The tegadlai’s other main item of clothing also came with a story of ingenuity attached. Black plastic sandals were first introduced to Eritrea by Raffaello Bini, a Florentine who arrived in the region as a photojournalist in Mussolini’s invading army. Falling in love with Eritrea, he stayed to set up a shoe company in Asmara. Registering that ordinary Eritreans were in desperate need of footwear but couldn’t afford leather shoes, he imported machines and designed a cheap PVC sandal, nicknamed the ‘Kongo’ after Hong Kong, traditional source of plastic bric-àbrac. When the Derg regime seized Bini’s factories, his workers volunteered for the Front, taking their skills with them. In first Sudan and then Orota, they installed machinery to turn out the Kongo, melting down old car tyres instead of importing PVC. A dirt-cheap sandal that could be rinsed free of grit and repaired over a camp fire suited the EPLF’s requirements perfectly. ‘We used to play mind games with the Kongo, because we knew the Ethiopians were reading our tracks. The Sudanese, Orota and Asmara versions of the sandal were all slightly different, so we’d cut them in two or melt them over the fire and leave footprints that would make them think a unit from the Sudan was operating in the area, or that there were only farmers around when, in fact, the district was teeming with EPLF,’ remembers an ex-Fighter.
The British explorer Thesiger, drawn to austere vistas, believed that the harsher the landscape, the purer the mettle of those who live off it. Few experiences came harder than the Sahel and it encouraged a puritanical earnestness that lay at the other end of the moral spectrum to Kagnew’s drunken japes. Drugs, alcohol and gambling were all shunned. There was a spiritual element to this disapproval. ‘To pick the word freedom, you have to pray, you have to cleanse yourself, in the Biblical sense, wash your sins away,’ said one former unit leader. Another commander tried to explain the intensity of focus that developed amongst the Fighters. ‘It’s like Pele,’ he said. Registering my baffled expression, he expanded: ‘Pele’s whole life has been football. He cannot do anything else, he can’t suddenly find a new career. Football is what he does. Pele will always be football, even when he’s dead. We were the same.’
It was both the best and worst of times. Looking back, ex-Fighters remember this as a period of supreme happiness, the unthinking happiness of the very young. But it was also a time of tragedy and heartbreak. When the war swung against them, the comradeship that had developed in the trenches made the pain of bereavement unbearable. A readiness to make the supreme sacrifice tipped easily into a love affair with death, an impatience to get the whole tricky thing that constitutes this, our human existence, over and done with. ‘What did you feel when one of your friends was killed?’ I once asked an ex-Fighter. ‘Did you think that maybe you had made a mistake, maybe you should not have joined the Front?’ ‘No,’ he replied. ‘When one of our commanders died you just thought: “I wish I had died alongside him. I don’t want to be left here on my own.” The worst thing that could happen to you was to be left behind, alive.’ When fathers took time off to visit their offspring at Zero School, their children would sometimes run and hide. ‘It was considered a mark of pride to have had a father who had been killed at the Front,’ recalls a former Red Flower. ‘When your father came to visit, you didn’t want to be seen in public with him. Why was he there, you wondered, rather than away fighting? Maybe he was a coward.’ As each Fighter saw siblings, lovers and friends ‘martyred’ around him, the invisible scar tissue formed. There is only so much mourning a human being can perform before emotional numbness sets in. ‘When people now say “I love someone” or “I care for so-and-so”, I just don’t know what they mean,’ an ex-Fighter once confessed. ‘I don’t hate people, obviously. I do an awful lot to help those around me, but I feel nothing. I think it started in the 1970s, when so many people I cared for died. I probably need a psychiatrist,’ he said with a laugh, ‘but here in Eritrea we don’t do that.’
What takes the breath away is the extent to which the EPLF determined, in these testing conditions, to carry on regardless. The Derg–which, like Haile Selassie, denied the very existence of an independence struggle–hoped to reduce the shiftas to the brutish necessities of survival, modern cave men scrabbling for sustenance. Africa teems with rebel movements with portentous acronyms that amount to little more than armed raiding parties. The EPLF would not let itself go down that route. Maintaining the standards of civilized society in this rugged terrain was not only a means of convincing the mass of the Eritrean population that the Movement was fit to rule, it was a way of showing oneself defiant in the face of overwhelming odds. A la Frank Sinatra, they would do it Their Way.
