peered through the small, distorted and scratched plastic window at his side, and at first was unable to see what had caught the pilot’s eye, but then he spotted an ectopic human shape, a speck in the enormity of the sun-blackened lava desert below, insect-like in its insignificance. And then his eyes focused on others, groups and individuals, strung out in a meandering, far-flung thread.
‘They’re heading for Weldiya,’ Tim shouted over the noise of the engine. ‘That’s the track they’re on.’ He was twisted round in his seat, and Adrian wished he wouldn’t ignore the controls for such long periods of time. ‘They say there are still 500 refugees arriving there every day.’
More statistics, Adrian thought, more meaningless numbers, but he said nothing. The pilot seemed determined to talk (so much for Australians being laconic, Adrian thought). ‘The country’s always going to have problems while there’s fighting.’
‘I wouldn’t argue with that.’
‘But none of the factions in the civil war will allow peace unless it’s on their own terms.’
Adrian nodded, reluctant to be drawn in.
‘Reason I’m telling you this, it’s generally reckoned most of the food you lot fly in goes straight into the pockets of the military, and it’s their relocation policy that’s largely to blame for the famine in the first place. The fact they steal most of the relief food just adds insult to injury.’
‘It’s impossible to prevent it. That’s how it is: armies always do well in famines.’
The pilot grunted, and the two men sank back into the close embrace of another sticky silence. They both, separately, contemplated the enormity of the task facing Ethiopia, a task personified in the figures barely visible in the desert landscape beneath them.
Adrian asked: ‘What’s the idea behind the resettlements?’ When Tim looked surprised, he added: ‘I’m a little new to this; never been in Ethiopia before.’
‘What do you do?’
‘Public relations. Africa Assist is a client of ours.’
The pilot nodded, staring at him, a little mystified, before saying: ‘The government moves people from areas where there’s little food to areas where it’s more plentiful. Claims their motives are humanitarian, but what they’re really doing is isolating the rebels by taking away their bases. They also want cheap labour for their agricultural enterprises in the south of the country.’
Without turning his head, Adrian said, ‘You can do that kind of thing when you’re a dictator.’ He’d never understood why dictators received such a bad press. If people were determined to prove they couldn’t run their own lives, then someone needed to do it for them; it was as simple as that. An individual was better at solving problems than any government. ‘At least it’s their own government they have to contend with.’
‘Meaning?’
‘At least it’s not a colonial power, the Italians, the British or the French that they’re dealing with now.’ This is exhausting, he thought. I’m too tired. And he decided there and then to be less forthcoming, and hope to discourage the pilot from further conversation.
‘The Ethiopians have never been colonized – or so they claim.’
‘What about the Italians?’
‘Like to pretend they were never here. Selective amnesia, I’d call it. But they’ve been colonized now – since 1985.’
Adrian frowned, not understanding.
‘By you lot – by the aid agencies. Since Live Aid, you’ve become the country’s new masters.’
Adrian wondered if he was being criticized, but rather than attempt to come to any conclusion, he said, with the slightest of smiles, ‘If you ask me, the only answer for Ethiopia – and every other country in Africa – is to be recolonized.’
The pilot blew through his lips, almost as if he’d been punched in the solar plexus. He looked momentarily puzzled, perhaps unsure as to whether his companion meant what he was saying. ‘You being serious?’
‘It’s the only solution I know that would sort out this mess.’
‘Doubt it would go down well in Cape Town – to pick one city at random.’
‘Even the South Africans are incapable of getting their affairs in order. As for the rest of the continent, it’s a disaster. Take Somalia as a case in point. Or Sudan, Kenya, the Congo, Namibia, Rwanda, Uganda, Liberia, Zimbabwe – you name it. Africa has everything, except the people to rule it. At least when the British were here, the place was run efficiently.’
Tim stared out of the cockpit. Whether he was examining the distant horizon or the outrageousness of Adrian’s last statement, it was hard to tell. Perhaps he was reluctant to argue with a client. Then, as if deciding an oblique rejoinder might be the best approach, he said with a grin: ‘You Brits can never face up to the fact that the only successful colony you ever established was Australia. And that was by mistake.’
Adrian ignored the provocation. He stared at the large, solid man in the pilot’s seat, with his long, thick blond hair swept back from his forehead and his eyes deep set like the embrasures of a coastal fortification (probably used to scanning some outback scene, far inland from any sea), and was suddenly uncomfortably aware of how he himself must come across to this self-sufficient Antipodean. Tim was likely seeing the face of someone for whom life has been a little too easy, a face that was a little too plump and soft, a little too round and unlined. He’d think it was the face of someone who wouldn’t survive long in the wild.
The pilot was pointing down to where the flat plains of eastern Ethiopia are funnelled into a deep gorge by the mountains that surround Addis Ababa. The towering, three-and-a-half-thousand feet red cliffs resembled fortress walls protecting the city against the onslaught of the desert. Elegant spurs and solitary summits, bluish in the afternoon sun, paraded their majesty and fertility over the flat sterility of the Danakil Desert far below. ‘That’s the Great Rift Valley and the Awash River down there. Reckon that’s where humans first appeared in the world, the cradle of civilization. Twelve years or so ago – in 1974 I think it was – anthropologists discovered Lucy there, a fossilized skeleton that was about three or four million years old.’
Adrian was more interested in the fact that a pilot – an Australian pilot, what’s more – should know so much about a country that wasn’t his own.
‘That’s where it all started,’ Tim said, almost to himself, shaking his head with wonder. ‘That’s where we all started.’
Ten minutes later they were talking to traffic control at the international airport, on the outskirts of Addis Ababa. Almost immediately they were given the all clear to land. They flew low over a World War Two Russian transport plane rusting at the end of the runway. After they touched down, they taxied to the terminal building.
At two in the morning, Adrian woke up in his Addis Ababa hotel room, and was unable to get back to sleep. Perhaps it was sleeping in a strange bed, or that he was upset by all that he’d seen at Korem, or that he was too wound up, but he lay for a long time with thoughts teeming through his brain: the refugee camp, work, Judith and Emma, the famine, Anne Chaffey… Round and round they went, in no particular order and with little sense of logic, a whirlpool he was unable to escape from.
