The Shadow of the Sun

Rising in the Darkness

Dawn and dusk — these are the most pleasant hours in Africa. The sun is either not yet scorching, or it is no longer so — it lets you be, lets you live.

It is twenty-five kilometers from Addis Ababa to the Sabeta waterfall. Driving a car in Ethiopia is a kind of unending process of compromise: everyone knows that the road is narrow, old, crammed with people and vehicles, but they also know that they must somehow find a spot for themselves on it, and not only find a spot, but actually move, advance forward, make their way toward their destination. Every few moments, each driver, cattle herder, or pedestrian is confronted by an obstacle, a conundrum, a problem that needs solving: how to pass without colliding with the car approaching from the opposite direction; how to hurry along one’s cows, sheep, and camels without trampling the children and crawling beggars; how to cross without getting run over by a truck, being impaled on the horns of a bull, knocking over that woman carrying a twenty-kilogram weight on her head. And yet no one shouts at anyone else, no one falls into a fury, no one curses or threatens — patiently and silently, they all perform their slalom, execute their pirouettes, dodge and evade, maneuver and hedge, turn here, converge there, and, most important, move forward. If a bottleneck occurs, people will participate harmoniously and calmly in diffusing it; if a traffic jam forms, everyone will set about resolving it, millimeter by millimeter.

The shallow river rushes over a cracked, rocky bed, descending lower and lower, until it reaches an abrupt threshold and from there falls over the precipice. This is the Sabeta waterfall. A small Ethiopian boy, perhaps eight years old, makes money from visitors by stripping off all his clothes and riding the swift current on his naked bottom down to the edge of the falls. When he comes to a stop right above the thundering abyss, the assembled crowd emits two cries: the first of dread, and the second, immediately after, of relief. The boy stands up, turns his back, and shows the tourists his bum. There is nothing rude in this gesture, no intended insult. On the contrary, there is pride, and a desire to reassure us, the onlookers, that because he has such a properly tanned hide on his buttocks — look, please! — he can slide down the riverbed, which bristles with sharp rocks, without harming himself in the least. It is true: his skin looks as tough as the soles of hiking boots.

The next day, the prison in Addis Ababa. Before the entrance, under a tin roof, a line of people await visiting hours. The government is too poor to provide uniforms for the police, the guards, and so on, and these barely dressed barefoot young men milling about near the gate are in fact the prison guards. We must simply accept that they have power, that it is they who decide whether or not to admit us; we must believe this, and must wait until they have concluded their deliberations. The old prison, built by the Italians, was used by Mengistu’s pro-Soviet regime for holding and torturing the opposition, and now the current authorities have shut behind these bars Mengistu’s closest entourage — members of the Central Committee, ministers, generals of the army and the police.

On the gate, a enormous star with a hammer and sickle, erected by Mengistu, and inside the prison, in the courtyard, a bust of Marx (it was a Soviet custom: portraits of Stalin hung at the entrances to the gulags, and statues of Lenin stood inside).

Mengistu’s regime fell in the summer of 1991 after seventeen years in power. He himself escaped at the last minute by plane to Zimbabwe. The fate of his armed forces is extraordinary. With Moscow’s help, Mengistu had built up the most powerful army in sub-Saharan Africa. It numbered 400,000 soldiers; it had rockets and chemical weapons. Its opponents were guerrillas from the northern mountains (Eritrea, Tigre) and from the south (Oromo). In the summer of 1991, these rebel forces had driven the government troops into Addis Ababa. The guerrillas: barefoot boys, often children, ragged, hungry, poorly armed. Europeans began fleeing the city, expecting a bloodbath once the guerrillas entered. But something quite different occurred, something that could have been the subject of a film entitled “The End of a Great Army.” At the news that their commander had fled, this powerful force, armed to the teeth, collapsed in a matter of hours. Hungry, demoralized soldiers transformed all at once, before the stunned eyes of the city’s residents, into beggars. Holding a Kalashnikov in one hand, they stretched out the other, asking for food. The guerrillas took the capital essentially without a fight. Mengistu’s soldiers, having abandoned their tanks, rocket launchers, airplanes, armored vehicles, and artillery pieces, set off, each man for himself, on foot, on mules, by bus, for their villages and homes. If by chance you find yourself driving through Ethiopia, you will notice in many villages and small towns strong, healthy, young men sitting idly on the thresholds of houses, or on the stools of humble roadside bars. They are the soldiers of General Mengistu’s great army, which was to conquer Africa yet fell apart in the course of a single day in the summer of 1991.