In the early days, the Fighters exhaustively monitored the airways on their short-wave radios, hoping against hope for some indication their Struggle had been noticed by the BBC, Radio France Internationale or Voice of America. Registering the world’s total indifference, the Movement decided it would have to provide its own media. The EPLF printed its own newspapers and political pamphlets, researched and filmed documentaries and ran a mobile radio station that broadcast its version of the campaign. Man cannot live by war alone, so cultural activities were always encouraged, with units expected to compose songs, work on poetry and write plays for staging in Nakfa’s underground theatre. Education was another priority, for if one day Eritrea was to become a modern state, the peasantry must be made politically aware. In Nakfa, there was little of the jaw-aching boredom associated with most military campaigns, for the Eritreans became experts at keeping themselves worthily busy. Perched in their mountain eyries, former farmers attended adult literacy classes given by their educated comrades and studied the great political thinkers, looking for lessons that could explain their predicament and reveal the future. If so many Eritreans today show a disconcerting understanding of Henry VIII’s clash with Rome and a grasp of the origins of the First World War, it can usually be attributed to those classes. The one luxury the EPLF enjoyed, after all, was time.
No allowances were made for circumstances. One of the Fighters I spoke to had been stationed atop Sulphur Mountain, where putting a foot wrong meant falling to your death. When his unit needed water, the Fighters formed a human chain and, backs pressed against the cliff face, passed the laden jerry cans carefully from one shoulder to another. As there was not enough flat ground for a latrine, Fighters would wrap one arm around a sapling that leant over the void, undo their flies, and relieve themselves into the abyss. ‘Not even a snake or a monkey, not even Jesus Christ himself could have survived there,’ he remembers. Yet the unit did not skip its three hours of morning study. ‘One member of the unit would prepare a subject and we would talk about it: the character of war, Mao’s teachings, the Irish question and the issue of Palestine. We had to expand our global outlook.’
The very isolation of the Nakfa experience, the absence of worldly distractions, encouraged a clarity of thought the meditating monks of Shangri-La would have recognized. The OAU had labelled the EPLF a secessionist movement, Washington dismissed it as a bunch of Commies, Moscow wanted it to simply go away. Global rejection created a space and distance in which cool analysis could unfold. Eritrea’s successive betrayals by Italy, Britain and America were dissected; the hypocrisy of UN resolutions guaranteeing the right to self-determination examined; the legal justification for Eritrean independence logged with bitter calm. Marx was read with an attention to detail normally reserved for Bible classes. ‘We didn’t just read it, we savoured it, we digested it, we mulled over the meaning of every phrase. It had the force of a spiritual conversion. Even today, I find myself applying the mental disciplines I learnt then,’ recalls a former EPLF ideologue.
Any movement with pretensions to intellectual credibility must be able to hold seminars and debates. The EPLF did just that, inviting foreign politicians to attend congresses where it articulated its ideological differences with the ELF, debated the shortcomings of classical Marxism and hammered out its blueprint for an independent Eritrea. What did it matter if such events were
held at night, in the shelter of crags? The fact that they were held at all was a miracle in itself. Nakfa’s constraints were never going to stop the Fighters staging a sports convention, however incongruous it might seem, or inviting delegates to attend a symposium on Third World debt. Visiting in 1979, French journalist Olivier Le Brun described the surreal experience of listening to a piano recital given under a thorn tree by a woman Fighter. The performance was interrupted by a MiG bombing raid, but resumed immediately afterwards. No wonder so many of the Western journalists, left-wing politicians and aid workers who visited the trenches returned True Believers, when such quixotic displays of true grit were on offer.
The napalm bomb struck within a few metres of the open-air kitchen, splashing its lethal gel in a phosphorescent starburst. As culinary mistakes go, this was one no cookbook ever thought worth mentioning. While the ground blazed, hospital staff scrambled to shovel dirt on the flaming liquid before it reached the dormitories where wounded patients lay resting. John Berakis had committed a blunder that could have cost his colleagues dear. His preparations for the hospital’s evening meal had coincided with a random over-flight by an Ethiopian plane. Spotting the light from the stove fire flickering in the darkness, the pilot dropped his load with impressive precision. ‘It lit up just like a Christmas tree,’ John remembers, with a guilty laugh. For the rest of the night, staff and patients crouched in the darkness, as one Ethiopian plane after another roared over the narrow gorge, taking turns to try and finish the job.
