Notes from the Hyena's Belly

by Nega Mezlekia

  The lady of the house sat quietly by Mam’s side. Putting her arm around Mam’s shoulder, she comforted her. Mam turned her head away from the lady as she dried her eyes and blew her nose into a handkerchief that she had pulled out of her bosom.

  “How can I ever thank you?” Mam mumbled, looking at the mistress of the estate with pleading eyes.

  “It was nothing,” the young lady replied, still smiling. “It felt like having my own brother around. Nega looks, in many ways, like my own young rebel. The last time I saw him was almost a year ago. I am from Nazareth, you know,” she added.

  The woman invited both Mam and myself in. The two of them sat in the living room, chatting. I was taken to the dining room and served like a visiting dignitary by a young maid in uniform. Once in a while the mistress of the house beckoned the maid, advising her what sort of tidbits to include in my menu. I ate my fill, and was about to fall asleep in my chair when Mam announced that it was time for us to leave. We thanked my benefactor, the maids and the guard. Mam invited the young lady to come over with her husband for the coming holiday; the woman gladly accepted the invitation. I wished that Mam hadn’t included the woman’s husband.

  On the way home, Mam broke the bad news to me. She told me that, as a result of our irresponsible adventures, over a hundred students had been roughed up by the police; that seven students, two low-flying angels, and a devil in a wheelchair had been injured so badly that they had to be hospitalized. The only fatality of the day was an aging stork who, like many of us, neglected to make a timely retreat. The street dogs were looking into the funeral arrangements. It was, indeed, a day of indiscriminate mayhem.

  All this because we suggested land reform? It was hard to grasp. There had to be a mistake, a breakdown in the chain of command.

  The time of reckoning was the following morning. When the school gate opened, dignitaries were gathered in the compound anxiously waiting to offer apologies and promise a thorough investigation of the terrible error. That was what I appreciated most about the monarchy. When the kingdom was challenged by an opponent, and felt justified in flexing its brute muscle, it dispatched 10,000 soldiers, 110 tanks and 28 cannons to subjugate 200 nomads with old, cranky rifles. And now, when it felt that it had done wrong, and was ready to offer apologies and make rectifications, the kingdom dispatched the Governor of Jijiga, the Chief of Police, two generals from the Mechanized Brigade and a whole array of lower brass. Even the school director was dressed in a three-piece suit, with matching necktie.

  We were told to assemble in front of the Chemistry Lab. The dignitaries led the way, climbing the three low steps of the porch in the most refined manner, assembling at the centre of the platform in the proper hierarchy. The military police stood facing us on the ground below, their backs to the wall, Uzi machine guns tightly held at their chests. The students arranged themselves in small clumps, which seemed reluctant to merge. The influential group could easily be identified, as the beautiful girls were with us.

  One of the generals gave orders for us to come closer for better communication. “Can somebody tell us what all the noise was about?” the same general continued. I was aching to spill my guts, to recount the atrocities committed by the police, which the high brass had obviously heard about but could not appreciate, as none of them had been dragged over the thorny fields or beaten like dumb cattle. I wanted to demand direct communication with the Emperor so that we could settle the “Land to the Tiller” issue once and for all. But I lost my nerve. I had never been a good speaker, and today my emotions got in the way.

  The general repeated the question. There was an eerie restlessness among the students. Dresses shuffled. Heads turned one way or the other, whispering. But no one volunteered to answer. Finally the general made the decision for us. Pointing at my friend Wondwossen, who was standing next to me and who was, even at that age, about six feet tall, thus standing out in the small crowd, the general commanded: “You, with the baseball hat, tell me what you were doing in the streets yesterday.”

  “We were…” Wondwossen began to reply when the general curtly cut him short.

  “Never say we. Say I. The only living soul in this great nation who can say we is Emperor Haile Selassie I, King of Kings of Ethiopia, Conqueror of the Lion of Judah. Never forget that!”