…

The prisoner with whom I am speaking is named Shimelis Mazengia and was one of the ideologues of Mengistu’s regime, a member of the Political Bureau and a secretary of the Central Committee for ideological matters — in short, a kind of Ethiopian Mikhail Suslov. Mazengia is forty-five years old, intelligent. He weighs his words carefully as he speaks. He is dressed in light-colored sweats. All the prisoners here are in “civilian” clothing — the government lacks the funds for prison garb. The guards and the prisoners are dressed alike. I asked one of the guards whether the prisoners do not try to take advantage of the fact that they look like everyone out on the street, and escape. He looked at me with bewilderment. Escape? Here at least they have a bowl of soup, and if they were free they would be dying of hunger like the rest of the nation. They are enemies, he emphasized, but they are not madmen!

Anxiety, even fear, in Mazengia’s dark eyes. They are in constant motion, running this way and that, as if he were feverishly searching for a way out of a trap. He says that Mengistu’s flight was a shock to them all, that is, to the commander’s closest entourage. Mengistu worked day and night; he was uninterested in material goods, only in absolute power. To rule — that was enough for him. He had a rigid mentality, incapable of any compromise. Mazengia describes the massacres of the red terror, which ravaged the country for several years, as “the struggle for power.” He maintains that “both sides killed.” How does he judge his participation in the highest ranks of the fallen regime, a regime that brought so much misfortune, destruction, and death? (More than thirty thousand people were shot on Mengistu’s orders, and some estimates put that figure at more than three hundred thousand.) I remember driving in the morning through Addis Ababa in the late 1970s and seeing corpses strewn in the streets — the previous night’s harvest. Mazengia answers philosophically: History is an intricate process. It errs, advances and retreats, searches here, there, and sometimes gets trapped in a dead end. Only the future can judge, can find the appropriate measure.

He and 406 others associated with the old regime (the Ethiopian nomenklatura) have been here for three years already, not knowing what next — more prison? a trial? execution? freedom? The government is asking itself the same question: what do we do with them?

We were sitting in a small office, probably a guardroom. No one was listening to our conversation, and no one was pressuring us to end it. As is often the case in Africa, there was chaos all around, people wandered in and out, on the table next to us a telephone that no one answered rang continually.

At the end of the conversation I said that I would like to see where the prisoners were kept. I was ushered into a courtyard surrounded by a two-story building with arcades. Along them stretched cells, doors opening onto the courtyard. A throng of prisoners milled about. I observed their faces. They were the bearded, bespectacled visages of university professors, their assistants, their students. Mengistu’s regime had many followers from this milieu — mostly adherents of the Albanian version of socialism as practiced by Enver Hoxha. When Tirana broke with Beijing, in Addis Ababa Ethiopian pro-Hoxha activists shot at Ethiopian Maoists. For months, the streets of the city flowed with blood. After Mengistu’s escape, his army dispersed and went home, and only the academics were left. They were seized without great difficulty and imprisoned in this crowded courtyard.

Someone brought from London a Somali quarterly that had been published there in the summer of 1993—Hal-Abuur: Journal of Somali Literature and Culture. I counted: of the seventeen authors represented — preeminent Somali intellectuals, scientists, and writers — fifteen reside abroad. Here is one of Africa’s problems: its intelligentsia lives for the most part outside its borders, in the United States, in London, Paris, Rome. Remaining in their native countries are, at the bottom, masses of illiterate, downtrodden, utterly exploited peasants; at the top, the corrupt bureaucracy or arrogant, coarse soldiers (the lumpenmilitariat, as the Ugandan historian Ali Mazrui calls them). How is Africa to develop, to participate in the great transformation of the world, without an intelligentsia? Without its own educated middle class? Furthermore, if an African scholar or writer is persecuted in his own country, most frequently he will not seek shelter in another country on his continent, but in Boston, in Los Angeles, in Stockholm, or in Geneva.

I went to the university in Addis Ababa. It is this country’s only institution of higher learning. I visited the university bookstore, which is this country’s only bookstore. Empty shelves. No books, no periodicals — nothing. It is this way in most African countries. Once, I remember, there was a good bookshop in Kampala, another (three, even) in Dar es Salaam. Now — everywhere, nothing. Ethiopia is the size of France, Germany, and Poland put together. More than fifty million people live here; in several years there will be sixty million of them, in a dozen or so, more than eighty million. And so on.

