by Peter Boehm
Then, immediately opposite the national bank, one of the city’s postcard pictures, the hardest stretch begins. This is where you find the more mobile beggars, and the “stomach zero” women with their children.
Besides this, there’s a blind woman who sits here every morning, murmuring to herself. Someone must bring her in the mornings and pick her up in the evenings. She is genuinely blind. When I go past, she doesn’t react at all. If I have loose change in my pocket, I give it to her. She corresponds to my image of a beggar. She seems grateful for what I give her, and she can’t run amok and demand more, because she can’t see that I’m white.
In Nairobi, I had a crucial experience at the bus station in the city centre. A man saw me, jumped up from the posts he’d been sitting on, and triumphantly indicated his leg stump. I gave him a coin. He complained. He needed twice that, he explained to me in all seriousness, that was the minimum.
And a colleague of mine had written about a beggar and his life’s dream in Nairobi. He wanted to start his own business. Readers in Germany and Switzerland had been so moved that they’d donated several thousand Euros. This had turned the beggar’s life completely upside down. He could leave his wife and marry a younger woman. Within a very short time, he lost everything. And, months later, his ex-wife still came to my colleague’s office, asking for money.
Next are the more mobile beggars. They’re not always the same ones. But when they see me, they all step into the middle of the pavement and stretch their hands far in front of them, so that I can’t simply avoid them.
At the same time, I have to also keep one eye open for the “stomach zero” children. That’s what I call them privately, because their mothers always clutch their stomachs and call out “stomach zero, Misterrrr”. That’s a direct translation from Amharic. Their word for “zero” is the same as that for “empty”. As they approach me they smack their lips in a way which is hard to bear.
In rural Ethiopia, smacking your lips is a sign of regret. They come from the north, and wear their hair in the traditional style. Their hair at the front of their heads is braided, and it’s frizzy at the back. I spoke to one of them. She came to Addis Ababa after her husband died. She didn’t own any land.
When you meet the “stomach zero” women in the street it’s hard to shake them off. Once, as I was waiting outside the Ambassador cinema, a whole group of them waited beside me, hands outstretched, for a quarter of an hour.
But those on my route make their children work. They are four or five years old, and like little burrs which stick to my side and run after me, shouting imploringly. There’s no point in running away. They stay with you. Up to the crossroads if necessary – almost 50 yards.
After a while I developed a technique to irritate them. I walk behind them. When they try to walk beside me again, I slip behind. And I react, with a step in the same direction, to any move on their part to get back to my side. At first they laugh, because they think I want to play with them. But they soon stop, and cast questioning glances to their mothers. Still, even this technique can’t stop them from trying again every morning.
Then, after the first turnoff at the double crossroads, I usually see Zero lying in the middle of the pavement, in the morning sunshine. Zero is a beautiful, beige husky mongrel. The first time I saw her, she jumped up at me for a couple of moments, whining. I thought that perhaps the white employee of an aid organisation had abandoned her here, or perhaps someone sometimes fed her out of pity. Because it’s clear to me that dogs in Africa can distinguish between black and white.
A Canadian colleague of mine lived in Nairobi in a compound with a lot of houses and guard dogs. We hadn’t noticed the dogs at all when he invited us over for dinner. But when a Kenyan arrived, they rushed at him, barking wildly. “I’m sorry, I forgot to warn you”, my Canadian colleague apologised. “The dogs are racist.” Burglars in Africa are black, not white.
I sometimes brought Zero some dry white bread from the Lido Hotel. The beggars would certainly have laughed at me for that. She wolfed it down as greedily as though it were a bloody steak. And since then she’s recognised me from afar.
Once, when I was returning to the hotel late at night, I saw her at the head of a whole pack of dogs, roaming the streets. It was now time to make her living.
Two Americans, fellow guests at the Lido Hotel, weren’t impressed by my tales of my morning route. I often saw them sitting on the veranda outside their room, talking loudly. One was a farmer from the Midwest, with tanned skin and a baseball cap on his head; the other was a lawyer, with nickel-rimmed glasses.
They’d worked in Ethiopia before, in Haile Selassi’s day, as members of the American Peace Corps in the 1960s. They just laughed at my story and said that it was nothing. In their day, there had been far more beggars in Addis Ababa.
“Whenever you went in anywhere, they’d wait outside for you”, the farmer told me, good-naturedly. “The best thing was to pick one and give him something every day. Then he’d keep the other beggars off your back.”
And don’t let anyone tell you again that there’s no development in the way people work in Africa!
Emrakeb (Addis Ababa)
I’d met Emrakeb on my first trip to Ethiopia in June 1998. She was a journalist too, and had just returned from a media trip to Germany. She was twenty-four, and I found her very attractive.
Women in Addis Ababa take a great deal of care over their appearance, and they take the omnipresent African desire for straight hair to an extreme. Some look as though they’ve only just taken their heads off the ironing board. Emrakeb had short hair. And she was very fashionably dressed, even for a woman from Addis Ababa. I considered her very modern.