  “But I am speaking for all of us,” Wondwossen reasoned.

  “Aha! So, you are the leader of the uprising!”

  “No, I am not the leader. I happen to share the same belief as the others and march under the same motto.”

  “Then explain what your motto is.”

  “We were…”

  “There you go again! I told you never to say we!”

  At this point the other general saw the light. “What is your name?” he demanded, looking down at Wondwossen with undisguised contempt.

  “Wondwossen.”

  “Who is your father?”

  Wondwossen repeated his father’s name twice, but the general could not place him. If a student had reached high school in Jijiga, he must have come from a decent family. All decent families in town knew each other. Someone whispered something into the general’s ears.

  “Well! Well! Well!” the general beamed, his decorated chest heaving, “your father is a good friend of mine. I didn’t know that he had such a grown-up boy. I will let him know what a fine boy he is raising.”

  This didn’t sound quite right to us, but all of a sudden every student wanted to speak his mind. The small gathering turned into chaos. Someone threw a stone at the dignitaries, and the military police fired shots into the air. We dispersed. School was closed for another day. Now it was clear that the struggle awaiting us would be long and treacherous.

  * * *

  BEFORE THE SCHOOL year was out we held another demonstration. We were better prepared than the last time, but the outcome was no less disastrous. Most of us were rounded up and detained. But we didn’t spend the night in jail. Before sunset, our families came to the detention centre, escorted by the police chief. The chief made a speech in which he blamed our families for our unruliness. He expressed a wish that we would not meet again under similar circumstances, but if we did he would not be responsible for the things that might befall us, and our parents shouldn’t hold him responsible, as he had given them a timely warning.

  During the next year and many years to follow, like many of my peers, I was thrown into jail twice or more per year for advocating “Land to the Tiller!”

  The first time I spent a night in jail, I was only fourteen. It was a sobering experience. The jail was a rundown building with no windows in its cells. The concrete floor was broken into so many fragments that it took me a while to realize that it was not poorly laid gravel. The room was full of human faces. Every inmate had cut out a tiny strip of floor on which he slept or sat, never leaving his place unless he absolutely had to. Because of lack of space, fist fights were common.

  Half the jail inmates were old-timers—thieves, burglars, murder suspects. They preyed on the newcomers, demanding money, cigarettes and valuables. Money could buy you safety and also a space to sleep on. Sleeping had its own routine. Everybody lay on his side, breathing on the back of his neighbour—for there was no space to sleep on one’s back. There were no mattresses, blankets, bedsheets or pillows. Many used their shoes to prop up their heads. Every few hours the whole human tide received its cue from the man at the end of the line, and turned over. Those who spent more than a few nights in jail could do this drill while deeply asleep, I was told.

  In the small hours of the morning the jail room was raucously opened and a man in a deep state of inebriation was thrown in. The man stumbled, knocked over the urine bucket behind the door and spilled its contents on us. The poor fellow, who was already half asleep when he stumbled in, would be asleep for the next few days, for the old-timers beat him mercilessly. They finished with him only after thoroughly searching his pockets, taking his silver necklace and his shoes. We spent the balance of th
at night on our feet.

  * * *

  AS THE YEARS passed and the student demonstrations proved to be unrelenting, the police refined their response. Detention became longer. Torture routine. The persuader of the old school was replaced in jail by “The Snake,” a two-tongued whip fashioned by Satan himself in his own spare time. The whip cut through your skin and soul, burning so deeply into your flesh that you could smell it roasting for three days after.

  In the classroom, the teacher would call upon the largest of the students to restrain the trembling limbs of each boy who was whipped; in prison, the large silent boy was replaced by a variety of torture techniques. There was the “helicopter,” where the prisoner’s hands and legs were tied behind his back and a pole was hoisted through the rope, raising his body far above the floor. There was the “spread-eagle,” where the prisoner was stretched out like a piece of drying hide, his arms and legs tied to the far columns of the building. And the “pilgrim,” which involved suspending the prisoner by his hands, a canteen of water laced to his penis and balls.

