk the shirt off your back. They are lazy and make their women do the work; they sleep until afternoon because their blood is full of mira, which they chew until late into the night.
This stream of vitriol is really a cover for ignorance, for Bole Mikhael is a truly opaque place. Who among its residents are Ethiopian citizens from the Ogaden and who refugees from Somalia is impossible to distinguish, and the residents of Bole Mikhael are certainly not going to tell you. And so the people you see in the streets may or may not be Ethiopian, and, even if they are, you can be sure that they hate you and support the rebels out in the Ogadeni desert. The Ethiopian security services are renowned for having spies in Bole Mikhael. It is the sort of place where one reveals little.
Asad arrived in this world in 2000, he thinks in March, for it was dry and cool, the rainy season still a month or two away. At first, he and Yusuf were frightened and disoriented. They had nowhere to stay, and the price of a room, they soon discovered, was three or four times that of similar accommodation in Dire Dawa. They needed to earn money and to do so fast. But they knew nobody in the big city; for the first time since his days with Zena and Tube, Asad passed a night on the streets, his bed a piece of newspaper, his bedroom a doorstep in an alleyway.
But by now Asad’s capacity to surmise, to calculate, to read a terrain for its opportunities, was acute. Addis’s opacity, the lack of trust among its residents, the barriers of language and culture, were to be lucrative for him.
He does not remember how long it was after he arrived in Addis, perhaps a month, maybe less. It was late morning. He stood on Bole Mikhael’s main thoroughfare, watching. On the opposite side of the street, an Ethiopian taxi driver leaned against his car. The man was huge, his car quite small, and Asad smiled at the incompatibility. He pictured the big man behind the wheel, his back hunched, his head craned, his pawlike hands squeezing the steering wheel. The taxi man’s eyes were red, as if somebody had just poured salt in them, and he kept rubbing them with the backs of his hands. He looked as if he ought to go back to bed.
A Somali family approached the taxi driver. From their demeanor Asad knew that they were new to the city; it was obvious from the hesitant manner in which they crossed the street, all looking out for one another as if they were crossing a flooded river. And from the snatches he caught of their accent it seemed that they were from Mogadishu. They came up to the strong Ethiopian taxi driver and spoke to him, and he spoke back, and from the way their eyes wandered while he spoke, Asad could tell that they did not trust him.
Asad put his hands in his pockets and strolled casually into the circle the two parties had made; he listened for a moment, then put his hand on the big Ethiopian’s shoulder.
“I know this man,” he told the Somalis. “He is somebody to trust. He will take you to the city for a hundred birr. He will wait for you while you sort out your business, and he will take you back. One hundred birr is reasonable. Others will see that you are new, and they will ask for three hundred.”
The Somalis immediately lightened, their relief palpable. They volleyed questions at Asad. Where do we go to get official papers? Where to buy food? Where to buy a mattress?
The Ethiopian stared at Asad and smiled. From the expression on his face, Asad saw that he did not understand a single word of Somali. But one did not have to comprehend words to get the meaning of what Asad had done, and in the big man’s smile there was mirth and admiration. The Somali family climbed into the taxi, and the Ethiopian drove them away; Asad stood alone in the middle of the street and grinned.
Asad had just found his way into one of Addis’s most enduring functions, that of the broker. When I visited twelve years later, many of the Addis residents I spoke to complained bitterly about their reliance on brokers. Never mind if you don’t speak a word of Amharic and are new to the city, many of them complained; even if you have lived here all your life, there is nothing you can buy, not even a house, without an intermediary. And can you trust that he isn’t conniving with the seller? Of course not, especially if your broker is Somali.
The taxi driver’s name was Yared. That he and Asad barely shared a language seemed not to matter. There was not all that much to discuss. During the course of a day, Asad would bring four or five sets of customers to Yared’s taxi. In the evenings, Yared would park his car on Bole Mikhael’s main thoroughfare and wash it. Then he would sit and watch the world around him and count his day’s takings. He would stuff most of the cash into the pocket of his jeans; the remainder, about 20 percent, he would hand to Asad.
“Yared was a wild man,” Asad tells me. “Everything he felt, he felt very passionately. And he was a heavy drinker. How early he started drinking would tell me how his evening would go. If he started too early, I knew he was going to make shit with somebody. He was such a strong, powerful man. He lifted weights every day. He couldn’t help fighting.
“The next morning he would come to me crying, literally crying, the tears rolling down his big face. His cheek would be swollen. Or there would be dried blood around his nose or a cut across his eyelid. ‘Asad,’ he’d say, ‘what are these marks on my face? I don’t even remember what happened. I swear I will never, ever drink again.’ ”
Asad’s business grew swiftly. Somalis were arriving in Addis every day. None of them knew the city, none knew Amharic, and finding an honest taxi driver was just the beginning of what they needed.
