by Peter Boehm
They may be strange, but they’re not uncommon. And there weren’t many in between them and the other extreme – those expatriates who hide themselves away in fenced-off residential areas, in expensive restaurants, and on golf courses, and whose only contact with the locals is limited to their servants.
In the end, Rimbaud believed that he couldn’t return to France. He was afraid that he wouldn’t find his feet again there. The climate was sure to be too cold for him, he wrote to his mother and sister. And his savings – a significant fortune – certainly wouldn’t be sufficient to allow him to retire.
Besides, he wanted to finally find a wife and start a family. He didn’t dare, however, expose himself to the “scorn of some bourgeois girl” in France, as his sister, Isabelle, noted in her diary.
Ultimately, however, Rimbaud couldn’t do otherwise than return. He was seriously ill, his knee “looks like a giant pumpkin”, possibly due to overexertion on his long treks, or as a late-onset result of syphilis.
He hired a couple of porters and was dragged along the coast for almost two weeks before boarding a ship in Aden for Marseilles. The French doctors, however, were unable to help him. His leg had to be amputated and his sister, Isabelle – “Women nurse these ferocious invalids come back from the tropics” – had to care full-time for the now completely exhausted and helpless man.
Rimbaud now returned once more to his hometown of Charleville for a couple of weeks, but he never properly settled back in Europe. He suffered hallucinations. He sometimes thought his sister was his long-standing servant, Djami.
“We are at Harar”, Isabelle noted in her diary. “We’re always leaving for Aden, we must find camels, organise the caravan; he walks very easily with his new artificial leg. Quick, quick, they are waiting for us. We must pack our bags and go.”
Whilst still in hospital in Marseilles, Rimbaud had written to Menelik’s governor in Harar, to say he would soon be back there to attend to his business.
“The idea of returning to Harar haunted him”, wrote Isabelle, the only witness of this period. “But as it became clearer every day, that such a long journey was impossible for him, he decided to leave for Marseilles. At least, he said, “there would be sun and warmth.”
What follows now is the final act in a life which was never quite enough for its protagonist. Rimbaud had to get away from here once again, even if it was just to a hospital in Marseilles. And what “Aphinar” was meant to be – a town, or the name of a shipping company – is just as unclear as it is unimportant, as Charles Nicholl justly notes.
The letter reads: “Dear Sir, I am writing to inquire if I don’t have anything left on your accounts. I want to change services today from this one – the name of which I don’t recall – but in any case, to one run by the Aphinar Line. They ship everywhere from here: And I, disabled, Unlucky and unhappy, I can’t find anything, as the first dog you meet in the street will tell you. So let me know the cost of the Aphinar service to Suez. I am completely paralyzed: so I want to find myself ready to ship out early and soon. Tell me at what hour I need to be carried aboard....”[4]
Rimbaud had to get away from here yet again. He couldn’t stay in France. But where was Aphinar? This damn place, or this untraceable shipping company!
Just this one short passage, but for me this letter is a masterpiece of world literature. It contains everything – longing, despair, the irrepressible desire to keep going. And it brings together all the tragedy in Rimbaud’s life in a sweet and innocent smile.
Rimbaud had never really felt at home here – no matter where that was. But someone who could write such things didn’t need to be anywhere. He could never have lived in vain, no matter where he was.
• Among smugglers II (Dire Dawa – Addis Ababa)
The train from Dire Dawa to Addis Ababa was completely different from the one between Djibouti and Dire Dawa. It had windows, luggage racks and seat cushions. And the emergency cord worked, as we discovered when a woman, screaming loudly, brought the train to a halt because her bag had been snatched.
But far more important were the passengers. The guard was the same one we’d had on the other train. But he was now unrecognisable. He was friendly and considerate towards everyone. You’d never have believed that he’d had one outburst after another on the first train. But now there didn’t appear to be any passengers without tickets either.
In Dire Dawa, I’d crossed a border – not a state one, but an ethnic one. These are the important ones in Africa.
