Dark Star Safari

7. The Longest Road in Africa

Back in Addis, I tried to plot a trip by road to the Kenyan border and beyond. Not difficult to plot — there was only one road — but in these uncertain times no reliable information. The farther you got from an African capital the worse the roads — everyone knew that; but harder information was unobtainable, and the more you inquired the vaguer people became. In such circumstances the cliché terra incognita was something real and descriptive. The border was distant; distant places were unknown; the unknown was dangerous.

Border towns in African countries were awful places, known for riff-raff and refugees and people sleeping rough, famous for smugglers and back-handers, notorious for bribery and delay, nit-picking officialdom, squeezing policemen, pestering money-changers, the greatest risks, and the crummiest hotels. There was either a new national language on the other side of the border, or the same tribal language straddling it — and a nasty border dispute because the dotted line ran through a divided people. Roadside customs and immigration were horrible bottlenecks, usually on the bank of a muddy river. People told me, Don’t go.

There were some buses to the southern towns of Dila and Mega, and occasional vehicles to the frontier town of Moyale, but Moyale was the edge of the known world for Ethiopians. None of them ever went into Kenya — why would they? The north of Kenya was just waterless desert and rutted roads and quarrelsome tribes, and a border dispute among the gun-toting Borena people, and worst of all the troops of roaming heavily armed Somalis known as ‘shifta.’ Just dropping the word shifta into a proposed itinerary was enough to make traveling Africans go in the opposite direction.

On what was now the longest road in Africa, some of it purely theoretical, from Cairo to Cape Town, there had once been a plan for a great transcontinental railway. Apart from his dream of diamonds and conquest, Cecil Rhodes’s imperial vision for Africa was of a railway line that would run from South Africa to Egypt, taking in Nairobi and Addis Ababa, Khartoum and Nubia. ‘Your hinterland is there,’ is the inscription under his bronze figure, pointing north on a pedestal in Cape Town. Sections of the northerly running railway line were built in Rhodes’s lifetime (a short lifetime — he died at the age of forty-nine). Later, track was laid to the copper belt in Northern Rhodesia as far as the Congo border. The Germans built a railway across their colony of German East Africa, later British Tanganyika, later still independent Tanzania. The Tanzanians, under the leadership of the muddled Maoist Julius Nyerere, soon had a line south from Dar es Salaam into Zambia, entirely the work of Mao-sponsored Chinese railwaymen, chanting the Great Helmsman’s Thoughts as they hammered spikes and fastened rails. This was 1967, at the beginning of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which Tanzania too embraced in a superficial and self-destructive way.

By zigging and zagging, and taking a ferry across Lake Victoria, it was possible for a solo traveler like me, with a bag and a map, to go by rail from Cape Town to Nairobi. But north of Nairobi the tarred road gives way to mud, the buses stop running at Isiolo, and after that it is just a rocky road, and hyenas, and colorful Rendille tribesmen, wearing armlets and loincloths, carrying spears and sabres, and forever fussing over their elaborate coiffures. As soon as the road surface turned bad the bandits appeared, shifta carrying AK-47s, classic highwaymen. The road from Nairobi to the border was reputed to be the emptiest in Africa. That was where I was headed.

No one had any information about that road in Addis, and there wasn’t much available about southern Ethiopia either. People would say they had been to a certain town in the south and then, when I questioned them further, they would go blank. Even the Kenyans went blank. Visa requirements had changed. I would need one. I went to the Kenyan Embassy and was told by a sulky Kikuyu woman at a desk that I would have to wait three or four days for the visa.

‘Why can’t I have it today or tomorrow?’

In a scolding tone, she said, ‘Mr Ochieng, the visa officer, must not be distubbed!’

‘And why is that?’

‘He is busy.’

‘But I am busy too,’ I said mildly, ‘and I want to visit your wonderful country.’

‘You will have to wait.’ She picked up a telephone and flicked her fingers at me in a bugger-off gesture.

But I did not leave. I buttonholed diplomats and inquired about the road. Of the three officers at the Kenyan Embassy I spoke to, none had gone by land from Addis to Nairobi across the common border. A Kenyan man in a three-piece suit seemed insulted that I should suggest it.

‘We fly,’ he said.

One Kenyan woman confided that she disliked Ethiopians. ‘They are proud,’ she said. She meant racist. To annoy other Africans, Ethiopians sometimes said, ‘We are not Africans.’

With time to spare in Addis, I looked around. No tourists in the country meant that the antique shops were full of merchandise, both treasures and fakes, in the form of old Amharic Bibles made by scribes and monks, with hand-painted plates, silver crosses that looked like giant latch-keys, paintings on cloth stolen from churches, icons, chaplets, Korans, amber beads, venetian beads, ivory bangles and armlets, spoons of horn and iron, and wooden and leather artifacts from every tribe in the country — elaborate stools, milk jugs, spears, shields, Konso funeral posts depicting the lately departed with a carved penis protruding from the forehead. Mursi lip plugs, penis sheaths and cache-sexes, little metal aprons that Nuer women wore at their waist for modesty’s sake.

An Asiatic man screaming at an Ethiopian woman in a curio shop one day caught my attention. The woman apparently owned the shop, or at least worked there.

‘You give me for 400 birr!’ The man was moon-faced and his tone of voice was harsh and bullying. But he wore a white shirt and tie and looked fairly respectable, which made his anger all the more disconcerting.

‘No. Six hundred birr. Last price.’ The woman turned away.

Shaking with rage, the Asiatic man said, ‘No! Four hundred! I come back! You give me!’

I listened with interest, for one of the curiosities of travel is hearing two non-native speakers of English venting at each other in English. The dispute went back and forth for a little while longer, the man growing shriller and a pinkness blooming in his cheeks as he became enraged and incoherent. Finally, wordless, he left in a minivan with some other grim-faced Asiatics.

Four hundred Ethiopian birr was $47, 600 birr was $72.

The shop was empty. I said to the woman, ‘I’ll give you 600. That seems reasonable.’

‘It is a good price. Best price. I sell him some before for 500 but it low quality. This maximum quality.’

‘What is?’

‘Ivory.’ She looked closely at me. ‘You give me 600?’

‘New ivory or old?’

‘New! Tusks! Big ones!’

Any trade in ivory was illegal, and so I pursued the subject. Ivory from poached elephants was available in large quantities, so I had heard; but though I saw chunks of it in shops, I never saw tusks and didn’t know the market price — indeed, though I had been told the trade flourished in Harar and elsewhere, I had no idea that I could just walk into a little store in Addis Ababa and say: How about some elephant tusks, please?

‘How many tusks do you have?’ I asked.

‘How many you want?’

‘Let’s say, quite a few.’

‘I have much. Fifty, sixty. Each tusk ten kilo, average. When you buy?’

Imagining a half ton of ivory stacked on the ground, something that would satisfy the greed of Mr Kurtz, I said, ‘Would these be Ethiopian elephants?’

‘Ethiopian.’ Ityopian, she said, the usual pronunciation for the Greek word meaning ‘the Burned Ones.’

The Ethiopian elephant, Loxodonta africana orleansi, is a severely endangered species — so endangered that an elephant sanctuary had been established at Babile, near Harar, to protect the creatures. Keeping the elephants in this special area made it much easier for poachers, and this place (as well as Kenya) was the source of the ivory.

So, when you come back? You come today?’