It is not easy, learning to be a chef when you have been posted to the frontline. The quest for gourmet excellence might, indeed, have seemed a tad counter-intuitive in the bleakness of the Rora mountains. But for John, a man whose brain churned with the relentless energy of a Magimix, pursuing his dream was a way of proving he was still human. ‘The Ethiopians’ whole aim was to terrorize us so that we couldn’t work. So you carried on with your work, regardless.’
Had John been born in the West, I have little doubt that by now he would be running a chain of five-star restaurants, a suave maître d’hôtel gliding to welcome his guests in a sombre silk suit. But John was born Eritrean, and that has made all the difference. Baptized Tilahun, an Ethiopian name, and brought up south of Addis, he spoke Amharic so fluently that all his friends and girlfriends assumed he was Ethiopian. He was careful never to speak Tigrinya in their company and when they talked about Eritrea, that bolshie province up north, he kept silent, pretending to share their views. But something, he knew, was not quite right. Like so many Eritreans of his generation, he felt a creeping unease. There was a sense that he was not like other folk, that he was playing a role that chafed. Once he moved to Addis, the moment of epiphany came.
He had returned home after dark to find a small crowd of worried Eritreans in the family compound. A mentally-retarded boy had disappeared, and concerned relatives had congregated to discuss where the missing youngster might be. The sight of this crowd, gathering after curfew and speaking in a foreign language, was too much for the Ethiopian security services. ‘The Derg rounded everyone up, made us put our hands against the wall. Then they beat us with their truncheons and arrested us. All that, just for speaking Tigrinya.’ That night, John realized his camouflage was not going to work very much longer. The contradictions had become unbearable. He set off for the north. Doing his best to avoid the main highways, he bluffed his way through a series of police checks until he finally reached the Sahel and joined the Front.
The EPLF system required everyone to be capable of combat, and John did his share. He learnt that it is possible, after your mind has been drenched in the limb-loosening adrenalin of terror, to find a still, calm place where rational judgements are coldly made, the hard core of the soul that constitutes courage. ‘In war, you only ever fear the first bullet. Once the shooting starts and you are in the thick of battle, you don’t worry any more.’ Stationed in one of the valleys east of Nakfa, he was part of an infantry unit which hunted down a force of Ethiopian soldiers helicoptered into EPLF-held territory in an attempt to break the military stalemate. ‘For eight hours, we killed them and we ran, we killed them and ran. We killed them until we were out of breath and could run no more.’ He had seen friends die, killed by bombs so big they dropped to earth in their own parachutes and, on explosion, left no body parts behind. ‘There was nothing to collect, not even a fingertip. They just vaporized.’
John also worked in the laboratory at Tsabra hospital, an underground clinic hidden in a valley on the outskirts of Nakfa, testing blood groups. The Front did not own a refrigerated unit where blood could be safely stored. So the EPLF found its own ingenious way around the problem. By testing Fighters beforehand and cataloguing their blood groups, it created a living, breathing blood bank requiring no storage facilities. When the battle turned fierce and the wounded streamed in, they knew exactly which Fighter to summon for a blood donation. It was while working in the laboratory that John received his own worst wounds. A colleague carelessly forgot to switch off the methane gas before retiring. When John entered to start his night shift the gas exploded, searing his head, upper torso and the arms he threw up to protect his face. His hands and forearms remain a mess of scarring, the skin buckled and twisted by the heat.