Maybe then?

If only one?

In my free time, I walk to Africa Hall, a great ornamental structure on one of the hills upon which this city is built. The first African summit meeting took place here in May of 1963. I saw Nasser here, Nkrumah, Haile Selassie, Ben Bella, Modibo Keita. Very big names at the time. In the hall in which they met, some boys are now playing Ping-Pong; a woman is selling leather jackets.

Africa Hall — it reflects perhaps a corollary of Parkinson’s Law untrammeled and triumphant. Whenever I arrive in Addis Ababa, I always notice the same thing: a new building is being erected near Africa Hall, each one more magnificent and luxurious than the one before. Political systems come and go in Ethiopia — first a feudal-aristocratic one, then a Marxist-Leninist one, currently a federal-democratic one. Africa too is changing, growing poorer and more wretched. But all this is of no consquence; the imperturbable and victorious law of the constant expansion of the seat of Africa’s rulers — Africa Hall — operates freely and without constraints.

Inside — corridors, rooms, conference halls, offices piled with papers from floor to ceiling. The papers are spilling out of cabinets and files, falling from shelves. Desks are squeezed in tightly everywhere, and behind them sit the most beautiful girls from all over Africa.

Secretaries.

I am looking for one particular document. It is called “Lagos Plan of Action for the Economic Development of Africa 1980 2000.” African leaders convened in Lagos in 1980 to consider solutions to the continent’s crisis. How could Africa be saved? And they resolved on this particular plan of action — the bible, the panacea, the grand strategy for development.

I search and inquire, but to no avail. Most of the workers here have not even heard of any such plan. Others have heard of it, but they know nothing more specific. Others have heard of it, know a bit about it, but still do not have the text. They can give me copies of the resolution concerning how the production of peanuts in Senegal might be increased. How the tsetse fly should be combated in Tanzania. How the drought in the Sahel can be curtailed. But how to save Africa? This plan they do not have.

Several conversations in Africa Hall. One, with Babashola Chinsman. He is vice director of the United Nations Development Program. Young, energetic, from Sierra Leone. One of those Africans upon whom fate has smiled. A representative of a new global class: members of Third World nations occupying seats in international organizations. A villa in Addis Ababa (official), a villa in Freetown (private, which he rents to the German embassy), a private apartment in Manhattan (because he doesn’t care for hotels). A limousine, a driver, servants. Tomorrow, a conference in Madrid; three days from now, one in New York; a week from now, another in Sydney. Always the same, the eternal, subject: how to relieve hunger in Africa.

The conversation is pleasant, interesting.

Chinsman: “It is not true that Africa is stagnant. Africa is developing; it is not merely a continent of famine.

“The problem is larger, worldwide. One hundred and fifty poorly developed countries are leaning on twenty-five developed ones, in which, moreover, there is recession and a stagnant population growth.

“It is extremely important to promote regional development in Africa. Unfortunately, the obstacle is a backward infrastructure: unsatisfactory means of distribution, bad roads, insufficient trucks and buses, a poor public transportation system.

“This inadequate transportation network results in ninety percent of the continent’s villages and towns living in isolation — they have no access to the market, and thus no access to money.

“The paradox of our world: If one figures in the cost of transporting, servicing, warehousing, and preserving food, then the cost of a single meal (typically, a handful of corn) for a refugee in some camp, for example in Sudan, is higher than the price of a dinner in the most expensive restaurant in Paris.

“After thirty years of independence, we are finally beginning to understand that education is important for development. The farm of a literate peasant is ten to fifteen times more productive than the farm of an illiterate one. Education alone, without any additional investments, brings material benefits.

“The most important thing is to have a multidimensional approach to development: develop regions, develop local societies, develop interdependence rather than intercompetition!”

John Menru from Tanzania: “Africa needs a new generation of politicans who know how to think in a new way. The current one must depart. Instead of thinking about development, they think about how to stay in power.

“The solution for Africa? Create a new political climate:

adopt as binding the principle of dialogue;

ensure society’s participation in public life;

observe fundamental human rights;

begin democratization.

“Do all this, and new politicians will emerge all by themselves. New politicians, with a clear, well-defined vision. A precise vision — that is what we lack today.

