Notes from the Hyena's Belly

by Nega Mezlekia

  The Amharas and other highland settlers were governed by the written laws, the Civil and Criminal Codes of Ethiopia. There were policemen in starched uniforms, shadowy lawyers whose identity no one guessed at, and judges taking bribes. People tended to settle their differences through elders, sorcerers and witches, though, since courts were expensive and the government’s mediation was considered a last resort. One had to bribe the clerks, ushers, interpreters, the man holding the washroom key, and the presiding judge in order to succeed in a court of law. It was a bidding war, where the litigant doubled and tripled his opponent’s offer until the opponent had completely exhausted the money stashed in his backyard, sold the jewels his wife had inherited from her ancestors, and even mortgaged their centuries-old bed.

  The judge in Jijiga was a very respected man, a pillar of the community. Sought after for wedding ceremonies, the settling of family disputes, and to recommend the right herbal medicine for unique afflictions, the judge attended all social occasions, and never missed observing a Sabbath. The Church regarded him as angelic. Four priests, six monks and nine deacons had already vouched for his saintliness, recommending that he be given the status of sainthood when he retired from this mundane world. The Archbishop in Addis Ababa, however, remained unconvinced. He demanded further evidence in the form of visible works—in the footsteps of St. Tekle Haimanot, whose noble deeds were written all over the northern highlands—before he would even consider granting such a monumental request, placing himself firmly between the judge and the mighty gates of Heaven.

  Many parishioners of the Church of St. Michael in Jijiga believed that if the judge could raise enough money to build a bigger and better church, to be named after the venerable St. Gabriel, the Archbishop would be shamed into naming him a saint immediately after his death. Building such a church would cost forty thousand birr. So it was not, after all, the Archbishop who stood between the judge and the pearly gates, but forty thousand birr.

  The people of Jijiga knew that the judge took bribes, but they also understood that his many expenses could not possibly be met by a modest government salary. The judge had seven growing daughters, a mansion with thirteen bedrooms, three housemaids, two guards in blue uniform, a Land Rover that required frequent waxing, and a wife who worshipped far too many saints—she was a member of nine Tsewas. The judge also needed to raise forty thousand birr for the Other World.

  Though the judge took bribes, he never permitted the money and favours he received to get in the way of his judgment. It was, after all, an open court. The bribe’s only consequence took the form of a hulking man who stood at the door to the courtroom, blocking evidence and restraining witnesses.

  The courtrooms of Jijiga were open to the public, so the populace could witness democracy at work. Once, I was dumbstruck when the presiding judge ruled that a middle-aged man who had thirty-two stab wounds in his chest, as well as a gashing bullet wound to the crotch and a severed head that had been discovered four days later in a far-off village, had committed suicide. I remember thinking that the learned judge had made a terrible mistake, but quickly realized that he could not have reached any other verdict, as all of the evidence and witnesses were missing from the court.

  As a young boy who’d grown up inspired by this democratic atmosphere, it was a shock to learn about the existence of such a monster as the “Feudal Lord” who kept a world of peasants on his leash, deciding what crops they would grow and what their share of the harvest would be. I asked many questions, but above all, I wondered why ownership of land, which in my boyish imagination was no different from any other personal possession, should require a complex tenure system, and armies of musketeers for enforcement.

  THE DEVIL-TAMERS

  MY INTEREST in the political life of Ethiopia grew steadily in the 1960s. During school recess, Wondwossen and I listened while Fekadu told us in his ancient drawl about the difficulties of life in the countryside. I’d come to know a great deal about serfdom, but the one subject I could not entirely fathom was a feudal lord running his own prison cell.

  At home, Mam and I talked about the things I’d learned from Fekadu. She always heard me out with unfaltering interest, even while attending to her kitchen chores, and never contradicted the story. Not that it was new to her, but hearing it from me must have given her a new perspective. She would sigh and conclude each session by reminding me that Ethiopia was a large, diverse and complex country.

