Notes from the Hyena's Belly

by Nega Mezlekia

  That day Dad stood by and watched as the soldiers did the slaughtering. When I asked him why, he told me that this occasion required a special kind of skinning. Indeed, the soldiers did not open up the belly of the animal. Instead, they carefully peeled the skin from the goat as though they were undressing someone. I thought that God would be happy to see how the soldiers did not in the least mar his careful creation.

  The skin of the animal formed a huge pouch. The leg openings were carefully laced up, and the refuse—the blood, urine and feces—was poured into the sac. It was a strange fetish I was witnessing, but I did not ask many questions. As I was standing at ease, waiting for the goat to be taken apart, the soldiers jumped on me, held me to the ground and took off all of my clothes. They tied my hands and feet together behind my back and plunged me into the goat’s skin.

  I was too shocked to put up much of a fight. Once inside the mire, I tried to keep myself from suffocating by poking my head out for air. But the soldiers pushed me down, adding water to the unsightly mix until I was completely drowned. While gasping for air and swallowing instead that greenish-red liquid, I tried to enlist the only aid I knew: I called out for my Mam, but she remained indoors, crying.

  Millennia passed and I was still in the goat’s skin. The kingdom on Earth rotted away and vanished. The three pillars supporting the Earth, anchoring it to the universe, gave in and the planet plunged into a different universe. It was a goat’s universe and goats ruled all creatures, on air, land and sea. The goat king, with a golden crown on his head and a thousand medals on his chest, was ferried about on a golden carriage pulled by six hyenas. All of the government officials were goats, and they often complained about the ungoatly behaviour of the sheep, the cow and the donkey. They were particularly dismayed by the lack of manners shown by dogs, who always lifted one leg to relieve their bladder; and they were simply incensed at the laziness of cats, who sat on windowsills grooming themselves, waiting for someone to take care of them.

  The goats tried to reform the world-and succeeded in many ways. They tamed humans and made pets of them, putting collars and chains round their necks before taking them out for walks; they trained frogs in meteorology, so that they could tell when it was not raining; they taught mice many languages, so that they could spy on their neighbours; and they trained horses to walk on their front legs, so that they could support the sky with their hind legs.

  The goats commanded earth and sky. Birds no longer flew, having forgotten how. The goats had stolen that knowledge from them, so that the sky was filled with goats, hovering over their property on earth. Aristocratic goats roamed the city streets, wearing monocles chained to the vests of their threepiece suits. These goats always massaged their goatees as they addressed the commoners—the sheep, the cows and the donkeys.

  When the aristocratic goats grew too large for their world, they decided to wage war on the world of lions and leopards. Their judgment became more and more clouded as they consumed oceans of arake. Then war broke out between the two worlds, but all the goats had for a weapon was the persuader—the bull’s penis. The lions and leopards descended on these pitiful animals, destroying their properties and killing them mercilessly. Hundreds of goat years passed in war. The goat civilization crumbled. The only pillar supporting their world gave way and their planet was plunged into oblivion.

  The goats’ planet fell through thousands of universes, which were clumped together like bubbles of soap, before the planet lost its momentum and came to rest in one of them—our universe. I awoke with the sad knowledge that I had come back to a place where goats were ruled by humans.

  BOOK TWO: CLOUDS

  FEKADU’S WORLD

  HAVING FINISHED my elementary schooling, I entered Grade 7 at the high school. My generation was fortunate. The high school in Jijiga had just been built and was ready to welcome us as soon as we left the old public school. In the past, students had had to leave town for much larger cities in order to further their education. The modern school system in Ethiopia was still in its infancy: there were just a handful of high schools to serve the millions of aspiring students. Only the financially privileged and the socially established could afford to send a child hundreds of kilometres away for what was commonly considered a luxury.

  The excitement of being among the most learned youths in town was intoxicating. The fact that we were going to be taught in classrooms unlike anything the town had ever seen before was so significant that we were often stopped in the street by students attending the old school who wanted to hear about the miracles.

  The first day we came to class the high school director called a meeting in front of his new office. He told us to remember always that our beloved school had been built with financial aid from the Government of Sweden, and that we should do our part for the generations to come by keeping the building and the furniture as they were now. We loved the Government of Sweden. We did not know, however, if Sweden was in the same universe.

  The only drawback to high school was the shortage of teachers. The teachers from the old public school were too ignorant to teach high school. We were to be taught by university graduates, who had been blessed with a degree. But that first year, and for many more to come, students had to miss one subject or another because of the lack of staff. Even after a teacher had agreed to come and we had celebrated the occasion by placing welcome signs on the wall, he might quickly leave us in the middle of the term, half-taught. We were always short of teachers, mostly in physics, mathematics and chemistry. There were too few graduates from the only university in the country, and teaching is seldom the first choice of those who possess a degree.

