The Shadow of the Sun

Lalibela, 1975

Central Ethiopia is a vast, open plateau transversed by numerous ravines and valleys. During the rainy season, rapid, turbulent rivers flow along the bottoms of these chasms. In the summer months, some of them dry up and disappear, revealing parched, cracked beds over which the wind raises black clouds of dust — mud desiccated by the sun. In places, mountains of three thousand meters loom above the plateau; they bear no resemblance whatsoever to the snow-covered granitic Alps, Andes, or Carpathians. These are mountains of weathered stone, the color of copper and brass, their summits so flat and smooth they could serve as natural airfields. Flying over them, one can see wretched mud shacks, without water or electricity. Questions instantly spring to mind: How do these people live? What do they eat? Why are they there? In such places, at noon the ground must burn the soles of your feet, turn everything to ash. Who condemned them to such a ghastly, subcelestial exile? Why? For what trespasses? I never had an opportunity to climb up to those solitary settlements and search for the answers. And no one down here, on the plateau, was able to tell me anything about the people up there, those wretches of the stratosphere vegetating somewhere on the margins of humanity. Born in obscurity, they would then vanish, no doubt quickly — unknown, anonymous beings. But this is not to say the lives of those at the foot of the mountains were easy or good.

“Go to Wollo,” said Teferi, “go to Haragwe. Here you will see nothing. There, you will see everything.”

We were sitting on the veranda of his house in Addis Ababa. Before us lay a garden encircled by a high wall. Lush growths of hot-pink bougainvillea and bright-yellow forsythia surrounded a softly splashing fountain. The places mentioned by Teferi were several hundred kilometers away. They were the provinces whose inhabitants were dying in a mass famine. Here, on this veranda, with the smells of grilling meat wafting from the kitchen, it was impossible to even imagine this. But how can one really imagine mass death? A human being always dies alone; the moment of death is the loneliest moment of his life. “Mass death” means that, somewhere, a man is dying alone; but at the same time, another man, also alone, is dying as well, and, equally alone, another one still. It means that by coincidence — most frequently against his will — each of them, experiencing in solitude his own, singular death, finds himself in proximity to many others experiencing the same thing.

It was the mid-seventies. Africa had just entered its two darkest decades. Civil wars, revolts, coups d’état, massacres, and hunger, such were some of the symptoms of the crisis from which millions of people inhabiting the Sahel (western Africa) and eastern Africa (especially the Sudan, Chad, Ethiopia, and Somalia) began to suffer. The epoch of the fifties and sixties, full of promise and hope, had come to an end. While it lasted, the majority of the continent’s countries freed themselves from colonialism and began their development as independent states. The dominant political and economic theories of the time held that freedom would automatically bring prosperity, would instantly, with one stroke, transform regions that were poor and wretched into lands flowing with milk and honey. So maintained the wisest men of these times, and it seemed there was no reason not to believe them — especially as the prophecies were so intoxicating!

But things turned out otherwise. Power struggles erupted within the new African states, with the opponents resorting to, and exploiting, all means possible: tribal and ethnic conflicts, military might, corruption, murder. At the same time, the new states proved to be weak, incapable of performing their most basic functions. And all this was occurring during the Cold War, which the East and the West transplanted onto the terrain of Africa. A salient characteristic of this war was that the problems and interests of weaker, dependent countries were utterly ignored, their affairs and dramas treated as strictly subordinate to superpower interests, with no independent significance or weight whatsoever. This was compounded by the traditional Eurocentric haughtiness and arrogance toward nonwhite cultures and societies. Thus, whenever I returned from Africa, I was asked not “How are the Tanzanians?” but rather “How are the Russians in Tanzania?” And instead of being asked about Liberians, I was asked “How are the Americans in Liberia?” (Still, this is better than what faced the German traveler H. C. Buch, who complained to me that after a grueling expedition to the most distant societies of Oceania, he always heard but one question: “What in the world did you eat there?”) Nothing upsets Africans more than this kind of dismissive, supercilious treatment. They find it humiliating, degrading, a slap in the face.

Teferi was the owner of a trucking company. He had several vehicles, antiquated, rattly Bedfords, in which he transported cotton, coffee, and skins. They journeyed both to Wollo and to Haragwe, so he agreed to my going to both with one of his drivers. It was my only chance of doing so, because buses did not run to either place, airplanes did not fly.

Traveling the roads of Ethiopia is arduous and often risky. In the dry season, the car skids over gravel on a narrow shelf cut into the flank of a steep mountain; the road runs along the edge of a precipice several hundred meters deep. In the rainy season, the mountain roads are impassable. Those on level ground turn into muddy quagmires, in which one can get stuck for days.

In the summer, after several hours of driving on the plateau, you are black with dust. Because it is hot and you are dripping with sweat, at the end of a day on the road you are encased in a thick, crusty armor of dirt. The dust, composed as it is of microscopic particles, is in essence a kind of thick hot mist, penetrating clothing and pushing its way into every bodily cranny and crevice imaginable. It takes a long time to get clean. The eyes are the most afflicted. Truck drivers have permanently swollen and reddened eyes, complain of headaches, and go blind at an early age.