  Torture was systematic. Indeed, it was a natural extension of childhood. By night children might fear the howls of the hyena, its distant cries charging the thin desert air with terror. But by day the hyena hides in the belly of the cactus and if one slits the belly open, the hyena wanders out—disoriented by the light, dazed and cowardly. In the morning we children would batter the daylight-dumb beast with stones and knock it with sticks, slowly destroying it. I don’t know why we did it, only that we did, and that it had always been that way.

  And so by turns we feared and struck the government. Systematic imprisonment and torture only refined the movement. We snuck under the cover of the desert darkness and painted slogans on the whitewashed buildings of downtown stores, spread handwritten pamphlets in the market stalls and the major streets, and always managed to appear in person during outdoor festivals holding the same old placards, “Land to the Tiller!”

  Years passed, but no change was effected. The movement became a divisive issue between the students and their families, who saw the uprising as little more than an attempt to destabilize the establishment. Fathers and sons would sit across from one another at the dining table in sullen silence. The Church had pronounced that when a son rose against his father it marked the end of the world: the proof was in the Bible. It had been foreseen many generations before by a young man in the barren mountains of the Jewish homelands. Civilizations had perished, great cities and monuments had been razed to the ground when the young rebelled against the old and decided to reshape the world consistent with their radical visions.

  We had the vision, but lacked the followers. The Somali nomads, who as a conquered people would elsewhere identify themselves with the student movement, turned a deaf ear. The land tenure system in Ogaden, as in many other pastoral regions, remained largely intact. The Amharas disliked the arid lowlands, as they feared that they might contract malaria there, and so they let these nomadic people administer their parched lands themselves. For the Somalis of Ogaden, land was common property. The various clans met from time to time to discuss how best to make use of grazing land or deal with a drying-up water hole; and, when there were insurmountable differences, they settled them the usual way, with guns.

  The student movement had become a predictable nuisance, to be dealt with by the persuasive boots of the police; by their mute, hard clubs. All the signs said that the monarchy would easily survive this uprising and last well into its third millennium. Then something happened in the northern highlands, where land tenancy had never been a problem, that ultimately changed the course of history.

  THE EXORCISTS

  THE MAIN RAINS failed. Seeds died before breaking out of the ground. Drought threatened millions of lives. But this was not the arid lowlands of the coastal regions around the Red Sea and Ogaden—it was the northern, temperate highlands of the Tigre and Wello provinces. The year was 1972.

  The loss of one or two harvests shouldn’t, normally, trigger a famine. These areas would have weathered the bad times had it not been for three significant factors. First, the rains in the preceding two seasons had been so erratic that the harvests had been minimal. Second, the government had failed to heed forewarnings and stock up on grain supplies. After all, Ethiopia had been subjected to similar conditions far too often for the government not to see the inevitable outcome. The 1965–66 famine, which had wiped out almost a third of the population of some of the same areas affected by the recent drought, was still in living memory. Third, Ethiopia’s farming practices were antiquated.

  * * *

  ETHIOPIA IS potentially a rich country: it possesses extensive tracts of fertile land with dependable rainfall, and mineral resources that include gold and platinum. Ethiopia could feed herself, and still export a great deal of agricultural produce. In other words, the 1973 famine was not an entirely natural disaster. Failure of the main rains had withered the affected areas, it is true, but the devastating consequences of the famine were largely man-made.

  The road to misery was paved when the government turned a blind eye to the systematic destruction of the nation’s forests. Only a century ago, 40 percent of the country was covered by trees, most of which were hundreds of years old; by 1973, only one-tenth of that remained. The destruction of the forests was swift. I had witnessed, in a mere decade, a densely forested highland region being transformed into a desolate landscape.