  One day, Mam asked me to bring Fekadu home for lunch. She took an immediate liking to the boy, giving him Dad’s old clothes and shoes. Fekadu never failed to say “mighty glad,” bowing until he almost touched the ground when receiving each gift. Mam did not feel comfortable with his expression of gratitude and asked him to be a little more at ease. But that was like asking a bird not to sing, a hyena not to laugh.

  Though Dad’s clothes were a little too big for Fekadu, the shoes must have been too tight, because he cut a small window for his little toe. I was always distracted by his wiggling little toe—it looked like a tiny mouse trying to emerge from a cave it had outgrown.

  Fekadu soon got a part-time job doing laundry for some of the schoolteachers, and running errands for housewives, so Wondwossen and I seldom saw him after school. We hung around with boys from other groups, talking about the same subject: the feudal lord and his modern-day slaves. As word trickled in from young people in much bigger cities, it seemed to us that the entire student body in the nation was, somehow, entranced by the same issue.

  We believed that serfdom must have been introduced without the knowledge of Emperor Haile Selassie. After all, we had shaken hands with the King, receiving a crisp one-birr bill, when he visited the school. He did not seem like the kind of person who would stand by and watch a feudal lord herd a world of serfs to his private jail. Hadn’t His Highness outlawed the slave trade while still a young man, impressing the world outside, and earning the nation a seat in the venerable League of Nations? How could the same king, at the summit of his power, stand by and watch while millions were held under a thinly disguised form of slavery?

  Haile Selassie was a hero not only here at home but all over the wide expanse of sunny Africa. Hadn’t he, for instance, intervened in the Sudanese civil war, when our northern neighbours were cutting one another’s throats in the most savage way? And hadn’t he successfully mediated peace among them, shaming his kinsman Christ, who had failed to achieve just that? And didn’t he go on to found the Organization of African Unity, breaking the ground for a towering building in Addis Ababa where leaders of African nations would gather each year and whisper in corridors about how to quash uprisings and unleash the most effective coup?

  Certainly if the Emperor had been aware of the full extent of the rural problem, of the atrocious ways in which a few landowners were governing the vast countryside, he would have done something about it. One couldn’t expect a single person, even if he was the King of Kings of Ethiopia, to know everything that went on in his vast domain. Someone had to alert His Highness, and we, the most learned youth of Jijiga, along with many other students, believed it to be our patriotic duty to do just that.

  But how could one get such a sensitive message across to the Emperor, past all those Royal Guards, fortune-tellers and Devil-tamers? Should we send petitions through the Post Office? But what if the feudal lords got hold of the package and came after us?

  Finally, we concluded that the best way of getting the message across was by cutting out the postman and the Devil-tamer. We would make public demonstrations along the major streets of Jijiga, past every government building, waving placards and chanting: “Land to the Tiller!” Jijiga had never seen any form of demonstration before. We were thrilled to be the first to bring yet one more novelty to this dusty city.

  Five students, including myself, volunteered to organize the rally. We prepared the placards with the “Land to the Tiller!” motto clearly written in big black ink letters on a white background. On the appointed day we sent coded mess
ages to each classroom so that the students would be ready. The piece of paper bearing the coded note was passed from hand to hand, desk to desk, before the classroom doors opened and smiling faces emerged. They came out in ones and twos, to the complete bewilderment of the teacher, who was not aware of the revolution brewing under his nose until the buildings had been completely vacated.

  In all, two hundred students gathered on the football field, cheering and radiating confidence under the light breeze of a spring morning. We were about to change the world for the better. The teachers, the school director and the rest of the staff congregated near the school flag, wondering what was happening and who was responsible for the uprising. We ignored them. Today we were the leaders, the teachers of a new lesson.