One can travel only by day. Between dusk and dawn, the roads are controlled by swift-footed, prowling bands, called shifts, who will rob you of everything. A group of these young bandits will operate until their first bad break. Those captured used to be hanged straightaway by the side of the road. In these more enlightened times, they are dealt with less publicly. In any encounter with them, life hangs in the balance. If a shift abandons its victim somewhere on an uninhabited and waterless expanse, the poor wretch will simply die from dehydration. Hence there are guardposts at all exits from the city. The policeman on duty looks at his watch, or simply at the sun, and calculates whether you will be able to reach the next town (or the next policeman) by dusk. If he decides that you will not, he will make you turn back.

I set off in a truck that Teferi was sending from Addis Ababa north, toward Desē and Lalibela, for a shipment of skins. Does it make sense to calculate the length of this route in kilometers? Here, one measures distances according to the number of hours and days necessary to traverse from point A to point B. For example, it is 120 kilometers from Desē to Lalibela, but it will take me eight hours along this road — if, that is, I manage to secure a good all-terrain vehicle, which is doubtful.

More than likely, it will take me a day, or two days, or more to reach my destination. The local trucks — usually rusted, dilapidated pieces of junk — are constantly breaking down on these roads through the middle of nowhere, in this dust and heat, and for spare parts one must go all the way back to Addis Ababa. The journey is always an unknown: you set out, you are rolling along, but when (and whether) you will get there, or when (and whether) you will be forced to turn around, this you can never anticipate.

There has been a long drought in the place we are headed to, and cattle are dying from a lack of grazing lands and water. The nomads are selling for pennies the skins pulled off the carcasses. They manage with this money to survive for a while yet, and then, if they do not find their way to an international relief center, they perish without a trace in the parched wastelands.

At dawn, we left the city behind us, its surrounding pale-green groves of eucalyptus, the roadside gas stations and police guardposts, and here we were on the sun-drenched plateau, on the highway, which would be paved with asphalt for the first hundred kilometers. The driver’s name was Sahlu — a trustworthy, calm man, Teferi assured me. Sahlu was silent and serious. To create a more friendly atmosphere, I nudged him in the arm, and smiled when he turned toward me. Sahlu smiled back, sincerely but a little shy, seemingly uncertain as to whether this sort of reciprocal grinning didn’t put us on an unduly equal footing.

The farther we were from the city, the more sparsely inhabited and desolate was the countryside. Some children were driving a few skinny cows; some women, bent in half, were carrying heaps of dry branches on their backs. The houses we passed looked empty; we saw no one near them, no people, no movement of any kind. The landscape was immobile, unchanging, as if it were drawn this way once and for all.

Suddenly, two men stepped out onto the highway in front of us, automatic rifles in hand. They were young, strong. I noticed Sahlu turning ashen. His face was frozen, his eyes fearful. He brought the vehicle to a stop. The men jumped onto the truck bed and tapped on the roof of the cab, signaling us to start driving again. I cowered in my seat, trying not to show that I was frightened to death. I stole glances at Sahlu: he was holding the steering wheel stiffly, and looked scared, grim. We drove like this for maybe an hour. Nothing happened. It was sunny, hot, and, inside the cab, dark with dust. Suddenly, banging on the roof. Obediently, Sahlu stopped. The men jumped down without uttering a word, walked to the rear of the truck, where we could not see them, and vanished into the fields.

In the afternoon we reached the small town of Debre Sina. Sahlu stopped on the side of the road, and a group of people instantly surrounded us. Ragged, emaciated, barefoot. Many young boys, many children. A policeman — in torn black uniform, the jacket fastened with the one remaining button — quickly pushed his way toward us. He knew a little English and immediately said, “Take everything with you. Everything! They are all thieves here!” And he began pointing at those standing all around us, one by one: “This is a thief! And this is a thief!” I followed with my eyes the policeman’s finger as it moved clockwise, pausing momentarily at each new face. “This is a thief!” he continued, and when he came to a tall, good-looking boy, his hand began to tremble: “This is a very big thief, sir!” he cried in warning.

The people of whom he spoke regarded me with curiosity. They smiled. Their faces showed neither anger nor cynicism, only a kind of embarrassment and, even, humility. “I have to live with them, sir,” the policeman complained self-pityingly. And, as if he were searching for even the slightest compensation for his cursed fate, he stretched out his hand to me and said: “Can you help me, sir?” Then, to further justify his request, he added: “We are all poor here, sir.” He pointed at himself, at his thieves, at the crooked mud houses of Debre Sina, at the shabby road, at the world.