I havered and said, ‘I have a little problem. I’m sending the ivory to the USA and that’s illegal.’

No problem. You got friends?’

What kind of friends?’

‘Embassy friends. Diplomat people. They buy it,’ she said. ‘That man you see shouting? He Third Secretary in Korean Embassy.’

‘So embassy people buy ivory?’

Yah. Chinese. Japanese. They buy it.’

I see. They put it in the diplomatic bag and ship it home?’

‘Yah. No one look.’

‘The American Embassy might not want to ship a thousand pounds of elephant tusks in the diplomatic bag.’

‘Yes, you ask them, you ask them,’ the woman said, now getting a bit impatient with my questions.

Just to satisfy myself I looked around Addis and asked for elephant ivory at two other shops. The only quibble was: How much do you want? Four years before the price had been 200 birr ($23) a kilo. Now, elephant tusks were harder to find and in great demand, so the price had risen. And there would come a day, not far off perhaps, when there would be no more elephants, although no shortage of devious diplomats, stuffing diplomatic bags with contraband.

‘No, I don’t think we can help you send any elephant tusks back to the States,’ the Information Officer at the United States Embassy in Addis said. He chuckled glumly and made a note to alert CITES, the Campaign on International Trade in Endangered Species. He was Karl Nelson, who had served in the Peace Corps in the early to mid-sixties in the Philippines; at that same time I had been a volunteer in Malawi.

‘How was Malawi?’

‘It was heaven.’

‘I loved the Philippines, too,’ Karl said. He had been a teacher, he had married a Filipina, had taught in the Pacific island of Yap for eleven years, had wandered the world a bit, and then joined the foreign service. He was exactly my age, and our lives had been somewhat parallel. He said, ‘I joined late. I didn’t make anything of my life,’ but he was wrong: he had a happy family, he loved his wife, he had raised five sturdy, successful children.

‘You say you’ve just come from the Sudan?’ he said. ‘And I know you’ve written about India and Singapore.’

‘I lived in Singapore for three dreadful years.’

‘You’ll appreciate this, then,’ he said. ‘A Sudanese, an Indian and a Singaporean were asked, “In your opinion, what is the nutritional value of beef?” The Sudanese said, “What is nutritional value?” The Indian said, “What is beef?” and the Singaporean said, “What is an opinion?’ ”

I laughed and realized I was in the company of a man whose manner of discourse was jokes and anecdotes. When his turn came in a political discussion with a bunch of bores, he would say, ‘Bush walks into a delicatessen and says, “I’ll have a sandwich.” Fella says, “What do you want on that?” Bush says …’ And Karl would make his point. They were jokes with a point, but gentle, and usually deflationary, intended to demonstrate the absurdity of the proposition being debated.

‘You’re going to Nairobi by road?’ he said and laughed his wheezy laugh. ‘Well, of course you are. Flying there would be too simple for you. It’ll take a week or more — you’ll have a terrible time. You’ll have some great stuff for your book.’

‘My idea is to get to the border. African borders are full of revelations. Have you been to the Ethiopian border at Moyale?’

‘No. So please write your book, and then I can read about it.’ Then he added, ‘Did you know, in any group of half a dozen Ethiopians, five of them will have been in prison?’

Is this a joke?’

‘This is an invitation,’ Karl said. ‘I want to introduce you to some people.’

We had lunch at his house in a back street of Addis, a bungalow behind a high wall, with a flower garden and bird houses and a dovecote. Five Ethiopians and two Filipina women doctors, who were also Catholic nuns. The nuns, friends of Karl’s wife, who was in the Philippines, were in Addis for a few days. They lived in a remote part of Ethiopia, where there was a large Muslim population, and their mission was providing medical treatment to Muslim women, an altruistic and thankless task which, judging from their uncomplaining dispositions, they performed cheerfully.

One of the Ethiopians was a woman who had worked at the embassy for many years. She said, in a tone of resignation, ‘Women have no status here. They are pushed aside and beaten.’

The four men were all writers, editors, and journalists. Each of them had been in prison. One had been jailed under three successive regimes, a total of twelve years. ‘I was even in the emperor’s prison — the palace jail!’ It was something of an accomplishment to have annoyed both Haile Selassie and the Derg, the monarchists and the Marxists. Another man had been in prison for most of the Derg years. The two other men had the same story. None of these men had ever been formally charged or brought to trial, just tossed in jail and left to rot.

Ethiopians are vague on western, that is, Gregorian calendar dates because their calendar is four years behind the western one (and of course the Jewish one is 2000 years ahead, and the Muslim one 600 years behind). When I asked an Ethiopian the date of something that had happened in the past he began to count on his fingers. To the best of his calculations, Nebiy Makonnen, an ex-prisoner of about fifty, had been languishing in Central Prison from 1977 until 1987 — ten years anyway.

‘It was politics. I was on the wrong side.’ He laughed at the very idea of charges or a trial. He had simply been picked up one day and thrown in the slammer, where — and he a man who was used to reading and writing — there were no books, nothing to write with, nothing to write on.

‘I would go crazy in jail,’ I said.

‘You would learn patience,’ he said.

‘That’s true!’ the other ex-prisoners said.

‘One day, after I had been there about a year, a man was brought in by the guards. He had been searched but somehow they had missed the book he was carrying. It was Gone with the Wind. We were so happy! We were all educated men. We took turns reading it — of course, we had to share it. There were 350 men in my section, and so we were allowed to have the book for one hour at a time. That was the best part of the day in Central Prison — reading Gone with the Wind.

‘I decided to translate it. I had no paper, so for paper I smoothed out the foil from cigarette packs and used the back side of it where there was paper to write on. A pen was smuggled in. I wrote very small. And I was Entertainment Officer, so every night I read some of my translation to the other prisoners.

‘But still I had to share the copy of the book — I could only have it for one hour. The translation took two years. I wrote it on 3000 sheets of cigarette foil. One by one, I folded these up and put them back into cigarette packs and when the prisoners were released they took them out of prison — just tucked them in their shirt pocket.’

Nebiy remained in prison for seven years. On his release, he looked for the 3000 sheets that contained his translation of Gone with the Wind. Locating them and gathering them took him two years of travel and inquiry. At last, he published his translation of the novel and this is the translation that Ethiopians read.

‘What’s your favorite part of the book?’

‘I don’t know. I read it over and over for six years. I know the book by heart.’

At the end of Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, the captive Tony Last is condemned to sit in a jungle clearing and read the works of Dickens, over and over, to his crazed captor, Mr Todd. It is improbable, so it is funny. But Nebiy Makonnen’s story was much better, and its hilarity more horrible for being true — six years squinting at Scarlett O’Hara in an Ethiopian jail.

After that, whenever I met an Ethiopian man over thirty or so I asked whether he had been in prison, and the answer was usually yes.

Wubishet Dilnessahu had done seven years. He was now a businessman, living in California, and was only in Addis Ababa for a few days in furtherance of a lawsuit. A man of seventy-seven, of a good family, he had been one of Emperor Haile Selassie’s ministers, concerned with cultural matters. He saw the emperor every day. He did not have to kowtow, as I had been told, but had to show respect. ‘I bowed very low, of course.’

After the Derg takeover, Haile Selassie was strangled — Wubishet said that Mengistu had personally choked the emperor to death. This information had just been revealed. At the time (August 1975) it was reported in the newspaper that the cause of death was ‘circulatory failure.’ The body was put in a hole at Menilek Palace and a structure (perhaps a latrine) built over it. Early in the 1990s the body was disinterred and the emperor’s remains kept in a crypt in a church in Addis. In November 2000, in an elaborate ceremony, the emperor was at last given a solemn burial in Holy Trinity Cathedral.