  We quickly formed a ragtag line and proceeded towards the unknown. Some overzealous students suggested that we break a few windows in the School Administration Building to mark the occasion, but they were drowned with criticism. No window-breaking. No insults. The only words to be repeated, loud and clear, were those written on the placards. The only action to be taken was to march peacefully to the government offices, to the main market, downtown and then back to school. Then we would take the rest of the day off.

  As we proceeded to the City Hall, our procession attracted a great deal of attention—more, in fact, than we could ever have imagined. The populace of Jijiga was too stunned to breathe. All eyes were on us. Even the street dogs, which had seen all manner of bizarre acts in their reckless lives and were inured to anything that did not affect them personally, stopped their bickering and watched our small demonstration. The dogs stared at each of us with puzzlement, tilting their heads first one way and then the other. Their attention was drawn to what we held over our heads. The dogs read the placards, twice. Then they became engaged in a heated argument about what “Land to the Tiller!” meant and how it would affect their territories, the lines of which were painstakingly redrawn every few seconds.

  A camel laden with firewood piled sky-high, stood stock-still in the middle of a crossroads watching us. A young soldier, driving an army colonel in full uniform, honked at the camel. The camel pissed on his Jeep. The Somali nomad pulled the beast by the rope tied to its upper lip, savagely tearing the lip in two. The lip bled. The camel’s mouth exuded white froth, but the beast held its ground. The camel wanted to know what was going on, pleading with passersby, in his guttural voice, to read the placards for him. Camels don’t read Amharic, as they are uncivilized. A sheep nibbling a banana peel decided to help. It read the placards with one quick glance. Looking up at the curious camel, the sheep pronounced: “B-a-a-a-a-a-d!”

  The City Hall compound was guarded by an armed policeman who was housed in a tiny wooden sentry box. His head appeared at two-second intervals, bobbing outwards before retreating back into the box. He was startled awake from his catnap by our noise. He fumbled with his gun, and his flyers. For a brief moment he was not sure if he was still napping, turning a new page in his dream. But our deafening noise could have awoken even the dead. The guard raised his rifle threateningly, but unsure of whether to point the barrel at us or not, he swept the gun before us, drawing a line in the air that we understood not to pass.

  The guard kept us in check for a long moment, until someone made a flurry of telephone calls. We were finally allowed to proceed. But no one came out of the grey, mysterious buildings to greet us. We could make out faces glued to the windows of the rooms upstairs, and on the ground floors there were some curious figures in the doorways. As we approached each building, the faces disappeared from view. But that didn’t deter us. We marched up and down the driveways twice, shouting our mottoes, until we were convinced that there was not a single soul in the building who could later blame us for keeping him in the dark.

  Our next destination was the Municipality Building, but we were intercepted halfway by policemen wielding heavy clubs. We hadn’t expected to be disrupted by the police. We hadn’t broken any windows or street lights or even insulted the Governor’s maid. Certainly, there was some misunderstanding. If we could only get a bit closer to them, if they could only read what we had written on the placards, we would see comprehension spread across the face of each officer, who would say: “Our mistake! Pardon us! Allow us to escort you through the southern quarters of town, as no one can tell what those temperamental Somalis are capable of!”

  We took a few measured steps forward, when all the wrath and anger that had long been held under a tight lid in the murky fortress at the end of town showed itself. We received a rude and violent awakening. Now we knew why the police had been recruited from a hostile tribe more than 1,500 kilometres away and kept isolated, speaking Amharic among themselves in a strange accent. The proof was now on the street, snapping tender bones, spraying virgin blood.

  With the ferocity of a black lion whose territory had been violated, whose females and young were held in siege by unrelenting hyenas, the police attacked, chasing us up and down the open field, crushing our bones with their boots. The first to fall were those the beast identified as the patriarchs—those holding the placards. But very soon everyone had felt their hard wooden clubs.

  I doubled up on the first impact, as the club hit my skinny thigh, and rolled on the gravel road, screaming. I watched, helplessly, as scores of others fell around me with bloody faces and broken arms. Some were punched in the stomach so hard that they rolled towards the open ditch like soccer balls that had got out of hand.