The passengers on the train were no longer Somalis. Like the conductor, they were Amharas. Until the victory of the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) in the Ethiopian civil war in 1991, the Amharas formed the main national group of Ethiopia. During the period of the Abyssinian empire, and the Socialism which followed, they had gained an advantage over the other ethnic groups. They were – and still are, to some extent – the traders and officials in the Somali and Ormoro regions, as well as in parts of the Tigrayan region. This is why in Ethiopia “Amhara” today is still a synonym for “gentleman”, if you like. And gentlemen travel in a different way from Bedouins. And of course they smuggle differently too.
At the first station, shortly after Dire Dawa, a woman passed twenty crammed sports bags into our carriage. Immediately afterwards, some of the passengers began to distribute these goods to the other passengers. I took charge of three radios, manufactured by “PHILIBS”, three packs of hair dye and large carton of cigarettes. The grandmother in the seat opposite me even had to take her jumper off and put on two silk shawls underneath it.
She patiently let everything wash over her. She was over eighty and was travelling with her son - who looked even older than she did – on a pilgrimage to Mecca. One of her sons in the USA had sent her the money for the journey.
Throughout the whole trip, she only stirred herself to eat sugary pancakes or to drink a little water. Otherwise, she sat there motionless. During the twenty hour journey, I never once saw her stretch out her legs or go to the toilet.
But the other passengers also accepted the forged goods from China without the slightest fuss. And the smugglers became increasingly brazen as the journey went on. They were in the minority, but they ordered us passengers around and stored the empty boxes between our legs. They told us how to behave in case there was an inspection. And if they feared there was about to be one, they disconnected a cable in the ceiling, switching off the light.
200 yards before Awash station, thirty of their accomplices were standing guard on the tracks, and they illuminated their faces with torches so the smugglers could throw their cigarettes to their contact.
Before the customs officers boarded the train at the station, a few figures wearing ten layers of second-hand clothes had already fled the train, as fat as barrels, only to slip back in after the inspection.
My neighbour on the train – a railway employee from Dire Dawa – complained to me that “now they really are taking it too far!”, but she was always friendly towards the smugglers.
In Africa, the traditional solidarity of a peasant society characterised by shortages, has seamlessly become solidarity between people in countries in their final stages. “Muddling through” is an established concept in many countries, and living this way is the fundamental experience of most Africans. Everyone somehow muddles through – by legitimate or illegitimate, legal or illegal means. That’s why it’s a taboo not to help others who are, after all, only doing what everyone else is doing – getting by as best they can.
I saw a dramatic example of this on a trip to Tanzania, when I once had to muddle through myself. My bus ticket and hotel invoice were both supposed so show a later travel date. The ticket vendor seemed very pleased when I asked him to copy down the later date. Of course that would be possible, he said. He didn’t ask why, just smiled happily and became very chatty.
And the woman at the hotel reception had undergone an even greater change. Prior to this, I’d always had to ask at lea
st twice when I wanted toilet paper or a towel. And I had to expect that she would snap at me before she gave me anything. But when I now asked her for a forged invoice, she suddenly turned helpful and kind. It was only now that I was starting to exist in her eyes. She gently placed her hand on my arm, came to my room several times, and really took care to ensure that the hotel proprietor signed the invoice. And, best of all, just like the ticket vendor she also vehemently refused to accept a tip.
The message was clear. I, too, had to muddle through for once. I had a problem which white people never usually have, but which both the ticket vendor and the hotel receptionist knew well. Our worlds, which otherwise never met, had briefly crossed. For once I was, briefly, no longer really a white person.
After Awash, a smuggler put two empty canisters between my legs. As a result, I could barely sleep that night. As the sun rose, however, the view out of the train window helped me make my peace with the world again. We had reached the highlands.