‘The Russians said, “We killed our king. If you kill yours there will be less trouble,” ’ Wubishet said.

A few days after the emperor was arrested, Wubishet was clapped in irons, charged with ‘helping the former regime,’ and taken to the Fourth Division Military Camp, where he was locked in a barracks-like hut with 120 other men. He showed me the prison, which is still a prison, and was that week bursting with political prisoners — university students who had just recently been arrested during a demonstration against government policies. Hundreds were arrested, many injured and forty of the students had been killed by police truncheons and gunfire.

‘You see the tin roof? The long building on the right? That was my prison building,’ Wubishet said. There were eight other buildings just like it, looking like hen coops, and they had also been full of prisoners. None of the men was charged; there were no trials. Most of the prisoners had no idea why they were there. ‘Many of the young men in there could not read or write, so we started a school, we taught literacy. And we just waited.’

‘Did they allow visits from friends or family?’

Wubishet laughed in the dark contemptuous way of the Ethiopian conditioned to be cynical after a lifetime of national catastrophes.

‘In seven years I saw my family once, for fifteen minutes.’

The royal apartments where Wubishet had worked for the emperor still stood. We went there in a taxi, for the Palace Gannah Le’ul (Princely Heaven), the emperor’s residence, built at the turn of the century by Haile Selassie’s father, Ras Makonnen, had been occupied variously by Makonnen; by the Italian viceroys, including the Count of Aosta; by the Italian Army; by one brief usurper (a rule of three days in 1960); by Haile Selassie, and now by the administrators of the University of Addis Ababa. It had been Wubishet’s own idea to convey the palace building to the university, which was in need of space. At first he had been too timid to suggest the idea to the emperor, but finally blurted it out. The emperor said nothing. ‘But he summoned me in the night and said, “Okay.” I was so nervous and excited I could not sleep.’

Although this building still looked like a royal residence, if a seedy one, with high doors and ornate trim and two baroque statues in front, there was a Fascist relic in the forecourt. This bizarre monument was a staircase of mildewed cement — fifteen steps representing the years that had elapsed since Mussolini entered Rome in 1922. The sculpture still stood after sixty-five years of war, monarchy, dictatorship, socialism, anarchy, and political asininity, a Fascist staircase, leading nowhere.

As Wubishet had worked in the emperor’s office I asked him if he had been aware of Haile Selassie’s relationship with Rastafarians. The very word had been coined in homage of the emperor’s birth name, Ras Tafari.

‘I know about the devotion these people have for him, but the emperor didn’t think about them very much,’ Wubishet said. For example, the emperor never mentioned Rastas in conversation. Wubishet said he knew nothing about Shashemene, the Rasta town on the road south of Addis; he was not even aware of the established fact that the emperor had given land to the Rastas. ‘Of course, he was a proud man and enjoyed respect, but the way they treated him was embarrassing for him.’

‘But he went to Jamaica and saw them there,’ I said.

‘They made him very embarrassed. They were kneeling! They thought he was God.’

Wubishet flapped his hand, dismissing the whole movement in a gesture.

‘You see, Ethiopians are Christians,’ he said. ‘We don’t worship human beings. Even a simple Ethiopian wouldn’t do it. They would think it’s stupid.’

‘But you bowed very low to the emperor,’ I said.

I liked his answer to this. He said, ‘That shows respect. That’s not worship. Worship is the forehead striking the ground. The emperor was a very small man, so you needed to bow extra low.’

As the days passed, Addis Ababa did not become more beautiful but it began to fascinate me for being a city of people with vivid personal stories, like Wubishet’s prison tale and Nebiy’s Gone with the Wind saga. There were so many others — for example, the story of Ali’s revenge.

I met Ali by chance. He had also done time in prison but it was a long horrible story, he said. I said I had plenty of time and was eager to hear it. Ali thought he might be able to help me get a lift to the Kenyan border, to Moyale anyway, with some traders he knew. Ali was a broker and general factotum, dealing in cars, horses, souvenirs, even ivory. ‘If you hide the ivory right you can get it into the US.’ He had been to the US many times, and held a multiple-entry visa, but had no desire to live there. America was too expensive, he didn’t like the routines, and anyway his whole family was here.

Ali had gray eyes and chipmunk cheeks and an air of circumspection about him that sometimes seemed like weariness and sometimes wiliness. He chain-smoked, rebuking himself each time he lit up. He had that special entrepreneurial sense that is able to single out a person in serious need. He saw that urgency in me — I was in need of a ride south. Of course he could supply it — he could supply anything — and the only question was how much would I be willing to pay and how much could he make on the deal?

Ali had time to kill and so did I.

‘These Kenyans!’ With the businessman’s disgust for bureaucracy and profitless delay he said, ‘They could just stamp the passport and take your money. But they make you wait.’

He discovered my liking for Ethiopian food — ‘national food,’ as everyone called it. And so, over three or four meals at Ethiopian restaurants in Addis — the most pleasant a ramshackle wooden villa called Finfine — he told me his prison story, which was different from any other I had heard and not political at all.

It had started with an innocent question from me. I had mentioned that on this long trip I missed my family, my wife and children, and feeling sentimental I asked about his family.

Ali winced and his face darkened, a memory passing over it, and then he shook his head and said nothing — an awkward moment. Stammering self-consciously, I tried to change the subject. But he interrupted and said, ‘I am divorced.’

That didn’t seem so bad, there was no stigma about divorce in Islam, at least for a man. In the Muslim world a woman’s life was over when she got dumped; there was no second act. A man just moved on, usually acquiring another wife.

‘The person I trusted most in my life, the only one I cared about, lied to me,’ Ali said. ‘I ended up in jail, but God saved me or else I would still be in jail today, or maybe dead.’

We had finished eating, we were drinking fragrant Ethiopian coffee under the arbor outside, in the Finfine’s garden. Perhaps it was because this was the fourth or fifth meal I’d had with Ali, and that he had found some traders who were going south — that we were on the verge of striking a deal — that made him trusting enough to tell me the story. But, as he said, it was the worst thing that had happened to him in his life, and so he told it almost without prodding from me.

‘The first time I heard about it I was confused,’ he went on. ‘There was a story that my wife had been seen with another man. I asked some questions. He was a colonel in the army. This was during the Derg, when the army was in power. They were very strong. A trader like me was nothing. Just hearing that her man was a soldier made me think, What? So I asked her directly.

‘She said, “There was nothing. I did nothing. Yes, I was with him — but he forced me. He was a soldier. What could I do?”

‘I have four children. I don’t want them to be upset and to know that their mother was in this position, so I said nothing. I wasn’t happy, though. I didn’t like the story. I lived for a while with my mind uneasy. Then, one day, I had to drive to Lalibela to buy some things for my business.’

A long way north by road, Lalibela was the remote location of the beautiful twelfth-century Coptic churches that had been carved in volcanic rock, the ones you saw all the time on the Visit Ethiopia posters. The town was in the Lasta Mountains, 300 miles or more from Addis. Just his saying Lalibela meant it was a serious trip of three or four days.

