The Change (Leutu)

In that compound, they were all strangers to one another. Everyone lived together. That much is true. They interacted, played spoke and ate together, some of them even slept together. Mostly they were just hungry together. They never spoke directly of the reality surrounding them. Just as well for to verbalize such an existence would make it simply unlivable. In any case there was never any need for any clumsy reference to “leutu” (the change) and they were a people to whom the very essence of communication was obliqueness. These were admittedly bad times but even in better times they were hard wired to be vague and unfathomable. They were at their element in the cemetery world of impreciseness and metaphor. They suffered well, these urban peasants. The gods, they say, are cruel and pull off the wings of flies for sport. They made excellent flies.

The boy, for one, was in constant danger. He lived the life of a mongrel dog that is afraid, at any moment of being discovered eating another, bigger, dog’s food. He became adept at slinking around blending with the scenery and for long periods could even aspire to the subtle mastery of the disappearing trick. He wasn’t though invisible. Far from it. He was always there shivering, looking furtive and perpetually prepared for flight. He transmitted his utter hopelessness to all. During the last months of his stay in the house he wasn’t even able to close his eyes. It was very eerie to watch him: a bundle of nervous and unstable energy.

The old man, the paterfamilias, was the worst. He had been, in his time, a gentle enough person, but he had, as each year irretrievably passed, wrapped himself more deeply in his cloak of selfishness. His wild, brutal and unfocused eyes followed them everywhere, it seemed, to those more inclined or sensitive, to do so even around corners and through walls. His favorite tactic was to pick out one of them and shower them with his own special brand of mumbled, discordant, and sarcastic invective. Those singled out for this kind of attention knew they were in for a tiresome time. The children, with uncanny antenna, were the best at sensing his changes of mood and were always better at dealing with an onslaught. They bore it with a feigned resignation that deceived no one. The air was crisp on such days and the atmosphere very fragile. They were days for walking on one’s toes.

On other days, rare fragrant eucalyptus days, when there was a lull in the unrelenting drabness and oppression of their lives they would be lulled momentarily into a totally artificial obsession with the irrelevances of daily existence which gave the appearance that these were ordinary people living in ordinary times dealing with ordinary things. These were moments to prize and to hold in one’s inner mind to return to in the bitter struggle to survive in this city.

They lived, it must be said, in a unique city. A eucalyptus and corrugated iron jungle. A city some strangers hated the second they arrived. The smells, the dirt, the squalor, the intertwining of slum and palatial villa, the steep claustrophobic streets with cattle, shoats and dogs vying with beggars, pedestrians and kamikaze blue and white taxi’s and monstrous evil smelling red and yellow buses for inches of space, the vague hint of oppressive watchers everywhere and the unrelenting curiosity: for everyone seemed determined to know each others business, made some visitors yield to an inner scream of despair and panic that they carried the shriek in their head for years after they left. One traveler I knew, actually vomited if she was somehow reminded of the place without warning. I exaggerate; of course, in her case it was the hot and spicy food that had swayed her (and her stomach).

It was also, and by a long shot, the most exquisite city in the world. Many strangers came to visit and seemed unable to ever leave. People who were by some quirk of fate obliged to leave, had to learn painfully to co-exist with a longing that could never be satisfied. It was as if all the aspects of the city and especially the food and coffee had some secret habit forming drug that enslaved everyone. People concocted all sorts of devious ways of keeping their pipeline safe and secure. They continued to live there in their minds and permitted their bodies to live more or less normal lives elsewhere. There were tricks for doing this: we will come to those later for I am one of those involuntary exiles and I know what I am talking about.

Of course it was also full of the "middle-men", the adventurers, bridge-builders, translators, interpreters, ambassadors, residents. Objective critics sometimes but more often mere apologists. Those with the presumption that half-understanding is enough. In the country of the blind the one eyed man is king, their hubris presumes.

How to begin to justify the attraction and beauty of this bizarre city. It isn’t enough to tell you of it’s unique rarified air, it’s hot springs, it’s eucalyptus and charcoal glow. It baffles everyone – even its own addicts- that this city of villages can have such a magnetic pull. Squalor and elegance live intertwined here and one had to work hard to distinguish one from the other. A megalopolis of paradox. An urbane urban centre that had witnessed inhumanity in a package that had never been experienced before. People played at being refined and courteous only so that they could appall more when they turned slovenly and vicious.