Once you reach 5,000 feet above sea level, Africa becomes bearable. It’s not as hot anymore, and the nature seems tamed and fertile, almost like in Europe. I’d now had barrenness and drought behind me for over 1,000 miles. I now absorbed the scene of a peasant idyll, in the whitish-clear glimmering dawn.
I saw a few early-risers, narrow tracks disappearing into beaten-out paths in the landscape; yellow, harvested fields of stubble with stalks of grain piled ready to be bundled; farmers, driving their cows in a circle across their grain to thresh it, and a father and mother with a small child, who danced and clapped for joy when it saw the train.
Then, with no visible border, the countryside gave way to the city. First there were more and more gardens with sugarcane. Then a shoe factory, then settlements with huts built from rusty corrugated iron, and then another state-of-the-art shoe factory. Beside it were craft workshops, and behind it a wood salesman and, a little further on, a timber yard. In between, donkeys were wandering around, and herdsmen, who had left their sheep to graze on the edges of the tarmac roads, were driving cars and buses.
The city appeared to have no structure or planning whatsoever. Business beside residential, tower blocks beside farms, old beside new, poor beside rich, dirty beside clean, a village like a city, or a city of villages – Addis Ababa.
Desta Pension (Addis Ababa)
It took me a while to work out what the “Desta Pension” guesthouse in Addis Ababa was all about. The guests were almost exclusively young couples, and it was noticeable how often you could hear moaning and rhythmically squeaking beds from the neighbouring rooms.
Although there were condoms on every bedside table, I was sure that it couldn’t be a brothel. The entire place was very clean, and the guests didn’t look the type. Some of the couples came into the TV room, and one of the young men even introduced me to his girlfriend.
The Desta Pension is very centrally located, three minutes from the national theatre. The rooms are cheap, and the food is good. And Mr Tadesse, the proprietor, translated the state TV news for me, and helped me generally with getting to grips with the minefield that is Ethiopian politics. Whenever I was in Addis Ababa, I stayed with him.
So he became a friend. The third time I stayed with him, I took my courage in both hands, and asked him who his guests actually were.
He said, “Most of them are young couples who can’t marry. They can’t afford to buy or build a house together. And if they could, then it would be so far out of the city that the journey to work would be unaffordable.”
There are only very few individual flats in Addis Ababa. And, in prudish Ethiopia, it would be unimaginable that young people wouldn’t be disturbed in their parents’ house.
From the outside, nothing except the words “Desta Pension”, in sky-blue paint on the wall, indicates what awaits you within. The building is as plain and unremarkable as any in the residential area, with its rough paths and its courtyard crammed with junk.
But young couples have found a cosy refuge in the rooms of the Desta Pension, with its slightly sloping walls. There are dark red satin covers on the beds, paper flowers on the tables, and those soft-focus pictures on the walls which I associate with the bedrooms of European girls in the phase between horses and puberty.
Whether this tells you anything about the sexual preferences of young Ethiopians, however, or just about Mr Tadesse’s tastes, I don’t know. All I noticed was that, in the three years during which I stayed at the Desta Pension, the couples got younger and younger. And that they talked an awful lot before they.....Well, you know. Mr Tadesse also confirmed that the pairs complained that the two hour window he stipulated was far too short.
Of course, in such a conservative society as Ethiopia, shaped by orthodox Christianity, Mr Tadesse often had trouble with angry parents. But with his characteristic cynicism he defended himself, saying that “business and scruples don’t mix.”
Neither did the 64-year-old hide the fact that he would be moving to a newly built house on the outskirts of the city the following year. He had originally opened the guesthouse in his parents’ house, simply because his pension alone wasn’t sufficient to survive on.
Its central location, cheap rooms and good food made the Desta Pension attractive for other clientele too. Once it had been included in an English guidebook, Mr Tadesse’s guesthouse was full of young tourists from all over the world. But then came the war with Eritrea, the tourists stayed away, and Mr Tadesse went back to letting his rooms exclusively to young couples.