‘I set off,’ Ali said, ‘but when I called ahead I was told by my friend Kamal that the goods were not ready. Bad, eh? So I decided to turn around and go south instead, with Kamal, and pick up some things.

‘We were about forty-five kilometers from Addis, going through the town of Debre Zeyit when I slowed down for the goats and cars and heavy traffic and saw, off the road, my Peugeot car, a brown one, parked near a building. Why did I see it so clearly? I think God wanted it.

“ ‘That’s my car.”

‘ “That’s not your car,” Kamal said. “What would your car be doing here?”

‘The building was a hotel, not a very nice one, but with a fence around it and a caretaker man at the parking lot. I said to him, “Did you see a fat woman with this car?” ’

I made an effort not to smile at Ali’s description of his wife.

‘The caretaker man said, “No.” I gave him some money. He said, “Yes. They are in room nine.”

‘We go to the room, the three of us, me and Kamal and the caretaker. I knock on the door. I instruct the caretaker man what to say. He say, “Please open. It’s about your car.”

‘The door opens. I have my gun drawn — yes, I have a gun but I did not show it to the caretaker man before. We rush in, Kamal and me — they are naked. I punch my wife in the face, Kamal fights the soldier, and they are soon on the floor, the soldier is screaming and crying, “Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me!” ’

Ali smiled for the first time, remembering a detail. He moved his upper lip, nervously twitching it in a rabbity way and said, ‘The soldier’s mustache is going like this.’ The soldier was trapped, begging for his life, his face jerking in fear. He was bollocky naked.

‘I say, “Stand up!” To my wife too. They have no clothes. Seeing my wife I feel a little sorry — her face bleeding from how I punched her and she try to cover her body. She is crying and pleading. I give her a dress to wrap around and then Kamal and I tie their hands like this.’

Ali stood up and demonstrated how he had tied his wife and her lover. He had faced them away from each other, and tied their wrists tightly, and then their arms. They were bound together, tightly, back to back. With her hands bound, Ali’s wife could not keep the dress wrapped around her, so she was as naked as the soldier now.

‘We pushed them out of the room to the car park and then down the street. It was hard for them to walk like that, so it was slow, and people saw them. They were laughing! I still had my gun pointed on them. Children were gathering around — many children, and a whole crowd of people.

‘Down the side of the road, a busy road — buses, taxis, cars, and many people — everyone looking at the naked ones. We keep pushing them until we come to a big stone, a flat one.

‘I say, “Sit there, don’t move. I am calling the police.” To the children and the people I say, “Don’t help them. They are bad. The police will come. If you help these two people you will have a problem.”

‘But they were laughing anyway, and I knew they wouldn’t help. I didn’t call the police. I went away, taking the man’s clothes with me. It was his uniform and his identification. Kamal drove the Peugeot. I went to the army base and asked to see the general. I gave the soldier’s clothes and everything to the general.

‘ “This is what your colonel did.”

‘He shook my hand! He thanked me. He said, “You did the right thing. The colonel deserved it.” ’

But I wanted to know what happened to his wife and her lover. He welcomed the question.

‘They stayed on the rock by the side of the road until six-thirty at night — maybe six hours or more. People laughing at them, a big crowd. The two nakeds — man and woman.

‘Then when it was getting dark, an army truck passed on the road and saw him. “Colonel!” and “What-what.” The truck stopped and they untied them and put him on the truck with my wife, gave them some clothes and took them away.

‘I left her. Left the house. I say, “This is my children’s house. They must go on living here. It belongs to them.” I got another place to stay. All I left with was two suitcases — my whole life in them. Nothing else. I went and started all over again. I said, “God saved me.” ’

Was he done? He was still gray-faced and reflective — and hadn’t he said something about prison?

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘three months later I was arrested for “attempting killing” because I had a gun and threatened the soldier. I went to court. There was a judge. I was sent to prison for two months.’

This was the only ex-prisoner I met in Ethiopia who had actually been charged and given a trial. It was also the shortest prison sentence I had heard about.

‘Then God saved me again,’ Ali said, a little more intensely. ‘I was walking in the street in Addis and I saw them in the street, my wife and the soldier, holding hands.

‘I decided to kill her. I went to my brother’s house, where I was keeping my gun, because I had nowhere to lock it where I was staying. My brother was not there. He had gone away and no one had the key.

‘For three days I tried to get the key. I wanted my gun — I was planning how I would kill her. Then my brother returned with the key. He opened the safe and gave me the gun.’

He was massaging his scalp, remembering, but saying nothing.

I said, ‘What did you do?’

‘Nothing. You see, time had passed. I said, “So what? Why kill her? Let her live — it will be worse for her. She has lost everything.” God saved me.’

After that, having unburdened himself with this story, having heard nothing from me of my life, he said that he felt he knew me well, and it was as though we had known each other for a long time. I could see that he meant it and was moved by this feeling.

I told him what I felt about time exposing the truth — that time did not heal wounds, but that the passing years gave us a vantage point to see the reality of things. I added that it was no fun to grow old but that the compensation for it was that time turned your mental shit-detector into a highly calibrated instrument.

Ali said, ‘Now I know that no one is virtuous. Women will sleep with anyone. Why do they throw everything away? Why they do these things?’

‘Because men do them.’

But he was baffled to think that a woman would behave so badly; that she would not do exactly as she was told. It was strange to him, this realization that someone so low and so despised had a mind of her own, an imagination, and the ability to devise elaborate stratagems for deceit and pleasure.

Through Ali, I met old Tadelle and young Wolde, man and boy, who were driving to the southern region to pick up spears and shields, beads and bracelets, milk jugs from the Borena people, ivory bangles from the Oromo, carvings from the Konso, and whatever baskets and knick-knacks they could find. They were traders.

‘If you go with someone else they might rob you,’ Ali said. ‘There are bad people on the road, bad people in the buses. Tadelle is a good driver and has a strong vehicle. Wolde is a good boy. They know the places to stay. You will be safe.’

In Africa when someone said, as they often did, ‘There are bad people there’, I tended to listen. I was sure Ali got a cut of the money, for I paid him and he paid them, but the price was fair. Besides, this was a way of going the whole way to the Kenyan frontier. The day I got my Kenyan visa — four days after I applied — we set off in a southerly direction on the longest road in Africa.

The potholed roads in Addis prepared me for much worse ones out of town. Addis lies at 8500 feet — I gasped for breath after I had rushed across a road to dodge a speeding car — and so our progress took us through a series of rounded hills and crowded settlements, through dry valleys and the highlands again. Among the goats and donkeys, the farting motor scooters and beat-up cars, I saw a skinny athlete in bright red shorts and a yellow jersey and Reeboks, running fast, weaving through the traffic, a marathoner in training. He was one of many. Apart from the emperor, the best known Ethiopian is the 10,000 meter gold medalist, Haile Gabre Selassie (no relation), who was born near here. These south central highlands are the home of many long-distance runners, with great legs and powerful lungs. Their speed has freed them from the hard life they would have faced as farmers and herdsmen, for there is no work here, and for the past thirty years there has been nothing in Ethiopia but uncertain harvests and war and political terror.

Tadelle said that he had been down this road many times. In fact he had been into Kenya.

‘Tell me about it.’

Haltingly, for his English was poor, Tadelle said that he had sneaked into Kenya twice, and made his way to refugee camps. It was his dearest wish to leave Ethiopia for good and to emigrate. ‘Anywhere — I go to any country!’ He hated life in Ethiopia, he said it would never get better, and anywhere in the world would be better than life here. America would be just about perfect.