  Slaying the forests triggered a chain reaction. The soil, once shielded from the torrential tropical rain by the dense vegetation, was carried away. Each year 1.6 billion tons of fertile soil was lost to erosion, much of it settling in lakes and creeks, reducing the country’s supply of fresh water. Some of this soil ended up in neighbouring countries.

  With the soil gone, not only the farmland was lost but the rains also failed to replenish the groundwater. In many regions where there were once countless brooks and streams, water is now mined from a deep-lying aquifer. The depth of these wells increases from year to year, and in time the inevitable happens: the underground water reservoir is depleted, resulting in mass migrations of the people who depend on it.

  Ethiopia has the largest number of domesticated animals in Africa, eighth in the world. About 27 million cattle, 42 million sheep, 17 million goats and millions of camels roam the countryside, taking up 61 percent of the land. This is a mixed blessing for the country. The herds are responsible for a great deal of environmental damage, as overgrazing accelerates soil erosion.

  The pastoral regions can support only 21 percent of the cattle population, 25 percent of the sheep and 75 percent of the goat herd. A responsible government would harness the economic potential of these regions, while curbing the detrimental environmental effects, by building slaughterhouses and meat-packaging plants in these regions, encouraging the nomads to evaluate their wealth with a method other than a head count. The ravages of the relentless droughts are too well known to the nomads for them to turn down a sensible offer.

  The explosion of the human population is one factor that is seldom addressed. In 1960, when I was a tot, the population of Ethiopia was 20 million. By the time the 1972 drought swept the country, the population had almost doubled. In 1996, the population stood at 58 million. The United Nations reckons that, if the present trend is maintained, by the year 2050 Ethiopia will be the ninth most populated country in the world, with a population exceeding 200 million. Food production is unlikely to keep pace with the population growth.

  The archaic land tenure system also played a role in fostering the famine. The peasant had no incentive to enhance his production, since his share of the produce was limited to what the feudal lord deemed sufficient for his sustenance. Even during abundant harvests, the peasant seldom noticed an increase in his meagre granary.

  The peasant used a centuries-old, labour-intensive method of farming that required three or four runs over his plot before the seedbed was ready. The finely pulverized soil also aggravated the wind e
rosion problem. The seeds used by the farmer might have been resistant to the adverse elements, as a result of natural selection, but the yield was meagre. The various research centres in the country managed to produce varieties of seeds that both resisted the adverse elements and gave higher yields, but they did not make it to the peasant’s plot.

  Agriculture being the driving engine of Ethiopia’s economy, the attention it received from Haile Selassie’s regime was at best pitiful. Barely 2 percent of the national budget was allocated to this economic sector.

  The latest famine might have come into view in 1973, but it had been in the making for many, many years.

  * * *

  AS SOON AS THE main rains failed in 1972, the Ministry of Agriculture responded by conducting a survey, the results of which were submitted to the Council of Ministers. After careful deliberations, the policy-makers made two critical decisions: first of all to do nothing, in order to avoid embarrassment to the Emperor, who was portrayed to the world outside not just as the oldest ruler in sunny Africa, but also as a caring and considerate father figure; and secondly, to actively suppress any news of the drought or any talk of famine. So began a series of cover-ups that would ultimately lead to the demise of the monarchy.

  The human price of the royal indifference and unaccountability was 200,000 dead by the time the famine was harnessed. This is not surprising considering that the peasants lived hand-to-mouth, saving nothing for the next season. But there was much that could have been done. The drought was localized. There was surplus harvest in other regions of the country, which to the astonishment of the Devil himself was being sent out of the country. At the time, the government had the financial resources to purchase the surplus grain and distribute it among the needy. Ethiopia received more than half of the U.S. foreign aid to black Africa. Between 1952 and 1974, U.S. military aid to the regime was over $270 million, and economic aid was over $350 million, but the money was being saved for a rainy day and the rains didn’t come.