“What is dangerous? Ethnic fanaticism. It can cause an ethnic principle to assume a religious dimension, to become a substitute religion. This is extremely dangerous!”

Sadig Rasheed — a Sudanese, one of the directors of the Economic Commission for Africa: “Africa must wake up.

“One must arrest the process of Africa’s increasing marginalization. Whether this will succeed, I don’t know.

“I worry about whether African societies will be able to assume a self-critical stance, and much depends on this.”

That is precisely the subject of a conversation I have one day with A., an elderly Englishman and longtime local resident. His view: That the strength of Europe and of its culture, in contrast to other cultures, lies in its bent for criticism, above all, for self-criticism — in its art of analysis and inquiry, in its endless seeking, in its restlessness. The European mind recognizes that it has limitations, accepts its imperfections, is skeptical, doubtful, questioning. Other cultures do not have this critical spirit. More — they are inclined to pride, to thinking that all that belongs to them is perfect; they are, in short, uncritical in relation to themselves. They lay the blame for all that is evil on others, on other forces (conspiracies, agents, foreign domination of one sort or another). They consider all criticism to be a malevolent attack, a sign of discrimination, of racism, etc. Representatives of these cultures treat criticism as a personal insult, as a deliberate attempt to humiliate them, as a form of sadism even. If you tell them that the city is dirty, they treat this as if you said that they were dirty themselves, had dirty ears, or dirty nails. Instead of being self-critical, they are full of countless grudges, complexes, envies, peeves, manias. The effect of all this is that they are culturally, permanently, structurally incapable of progress, incapable of engendering within themselves the will to transform and evolve.

Do all African cultures (for there are many of them, just as there are many African religions) belong to this touchy, uncritical mess? Africans like Sadig Rasheed have begun to consider this; they want to find the answer to why, in the race of continents, Africa is being left behind.

Europe’s image of Africa? Hunger; skeletal children; dry, cracked earth; urban slums; massacres; AIDS; throngs of refugees without a roof over their heads, without clothing, without medicines, water, or bread.

The world, therefore, rushes in with aid.

Today, as in the past, Africa is regarded as an object, as the reflection of some alien star, as the stomping ground of colonizers, merchants, missionaries, ethnographers, large charitable organizations (more than eighty are active in Ethiopia alone).

Meantime, most importantly, it exists for itself alone, within itself, a timeless, sealed, separate continent, a land of banana groves, shapeless little fields of manioc, jungles, the immense Sahara, rivers slowly drying up, thinning forests, sick, monstrous cities — a world charged, at the same time, with a restless and violent electricity.

…

Two thousand kilometers across Ethiopia. Empty, unpopulated roads. Mountains and more mountains. At this time of year (it is winter in Europe), the mountains are green. They are sky-high and magnificent in the sun. Profound silence everywhere. But stop for just a moment, sit down by the side of the road, and listen. Somewhere, far off, you will hear high monotonous voices. It is children singing on the nearby slopes — children collecting brushwood, tending herds, cutting grass for the cattle. You will not hear the voices of adults. It is as if this were a world only of children.

And this is a world of children. Half the population of Africa is under fifteen years of age. There are innumerable children in all its armies; children constitute the majority in refugee camps; children work in the fields, buy and sell in the markets. But the child’s biggest role is in the home: he is responsible for supplying water. While everyone else is still asleep, little boys are rising in the darkness and running to springs, ponds, rivers — for water. Modern technology has proven to be their great ally: it gave them a gift — the cheap, light, plastic container. A dozen years ago, this container revolutionized life in Africa. Water is the sine qua non of survival in the tropics. Because there is generally no plumbing here and water is scarce, one must carry it over long distances, sometimes ten or more kilometers. For centuries, heavy clay or stone vessels were used for this purpose. Traditional African cultures did not know wheeled transport, so human beings carried everything themselves, most often on their heads. The division of domestic labor was such that carrying water was women’s work. A child could never manage such a large and heavy receptacle, and in this bare-bones world each house usually had only one.

Then, the plastic container appeared. A miracle! A revolution! First of all, it is relatively inexpensive (although in certain houses it is the only thing of any value): it costs around two dollars. Most important, however, it is light. And it comes in various sizes, so even a small child can fetch several liters of water.