But the United Nations interviewers at the camps both in Nairobi and Mombasa said he was not a genuine refugee. ‘I say, “I no like Ethiopian government. I hate zat — all of zat.” ’ But they sent him back to Ethiopia.

‘I go again sometime,’ Tadelle said.

About three hours south of Addis we came to Shashemene.

‘This bad place,’ Tadelle said. ‘Very bad place. Too much thief. They are all termites.’

‘Let’s stop,’ I said. Shashemene was part of my plan.

If Ethiopia was the spiritual home of the Rastafarians, Shashemene was its capital — not Addis, though Addis too was full of un-Ethiopian-looking black men in bulgy bobble hats of multi-colored wool, the Rasta banner of red, yellow and green, which were also the colors of the Ethiopian flag. Haile Selassie had granted some acreage in Shashemene to these devotees to satisfy their desire to return to Africa and have a place to settle. Ethiopians described them as impious and faintly ludicrous. The Muslims called them infidels, the Copts claimed they were misguided Christians. No one took them seriously, and many Ethiopians tended to stare at them, sometimes giggling at the Rasta get-up and the African’ affectations, beaded bracelets, horn necklaces and woven shoulder bags. The dreadlocks were weird to Ethiopians, not African at all, and not the cultural statement Rastas regarded them, but just the epitome of a bad hair day.

As soon as we entered the outskirts of Shashemene I saw this coiffure and these colors and these men, very skinny ones, striding along the roadside.

We had agreed that in return for my paying for my passage I could stop wherever I wanted, within reason. Our aim was to get to the border in three or four days. Tadelle and Wolde drove into town looking for a place to stay, while I nosed around, searching for a Rastafarian to talk to.

Through a succession of chance meetings and introductions I met Gladstone Robinson, one of the earliest pioneers, virtually the first Rastafarian to settle for good in Ethiopia. He was seventy-one, the father of eleven children; his youngest, a one-year-old, was crawling out of his hut. His radiant and smiling young wife — ‘She’s twenty three,’ Gladstone said — was heavily pregnant, so he would soon be father to an even dozen.

Gladstone was friendly, funny and alert, youthful in spite of his age, with a jazz musician’s easy smile and silences. He was skinny but supple, with a knotted stringy beard and gray dreadlocks drooping from beneath his wool hat. His hut was just a cement shed, two rooms. The room we sat in was stacked with files and strewn with papers, some old photos on the wall, the requisite pictures of Haile Selassie and Bob Marley, and a bulging paper bag on the table.

‘You want some herb? You smoke?’

‘Oh, right, flame a jay for me.’

He laughed and fossicked in the bag. Pork and milk are abominations for Rastafarians but marijuana is sacred, which perhaps explains their lean physique and their torpid smile. In general it was a sect of very skinny, spaced-out men and hardworking clearheaded women.

Although Gladstone expertly rolled a doobie he was so busy answering my questions he did not fire it up.

‘My father was a Bado’ — a Barbadian, he explained — ‘and my mother was a Cherokee Indian. But Rastas come from all over. See that picture?’

A blurred snapshot of a group of men standing shoulder to shoulder in a tropical setting hung on the wall in a chipped frame.

‘Those are black Jews from Monserrat. They came over in the 1980s.’

‘Did you say Jews?’

‘Indeed, I did. By the way, there are lots of black Jews in America. We are the true Israelites, not those so-called Jews you get in Israel. They are not true Jews. True Jews are the children of Solomon. We are, and the Falashas. The Falashas carry the ancestry of the father, not the mother.’

I had seen Falashas in Jerusalem. These Ethiopian Jews, who dated their faith from ancient times, had emigrated to Israel, regarding it as a homeland and a refuge. In the event they were a melancholy bunch, sidelined by the Hassidim, squinted at by tourists, unskilled except as farm laborers yet seldom seen on kibbutzes. The irony was that West Indian Rastafarians were arriving in Ethiopia as the Falashas were leaving for Israel.

‘The Falasha high priests were sent with Menelik to Solomon,’ Gladstone said. ‘The key is the Ark of the Covenant — the Ark is at Axum. Whoever has the Ark of the Covenant has God’s blessing. We say that Jesus came as a lamb to the slaughter, but Haile Selassie came as a conquering lion.’

‘What I am wondering is’ — because Gladstone was confusing me with unrelated scriptural snippets and vague historical allusions — ‘how is it that you happened to come here?’

‘Tell you how it all began,’ Gladstone said. ‘When Haile Selassie was crowned the words describing him showed his true lineage, from the House of David. His kingship was accepted by seventy-two countries.’

‘What’s the connection with Jamaica?’

‘He went there. The hardest praying people are the Jamaicans and they saw who he truly was.’

Envoys will come from Egypt, they had read in Psalms 68:31.Ethiopia will stretch out her hands to God.

Marcus Garvey, who initiated the Back to Africa Movement, had predicted that a savior would come, Gladstone said. Garvey was a Jamaican, gifted in oratory and an able organizer. He was also an entrepreneur, the founder of Black Star Shipping Lines. The United Negro Improvement Association, which Garvey started in 1914, had been an inspiration to blacks in America and the Caribbean. ‘Ethiopia, Thou land of Our Fathers,’ was Garvey’s hymn. Garvey was Moses, Haile Selassie the Messiah, even if he didn’t know it. Eventually, Garvey became critical of the emperor and his autocratic rule, but Garvey never wavered in his belief that, for the blacks in the West, Ethiopia represented hope and a homeland.

Gladstone showed me a copy of the August 1970 edition of Africa Opinion, with a cover picture of Marcus Garvey and a piece inside about settlers in Shashemene — Gladstone himself mentioned by name in the article.

‘I was chairman of the Ethiopian World Federation,’ Gladstone said. ‘Here is our constitution.’

He passed me a photocopy of a typewritten document. I glanced at the opening.

Ethiopian World Federation — 25 August 1937, New York City. We, the Black Peoples of the World, in order to effect Unity, Solidarity, Liberty, Freedom, and Self-Determination, do hereby affirm –

‘I was in the United States Army — trained as a pharmacist,’ Gladstone said, folding the constitution. ‘During the Korean War I was in Japan, at the Tokyo General Dispensary, with the US Medical Corps. But I dreamed of Africa.

‘After I joined the Ethiopian World Federation, I was put in charge of repatriation.’ He said, ‘We had three options. Integration. Separation. Repatriation. Integration is living together. Separation is the Nation of Islam — and maybe some southern states set aside for blacks, some northern ones for whites. Repatriation was coming back to Africa.’

‘When did you first come here?’ I asked.

‘Sixty-four,’ he said, and picked up an old school notebook, and opened it to a page of neat penmanship. Pasted on the facing page were some browned newspaper clippings.

I read,

June 16, 1964. The two delegates of the African Repatriation Commission left the BOAC terminal at John F. Kennedy Airport, Gladstone Robinson and Noel Scott.

‘That’s my diary of the whole trip. I came here with the first twelve. There are only four left. Brother Wolfe. Brother Waugh. Sister Clark, and me, Brother Robinson.’

There were about fifty Rastafarian families settled now, a hundred or so children, and many people kept a place in Shashemene as a second home, coming and going. Some blacks had come and not liked it; for others it was a refuge, Gladstone said. All this time he was shuffling snapshots: Gladstone in his pharmacy in Addis Ababa, Gladstone in a laboratory smock, Gladstone in glasses, Gladstone in dreadlocks, Gladstone posing with tourists, Gladstone in robes, Gladstone in a suit, Gladstone with some of his many children.

