Yes, looking was a provocation, it was blackmail, and everyone was afraid to lift his eyes, afraid that somewhere—in the air, in a corner, behind an arras, in a crack—he would see a shining eye, like a dagger. And still the unanswered questions—Who was guilty? Who had conspired?—hung over the Palace like a thundercloud. To tell the truth, everyone was suspect, and rightly so, if three of the people closest to the Emperor, men of whom the Emperor had been so proud, in whom he had placed his greatest trust, could put a gun to his head. Think about it. Mengistu, Workneh, and Dibou belonged to the chosen handful who always had access to His August Majesty, and even, if the necessity arose, had the unique right to enter the bedchamber and wake him from his sleep. Imagine, my friend, the sort of feelings His Benevolent Majesty went to bed with from then on, never knowing whether he would wake up in the morning. Oh, what ignoble burdens and distresses come with power.
And how could we save ourselves from suspicion? There is no deliverance from suspicion! Every way of behaving, every action, only deepens the suspicions and sinks us the more. If we begin to justify ourselves, alas! Immediately we hear the question, “Why, son, are you rushing to justify yourself? There must be something on your conscience, something you would rather hide, that makes you want to justify yourself.” Or if we decide to show an active attitude and goodwill, again we hear the comments, “Why is he showing off so much? He must want to hide his villainy, his shameful deeds. He’s out to lie in ambush.” Again it’s bad, maybe worse. And, as I said, we were all under suspicion, all slandered, even though His Most Gracious Majesty said nothing directly or openly, not a word—but the accusation showed so in his eyes and his way of looking at his subjects that everyone crouched, fell to the ground, and thought in fear, “I am accused.” The air became heavy, thick, the pressure low, discouraging, disabling, as if one’s wings had been clipped, as if something had broken inside.
His Masterful Highness knew that after such a shock some people would start to become embittered, to grow gloomily silent, to lose enthusiasm, to give in to doubts and questions, to lose hope, to grumble, to surrender to weakness and decay—and that is why he started a purge in the Palace. It was not an instantaneous and complete purge, because His Majesty opposed impious and noisy violence, preferring an exchange in careful doses, thought out, which would keep the old residents in check and in constant fear while at the same time opening the Palace to new people. These were people who wanted to live well and make careers for themselves. They came from all over the land, directed to the Palace by the Emperor’s trusted deputies. They had no close knowledge of the capital’s aristocracy, but because of their low birth, crudeness, and clumsy thinking, they were held in contempt by the aristocracy and felt fear and aversion for the salons. Therefore they formed their own coterie, keeping close to the person of His Most Unparalleled Highness. The kindly grace of our venerable ruler made them drunk with a feeling of omnipotence, yet how dangerous that feeling of omnipotence could be in someone who wanted to disturb the evening atmosphere of an aristocratic salon or to irritate too long and too importunately the company gathered there! Oh, great wisdom and tact are needed to conquer a salon! Wisdom—or machine guns, which, my dear friend, you can see for yourself when you look at our tortured city today.
Gradually, these “personal people,” our Emperor’s chosen ones, began to fill the Palace offices, despite grumbling from members of the Crown Council, who considered the new favorites third-rate, falling far short of what ought to be required to serve the King of Kings. Yet this grumbling only proved the downright shameful naïveté of the Crown Council members, who saw weakness where His Highness saw strength, who could not comprehend the principle of strengthening by depreciating, and who remained oblivious to the fire and smoke raised only yesterday by those who had been elevated long ago and had proved themselves weak.