  I struggled to stand, but my wounded leg had completely given out on me. Fearing that the Devil-tamers would soon return to finish me off, I dragged myself across a thorny field and headed for a compound on the near side of the road. It was a residence, fenced with tightly spaced barbed wire. I pulled myself through the wire, shredding my clothes and skin into a thousand long, narrow pieces in the process.

  Still fearing for my life, I limped through the first open gate I saw, which brought me into a very narrow alley. In front of me was the open gate of another compound, and I made for that, pushing aside the bewildered housemaid who was emptying some trash into a garbage container. The maid cried. The dogs barked. I tripped on the protruding root of a tree inside the compound and collapsed on the ground.

  When I raised my head, I saw a burly man in uniform wielding a heavy black club. Unceremoniously, and without asking any questions, the man grabbed me by the lapel of my jacket and started dragging me towards the front yard.

  “Stop,” commanded a female voice.

  A startlingly beautiful woman in her mid-twenties came into the garden. The woman regarded me carefully, her face changing colour as she sensed my agony. “Who has done this to you?” she inquired, with mounting concern. When I told her who it was and why, a fleeting smile passed over her sweet face. “So that’s what it is?” she responded, waving the guard away and leading me into the garden, her arm around my shoulder. She had heard the commotion outside, but thought that a Somali nomad had dismantled his helmet-shaped hut, bound the contraption to the back of his camel, and then tangled his cargo in a power line, getting himself into trouble with the irate neighbours.

  The young lady was aghast that the children of decent families, such as her own, should be subjected to barbaric treatment for doing what children had always done: silly things. Her long, unkempt hair and transparent dress seemed to amplify her beauty, as she asked me questions and dressed my wounds. She took me to a faucet on a lone standing pipe in the garden and washed my hair. “The cold water will calm your nerves,” she said, still smiling.

  I was transfixed by those large and sweet eyes, eyes that had not been reddened and dried by the eternal dusty winds of Jijiga. She must have been very rich to live in one of the villas that had recently sprouted in the midst of the city. The building was exotic; even the fence of the compound was unique, being only two feet high, and topped with ornamental iron bars. This couldn’t possibly protect her from the evil outside, I thought. Then I remembered the brute in uniform who ha
d dashed to the backyard the minute he heard the dogs barking, in order to confront the trespasser.

  “I want to send someone over to your place so your mother knows that you are fine,” she said, flashing her white teeth. “You know I can’t let you go out now. Those animals will pounce on you before you turn the first corner.”

  I ached to go and find out what had happened to my friends. I could see through the dark bars of the fence that the world had resumed its usual rhythm. Hawkers were shouting out loud. Donkeys carrying jerricans full of water criss-crossed the road, farting. And a street goat, the most reliable of all informants, showed itself to me. The goat jumped onto the fence, poked its head through the iron bars, and looking straight in my eyes nodded its head twice, telling me that the world outside was back to its normal chaos and that I need not stay locked away any more.

  “I am going,” I announced.

  “No you don’t. Can you go past him?” the lady challenged, pointing at the compound guard who was still hovering over me. “Don’t be silly. Wait until your mother gets here.”

  The young lady dispatched one of her maids to fetch Mam.

  It did not take long for Mam to dash in, panting. Mam seemed to have forgotten her manners. She did not greet the lady of the house, or acknowledge any of the people standing around me. She slumped on the concrete stair beside me, and started unravelling one of the bandages on my arm to examine my wound. Her hand was shaking. Satisfied that it was nothing but a ragged ugly line, Mam went on to examine my legs and my back. All this time, she did not say a word to anyone, completely drowned in her fears and concerns. Finally, glad that I was still in one piece, that I had once more proven to the world that I had nine lives, Mam let out a deep sigh. She covered her eyes with the end of her netela and silently wailed. These were cries of jubilation.