‘My daughter — she’s a New York City cop. Graduated from John Jay. She wears dreads. She went to court when they said she had to cut them off. Rastas were defending her, Rasta lawyers. She’s been here to Shashemene.’

‘You’re happy here, Gladstone?’

‘I am happy. You have to go home — a tree grows better in its own soil. Those first people each got twenty-five acres. We didn’t know what to do with all that land!’

‘What did you do with it?’

‘Built a school, and farmed, and opened up some pharmacies. I was doing all right.’

‘Did the Derg bother you?’

‘The Derg closed me down. Took my land. That was terrible. I worked for two years with Russian and Cuban doctors at the hospital here. They were surgeons. That was okay, but one day the soldiers came and beat up the Ethiopian doctor. They said he had guns.’

‘Weren’t you scared?’

‘Sure was. I said to myself, “Let Uncle Sam kick my butt, I am getting out of here.” Went back to New York until it was over.’

Gladstone, the most genial Rastafarian I met in Shashemene, introduced me to some more immigrants from Jamaica. He said I should understand that there were many black West Indians and Americans who had come for reasons other than Rastafarianism. ‘We have Bobo Shante and Nyabinghi, Ethiopian World Federation, Independents, and Twelve Tribes.’

Desmond and Patrick, both Jamaicans, were members of the Twelve Tribes. Desmond was fifty and rather haggard, but talkative and open. He had been in Ethiopia for twenty-five years. He came ‘because this is a place of refuge’, and stayed on through the worst years of the Derg, ‘when Mengistu was dragging young boys out of the villages and making them fight.’

Patrick was young and very intense, wearing a jacket of Rasta colors, fluent and apparently knowledgeable. While Desmond in his beret and shabby velvet jacket was happy to put his feet up and smoke a joint, Patrick — who did not smoke herb — was just visiting, but planning a future here, buying a house and moving with his large family.

‘I come and go, but I tell you this is my home. Jamaica is not my home. My roots are here. I am African,’ Patrick said. ‘We were taken as slaves from here — and now I am back. We are the Twelve Tribes of Israel.’ He raised a slender finger to make his point. ‘But we are not Israelis, making ethnic distinctions and coming from wherever and pretending we are people of the desert. We are really African. We want no special favors — just a home here.’

‘What place does Haile Selassie occupy in your theology?’

‘His Majesty,’ Patrick said, correcting me, ‘is a direct descendant of the House of David. Look at the Bible — it’s all there, the short version. King of Kings, Ras Tafari.’

Much is made by Rastafarians of the titles Ras Tafari assumed when he became emperor. His coronation was mocked by Evelyn Waugh in his travel book, Remote People, but it marked the beginning of Haile Selassie as a symbol of redemption to blacks in Jamaica and elsewhere. The emperor himself seemed to claim a strong Biblical link. On Megabit 25, 1922 (corresponding to April 3, 1931), Ras Tafari issued a proclamation saying that His Majesty, King Tafari Makonnen, would be emperor, crowned His Imperial Majesty, Haile Selassie the First, King of Kings, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Elect of God, Emperor of Ethiopia.

His Majesty ended the proclamation, ‘Trader, trade! Farmer, plough! I shall govern you by the law and ordinance that has come to me, handed down by my fathers.’

Because Haile Selassie was styled the Lion of Judah and claimed Solomon as an ancestor, he inserted himself into the Bible. The Ethiopian monarchy traces its origins to Menelik the First, who was the son of the Queen of Sheba and Solomon. It’s all there in Kings and Chronicles, as the Rastafarians say. Well, not exactly. What is clear in scripture is only the visit of Sheba to Solomon. A subsequent visit to Solomon, and the birth of Sheba’s son Menelik, is depicted in the Ethiopian epic the Kebra Nagast, described by Nicholas Clapp in Sheba, the account of his quest, as ‘a document claimed to have been discovered in the library of Constantinople’s cathedral of Santa Sofia in the Third Century A.D. but it is more likely a fourteenth-century compilation of Ethiopian oral history.’ Clapp’s entire book, his sound scholarship and wide travel, is the history of this shadowy queen who flits in and out of the Bible. His conclusion is that she could be any one of eleven historical or mythological figures. And by the way, she was not named Sheba. This enigmatic woman was the unnamed queen of a country called Sheba, or Saba.

Patrick said, ‘His Majesty is a spiritual descendant — not a god. We don’t worship him, but we see that His Majesty has many of the qualities of Jesus.’

‘For example?’

‘For example, the Italians tried to take over this country many times. They were terrible, but His Majesty did not condemn them. He forgave them. He was merciful. It is the mercy that is written in the Bible. He is that man who was foretold. What month were you born?’

I told him April. He said, ‘There is one tribe for each month. April is Reuben. Very important for the eyes. Your sign is silver.’

Why did this man’s zealotry make me so uneasy? He seemed a kind fellow, he specifically said he accepted everyone, ‘even white people,’ he was a musician. He said, ‘Some of our message is in our music.’ But he did not listen, he was a true believer. His zealotry worried me just because it was zealotry. Zealots never listen.

Desmond, older, rather easy going, was admiring of him, and said Patrick fasted on the Sabbath, read the Bible, did not smoke herb. ‘He is young, he is pure.’

‘Read the Bible,’ Patrick said. ‘A chapter a day keep the devil away’

‘Me, I smoke ganja,’ Desmond said. ‘We grow it but’ — with a hand gesture — ‘under, you see what I’m saying, because the government don’t like it and some Ethiopians make trouble for us.’

Desmond told me of his conversion. ‘We had a prophet in Jamaica, Gyad’ — but he might have been saying ‘God’ the Jamaican way — ‘who said, “His Majesty will leave the scene of action.” Those were his words. He prophesied that His Majesty will pass on.

‘I came here immediately after that, with my wife. We had four children. My wife, now, she didn’t like it. I said, “Go! I can find another wife but I can’t find another Ethiopia.” I take an Ethiopian wife and have four more children.’

Seeing me, correctly, as a profound skeptic, Patrick explained that I should pay close attention to world events. The catastrophes worldwide were signs of an end time.

‘The Millennium came and went,’ I said.

‘The Millennium hasn’t come yet,’ he said. ‘The Ethiopian calendar is behind by seven years and eight months, so the Millennium is coming in about six years. You will see. The earth was destroyed by water. It will be fire next time. The Rift Valley will be spared — it will be the safest place in the world when the fire comes. You can come and be a refugee here. Bring your family.’

I thanked him and walking out to the main road I reflected on how Africa, being incomplete and so empty, was a place for people to create personal myths and indulge themselves in fantasies of atonement and redemption, melodramas of suffering, of strength — binding up wounds, feeding the hungry, looking after refugees, driving expensive Land-Rovers, even living out a whole cosmology of creation and destruction, rewriting the Bible as an African epic of survival.

That night at a grim hotel in Shashemene, Tadelle seemed resentful that we had to stay and was in a bad mood. He saw some Rastas loping along, bulgy-hatted.

‘Why these people come here?’ he said. ‘Where is the country of Jamaica? They have no work there?’