One important and useful characteristic of the new people was that they had no past, had never taken part in conspiracies, trailed no bedraggled tails behind them, and had nothing shameful to hide in the lining of their clothes. Indeed, they didn’t even know anything about conspiracies, and how were they going to find out about them if His Noble Majesty had forbidden the history of Ethiopia to be written? Too young, brought up in distant provinces, they could not know that in 1916 His Highness himself had come to power thanks to a conspiracy; that aided by European embassies, he had staged a coup and eliminated the legal heir to the throne, Lij Yasu. That in the face of the Italian invasion he had sworn publicly to spill his blood for Ethiopia and then, when the invaders marched in, had gone by boat to England and spent the war in the quiet little town of Bath. That later he had developed such a complex about the leaders of the partisans who had remained in the country to fight the Italians that when he returned to the throne he gradually eliminated them or shoved them aside, while granting favor to the collaborators. And that he had done away with, among others, the great commander Betwoded Negash, who came out against the Emperor and wanted to proclaim a republic in the 1950’s. Many other events come to mind, but in the Palace it was forbidden to talk about them, and, as I said, the new people could not know about them and did not show much curiosity. And as they had no old connections, their only chance for survival was to keep themselves tied to the throne. Their only support: the Emperor himself. And thus His Most Extraordinary Majesty created a force that, during the last ten years of his reign, propped up the Imperial throne that Germame had undermined.
Z. S.-K.:
. . . and as the purge went on, every day when the Hour of Assignments—and therefore of demotions—drew near, we old Palace functionaries were overcome by shivering fits as we sat behind our desks. Everyone was trembling for his fate, ready to do anything to keep them from pulling that piece of furniture from under his elbows. During Mengistu’s trial, fear reigned behind the desks, fear that the general would start accusing everyone of having been in on the conspiracy. Even very distant participation, even clandestine clapping, led one right to the noose. So when Mengistu pointed at no one, holding his tongue until the Day of Judgment, a winged sigh of relief arose from behind those desks. But a different fear immediately replaced the fear of the gallows: the fear of the purge, of personal destruction. His Most Benevolent Highness no longer hurled people into dungeons, but very simply sent them home from the Palace, and this sending home meant condemnation to oblivion. Until that moment you were a man of the Palace, a prominent figure, a leader, someone important, influential, respected, talked about, and listened to; all this gave one a feeling of existence, of presence in the world, of leading a full, important, useful life. Then His Highness summons you to the Hour of Assignments and sends you home forever. Everything disappears in a second. You stop existing. Nobody will mention you, nobody will put you forward or show you any respect. You may say the same words you said yesterday, but though yesterday people listened to them devoutly, today they don’t pay any attention. On the street, people pass you with indifference, and you can already see that the smallest provincial functionary can tell you to go to hell. His Majesty has changed you to a weak, defenseless child and thrown you to a pack of jackals. Good luck!
And then, God forbid, what if they start investigating, sniffing around, poking into things? Although sometimes I think it’s better after all if they start to sniff around. Because if they start to sniff around, at least you can come back into existence, if only in a damned and negative way. Still, at least you have being again, you stop drowning, you get your head above water, so that they say, “Look! He’s still around.” Otherwise, what remains? Superfluity. Nothingness. Doubt that you had ever been alive. There was such a fear of the precipice in the Palace that everyone tried to hold on to His Majesty, still not knowing that the whole court—though slowly and with dignity—was sliding toward the edge of the cliff.
P. M.:
Indeed, my friend, from the moment smoke rose from the Palace a sort of negativism started to flood over us. I have trouble pinning it down, bu
t you could feel negativism all around. You noticed it everywhere on people’s faces, faces that seemed diminished and abandoned, without light or energy, in what people did and how they did it. There was negativism in what they said without speaking; in their absent being, as if shrunken, switched off; in their burnt-out existence; in their short-range, small-stuff thinking; in their vegetable-patch, cottage-garden digging; in their weed-grown, overcast look; in the whole atmosphere; in all the immobility—despite the moving around—of the daily grind; in the climate; in the mincing steps. In everything you could feel the negativism flooding over us.