A good game this, and the adepts really savored changing the rules without warning so that their victims would have to adjust rapidly to new and unexplained rules. How can I explain it? It was a game where the commentators and participants could not declare: “that’s not cricket!” because, of course, everything was cricket. (You could hear them at night. Every night!) Let me whet your appetite. In the dark night of leutu, for example, soldiers and other armed heroes took to refusing fathers and especially mothers access to the corpses of their children unless they paid for the bullets that had killed them. It was a good game and they did not tire of that one for nearly a year.

This is a story of that city and some of its natives and guests: its fiends and its angels. I am like a curious photographer: snippets of detail interlaced with non sequiturs. It is not the complete unexpurgated version of that tale of the change: that entertainment cannot be recalled or told. No. This is the story of some of the flavors and glimpses of that city: only hazy and unstructured fragments of the whole. Do not expect precision here. This is the camera lens taking a picture of moving tail lights at night. The medium itself is uncertain and the focus weak.

I have obfuscated long enough. Even I can concede that. Let me introduce myself, all that David Copperfield kind of “crap”. I am Tesfai Wolde Daniel, the son of Daniel Dessalegn, the son of Dessalegn Gebre and so on. We have no surnames in my country, you will have to park whatever garbage you may have heard about Lions of Judah and Kings of Kings: that was the invention of recent history. Men and women take their fathers name as their second name. They keep these names for life. There is no exclusivity in names. Identical names are thrown up by the geography of daily interaction. There is magic and importance in names. I am a simple dweller of this city. Not quite a hewer of wood or a drawer of water. I was born in this city. I have never lived long out of it -I wonder often if I could. I can write and read. You have evidence of that already surely?

I am, let me admit right away, luckier than most. I have been briefly to school and I am a graduate of the best university this country has to offer – No3 Prison behind the railway station. You will see that I had some of the finest teachers in the country explain things to me. Yes I am luckier than most. Prison may have educated me but it also saved me as it kept me out of sight and mind during the red terror, and I survived many friends that were being butchered outside for mere terminological inexactitudes. I am alive and I am able to begin telling this story that has bubbled inside me for years. I am lucky. I will tell my version of this rather convoluted story. How many are unable? These things, as you will discover shortly, are intertwined. I find it hard to tell all that follows dispassionately. It is, moreover, cumbersome and heavy to remember. Do not believe them when they tell you that painful memories become less painful in the telling. It is not true. I have found that in the telling the ironies and paradoxes simply become heavier and more wearysome still. I am sorry for you, dear reader or listener, as I am afraid that I have, in any case, been well trained in the tradition or instinct of evasion: we tend to do it on principle. we Abyssinians, Do you see? I offer you with clues almost continuously. Soon, too soon, you will know everythng. It is difficult to speak clearly and unambiguously. I will use big words and I will digress often. Taking you down winding paths with nonsensical words and meaningless dialogue. It is a way with storytellers: a kind of delicious torture devised by writers. This is why I will alternate between brutal frankness and total deflection. Anyway, although I am paid to keep your interest, the truth is that my own mind wanders.

The truth? What truth? Whose truth? All of the truth? Or just some of it, half remembered, dreamt almost? Staccato truth? That’s what it’s like for me. I only have a very faint recollection of what happened in any case and now this cursed disease so determinedly burrowing into my mind is eating intermittently at the dim memories I have preserved so diligently: fate’s pretty bundle of tricks again. Those gods again playing with flies! I am not sure if I know precisely what happened. So much of what happened caught me unawares: Bravery where none expected it, treachery, loyalty, joy, corruption, principles, credulity, suspicion, wisdom, ignorance, fear. All of it together. jumbled up and squashed like scrambled eggs, or better like fit fit (day old injera mashed into old wot). Fused together Excitement dancing with anomie. Euphoria, the sweet fragrance of freedom one second, the paranoia of oppression the next and always, always, always the deep mystification and distrust of self. But there could be redemption: perhaps if I tell this tale I can excise some of the ghosts.