  The chemistry laboratory was the wonder of the town. In this room were strange things that the city of Jijiga had never before known. The walls were lined with beautifully crafted cupboards that had glass windows, complete with handles bearing the inscription of the lion. The cupboards were filled with all kinds of glasses and bottled liquids. One huge table sat at the front and many others were laid carefully around the room. The tables were unlike any others in Jijiga: they were made of a smooth and shiny Formica, which everyone thought came from the fourth universe. There were even high, three-legged stools cushioned like the King’s throne itself.

  We were led into the chemistry lab one day by the school director, who explained the use of various fixtures. We were not allowed to touch anything, because there were things in the room from which the atom bomb could be made. After the visit, the room was locked up, awaiting the appointment of a chemistry teacher.

  There was a watchman in the school whose job it was to make sure that no one stole anything. He walked around the compound, chasing students from buildings; we had no business being near the building during recess. But we always managed to sneak behind the chemistry lab and peer through the big windows, cheerfully anticipating the day we would be allowed to build the atom bomb.

  A few months passed and, as the items on the shelves started dwindling, it became alarmingly clear that someone was robbing us. Before the school year was out, all the bottles, beakers and tubes—even the stools—had disappeared. Only the tables remained, and that was because they were anchored to the concrete floor. Strangely, the building itself hadn’t been damaged. The door wasn’t broken and the windows were intact. Everyone, including the pigeons on the roof, was depressed by the events and wondered how this could happen under the watchman’s careful eye. Indeed, the watchman never left the compound before everyone was gone, every building was locked and the main gate was chained and padlocked.

  Only later was it discovered that the watchman was distressed at the idleness of the chemistry lab. Appalled that so many good things had been locked away, never having been used, he wisely elected to redistribute the items so that someone could make use of them. As long as nothing left the country, he reasoned, the equipment served its original and rightful purpose—benefiting the people of Jijiga.

  And so the markets were stocked with graduated cyl
inders, U-tubes, retorts, wide-mouthed bottles of various sizes, burettes, pipette tubes, evaporation dishes and incandescent burners. The big bottles were the best-sellers—many people could put them to good use. The graduated cylinders followed, as people realized that they could now be sure of the exact amount of arake they consumed. Afterwards, people began wondering what they could do with the rest of the merchandise.

  It is easy to imagine a nomad stopping by the stand, picking up a U-tube with rubber cork fittings and brass tubes sticking out of its ends and scratching his head, wondering what possible use he can put it to. Unable to figure out a purpose for the object, he reluctantly returns it to the table. Meanwhile a respectable lady snatches up a pipette tube and examines the oddly shaped device with the utmost interest. The tube, with its central bulging belly and tiny bulb ends, captivates her. Unlike the nomad, she quickly figures out a use for the strange tube. She decides that she will burn ood in its belly, so that the aroma will be retained longer, and buys three.

  The tea rooms of Jijiga received most of the bounty. The stools with high legs and comfortable cushions drew a lot of customers. The tea rooms dramatized the uniqueness of their establishments by serving tea filtered by laboratory funnels and delivered to the customer in half-full beakers. The sugar was presented in an evaporation dish and the milk was offered in a test tube.

  Aside from the loss of our beloved lab, the high school was a delight for us. Here, there was no persuader. The teachers, being young and graduates of university, were too civilized for that. If a student persistently made trouble for the teacher, the teacher resolved the problem democratically. He would dismiss the class, keeping only the troublesome student behind. The teacher would lock the door and windows of the classroom, move the first two rows of tables back to create an open space at the front, and invite the bully to a fist fight. The two would then knock each other down, tear each other’s shirt to shreds, and pull out tufts of each other’s hair, until one of them admitted defeat, or until the bell rang, announcing the end of the session. The rest of us would gather at the windows at the back of the building and cheer them on, so that they wouldn’t lose momentum. When the differences were settled, the door of the classroom opened and the pair would walk out together, wiping the blood from their noses and nursing their wounds.

  Not all teachers believed in settling differences by slugging it out. Some believed in dialogue. If, for instance, an idle student remarked on the bare scalp of a teacher by calling him “bald,” while disguising his voice, the teacher would not demand to know who the culprit was. Instead, he would continue writing on the blackboard with his back to the students, and provide a subtle retort: “Fuck your mother.”

  * * *

  HIGH SCHOOL WAS for me, as for many of my peers, a window onto the larger world, a world that had long been kept from our view by aging imperial drapes and our families’ careful planning of the vista. But when the veil of secrecy was unceremoniously thrown aside by students from the countryside—children of peasant families who had been given the rare opportunity of being educated past the elementary level—what we saw didn’t look right. Indeed, those of us who grew up in Ethiopia’s towns and cities had never guessed at the existence of such a complex land tenure system. It systematically excluded the vast majority of peasants from land ownership, forcing them to eke out a living by working the lands of the chosen few.

  There were four such students in my classroom alone, all boys. The girls were kept at home, to provide help, until they turned thirteen and were old enough to marry. The boys stood out in the small crowd because of their strange accent and their age. All four were much older than we were.