The next day, driving south, Tadelle told me he hated Ethiopia. He hated the army. ‘They are all termites.’ Where had he learned this expression? He said it a lot. Politicians were termites, soldiers were termites, policemen were termites.

He wanted to leave so badly he could not understand why anyone would willingly come to Ethiopia to live. He was saying this as we drove through the pretty town of Awasa, and its lakeshore, where we stopped for lunch and I went bird-watching and saw herons and hornbills. In the afternoon, still heading south, I could see mountains and the empty plain ahead, as green as Astroturf, with a suggestion of more lakes and more mountains beyond them, and fertile valleys bursting with pineapple fields. Boys were selling the fruit by the side of the road. We stopped and I bought eight for the equivalent of a dollar. I learned the Amharic word for pineapple: ananas, as in Italian. On we went down the twisting road to the town of Dila.

Late afternoon was the time to stop. It was not a good idea to travel at dusk, it was unthinkable to travel after dark. Dila was a crowded town, huddled on the main road, in a coffee-growing area; a market town in the Mendebo Mountains. There was not much in the market except little piles of dusty fruit, no food in the shops, only soap, shirts and Chinese goods that were all infringements of copyright — ‘Lax’ soap and fake Nike, Reebok and Gap merchandise.

Wolde followed me around the dusty lanes of the town as I went in search of a hat. The temperature was in the nineties, the sky cloudless, the sun unremitting. The heat in such a place persisted until midnight. Oromo women in orange robes and beads squatted by the roadside howling at passersby, howling at me, too, as their children pestered me for money.

A useful word in Amharic was yellem, meaning ‘There is nothing’ or simply ‘Forget it.’ Wolde laughed at the effect it had on the importuning Oromos.

I said, ‘We’re going to stay here?’

Tadelle smiled apologetically. The hotel, the Get Smart, was terrible, but it was the only place to stay. We were not welcomed.

‘We have no room,’ the clerk said.

‘Maybe you could check?’

There was a desultory fuss, he flipped pages in a scrappy school exercise book that was the hotel’s guest book.

‘No room with water.’

‘That’s fine’ — more than fine, I thought, since the water would be corrosive.

He was still flipping pages: ‘Okay, room with water, in the back.’

The room was dirty, very hot and vile smelling, much worse than the one at Shashemene, but at the Ethiopian equivalent of $2.50 excellent value. After I had drunk three bottles of beer and written my notes on a wobbly table I felt optimistic and happy, for here I was in a flop-house in a remote town in southern Ethiopia, within striking distance (420 km) of the Kenyan border. With luck we might be there tomorrow.

A young Japanese man sat among some Ethiopians in the dining room of the Get Smart, eating national food. I joined him, and on the assumption that vegetables were less likely to be tainted, ordered ‘fasting food’ — it was all they had, anyway. I sat at the common table and we shredded the injera bathmat and squelched the vegetables.

The man was Mr Daisuko Obayashi, sent to southern Ethiopia by the private company NEC of Japan to install a telecommunications system. He had been in Dila for two months. He spoke no Amharic, and his English was rudimentary. He had been in rural Tanzania for two years, but preferred Ethiopia.

‘Sometimes, Ethiopian people they buy me drink, but two years in Tanzania no one buy me drink!’

He said he did not speak Swahili. Hearing that I lived in Hawaii he said he did not want to visit the islands. ‘Too many Japanese people there.’

After ten minutes of this irritating small talk I thought: The only English speaker in Dila and he’s a fat head.

He said, ‘In Tanzania, I go to disco and girls say they want to have sex with me. But I say no because of AIDS. Almost three years — no sex! Ha! Ha!’

Perhaps that forced celibacy explained his tetchy demeanor, so I turned my attention to Tadelle and Wolde.

‘What do you think of this place?’

‘Is mess,’ Tadelle said. Tadelle was from Tigre, as was Mengistu, and so he missed the days of the Derg which everyone else deplored, for the years of famine, bankruptcy, mass murder, terror, and arbitrary imprisonment. Mengistu had built schools and hospitals, Tadelle said, especially in Tigre.

‘I sink zat Mengistu was good. Za Derg was good. Yes, some people was killed. But it was za soldiers and smaller people who did it.’

‘But there’s democracy now,’ I said, to needle him: the present government persecuted any group that dissented and turned the Ethiopian police into junkyard dog.

‘Za democracy we have is bad. Za government is just termites.’

Lying in my small hot room at the Get Smart that night, I twiddled the knobs on my short-wave radio and listened in the darkness to the news. Wall Street was in trouble: The Dow went south again for the third straight day … Tech stocks deep in negative territory … The Nasdaq hit a five-year low … No sign of an uptick … Fears grow for a recession …

But in Dila it made no difference.

In the morning, I asked the Get Smart clerk for coffee. This was after all a coffee-growing region.

‘Is finished.’

‘Any fruit?’ It was a fruit-growing region, too.

‘Is finished.’

‘How about Ambo?’ Ambo was Ethiopian bottled water.

The Get Smart clerk smiled: finished.

We ate some of the pineapples we had with us and set off for Yabelo and Mega and the border town of Moyale.

Steering around the deep potholes on the road south of Dila we entered long valleys, some of them green and cultivated, others no more than dust bowls. We came to the ramshackle town of Agera Maryam. ‘They have food here,’ Tadelle said, driving into a walled compound. A sad sweet-faced woman brought us some evil-looking goat meat and cold pasta. I ate some of the pasta, Wolde scarfed the goat, and Tadelle said, ‘Za people here are thieves. I must watch za car or zey will steal from it.’

The table covering at the eating place was a week-old Ethiopian English language newspaper in which there was an alarming item, reporting this southern region was being ravaged by outbreaks of meningitis. It did not specify which form. Ethiopia (and the Sudan) is in the African ‘meningitis belt.’ There is even a ‘meningitis season’ — these very months. I made a mental note to buy some cans of food. There were no cans. All I could find in the way of packaged food were some boxes of stale cookies, made in Abu Dhabi.

We drove onward through a wide mountain valley down an empty road past the town of Yabelo. The men in this region wore traditional dress, tunics and beads, the men carried spears, the women toiled on paths with bundles of wood on their heads, very young herdboys bullied goats with their crooks. The landscape had become hotter and drier, and in one sun-struck place a small boy was pressed against a tree for the relief of a little patch of shade.

‘The women very pretty here,’ Tadelle said, slowing down.

But he was slowing down for roadkill — fifty-nine hooded vultures surrounded a dead hyena on the road, flapping their ragged wings and tearing at the animal’s flesh, while other scavenging birds, the kites and marabou storks, kept their distance. In the fields beyond were wild camels, or at least roaming ones, unsaddled, unhobbled, plodding towards the hills.

This was the region of the Wolayta people, who lived in beehive huts that were topped with bald ostrich eggs, a token of fertility. Clusters of these huts lay along the road. The women were beautiful, with long plaits of braided hair and bright cloaks, some of the women heavily burdened with bundles of firewood. Men in fields were using yoked oxen and wooden plows shaped like wishbones, and all the boys striding with spears.

The town names were large on the map, but the towns themselves were tiny. Mega was just a wide place in the road. There was nothing to eat here, but being among so many hungry people had killed my appetite. In Ethiopia I ate one meal a day, injera and vegetable glop, or pasta, a dish that was a hangover from the Italian occupation.

Tadelle said, ‘There was a war here in 1983’ — no sign of it, though, except for some wrecked vehicles on the low bare hills. The war had come and gone, people had died, life resumed, nothing had changed, still the plow and the herd of goats and the cooking fire and the bare buttocks; the African story.