At first, for me, Ethiopia was a closed book. I was a newcomer, the land struck me as closed and inaccessible. Ethiopia had been a sideshow in world history for almost two thousand years. Its location in the mountains, and its isolation, had long protected it from attacks from outside. It was Menelik II who first restored the emperor’s power over the whole country at the turn of the century, thereby founding modern Ethiopia. After that, Haile Selassie came to power, and played to the same tune as the colonial powers.
Nonetheless, the modernisation of the empire, and its opening up to the outside world were superficial, and had virtually no impact on the rural regions. In 1974, Haile Selassie was followed by Soviet-inspired Socialism. There was a strong anti-western, almost xenophobic mood in the country.
It wasn’t until the end of the civil war in 1991 that Ethiopia opened up to the world, and it’s changed hugely since I first went there in 1998. This was why I was pleased that I knew Emrakeb. Each time I was in Addis Ababa, I’d ring her. She helped me to understand Ethiopia better.
During my first trip, it was still difficult for the two of us to go out in the evenings together. We couldn’t wander around the city together. We were either trailed by singing children, wanting to earn a few pence, or we were hassled and robbed by teenagers. In the end we gave up and got a taxi.
Today, that’s no longer a problem. But in those days it was still hard to find somewhere you could sit quietly. Just as was the case all over Africa, there was the obligatory “white man meets black woman” disco. Then there was the pub at the station, with its white tablecloths and plastic flowers, and sour Ethiopian red wine. We went there once. Apart from us, there were no other couples there. Our words rang in the huge restaurant like an echo in the mountains. It wasn’t easy.
And then there was the bar at the Ambassador Hotel. Young couples sat in the alcoves, separated off by wooden beams, and spent hours holding hands over lemonade and club sandwiches. They were yet to reach the stage when they’d visit the Desta Pension.
By my second trip in May 2000, there was the Silver Bullet, a pub with Wild West decoration and a garden. It was here that Emrakeb and I first realised that there were a few things about which we didn’t see eye to eye.
By then, Ethiopia had already been at war with the former E
thiopian province of Eritrea for two years. It had become independent in 1993, after a 30-year civil war. The Ethiopian government put almost all other projects on hold, and instead turned all its resources to the war effort. The argument for this was that the country had to defend its territorial integrity. In truth, it was about a tiny, entirely unfertile but disputed border region.
At the same time, Ethiopia was hit particularly badly by the drought affecting East Africa. The notorious images of skeletal children once again came out of Ogaden, in the Somali province in the south east of the country.
It was a case of déjà vu. Just like in 1984-5, when over half a million people died of starvation, Ethiopia was once again suffering hunger and war at the same time.
The Ethiopian Foreign Minister, Seyoum Mesfin, wasn’t happy about this. He complained that the West would never help until there were television images of skeletal children. I found that odd. After all, the UN world food programme alone had fed five million people in Ethiopia the previous year.
I said this to Emrakeb, and I also told her what an exasperated European Union representative had told me in response to Mesfin’s accusation. Namely, that the EU had provided Ethiopia with 250 million Euros’ worth of grain over the previous four years.
Emrakeb wasn’t happy about this either. She lost her temper. She said, outraged, that that just couldn’t be true. Ethiopia had had a record harvest in 1997. So how could it have received food aid that year? She said she would check the EU representative’s claim, and then write an article about it herself. She wanted to go home straightaway. We went into town in silence in a taxi, and parted coolly.
I now know that, since the huge famine of 1984-5, Ethiopia has received food aid every year, not just in times of shortage. And it’s a not insignificant amount either, compared with the other African countries.
I was surprised by Emrakeb’s reaction, but understood it slightly better after reading an article in the weekly newspaper, “The Reporter”, which she worked for at the time.
One of the columnists ranted for an entire side not about some insignificant event, but about the fact that the Indian daily paper “Hindustan Times” had used the caption “The Ethiopia of India” for a commentary about a poor Indian province. The text had claimed that western Odisha was “frequently compared with the shocking images from Ethiopia and Somalia, of emaciated children with swollen stomachs...”
The “Reporter” columnist stopped just short of demanding a declaration of war against India, but wrote that this commentary was “a violation of human dignity, a refusal of the principles of the UN Charter, a barrier to peaceful and friendly relations between nations.”
Ok then. I’d understood that Ethiopia doesn’t like being made aware of the state of its country.
And then, when I was making copies of articles from the “Reporter” during my research for my piece about Emrakeb, I didn’t find any which she’d written after our argument. But I found one from February 2000, three months earlier.
Under the title “The seventh call for help in three years”, I read, “What is it that makes Ethiopia so susceptible to famine that it has become the government’s habit to sink into an abyss of begging? Three years ago, almost three million Ethiopians were reliant on direct food aid. Two years ago the number had risen to four million.”
Was I just being stupid, or did this article lead to the exact conclusion which Emrakeb had contested with me? Namely that Ethiopia had continued to receive food aid even during its record harvest of 1997.
During my next trip to Ethiopia a couple of months later, I then had the discussion with Emrakeb about the women in Ethiopia who shield their faces from the sun with a newspaper, a book or a bag. I felt that there would always be differences of opinion, and I rang Emrakeb again, despite our cool parting following our last meeting. She agreed to meet me, on condition that I wouldn’t be “spiteful” again.