Initially, Mr Tadesse had been enthusiastic about the war. But after a while his business sense won out again. He then said that deporting Eritreans from Ethiopia was a stupid idea. Now there was no-one there who could carry on their businesses.
Other good customers were sent to the front. “I never see them anymore. I’ve often wondered whether they might be dead.” In a word, the war had affected Mr Tadesse’s business, and that eventually turned him into a staunch pacifist. It took me a while to find this out too. But that’s another story altogether...
Stomach Zero (Lido Hotel – National Theatre)
Every morning, on the way into town from the Lido Hotel, I run the gauntlet of the beggars. Mr Tadesse has bought a radio, and installed loudspeakers in every room in the Desta Pension. Even at night, there is now loud music blasted out in every room, and it can’t be turned off. I’ve had to move. I’ve gone to the Lido Hotel. It’s quiet and not far away.
From my new hotel it’s just a 500-yard walk downhill to the crossroads by the national theatre. There are many more beggars in Mercato, Addis Ababa’s business district, but the first one is usually sitting immediately outside the gate of my hotel.
The old man is completely wrapped up in a white cloak, against the cool of the morning. Like most beggars, he sits on a stone on the pavement, but still supports himself on a stick. When he sees me, his whole body jerks. He lifts his head briskly, stretches out his leprosy-scarred hand towards me, and starts babbling something about Jesus and Mary.
Then I ignore an old, bent woman. She, too, implores me as soon as she sees me.
Then I ignore the first tent, resting against a large stone on the traffic island.
I now have to concentrate on the shoe shiners at the first junction. They aren’t beggars, but they’re just as persistent. “Misterrr, Misterrr, shoeshine today?” one of them always asks, even though I haven’t yet ever taken up their services. Now to put a smile my face and, as I walk past, to say “not today, guys!” in a friendly tone.
The next 50 yards to the Ministry of Culture, on the other side of the road, are usually quiet. Then comes the next tent on the traffic island. It belongs to three young men.
I spoke to them one afternoon. The eldest is nineteen. All three have left their villages on account of their evil stepmothers. The translator told me that was a common occurrence in Ethiopia.
Their tent is three feet high. A frame of branches is covered with numerous pieces of plastic sheeting, tied down with a
cord. Inside, it really stinks. On the wall there’s a wire cross, a picture of a British pop group, and an insurance advert cut from a newspaper.
The local authorities have given the three boys permission to live here. In return, they have to collect the rubbish from the grass on the traffic island. It’s only before the major public holidays that they’re rounded up by the police and taken to a camp outside the city. Once the festivities are over, they’re released again.
They don’t beg in the mornings. I sometimes see them building a fire out of the rubbish they’ve collected. It’s only when I return in the evenings that they’re sitting by their tent on the pavement, wrapped in a blanket with their hands outstretched.
During the day, this place is occupied by the second leprosy sufferer. He wears a ship captain’s cap, a worn-out black jacket, grey trousers and, around his shoulders, the white linen wrapper, which is ubiquitous in Ethiopia. His nose is already shrivelled. On the first couple of occasions he wriggled his leg stumps, clad in black and white striped sports socks, as though he were a beetle which had fallen on its back – so that I couldn’t fail to notice that he had completely lost his feet, and that he now just walked on strapped-on plastic soles.
Now that I’ve interviewed him, and given him some payment for it, he always lifts his cap, bows deeply and moans a little more each day that I merely greet him.
I once saw him waiting for the city bus. He travels from his leprosy clinic to the city each morning, he told me in the interview, because the care there isn’t what it was anymore.
Next I have to concentrate on the half-dozen ragged small boys – perhaps five or six years old – at the next crossroads. They want to shine shoes, and they each have a metal box on which they hammer with their brushes to advertise their services. I have to be careful that the youngest and most persistent doesn’t walk along beside me, chattering away. Quickening your pace doesn’t help in the least with him. I sometimes have to stop, look him straight in the eye and say “Boss, I’ve never asked you to shine my shoes. And I won’t today either” – before he’ll leave me.