I walked from shop to shop, making notes on what was for sale — cheap Chinese clothes, aluminum pots, knives, enamel basins: no food. Since I was the only faranji in town, I attracted attention, and boys began following me.

‘Please give me one birr. I am poor and I am a schoolboy.’

They took turns begging. I said no, to discourage them from pestering farajis. Is this the right thing to do? I wrote in my diary that night. I don’t know. Everyone asked, everywhere I went from Cairo to Cape Town, people — kids mostly — had their hand out: Meesta. These kids in Mega I gave some of the Abu Dhabi cookies before shooing them away.

Tadelle said it was too hot to continue for now. We would stay in Mega for a few hours and set offagain for Moyale later in the afternoon. We sat in the shade, Tadelle complaining genially about Ethiopian politicians (‘Zay are termites’) and we were joined by some girls from a shop who brought us bottled water. To kill time I demonstrated the blades of my Swiss Army knife.

‘One month’s salary,’ said Tadelle when I answered his question about the price of it. Fifty dollars, I had said. But most Ethiopians earned nothing at all.

We ate some more pineapple, and the girls asked for pieces.

‘Sebat birr,’ I said, and they laughed because that’s what they had charged for the bottled water.

I loved watching the pretty girls gorging themselves on the fruit, the pulp in their fingers, the juice on their lips and running down their chins.

Tadelle said, ‘Instead of Kenya, come wiz Wolde and me, and we travel togezzer. We teach you Amharic. We have good times. We go in za bush.’

He explained this in Tigrinya to Wolde, who smiled and said isshi — an emphatic yes.

I was tempted, I would have liked nothing better, but whenever I looked at the map of Africa I was reminded of the trip I had set myself, what a long road it was to Cape Town. If Tadelle and Wolde had been going south I would have gone with them, but they were traveling west to Konso and Jinka and the Omo River, the regions of buttock-naked people and lovely handmade ornaments.

On the last leg to Moyale, a gun-toting soldier in camouflaged fatigues — sticking out in the brown grass by the roadside — waved his weapon at us. Tadelle stopped and after a laconic conversation, the soldier got into the back seat with Wolde. Just a hitchhiker, but an armed one. I could tell from Tadelle’s demeanor that he hated the man and was thinking: termite.

The soldier had some information, but it was bad news.

‘The Oromo were fighting the Somalis here last week,’ he said.

Nearer Moyale, the Soldier muttered something and Tadelle slowed down. After the soldier got out, Tadelle said, ‘I don’t trust zis man.’

But the Somalis were everywhere, women with bundles, men driving goats ahead of them.

‘Any trouble here, Tadelle?’

‘Zey are poor people,’ he said.

We had come to a very infertile and inhospitable landscape, no trees, lots of idle squatting people, some with the look of refugees and scruffy-looking bundles, others just chancers and riff-raff, and urchins, the detribalized and the lost, the Artful Dodgers who gravitate to national frontiers. We were at the brow of a hill. Down below was a dry riverbed and a cleared area — no man’s land; and beyond it, Kenya, looking even drier than the Ethiopian side.

‘Zey are all thieves and termites — be careful,’ Tadelle said.

He found a parking place while I made some inquiries at the border post, an empty one-story building standing in a patch of waste ground. I was told that the border would be open at six the next morning. No information was available about onward transport in Kenya. I returned to the vehicle. Tadelle said angrily that someone had kicked off half his front bumper and stolen it.

Just then a white Land-Rover went by. An idealistic slogan, relating to hunger in Africa, was lettered on the door of the vehicle, two faranjis inside.

‘Could you give me a lift across the border?’

‘This isn’t a taxi,’ the first man said: a West Country accent.

‘I was looking for a place to stay on the other side.’

‘We don’t run a guest house,’ the other one said: a Londoner.

They drove away, leaving me by the side of the road. That was to be fairly typical of my experience with aid workers in rural Africa: they were, in general, oafish self-dramatizing prigs and often, complete bastards.

I walked back to Tadelle’s vehicle and saw that Wolde was crying.

‘What’s wrong with Wolde?’

‘Wolde is so sad to see you go.’

Wolde hid his face in his hands and sobbed.I was touched and a bit confused. He did not speak English but Tadelle had a habit of translating our conversations to him, so he had shared everything we had discussed on the long road.

We found a hotel, the worst one yet, but the best in Moyale, the Ysosadayo, three dollars a night for a mosquito-haunted room in the block behind it, pasta for a dollar, beer fifty cents, electricity that came and went. The hot airless room smelled of cockroaches and dust, the bed was hard and stinky as a prison cot. I gave ten dollars each in birr to Tadelle and Wolde and then walked around Moyale, asking questions. Within an hour, I established that cattle trucks left the Kenyan side for Marsabit at seven in the morning, that they took eight hours to reach Marsabit; no, they took ten hours to Marsabit; no, twelve. No, it was two days to Nairobi, or three, or if the truck broke down (‘but they always break down’), four days.

The longest road in Africa ran ever onward, to the horizon, into the big bare country of hot hills, in the distance, beyond the steel pipe that served as a customs and immigration barrier. Wherever I walked, I was followed and pestered for money in the insolent way of people who have nothing to lose. But the faranjis who came here were vagabonds themselves, and so no one was surprised when I said, ‘Yellem’ — there is nothing for you. There was no running water in Moyale. The Ysosadayo had a cistern, the shops got by with buckets. The principal activity on the long north — south road was the water carriers, young boys and young girls whacking donkeys on the hindquarters, each donkey loaded with four eight-gallon tins of water, back and forth across the border — for the water came from a well on the Kenyan side.In no man’s land between the two countries a crazy man in rags with matted hair lived in a little lean-to.

Wolde was still upset when I saw him again, but he was wearing a new shirt. He was friendly, helpful, not hustling for a tip but naturally good-hearted. I greatly regretted this parting, and felt that I could go far with them — our little team. They were game for adventure and would be loyal, Tadelle a good driver, the middle-aged pessimist (‘I hate zis country, zay are all termites’), and Wolde the youthful optimist, eager to please. We could go to the ends of the earth — though we were probably already there, for that was not a bad description of Moyale.

Tadelle had bought a new jacet, two shirts, a pair of shoes, khaki trousers; and still had change from ten dollars. The clothes had been smuggled from the Kenyan side to the Moyale market.

‘I like clothes,’ Tadelle said with feeling. He was wearing his new jacket in spite of the heat. It was still in the nineties, well after sundown.

He and Wolde wore their new clothes around Moyale, looking quite different from anyone else in town.

Dinner — cold pasta, warm beer — was a somber affair. Wolde was still snuffling with grief, Tadelle was quietly uttering treasonous remarks. Then the lights failed and there was silence.

At last, in the darkness, Tadelle said, ‘My name mean “gift”.’

‘That’s a nice name.’

‘Zere was one man,’ he said. ‘Adam.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘He have children.’

‘Yes. They found the bones in Ethiopia.’ The Lucy skeleton: bowlegged and tiny and ape-like — I had seen it in the museum.

‘According to air-conditioning,’ Tadelle said, meaning weather and climate, ‘za children were different colors.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I am black, you are red.’

‘Yes.’

At the far end of the table, in the shadows, Wolde began quietly to sob.

‘But we are bruzzers.’