Even though the Emperor went on issuing decrees and striving to get things done, got up early and never rested, all the same the negativism was there, growing all the time, because from the day Germame committed suicide and his brother was captured to be hanged in the main square of the town, a negative system started operating between people and things. People seemed unable to control things; things existed and ceased to exist in their own malicious ways, slipping through people’s hands. Everyone felt helpless before the seemingly magic force by which things autonomously appeared and disappeared, and nobody knew how to master or break that force. This feeling of helplessness, of always losing, always falling behind the stronger, drove them deeper into negativism, into numbness, into dejection, into depression, into hiding like partridges. Even conversation deteriorated, losing its vigor and momentum. Conversations started but somehow never seemed to be completed. They always reached an invisible but perceptible point, beyond which silence fell. The silence said, Everything is already known and clear, but clear in an obscure way, known unfathomably, dominating by being beyond helping. Having confirmed this truth by a moment of silence, the conversation changed its direction and moved on to a different subject, a trivial, second-rate, secondhand subject.
The Palace was sinking, and we all felt it, we veterans in the service of His Venerable Majesty, we whom fate had saved from the purge. We could feel the temperature falling, life becoming more and more precisely framed by ritual but more and more cut-and-dried, banal, negative.
He goes on to say that even though the Emperor considered the December upheaval to be over and done with and never returned to the subject, the coup staged by the Neway brothers continued to have destructive consequences for the Palace. As time passed, these consequences grew more powerful rather than weaker, and they changed the life of the Palace and the Empire. Having suffered such a blow, the Palace would never again know true, sweet peace.
Things were gradually changing in town, too. The first mention of disturbances appeared in the secret reports by the police. Fortunately, as my informant says, these were not yet disturbances on a great, revolutionary scale, but rather—at first—tremors, slight oscillations, ambiguous murmurs, whispers, sniggering, a sort of excessive heaviness in people, lying around, drooping, a certain messiness, all expressing some kind of avoidance and refusal. He admits that cleanup operations couldn’t start on the basis of these reports. The information was too vague, even comfortingly innocent; it stated that something was hanging in the air, without saying precisely what and where. And without specifics, where was one to send the tanks, and in what direction order the shooting? Usually the reports stated that these murmurs and whispers came from the university—a new one, the only institution of higher learning in the country—in which, from God knows where, there had appeared skeptical, unfriendly individuals, ready to spread harmful and unverified calumnies for the sole purpose of causing new anxieties for the Emperor. He goes on to say that the monarch, in spite of his advanced age, maintained a perspicacity amazing to those around him, and that he understood better than his closest followers that a new era was coming and it was time to pull together, to bring things up to date, to speed up, to catch up. To catch up, and even to overtake. Yes, he insists, even to overtake. He confesses (today one can talk about it) that a part of the Palace was reluctant to embrace these ambitions, muttering privately that instead of giving in to the temptation of certain novelties and reforms, it would be better to curb the Western inclinations of youth and root out the unreasonable idea that the country should look different, that it should be changed.
The Emperor, however, listened to neither the aristocratic grumbling nor the university whispers, believing as he did that all extremes are harmful and unnatural. Demonstrating innate concern and foresight, the Emperor widened the scope of his power and involved himself in new domains, manifesting these new interests by introducing the Hour of Development, the International Hour, and the Army-Police Hour, between four and seven in the afternoon. With the same goals in mind, the Emperor created appropriate ministries and bureaus, branch offices, and commissions, into which he introduced hosts of new people, well behaved, loyal, devoted. A new generation filled the Palace, energetically carving out careers. It was, recalls P.M., the beginning of the 1960’s.
P. M.:
A kind of mania seized this mad and unpredictable world, my friend: a mania for development. Everybody wanted to develop himself! Everyone thought about developing himself, and not simply according to God’s law that a man is born, develops, and dies. No, each one wanted to develop himself extraordinarily, dynamically, and powerfully, to develop himself so that everyone would admire, envy, talk, and nod his head. Where it came from, no one knows. Like a herd of sheep, people went crazy with blind greed, and it sufficed that somewhere at the other end of the world someone developed himself; immediately everyone wants to de velop himself. Immediately they press, storm, urge that they be developed, too, be raised, that they catch up—and it’s enough, my friend, to neglect these voices for you to get mutinies, shouts, rebellions, negativism, frustration, and refusal. Yet our Empire had existed for hundreds, even thousands of years without any noticeable development and all the while its leaders were respected, venerated, worshiped. The Emperors Zera Jakob, Towodros, Johannes all were worshiped. And who would ever have gotten it into his head to press his face to the floor in front of the Emperor and beg to be developed?
