have had me executed!’
‘Why did you let him off?’ I asked, smiling.
The general glanced at Teshome. ‘He was a lawyer. He stood up in the court and convinced me.’
‘That he was innocent?’
‘No—that the court had no validity.’
Teshome laughed. He was still holding the general’s hand.
Teshome was released, and when the Derg fell General Negussie himself was imprisoned. He had only just been released. Now Teshome was helping him; he had given him a car.
‘Did you approve of the Derg?’ I turned to General Negussie.
‘To begin with, I was very happy with the ideology. We really believed it would help Ethiopia. But for me it changed completely when they executed my uncle. I was so filled with anger—I wanted to kill every one of those Derg men. My colleagues suggested I apply for a transfer. They probably saved my life. For six and a half years I was administrator of Hararge region. Then in 1982 the Derg asked me to become a minister—Minister without Portfolio.’
‘Did you accept?’
He shrugged. ‘I had ten children.’
‘What do you remember of Mengistu?’
‘Very moody. Very violent. My office was just above his and I could always hear his shouting. The only quality I know he had was that he loved his country. Also he was not corrupted at all. He was very honest with money. And he was very good at listening. He always knew exactly what the important point was.’
‘Did you admire him?’
He looked at me. Prison had greyed his hair; his face was soft and troubled. ‘Every day I was with Mengistu, I was thinking: how can I kill this man? We were always searched before going to our office. But when I was alone with him I would watch him and think how could I do it—he was a small one and I am a judo expert. I travelled with him to different provinces and I sat behind him on the plane looking at the back of his head and he had one little scar just here—’ the general leaned forward and tapped the top of his neck ‘- and I was thinking, that would be the place, that would do it. A bullet just there…’
General Negussie stood and said goodbye. He walked stiffly to the door. For a moment after he had gone, Teshome and I were silent. A yellow weaver bird was pecking at the windowpane—tap-tap…tap-tap-tap.
Teshome and I carried on talking. I told him about my first trip to Lake Tana, about Wonderland Tours and Teklu and Dr Mengesha.
‘Mengesha Gabre-Hiwot?’
‘Yes.’
‘I was brought up with him! We were classmates at Tafari Makonnen school. He helped me. He gave me money when I came out of prison in September 1982.’
‘That was a few weeks after I was here.’
The weaver bird was again tapping at the window— sparring with an aggressor that matched him blow for blow.
Teshome pursed his lips and let out a long, frustrated ’Dhaaaaa…’ for all the shattered years, the Derg’s brutalities, the squandered hopes of his own generation.
‘Do you know what happened to him, Teshome, why he was detained?’
‘Do I know?’ He looked at me blankly, then nodded. ‘They said he read and distributed some anti-Derg literature.’
‘Did he?’
‘Actually he did, yes. In fact he showed it to me and I was very nearly imprisoned again as a result. It was also a time that the TPLF was advancing—so of course Tigrayans were not that popular.’
The weaver bird was still attacking its glass opponent—tap-tap…tap-tap-tap…
‘What happened in the end?’
‘They tortured him. He got gangrene in his leg—they had to amputate it. The gangrene was also in the other leg, and they had to amputate that one too. In fact, he was given permission to go home. But someone apparently said: What will people say when they see him with no legs? Much easier to kill him. They took him to a place on the edge of Addis known as “Bermuda”—the Bermuda Triangle. When people went there they nevercame back. They killed him there.
‘Mengesha was one of the best, one of the most decent individuals you could ever imagine.’ Teshome pressed his fists hard on the desk. For a moment he looked overwhelmed by his own anger. ‘That was the worst of it. They took men like that and destroyed them. Those animals.’
I had kept an image in my mind all those years, an everyday Ethiopian image glanced from a bus window. It was of a farmer, bare-legged, his dula flexed across his shoulders, setting off on a narrow path across the plateau.
Ethiopia taught me many things. As a naïve twenty-one-year-old, with years of flunked schooling behind me, I was ready for the simplest of lessons. Instead I was presented with paradoxes. I learnt of the cruelty that could be perpetrated in the name of a good idea. I saw how a people hurtling towards catastrophe, hungry, with population growth out of control, could go on living day to day with such astonishing grace. I saw how those apparently ignored by divine goodness could still apply their greatest energy to worship. I learnt that the human spirit is more robust than life itself.
Ethiopia opened my eyes to the earth’s limitless range. I pictured the country’s startling scenes and stories multiplied across the globe, then factored up by the past. It made the notion of ‘a small world’, ‘a shrinking world’, look absurd, and it made me restless.
Ethiopia instilled in me the habit of a lifetime, the habit of travel. It revealed the rewards that can be had simply from being footloose among strangers, from taking remote and narrow paths with bare-legged farmers. It bred in me the conviction that if there is any purpose to our time on this earth, it is to understand it, to seek out its diversity, to celebrate its heroes and its wonders—in short, to witness it.
There is a saying in Ethiopia: ‘Kes be kes inculal bekuro yihedal‘ (’Step by step the egg starts walking’). My Amharic teacher would use it whenever I showed signs of frustration. I was a hopeless pupil; he used the expression very often. But now, after twenty-one years, the egg was hatching. I would go north into the roadless heart of the country, set off across the plateau. I would go to the places first conjured up by Teklu that afternoon in Mengistu’s stifled city, with the rain hammering on the tin roof. I would go to Lalibela, to the sacred city of Aksum, and I would walk between them.
‘Walk?’ spluttered an Ethiopian friend. ‘You can’t walk! Foreigners don’t walk.’
Walking was what villagers did. They walked and walked, to find grazing, to church, to market, to clinics. Until the nineteenth century wheels were unknown in the highlands. They still are in most places—no barrows, no carts; just legs and shoulders and mule-backs and the glimpse of a government or NGO’s 4×4 as it races by, leaving you coughing in its dust-wake.
I made plans. I began the Ethiopian game in which information, misinformation and pure fantasy are all cunningly dressed up as each other. With such distances, I asked, might it be better to ride? Yes, ride, ride—on a horse! No (there