“Most Somalis who come to Addis want to apply for a passport,” Asad recalls. “That is not something they can do easily without a helper. First, they want an Ethiopian identity document. Mainly, the Somalis who arrive in Addis are only coming so that they can get an Ethiopian passport, which will get them to Europe, which is where they really want to go. And to get a passport, you must start with an identity document.
“To get one, they need to show that they are from the Ogaden, not from Somalia. If they can’t show they are from the Ogaden, they need to pay Ogadeni Somalis a lot of money to teach them how to make the right lies. The Ethiopian officials will interrogate you about your Ogadeni origins. Show us your district on a map, they say. What are the three main roads in your district? What is the district immediately to the east? Who was elected vice president of your district in 19
94?
“Then if they are successful in getting an Ethiopian passport, they want you to help them get a visa to Sudan. That is easy. The Sudanese know very well that Somalis do not want to settle there. They are just passing through, heading north, to Europe.
“Now that they have their visa, they want tickets to Sudan. There are fifteen of them. They are throwing around a lot of money by now. And they have become dependent on me. They realize now that as soon as they leave Addis, they lose me. And so they ask me to come with them and offer to pay my way to Europe, tickets, food, bribes, everything. I say, No, I am not coming with you to Sudan. They say, We are so grateful to you, thank you so much for everything. Here’s one thousand five hundred birr.
“It only costs three hundred birr a month to live. So I have taken these people around for a week, maybe ten days, and I have earned a lot of money.
“And then,” he says, “from those who are wanting to settle in Addis, there is a different sort of money to be made. Above all, they are looking for a place to rent, and that is a very complicated business, because it means living in the house of an Ethiopian family. And when it comes to domestic matters, Ethiopians and Somalis do not see eye to eye. It takes a lot of work on my part to make things smooth.”
He pushes his head into the headrest of my passenger seat, looks up at the ceiling, and laughs.
“Some Somalis,” he says, “want to rent as a family. Some want to rent single. But some Ethiopians don’t want a family as tenants because there isn’t enough space. Others don’t want a single because he will bring friends late at night and make noise. So you have to match the right people with the right people.
“And then you have to interpret what ‘family’ and ‘single’ really mean. A young Somali woman will tell an Ethiopian family she wants a single. The Ethiopians will think it means that just she will stay. But she is actually going to bring at least six friends with her, and it is for me to explain that in advance, or there will be big trouble later.
“Then the Ethiopian will get suspicious. ‘If she said single, why will it be six?’
“ ‘You can’t expect a Somali to sleep alone,’ I would say. ‘We need company, even when we are sleeping. So when she says “single,” she assumes you know she means six, because she has never met anybody who sleeps alone, and she thinks that that goes for you, too.’
“Then there is the problem of the toilet,” Asad continues. “Ethiopians stand when they pee. The Somalis are outraged by this. They think it is disgusting. They do not think it is possible to aim your penis straight. They complain that the toilets are not clean because of the Ethiopians. You cannot pray when you have even a drop of urine on you. If you use a toilet the Ethiopians use, you have to wash your whole body every time you want to pray, and that is five times a day.
“So the Somalis refuse to touch the toilet seat, which means that instead of sitting on it, they squat, with their feet on the seat rather than their legs. And they don’t take off their shoes when they do this. So the Ethiopians complain that the Somalis dirty the toilet seat by standing on it with dirty shoes.
“I must try to find a compromise between landlord and tenant. It is not easy to approach an Ethiopian man and tell him it is better if he sits when he pees. It’s not easy. And to tell a Somali he must clean his shoes before he pees…I don’t know.
“Then there is the problem of noise. The Ethiopians are very quiet people. They hate shouting. Somalis shout when they see each other. People come to visit you late at night, you shout; that is how you show that you are happy to see them. Eventually, the landlord evicts the Somali family for shouting. This always happens in the middle of the night. The last straw for the landlord is always when he is woken at one in the morning, two in the morning. The evicted ones come knocking at my door. ‘Asad, help us. These people you fixed us up with are no good. It is the middle of the night, and we are sitting on the street with our possessions.’ I must find them a new landlord first thing in the morning. And I must sit the tenants down and tell them that in the new place they please must try as hard as they can not to shout.”