I’d already asked myself before why so many women in Addis Ababa shielded their faces from the sun, and had asked some of those who did. One said she did it to protect her eyes. Then I saw a woman with sunglasses and a newspaper in front of her face. I asked again. It was embarrassing for the women and for me. They gave all kinds of reasons – just not that it was so their faces remained paler.
That was why I asked Emrakeb. She said she did it herself too, sometimes. Women do it to protect their heads from the sun. Otherwise they easily get headaches in the highland areas.
And so why was it just women who did this? Because they’re more sensitive, Emrakeb told me.
I had another very careful look. The women weren’t holding the newspapers over their heads, but in front of their faces. And I soon noticed that everyone except Emrakeb seemed to know this too. The men laughed about it. And if you asked the women, they laughed coyly and denied that they did it for a pale complexion.
And the secretary at the “Reporter” – so right under Emrakeb’s nose – had “Africa” as her first name. A lovely name, I said to her, but unusual. And I asked how she’d been given it. “Well”, the secretary said, her eyes fixed on the ground, “I’ve got a rather darker complexion than the rest of my family.”
I told this to Emrakeb. And that the women don’t shield their heads, but rather their faces, from the sun. And, in the course of conversation, that everyone in Addis Ababa knew this except her.
Emrakeb denied everything. “That’s just racism!” she said, indignantly. And she said that Amharic poetry was full of praise for Ethiopian women’s lovely dark skin. Once again, we had to leave immediately, we went home from the Silver Bullet in silence, and parted coolly.
Emrakeb couldn’t have failed to realise that Ethiopians in the highlands consider a pale complexion to be the ideal of beauty. But if a white person told her that, it was racism. I now understood that, with Emrakeb, there were some topics you had to avoid like the plague if you didn’t want to end up arguing with her.
But I’d never been keen on people who deceive themselves. In the rarest of cases, you can take your illusions to the grave. And I wanted to write about Emrakeb. So I rang her when I was back in Ethiopia, during my continent crossing.
Emrakeb said she hadn’t taken it personally last time – “it” being my racism – and said she was prepared to meet up again.
I’d always picked up fleas during my previous trips to Ethiopia. I don’t know whether these creatures stop at the national borders, but I got them only there, not in any other African country, and you could be quite certain of being plagued by them following a minibus trip in Addis.
I therefore asked Mr Tadesse what I could do about them. He was furious, and said that I certainly hadn’t picked them up from his guesthouse. He made certain that everything was spotlessly clean. And the pharmacist at the chemist by the national theatre almost sank through the floor, he was so embarrassed that I’d asked him for a remedy for these parasites.
And what about Emrakeb? I knew she wouldn’t be happy about the question, but by now I found it fun to provoke her.
Emrakeb said that she had never had a flea in her life. Her piercing eyes bored through me. In her voice, there was utter incomprehension about my question. Why was it just me who had them? Really never? “Never.”
How some things change, and yet still remain the same! At the time of the imperial coronation of Haile Selassie, over seventy years ago, a British newspaper had disclosed that there were fleas in the imperial camp. The Ethiopian government was not amused by this. The result was a minor scandal, noted by Evelyn Waugh, who had remembered as no-one else the preposterous outcome of the clash of African tradition and Western belief in progress. The imperial government lodged a protest with the European embassies. Rumours were rife that all foreign journalists would have to leave the country within 24 hours.
I should be grateful to Emrakeb. She made understand her country better. She has made it clear to me that I can never become an Ethiopian.
• Flesh and blood (Addis Ababa)
&
nbsp; When I think of Ethiopia, I think especially of its smell. Everything there smells of it – the restaurants, the houses, the clothes, the money, and also the people.
The smell I’m talking about is that of berbere – the hot spice mixture containing a lot of chilli, ginger and other ingredients. Besides the flatbread made from teff flour, this spice mixture is the most important condiment when eating raw meat, which I’d already heard a great deal about during my previous trips to Ethiopia. This is why, on my current trip, I went with some friends to the quaint Addis Ababa Restaurant on the road to Entoto. That’s where you’re said to still get genuine traditional food.
The restaurant was octagonal, and from the outside it looked like an orthodox Ethiopian church. Silver incense burners were hanging from the ceiling, and there were iron shields and lances on the walls. The diners sat at tables and on chairs made from plaited reeds, and they drank vials of bright orange Tej.
The raw beef we were given, however, was already old and tough. The three pieces on my plate could just as easily have been found on the counter of any butcher’s shop back home.
You cut small pieces of it, took a piece of the slightly sour-tasting flatbread, and dunked it all in the berbere sauce. And that was it.
I was disappointed. But that wasn’t surprising. Until very recently, the Ethiopians ate raw meat in a very different way.
This is how James Bruce describes a “gebbur” – a banquet of raw meat – in the second half of the 18th century. The Scottish nobleman spent five years in Abyssinia, during his search for the source of the Blue Nile.