But John possessed other useful skills. He had been one of the first candidates to complete a new hotelier course in Addis. He had trained in the Hilton’s kitchens–a job he enjoyed so much it barely counted as a chore–and worked as a waiter, donning black coat and white gloves to serve caviar canapés to Haile Selassie, cheekily attempting to catch the Emperor’s eye to see if the story that no man could hold his gaze was true (it wasn’t). When a consignment of books sent by EPLF sympathizers abroad arrived in Nakfa, the Fighters would sort through it looking for what was useful. Those on hotel management and catering–guides published by training schools in Kenya–ended up on the scrapheap, only to be fished out again by John. He devoured them, page by page, memorizing the jargon. ‘When someone was leaving for Sudan and asked me what I wanted I would always say “send me hotel books”.’ Laying out petri dishes for the laboratory, watching the bacteria spores grow on his preparations, John mulled over the principles of nutrition and hygiene, cause and effect. He was ready to risk his life, endure the bleakness of the Sahel without complaint. But, in the meantime, he would also learn how to prevent a béchamel sauce from tasting floury, how to squeeze stock from a scrag of chicken, and what cookery writers meant when they talked about the purée and the gratin, the julienne cut and the roux.
When, in 1790, a French officer who had been arrested for duelling found himself confined to quarters for what seemed an endless 42 days, he warded off boredom by launching a mental voyage of discovery around his bedroom, exploring the ideas associated with every humdrum object. When Xavier de Maistre, author of Voyage around my Room, was told his confinement was over, he felt nothing but disappointment: the intellectual journey had proved so enriching, he did not want it to end. There was a similar cerebral quality to John’s culinary obsession. This was ‘virtual’ cuisine, a form of mental gymnastics staged almost exclusively in his own imagination, practised on gleaming steel kitchen surfaces he would never possess, using market-fresh foodstuffs he would never receive.
‘At the start, when we were moving from place to place, we were quite literally in the Stone Age. To bake bread, you would find a flat rock, prop it up on three stones, light a fire below and wait for the flat stone to heat to a point where you could cook on it. The stones were our pans, our plates and our tables. It was back to the primitive ways.’ The position improved slightly when John was assigned to Tsabra. Here, at least, permanent stoves could be constructed, equipment gathered. But he never got a chance to put the lessons of Elizabeth David and Escoffier–John always favoured the classics–into practice. ‘Most of the time all we had were lentils, poor man’s protein. You boil them, throw in some salt and eat that twice a day. There’s not much room for invention.’
If
he couldn’t deliver on quality, John soon learnt how to provide quantity. From the air, Tsabra was effectively invisible. At first glance, a casual passer-by would have seen only a V-shaped valley traversed by a clear stream squirming with tadpoles, the odd goat scampering through green sprigs of wild olive. If he lingered, he might have noticed a suspicious number of comings and goings, or registered that the surrounding slopes seemed strangely bare of trees. In fact, this was Nakfa’s main referral hospital, a 200-bed facility where doctors received the injured from the trenches and decided which patients needed immediate treatment and which could risk the arduous trip north to Orota. The spot had been chosen because of the river–every hospital needs plenty of water–and because the gorge was narrow enough to present Ethiopian bombers with a challenge. A hidden generator supplied electricity to the maternity ward, operating theatre, lab, dormitories and offices, all built on the same principle. The Fighters had dug deep into the rock, hollowing large rectangles out of the red earth, building up the stone walls until they were thick enough to withstand bombing, then covering the lot with wooden screens heaped with soil and shrubs. It was a big facility and people needed to eat. Juggling his jobs as lab technician and head cook, John regularly turned out meals for up to 500 people.
But his gifts really blossomed when John was reassigned to the laboratory in Orota and was handed the responsibility for feeding the main hospital’s 3,000 patients. When he arrived, each department ran its own kitchen, the women walking miles to find increasingly-scarce firewood. Looking at the denuded mountain slopes, John realized the hospital’s fuel needs were causing an ecological holocaust. The energy-efficient answer was a central kitchen with a giant, multi-hobbed oven, built according to John’s careful specifications. Friends in London were sent a list of the equipment he needed: a dough machine, a pastry mixer, a vegetable slicer, eight 200-litre cooking pans. He had moved on from lentils and salt, introducing poultry to the Sahel, and the arrival of a flour mill meant the Movement could grind its own grain and bake bread. A few more ingredients were becoming available, as Fighters began planting vegetable gardens and raising livestock. Soon the kitchen, staffed by 50 women trained by John, was dispatching containers of hot food and bread to the hospital departments each morning, and fuel consumption had been cut by 80 per cent. In his own way, John had managed to recreate what he had seen and yearned for at the Hilton as a young man: ‘I had my modern kitchen.’
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