That year, the rains did not help much. The rainy season in this part of the world proves itself, every time, as the mother and father of all rainy seasons. I dare even the most sanguine amongst you to come and remain unflinching and relaxed under the misery that is the rainy season in these parts: thunder; lightening; hailstorms; dark skies above. It is almost comical. Each year as the tempest rages people try to reassure themselves that it has rained harder or at least equally hard the year before.

That year was no different. Some people, you know the ones I mean, lay warm and snug in warm dry bedding and stretched and yawned as they lay contentedly listening to the reassuring din on their corrugated tin roofs. Others lay huddled against buildings under cardboard and dreamt horrific premonitions of what the rivers would do in the morning as they rose and broke their banks and poured forth the excrement and dead dogs and humans of the city into the poorer quarters. Someone had chosen the site of the house badly and each year, almost as soon as the rains started, the filth and debris of the city would be deposited in layers on the floors. The stench was overpowering. It was hard to believe the stories that were circulating concerning hunger in the provinces. It rained as hard as ever and so no one could understand this talk of drought.

Awful stories were being told but then those country bumpkins wouldn’t know a drought if it hit them in the face. Lazy, good for nothing, peasants living off the fat of the land. They could not know the meaning of hunger. Farming is so easy. You scratch the surface of the earth, you drop a few seeds in and then you wait and eat. What could be more simple? In any case if it was true that people in Wollo were hungry what was Janhoi, doing about it? It was up to him surely not something lesser folk had to worry about?

There was also much talk about fighting in the North. No one was quite what that was about. Some said outsiders, strangers, were attacking the country; others claimed that northerners were rebelling against the rightful order. These northerners were all the same. They had no loyalty to the motherland. They were forever fantasizing about being foreigners. What was so different about them? Did they look different? Did they have two heads or what? Maybe they had no bodily functions? It was confusing and unclear.

Life was difficult enough, what with the rain and the stench, prices going up all the time. Struggling through the day was draining everyone in the house of energy. The old man hardly had a good day anymore. The women of the house were almost desperate. Turunesh, the hidden but uncontested power in the house, tried to avoid it but had to consent to the beautiful Almaz returning to the tej beit (bar). Almaz even persuaded an accounting clerk, a habitué of the bar-cum-brothel, a man mesmerized by her radiance, to help them make a list of all the income they could expect and to subtract their expenses. Even on paper it didn’t work. The puzzled man, besotted as he was, just shook his head and grumbled that they had other income that they hadn’t let on about. Turunesh insisted this was a clue about the clerks own circumstances and tried to persuade Almaz into seeing him more regularly. It was really ironic how men simply did not understand the power of edir (rotating credit) and ikub (burial society) in helping them manage to get money for all the essential things: food, clothing, school fees, burials and the occasional feast. There would have to be less essential things next week. That was all.

In the evenings they would luxuriate in the comfort of words. Mengesha precisely because of his idiosyncrasies, was a marvelous story teller. He would savor his words and with just the right amount of innuendo (for the adults), comedy (for the children) and a masterful control of the devices of storytelling: pauses, inflections, pregnant silences, whispers and excited ejaculations, he would hold them all captive. Somehow it never seemed as if they had heard the story before. They probably hadn’t: Like all good storytellers, the old man never told a story the same way twice. Once, one of the children, Tadesse, I think it was, taking advantage of having the ogre in a mellow mood, dared to suggest that these were either not “true” stories or indicated that his memory was letting him down and he was compensating by fabricating new details.

Mengesha had been chewing his last mouthful of dinner. He gulped it down and excitedly and angrily began lecturing the roomful of them.

“You dither heads, you ignorant fools, donkeys, you don’t understand do you? It isn’t as simple as that. Each incident in life is observed by hundreds and hundreds of mirrors. Each mirror catches an aspect of something that happens. Each mirror distorts what it sees and confuses it with aspects of other incidents that are occurring at the same time. These mirrors cannot reflect a truthful image of what they see.