However, the world began to change. Our Emperor, innately infallible, noticed and generously agreed with this, seeing the advantages and charms of costly novelty, and since he had always had a weakness for all progress—indeed, he even liked progress—his most honorably benevolent desire for action manifested itself in the unconcealed desire to have a satiated and happy people cry for years after, with full approval, “Hey! Did he ever develop us!” Thus, in the Hour of Development, between four and five in the afternoon, His Highness showed particular vivacity and keenness. He received processions of planners, economists, and financial specialists, talking, asking questions, encouraging, and praising. One was planning, another was building, and so, in a word, development had started. And how. His Indefatigable Majesty would ride out to open a bridge here, a building there, an airport somewhere else, giving these structures his name: the Haile Selassie Bridge in Ogaden, the Haile Selassie Hospital in Harara, the Haile Selassie Hall in the capital, so that whatever was created bore his name. He also laid cornerstones, supervised construction, cut ribbons, took part in the ceremonial starting of a tractor, and everywhere, as I said, he talked, asked questions, encouraged, and praised. A map of the Empire’s development hung in the Palace, on which little arrows, stars, and dots lit up, blinking and twinkling so that the dignitaries could gladden their eyes with the sight when His Venerable Majesty pressed a button, although some saw in all this the proof of the Emperor’s growing eccentricity. But foreign delegations, whether African or from the wider world, obviously delighted in the map, and upon hearing the Emperor’s explanation of the little lights, arrows, and dots, they too talked, asked questions, encouraged, and praised.
And that is how it would have gone on for years, to the joy of His Supreme Highness and his dignitaries, had it not been for our grumbling students, who, since Germame’s death, had started to raise their heads more and more, to tell horrendous stories, and to speak unreasonably and insultingly against
the Palace. Instead of showing their gratitude for the benefits of enlightenment, those youngsters launched themselves on the turbid and treacherous waters of slander and faction. Alas, my friend, it is a sad truth that, despite His Majesty’s having led the Empire onto the path of development, the students reproached the Palace for demagoguery and hypocrisy. How, they said, can one talk of development in the midst of utter poverty? What sort of development is it when the whole nation is being crushed by misery, whole provinces are starving, few can afford a pair of shoes, only a handful of subjects can read and write, anyone who falls seriously ill dies because there are neither hospitals nor physicians, ignorance and illiteracy hold sway everywhere, barbarity, humiliation, trampling underfoot, despotism, exploitation, desperation, and on and on in this tone, dear visitor. Reproaching, calumniating ever more arrogantly, they spoke out against sweetening and dressing things up—taking advantage of His Clement Highness, who only rarely ordered that the mutinous rabble which spilled from the university gates in a larger mass each year be fired upon.
Finally the time came when they brought out their impu dent whim of reforming. Development, they said, is impossible without reform. One should give the peasants land, abolish privileges, democratize society, liquidate feudalism, and free the country from dependence on foreigners. From what dependence? I ask. We were independent. We had been an independent country for three thousand years! That’s thoughtlessness and running off at the mouth for you. Besides, I ask, how do you reform, how do you reform without everything falling apart? How do you move something without bringing it all tumbling down? But was one of them ever capable of asking himself such a question? To develop and feed everybody simultaneously is also difficult, because where will the money come from? Nobody runs around the world passing out dollars. The Empire produces little and has nothing to export. So how do you fill the treasury? Our Supreme Leader treated that problem with kindly and provident solicitude, considering it a matter of the utmost importance and manifesting his concern incessantly during the International Hour.
The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat Page 8