We walked to the center of the town, to the market. On the square stood stalls with barley, millet, and beans, ones with lamb, and beside them others selling onions, tomatoes, and red peppers. Elsewhere, bread and goat cheese, sugar and coffee, cans of sardines, biscuits and wafers. A market is usually a crowded, bustling, and noisy place, but here all was silent. The vendors stood motionless and idle, now and then only swatting halfheartedly at flies. There were flies everywhere. Dark, thick, churning clouds of them, irritated, frenzied, furious. We fled to the side streets to escape them, for they had instantly thrown themselves at us, and there we encountered a different world — empty, in final agony. On the ground, in the filth and the dust, lay emaciated people. They were the inhabitants of neighboring villages. The drought had deprived them of water, and the sun had scorched their crops. They had come here, to the town, in the desperate hope that they would be given a sip of water and would find something to eat. Weak and no longer capable of any exertion, they were dying of hunger, which is the quietest and most docile kind of death. Their eyes were half-closed, lifeless, expressionless. I could not tell if they saw anything, whether they were even looking at anything in particular. Right beside where I was standing two women lay, their wasted bodies shaking with malaria. Their trembling was the only movement on this little street.

I pulled the driver by his sleeve. “Let’s go,” I said. We returned by way of the market, with its sacks of flour, slabs of meat, and bottles of mineral water: for the great famine was the result not of a shortage, but of inhumane relations. There was food in the country, but when the drought came, the prices went up and the poor peasants were unable to purchase any. The government could, of course, have intervened, or allowed the rest of the world to do so, but for reasons of prestige the regime did not want to admit that there was hunger in the land, and refused aid. A million people died in Ethiopia during this time, a fact concealed first by the emperor Haile Selassie, and then by the one who took his throne and his life, Major Mengistu Haile Mariam. They were divided by their struggle for power, united in their lies.

A mountainous and empty road. Neither cars nor herds of cattle. Skeletons of cows on the gray, parched, ashlike earth. Women with immense clay vats sit waiting in the shade of an acacia — what if a truck carrying water to the city passes by and the driver takes pity on them, stops, and briefly turns on the tap?

By evening we are in Desē. Ahead there is a day’s driving to Lalibela. The whole way, mountain gorges heated like the insides of smelting furnaces, the land empty, devoid of people or vegetation. But we need only stop for a moment, and swarms of flies instantly surround us. It is as if they had been waiting here for us specifically! Their buzzing is deafening, triumphant, victorious: “There you are! We’ve got you!” Why are there so many flies here? How can there be any life whatsoever?

At last — Lalibela. It is one of the eight wonders of the world. And if it isn’t, it should be. Seeing it, however, is not easy. In the rainy season, there is no passable road, and getting here in the dry season is barely less difficult. One can arrive by airplane — if they happen to be flying.

You cannot see anything from the road. More strictly speaking, all you see is an ordinary village. Boys run out to meet you, each begging that you choose him as a guide — it is their only chance to earn something. My guide’s name was Tadesse Mirele and he was a schoolboy. His school was closed, everything was closed — there was famine. People were constantly dying in the village. Tadesse said that he hadn’t eaten anything in several days, but there was water, and so he drinks that. Did he maybe get a handful of grain somewhere? A piece of flat bread? Yes, he admitted, a handful of grain. “But,” he added sadly, “nothing else.” And immediately asked: “Sir?” “Yes, Tadesse?” I replied, “I’m listening.” “Be my helper, please! I need a helper!” He looked at me, and I saw then that he had only one eye. A single eye in the haggard, frightened face of a child.

A while later Tadesse suddenly grabbed me by the arm. I thought that he wanted to ask me for something, but then realized he was only preventing me from falling into a chasm. For just below was a church carved out of stone. A three-story-high structure cut into the massive mountain beneath our feet, inside it, as it were. And farther on, in the same mountain, also invisible at ground level, was carved another church, and another. All together, eleven great churches. This architectural wonder was constructed in the twelfth century by the saint Lalibela, ruler of the Amhara kingdom, whose inhabitants were (and are) Eastern Orthodox Christians. He carved them out of the mountain itself so that Muslims invading these lands could not spot them from afar. And even if they did, they could neither demolish them nor move them, because these churches constitute an integral part of the mountain. There is a Church of the Virgin Mary here, of the Savior of the World, of the Holy Cross and St. George, of Mark and Gabriel, all of them connected by underground tunnels.

“Look, sir!” said Tadesse, pointing down to the courtyard in front of the Church of the Savior of the World. But I had already noticed the sight myself. A dozen or so meters below where we stood, in the yard and on the steps of the church, surged a crowd of lame beggars. It is odd to say “surged” when speaking of discrete human beings, but that word best describes the scene. The people below were so tightly squeezed together, their crippled limbs, stumps, and crutches so tightly interwined, that they formed a single crawling mass, out of which dozens of arms stretched upward like tentacles, and, where there were no limbs, innumerable gaping mouths extended upward, waiting for something to be thrown into them. As we walked from one church to another, this gnarled, moaning, expiring creature below crept after us, and from it dropped every now and then an inert, already lifeless member, abandoned by the rest.

There had been no pilgrims here in a long while, to throw down their alms, and these cripples were unable to get out of the stony chasms.

“Did you see, sir?” Tadesse asked me as we made our way back to the village. And he said it as though to suggest he thought this the only thing really worth seeing.