He paused, and then went on, already much calmer,

“Actually, it is better to say there is no such thing as a single true image. Each version is as valid as the next. I am a simply different mirror each time I tell a story: I merely see the incident from another perspective. I’m telling you, my darling innocent idiots. Keep this in the foremost of your minds always: Distrust anyone who claims to know the single truth and despise those who accept that one version of a story has more validity than another.

“Anyway, it is my story – like an azmari (ballad singer). I am allowed to change my emphasis in anyway I like. How many versions of tizita have you listened to? Which is the real one? You chicken heads, don’t you see that if I told you the same story twice you would fall asleep? The true art is to use the same story to tell another tale and to unveil significance. Remember, my donkey children, it’s all about nuance. You will remember these stories of mine when I’m dead. Anyway why am I telling you this? Wasting time. Do you want to hear a story or not? If you know the meaning what is the point of asking me to tell it”? Tadesse, if you want to leave just do so, or maybe you want to become storyteller -its no skin off my nose- I’m tired of sharing my knowledge with you degenerates anyway”.

Tadesse stayed, of course, what choice did he have? Where did the old fool expect him to go? He glanced down at the floor hoping it would swallow him up.

Mengesha’s stories always began by addressing the children and they all began the same way, he spoke of today’s seeds (children) that would become tomorrow’s fruits (adults). It always began as some kind of fairy tale and, as with all things he did, the ritualized “once upon a time” beginning was deliberate: smiling conspiratorial eyes would meet over flickering flames and anticipatory backsides would shuffle more comfortably into place. One really never knew where one of the old man’s stories would lead. Settling down for the journey was part of the fun and all vied with each other for sitting space closest to him for Mengesha was in the habit of muttering small asides as if to himself. These asides, longingly listened for by the gathering, often gave his deceptively simple stories such great depth and texture that they transformed them from splendid stories to sophisticated Machiavellian navigational charts for use in the politics of daily interaction. It was from these stories that the children learnt their history and their culture. They learnt too the style of speech expected of them in different contexts and in later years would think fondly that they learnt to defend themselves with the right tones and retorts all gleaned effortlessly from the navigation charts.

I have great need of a political navigational chart right now. How can I begin to tell this story without one? It is confusing enough for those of us who lived through it first hand.

First, there is the language itself. A language delicately moulded by centuries of caution and subtlety. It is built like a series of boxes within boxes. Meaning hidden inside the innermost box and each box being unlocked only by a very painstaking breaking of codes and combinations. Do you now begin to perceive why it takes to long to say anything? Wax and gold.

Then there is the minutia of political disagreements between factions whose only way of communicating their differences was to resort to coining new artificial words and then present us all with obtuse complex never-ending arguments about which was the most appropriate to encapsulate some half-baked alien concept. Can you blame us for not understanding people who maim and kill each other and innocent bystanders because one wants to help the “sweating ones” and the other wants to help the “perspiring ones”? Apart from the fact that it wasn’t exactly polite to speak of these things anyway, who in hell was supposed to understand what it was all about? It was a madness unleashed and then only very hesitantly held in check: a rabid dog being precariously held on to by a very confused and frightened child.

But there is also the question of what is innovation and what is mere repackaging, is it self delusion or epic myth? The constructs of political change are somewhat repetitive. You desperately try to usher in something that is band new but since you have to construct with the tools and instruments you already have and you end up using scaffolding that looks strangely familiar and all the constructs you have access to in your head are second hand: An echo of something you knew before? Ah, you know what they say, don’t you? Its pithy, but depressing: There is nothing new under the sun. Even the words you need to use to explain your brand new bag are the same old tired, worn, wrong-sized words.

Somehow the change was, in the end, not so much definitive but more like a series of blows to the nations’ head. Eventually, concussion resulted and the entire country seemed somehow to develop a remarkable capacity to remember some things in the distant past but forget recent events completely. How do you begin to explain a regime that deposes an emperor in the name of marxism, obliterates his memory, cheapens his character but celebrates his and his ancestors’ dubious conquests and victories? Selective memory makes me nervous. Nationalistic and selective memory absolutely terrifies me, what can I say?