All the children carry water. You see entire flocks of youngsters, playing and teasing one another as they walk to a distant spring. What a relief this is for the exhausted African woman! What a transformation in her life! How much more time she now has for herself, for her household!

The plastic container possesses countless advantages. Among the most important is that it holds your place in line. Often, you have to stand for days in a line for water (in those places, that is, where it is delivered by truck). Standing in the tropical sun is torture. It used to be that you couldn’t just set down the clay pot and go sit in the shade: it was too valuable to risk its being stolen. Now, however, you place your plastic container in the line and then go find yourself some shade, or go to the market, or visit friends. Driving through Africa, one sees these kilometer-long, colorful rows awaiting the arrival of water.

More about the children. It is enough to stop briefly in a village, a town, or simply in a field — a group of children will instantly materialize. All of them indescribably tattered. Little shirts, pants — all frayed and shredded beyond belief. Their entire treasure, their sole nourishment, is a small calabash with a bit of water in it. Each piece of bread or banana will disappear, inhaled, in a fraction of a second. Hunger for these children is something permanent, a way of life, second nature. And yet they do not ask for bread or fruit, or even for money.

They ask for a pencil.

A mechanical pencil. The price? Ten cents. Yes, but where can they possibly get ten cents?

They would all like to go to school, they would like to learn. And sometimes they do go to school (a village school is simply a spot in the shade of an enormous mango tree), but they cannot learn to write because they have nothing to write with — they do not own a pencil.

Somewhere near Gondar (you will come to this town of Ethiopian kings and emperors by traveling from the Gulf of Aden through Djibouti in the direction of Al-Ubayyid, Tersaf, N’Djamena, and Lake Chad), I met a man who was walking south. That is really the most important thing one can say about him: that he was walking north to south. Oh, yes, and that he was searching for his brother.

He was barefoot, dressed in short, patched-up pants, and on his back he had something that might have been called a shirt once. Besides that, he had three things: a wanderer’s walking stick; a piece of cloth, which in the morning served him as a towel, shielded his head during the afternoon heat, and at night covered his body while he slept; and, slung over his shoulder, a wooden water dish. He had no money. If people along the way gave him something to eat, he would eat; if they did not, he walked hungry. But he had been hungry his whole life; there was nothing extraordinary about hunger.

He was walking south, because his brother had once set out from home in a southerly direction. When was this? Long ago. (I was speaking with him through the driver, who knew scant English, and had only one expression at his disposal for referring to the past: long ago.) And he has been walking a long time, from somewhere in the Eritrean mountains, from near Keren.

He knows about walking south: in the morning, you must head straight into the sun. When he meets someone, he asks whether they have seen, or know, Solomon (that’s his brother’s name). No one is surprised at such a question. All of Africa is in motion, on the road to somewhere, wandering. Some are running away from war, others from drought, still others from hunger. They are fleeing, straying, getting lost. This one, walking north to south, is an anonymous drop in the human deluge flooding the roads of the continent, a deluge driven either by fear of death or by the hope of finding a place under the sun.

Why does he want to find his brother? Why? He doesn’t understand the question. The reason is obvious, self-evident, not requiring an explanation. He shrugs his shoulders. It is possible that he feels pity for the man he has just encountered and who, though well dressed, is poorer than he in some important, priceless way.

Does he know where he is? Does he know that the place we are sitting is no longer Eritrea, but already Ethiopia, another country? He smiles the smile of a man who knows many things, or who, in any event, knows one thing: that for him there are no boundaries here in Africa, and no states — there is only the burned earth, on which brother seeks brother.

Near this same road — but one must walk down, deep into a nearly impenetrable cleft between two steep mountain slopes — lies the monastery of Debre Libanos. Inside, the church is dark and cool. After hours of driving in blinding sun, the eyes must adjust to this place, which at first impression seems submerged in total darkness. After a time you begin to discern frescoes on the walls, and see Ethiopian pilgrims dressed in white lying facedown on the mat-covered floor. In one corner an old monk is chanting a psalm in a drowsy voice, which periodically dies away altogether, in the already dead language of Ge’ez. In this atmosphere replete with a concentrated and quiet mysticism, everything seems beyond time; beyond measure and weight, beyond life.

Who knows how long these pilgrims lay there, for I walked in and out of the church several times in the course of that day, and each time they were still resting motionless on the mats.

All day? A month? A year? Eternity?