Asad giggles. “And then,” he says, “there is the problem of the curfew. There was a citywide curfew in Addis when I lived there. First, it was seven thirty p.m., then nine p.m. Somalis did not obey the curfew; if you wanted to chew mira with your friends, you would go and chew. You did not look at your watch to see if the Ethiopian government would allow you to go and chew. It made the landlords so upset when their tenants violated the curfew. But even the prime minister of Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi, knew that you could not get Somalis to obey it. When he put the curfew back to nine p.m., he went on television to announce it. He said that this was not a slackening of rules; enforcement of the new time would be very, very strict. ‘Let me warn you,’ he said. ‘After nine p.m., only dogs and Somalis will move.’ ”
—
When Asad started earning money, he rented a room in the house of an Ethiopian family in Bole Mikhael for himself and Yusuf. They were soon joined by two other young Somali men, Moled and Khadarmahad. Asad no longer recalls how he and Yusuf met the other two. They were all hanging out in the streets of Bole Mikhael. They spent time together. They chewed mira together. Before they had thought about it much, they were sharing a room.
There was a fifth person in their group, Abduraham, whom they called Hoolo, which means “animal.” He was bringing up a child as a single parent and rented his own room for himself and his baby daughter. His wife was in Canada and sent him money each month. He was waiting to get Canadian immigration papers. In Addis, he had little to do. He had finished school but could not get a place at university and had thus reached a dead end.
The others—Yusuf, Moled, and Khadarmahad—were at various stages in the stop-start journey of acquiring an education. As literate boys, they refused manual labor. They wanted jobs in the civil service. But the Ethiopian bureaucracy, which a generation or so earlier had been large enough to absorb most who aspired to join its ranks, had been rapidly shrinking since the early 1990s. Government-sponsored places in the universities became scarcer with each passing year. Young people like Yusuf would travel far from home and live off the smell of an oily rag to finish high school, only to find that graduating did not help them. The more they imagined and spoke of their careers, the more mercurial these careers became. They would probably be imagining their futures deep into adulthood.
It was Asad, without an education, scarcely able to conjure the sort of adult he might become, who went to work every morning, paid the rent, and provided food.
“I was happy to support the other boys with my money,” Asad tells me. “I remembered my own bad times. In Dire Dawa, it was I who had nothing.
“The others would contribute when they could. One of them would suddenly get a big sum of money, maybe three hundred dollars. And then they would also be generous. There were no cell phones in Ethiopia in 2000, so they could not tell you the news. You would get home and there would be new trousers, shoes, shoe boxes, trouser tickets. You would know that somebody got a money order.”
That Asad was earning enough money to feed and clothe a whole roomful of young men meant a great deal to him.
“When I first started renting,” he recalls, “I could not believe that I would be able to keep paying. We just moved in and hoped for the best. The first night, the mattresses were full of grass. After two or three days, we would buy a new one, then another, then another. It took maybe a month before it really sunk in: I was earning a living; all of this was working because of me. It was 2000, maybe 2001. I was sixteen, seventeen years old. I felt like a serious person.”
—
“My work was always during the day,” Asad tells me. “I would be home by five o’clock, often earlier. Sometimes, the others would only be waking up then. They had been chewing mira until four in the morning, five in the morning, and they would sleep for most of the day.
“When they were washed and dressed, we would s
ometimes sit and eat, and at other times we would go out. We went everywhere in the Somali parts of town. If we are not at home when we are ready to sleep, then we just sleep where we are. We wake up the next day, maybe then we go home, but maybe there is somewhere better to go. Sometimes, we were not together. Yusuf goes off; you don’t know where he is for a while. Other times, we are all together for weeks.
“Except for Abduraham, we lived in one room. Sometimes there were four or five of us, sometimes eight in one room. Maybe four or five come to visit. We cut mira. It gets late, they say, No, we are not going home tonight. Two people would climb into your bed with you. Move over! Nudge you with their elbows. If you do that in South Africa, they think you are homosexual. With us, it is nothing.
“There are no people better in the world than young Somalis,” he says. “They do not ask you questions. They do not want to know who you are or where you are from. You just move with them. You see somebody day in and day out. You share everything with him. Later in life, when you have not seen him in years, you think: What is his clan? Where did he grow up? Where was his family? You don’t know these things. You would never have asked. You were together. That was all.”
For the first year or so, everyone but Asad chewed mira. In retrospect, he is not sure why he abstained for so long. It was in part because he was the only one among them who worked, and he did not have the luxury of chewing until four in the morning and sleeping until the following afternoon. It was also the place mira had in the lives of his friends that made him uneasy. They would chew into the early hours, and, as they did so, they would dream and talk and plan, always about the grand things that would fill their futures. And yet the daily rhythm of mira chewing suggested that there was no future, only a constant present: you talk, you chew until late, the mira makes your mind race so that you cannot sleep, you spend the daylight hours trying to drain it from your system so that you can rest, and then night falls and you start chewing again. How can you even begin to make a future if you live like that?
A Man of Good Hope Page 12