When he was younger, Mengesha had been an aiutante (a wonderful term for a combined companion, guard, tire-changer, general do-all-the-dirty-backbreaking-shit-the-driver-doesn’t-want -to) on an old trenta quattro truck. These incredible workhorses had survived the Italian invasion and had become, in the first years of the restored empire, the life blood of the country. The driver, Giovanni, a Sardinian barbaricino, had decided he had nothing to return to in Italy after the war and had developed, like so many other ferengi’s (Foriegners) before and after, an obsession with beautiful Ethiopian women. Giovanni was fond of wine and other, more powerful, concoctions, and passed most of his later life in alcoholic stupor. Nearly always incapacitated, he and had begun teaching his factotum Mengesha how to drive simply in order that he could have his drink and drink it. It began by Giovanni simply allowing him to steer whenever the poor man was incapable of seeing straight (he could still manage the pedals and gears) but had quickly progressed to teaching him how to drive as the drinking deteriorated. He soon learnt the rudiments of driving but he never quite progressed from there.

Along with the rudimentary driving Mengesha learned an even more essential skill which was to make use of the rest of his life. This skill he really mastered. He had the equivalent of a back belt in the fine art of Italian swearing – the Italian school of swearing, you know, is honored throughout the world. Well, Mengesha, became particularly attached to the sheer simplicity and range of Italian swear words. His favorite profanity was that addressed to the deities.

Giovanni had been of a fiery nature and was often brought to the point of choleric hysteria. He had devised for himself a simple yet effective mechanism for getting a grip on himself in what was, given his habitual frenzied state, a remarkably short time. He would stand in the full view of as many people as possible and pull off theatrically his oil-stained beret and then braying at the top of his voice, begin invoking the immediate presence of all the saints of the Roman Catholic church. Depending on the extent of his anger this phase could continue for anything up to ten minutes, often he would repeat names several times but he always remembered to invite his own patron saint St John and, of course, the blessed Virgin.

Giovanni evidently had some serious clout with them since all the saints promptly dropped whatever good works they were doing and rushed over into the cap. The beret was soon filled to the brim with saints. Giovanni would then magnanimously but brusquely order the Virgin and St.John to “escape” out of the cap, the unfortunate saints left behind would be squeezed, crumpled, crushed, wrung and twisted mercilessly. On particularly inauspicious occasions Giovanni would even throw the cap to the ground and stamp heavily on the saints as they lay passively inside the mangled beret. This would restore Giovanni instantaneously into a good mood and with a sheepish, if drunken, grin he would restore the cap to his head and go about his business.

One time, with Mengesha watching, Giovanni, brought to the brink of derangement by his wrath, had committed an unpardonable sin. He had forgotten to request the Virgin and St. John to vacate the beret and they were there with the other saints when Giovanni pulverized the beret. Giovanni, transformed instantaneously into a state of sober and shocked numbness had driven immediately to confession. He found the priest otherwise engaged but convinced him of the urgency of his sinfulness. He had, nevertheless, remained shaken, subdued and contrite for several months. He had been unusually nice and pleasant to everyone and seemed incapable of losing his temper, just as they were lulled into thinking this could be permanent, he had a series of mishaps and had a relapse- soon followed by another and the cycle was renewed. Mengesha fervently wished that Giovanni would repeat this lapse, in part so he could benefit from the easier working conditions, but really to see if this remarkable metamorphosis could be accomplished a second time, but he never witnessed it again.

Giovanni was such a rich source of entertainment that he figured prominently in Mengesha’s parables and repertoire. Like Mark Twain’s Puddinghead Wilson, Mengesha’s conceit was that Giovanni had fashioned a rudimentary, comic and unpretentious philosophy – aphorisms really- and these sayings became, through these stories, an integral part of their lives and their formulaic and rhetorical discourse.