  One of the boys became a good friend of mine. His name was Fekadu Lemessa. He’d come from western Ethiopia, following his younger sister, who was married to a private in the infantry in Jijiga. When I first saw him, Fekadu was so poorly dressed that he did not even have footwear. Students made fun of his bare feet and odd accent, though not to his face. The boys knew that if they became embroiled in a fist fight with Fekadu, he could easily knock them out with one quick punch.

  Fekadu never actually knocked anyone out. One needs to associate oneself with a group before making an enemy, and Fekadu kept to himself. Even during recess, when students formed groups and set out to play ball or chatted away, he could be seen pacing up and down at the remote end of the compound, all by himself. Wondwossen and I thought the boy felt inhibited because of his modest background and found it difficult to integrate with the student body. We made more than one attempt to include him in our small group, but he invariably declined. A semester passed before the boy became trusting enough not to cross to the other side of the road when he saw someone he recognized coming his way. Yet another semester would go by before he betrayed a smile.

  His transformation achieved its highest rung, luring all sorts of curious glances, when he stopped to answer a greeting and shake hands. “Mighty glad you could help,” he’d say, at the slightest gesture of goodwill. Fekadu was from the Oromo tribe, but his Amharic was so archaic that he could have easily passed for an archbishop if he had wanted to. In the classroom, on those rare occasions when he stood up to speak, the students looked questioningly at each other, wondering whether or not to say “Amen” at the conclusion of his presentation.

  “What does your father do for a living?” I asked when I’d got to know him better.

  “He is a serf,” he replied.

  I asked him what a serf was.

  “A serf is a sharecropper,” he told me.

  When I asked him what a sharecropper was, he paused to take a good look at me. Reading the ignorance on my face, he proceeded to explain: “A sharecropper is someone who works the plot of a feudal lord for a share of the harvest.”

  I was puzzled. Why would anyone hire himself out as a labourer when he could easily apply to get a piece of the government’s land? In Jijiga, if you spoke refined Amharic and promised to make good use of the fields, your land request was easily granted. Surely, Fekadu’s father spoke polished Amharic.

  “How come your father did not apply for a piece of the government land?” I asked my friend.

  What I learned shattered my world. Menelik II, King of Kings of Ethiopia, was not the saint Mam had portrayed him as, but a merciless tyrant. I now knew he was at the heart of the tenancy problems. Fekadu told me that when the Emperor brought Western Ethiopia under his control in the late nineteenth century, he confiscated all the land and divided it into three parts: one-third each was then given to the Church, the State, and worthy local people—the latter being the traditional leaders of the region. The Church’s share was further divided among its hierarchy. The State’s share was also broken up and granted to various warlords who had helped to subdue the region and were now overseeing its administration. Since there was no paid army in those days, the warlords paid their officers and men in kind: they broke down parts of their own land share and gave them to their soldiers to work.

  The recipients of the State’s share of land were required to participate in the kingdom’s efforts to strengthen its might. In time of war they would provide mules, rations and other items necessary for the war effort. In some cases, they even equipped their tenants and led them into battle. The Emperor further rewarded these model citizens by exempting them from paying taxes, and permitting them a generous leeway in interpretation of the law.

  For conquered people, like Fekadu’s father, the loss of two-thirds of their land meant earning a much harsher living as tenants. The new landlords had little affection for these people, as they were their former enemy. For the privilege of working the land, the tenants paid in kind: as much as half of their produce went into the landlord’s coffers. They were also required to provide a tithe of their produce to the central government and another to the local governor. Though they were not owned by their landlords per se, and could theoretically pack up and leave, the position of these tenants was for all intents and purposes indistingui
shable from that of slaves.

  Despite these brutal circumstances, the tenant had one consolation: he was socially better off (although economically less so) than someone who earned his living as a skilled worker with no land to till. For only an outcast worked as a blacksmith, weaver, trader, skindresser or potter. Indeed, the peasant was too proud to be seen in public with one of these handymen, even when they were from the same ethnic group. During hard times, if the tenant was forced to hire himself out as one such labourer, he would travel many villages away from his home, where no one knew his name.

  In the northern and central highlands, home of the old Christian kingdom, agricultural land remained hereditary and inalienable. Each male descendant of a founder was entitled to the use of the land granted his ancestor. Thus the land was the communal property of all the descendants. When a boy was married he would be allocated a small parcel of the land to work on, and when someone died or ceased to farm, his lot would be divided among the others. No one was allowed to sell or mortgage his share of the land, or to transfer it to someone outside of the family. In this ancient culture, tenants were extremely rare.

  There were no feudal lords or tenants in Jijiga or the surrounding regions. It was a land of settlers and nomads who pretty much stayed out of each other’s way, unless it was to trade, collect taxes, or wage war. The nomads roamed the vast countryside, settling their tribal differences peacefully through the clan chief, as they had for hundreds of years. But even the Somalis were not perfect. Once every few rainy seasons, they found it absolutely necessary to shed some blood among themselves, and settle a few outstanding issues. Right about then, the kingdom would make its discreet appearance on the horizon, a few boxes of rifles in hand, encouraging them to resolve their differences without outside intervention.