The old man’s bete noire was, of course, the boy, Haile. For some reason he personified the circumstances they found themselves in. The old man insisted on laying the entire blame for the change on youth in general and students in particular. Hadn’t it been them who talked so glibly about “land to the tiller” and had spouted all that Marxist garbage. Wasn’t it them who had poked and prodded and nagged until something snapped? Wasn’t it them who had asked for this change? Well, they bloody well had it now and they deserved every bit of it they could swallow. Now they could eat their damned New Era. Especially Haile. The old man had no time for Haile and made this so obvious that it exacerbated the boy’s frenzy and fear. Turunesh tried to convince Mengesha that he should lay off but to no avail: He wanted Haile out of the house so his presence there would not endanger everyone living in refuge there. If they got wind of his presence they would be on them all like a ton of bricks. In his own pedantic way, he made sure by the oblique certainty of indirect language, that everyone understood his disgust and took measure of his poison.

It got so bad that the Haile felt Mengesha might turn him in himself at any moment. He began to slither about in that ugly shuffle of his trying to blend into the background. He ate away from home and kept away from family gatherings, at first he would turn up late for the evening story ritual. But Mengesha was crafty as he was patient; he would hover suspended in the depth of his story and as soon as he detected Haile’s presence would begin his unrelenting ambush. He would invariably begin to heap upon that bent youthful back the sole responsibility for the change. The others were powerless to intervene. Haile began to be haunted by the stories, he was addicted to them and gradually forgot the art of sleep. He tried so hard to stop attending but somehow those whispered depth charges would wriggle their way into his fragile mind. One day during one of his somnambular shuffles he was picked up and packed off. The old man never saw him again. Somehow the stories fizzled out after that and they never would regain that anticipatory glow again.

Those first few months of the change, everyone was ecstatic. Newspapers for the first time were being bought as soon as they were printed and had a second hand value which far exceeded the price printed on the front page. People talked loudly and openly about their hopes and dreams. As exalted ones got detained, arrested and disappeared and it became clear that the committee (Derg) was beginning to eat systematically away at the old order. People were taken aback at first. Could they believe what was happening? After years of saying what will happen when Janhoi goes? Well here the moment was. The future was there. The Derg was a wonderfully shadowy thing -no one knew who was in it- and it was ever so slowly and skilfully taking the edifice apart. People began to sense that they no longer needed to fear and suddenly with joy in their hearts they were given the freedom to search within themselves for the hatred and humiliation that only yesterday they had not dared probe for.

I can only describe it like a bad tooth. You get along fine – fooling yourself ignoring the prangs- until one day you suddenly find this excruciating pain in your own mouth. Once you have learnt to accept its presence, though, your tongue comes tripping over scorning your objections, and explores the pain. So it was with these folk: the lid was about to come off, and sensing this resulted in a palpable excitement that could scarcely be contained. Every society should experience the exhilaration and joy of the first six months of the change. Ah yes, you can see, how exciting it is when the lid comes off. The problem is, of course, what happens when it comes down again. everything that goes up must come down.

Addis Abeba, is the domicile and refuge of the three f’s (fantasy, fiction and falsehood). Even the governments here have learnt that the only way to communicate with and gauge the temperature of the city is to fabricate, ferment and float rumors about itself and then send out spies to tej beits and other pubic places to hear the vibes of the city. Rumors were the very fabric of the city, legend and myth were in the very rarefied air that people breathed at that high altitude. And here they were with license to manufacture allegories, parabels and anecdotes, who would have thought such bliss possible. An orgy of total deceit. Rumormongers of the city were in their element and most of the city was wetting itself in the excitement and speculation. A celebration it certainly was. People virtually danced in the streets (dancing, you understand, is not a national pastime).

Arrests went on. Slowly but surely it was coming. First the periphery, then the outer rings, then the inner. Like a gigantic onion they peeled off one layer after another. A creeping joyous revolution. It puzzled everyone to hear of absolute lack of resistance as the Committee slowly rounded the old guard in. Old fiery warrior patriots who had braved Italian tanks with spears surrendered meekly. Finally the onion had been peeled. Only Janhoi left.

His imperial majesty, Haile Selassie I, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, King of Kings, Emperor. The Rasta’s great “Ras Tafari”. Janhoi. Yes, he went too, acquiescently into the night. They went to him. read him a proclamation abolishing the monarchy and drove him away in a white volkswagen beetle.

“Where are We going?” he asked, trying to keep up pathetically beside them. Alzheimer’s had already set in.

“Don’t worry, just for a drive. ”

He shuffled off beside them. An old man, tired, worn out, a little confused and consenting. Dignity, “Noblesse oblige” and just plain dementia all rolled into one.

He stiffened as he saw the car. “Do you want Us to get into that car?”;

“Yes Janhoi”.

Some there later confessed in their beers that they wondered if this at last was to be the resistance to them but he went quietly enough mumbling something about the “good” of the people. He remained crouched diminished and subdued as they drove from the palace and the rabble threw rotten vegetables at him.

The streets were full of people. Suddenly electrically by a strange process of osmosis that is common in rebellion riots, they knew instantaneously what was happening. Some people called out Janhoi, others stood in shock, someone took up the cry “thief, thief!” and one of his companions drew his attention to it… Janhoi, are you listening to what they are saying?”.

“Of course, what do you expect them to say when you are stealing their emperor away from them under their very eyes?”

Who knows what really happened? Some say his spirits picked up after that repost. That he broke so many television sets (they forced him to watch their propaganda about him daily) that they had, finally to resort to placing the television close to the high ceiling where his strength prevented him from throwing objects with any accuracy. Others were skeptical. His behavior prior to the abdication (did I really call it that? How peculiar) had seemed as if he hadn’t understood too well what was going on. What could you expect of a senile eighty-plus old man?

The greatest joke of all was that he was taking their allegiance to him at face value and still thought he was in charge. Ah! what magnificent delight all the gossip lovers had. What sublime fun they had with this story for years until his skeleton was discovered in someone’s latrine, and they instantaneously rediscovered the love and respect they had always had for him. But that came much later and I must not, I must not digress.

Ah! it was glorious fun. People kept comparing it with the attempted coup in 1960 which had turned into such a bloodbath. This one was different! This was the bloodless revolution. This experience was bound to be much more enjoyable, no one was going to get hurt physically. A revolution conducted by shame and embarrassment.

A snail’s revolution with pieces only lethargically moving into place. A wonderful chess game with an invisible opponent. the night of the 17th of November 1974. When it came, it came like the ugly thing it was. A huge insect creeping about in the dark depositing its slime on the city’s gutter streets. A man attacked in his own home with armies and tanks.

The first victim of the revolution, its new leader. The Eritrean General. The Desert Lion the soldiers called him. The scourge of the Somali! Aman Andom. Aman, perhaps Ethiopia’s last chance at making this revolution a go. His house was razed to the ground. They pulverized him. Then with hands still bloody from having been dipped in his they turned in panic on the old guard sitting in prison. In one night, in a few hours, they established the hallmark of this revolution, they butchered sixty people who were their prisoners.

The change had started now! The slogan? Ethiopia First! Etyopia Tikdem! May Ethiopia be foremost! foremost in blood and depravity; foremost in perpetual pain and deep scars; foremost in hunger, humiliation and poverty; foremost in stubborn and empty Abyssinian pride. It had come about. No celebration now: just a grim and timely hint that this was the world of wanton boys and flies after all! Nobody would mistake this for a picnic ever again. Some subtlety! Some bloodless revolt!

It came at night, as such ugly things should and brought with it the turmoil that only such events can. I was there and it was possible to actually see joy and excitement fading from people’s eyes as the sobering realization sunk in. You will not believe me, I know, but it was almost as if some invisible hand reached out and switched off the light of hope. Darkness. Terror. It began with that freezing certainty on the morning of the 23rd as we confirmed that those had been real noises we had heard the night before that some invisible line had been crossed. Henceforth true dread fear, chaos and an eventual exhausted cowed and simmering resignation was to grip this city to this day. The unleashing of the vermin of despair and a renewed, more ruthless and malevolent subjugation. The wanton boys were out there with a vengeance, Giovanni’s saints wriggled and suffocated in vain: there was to be no reprieve this time: no sacrificial appeasement of the choler.

Heady days. Long elastic gooey days. Days for walking on one’s toes. The great roundups of youth. Haile was one of those picked up to take the message of the revolution to the countryside. He died there within a month. None of them – was ever to know where and how he died. Mengesha never told another story.