In Search of King Solomon’s Mines

‘Princes shall come forth out of Egypt, and Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands unto God.’

Marcus Mosiah Garvey

FRANCO SAID HE could not remember a time when he did not live in Addis Ababa. He had survived the bad times and the even worse times. He’d seen the capital set ablaze, and the gutters running with young men’s blood. Three generations of his family had lived and died in Ethiopia and the last thing he was going to do was leave now. When he had money he dined at Castelli, a plush Italian restaurant favoured by aid workers. In leaner times he sat on the porch of his ramshackle shop and drank Bedeli beer from a bottle. Five decades of the summer sun had seared lines into Franco’s face. They told his age like the rings of a tree.

Most of Franco’s family possessions had passed through the shop at one time or another. He’d sold his mother’s wedding-gown, his father’s top hat, dozens of trinkets, even his grandmother’s false teeth. I poked about the shelves, admiring the merchandise, but Franco wasn’t really bothered whether I bought or not. His attitude was much the same as that of Abdul Majeed, his friend of forty years whose shop lay opposite, on the other side of the street.

Bric-à-brac shops containing anything of real value have all but disappeared in the West. These days no one throws anything out for fear that it might be worth something. But a browse through Franco’s shop told the recent history of Ethiopia. There were pictures of Haile Selassie as a young man in his imperial robes. There were Fascist medals and rings made from Italian coins. On a hat-stand hung a pair of moth-eaten uniforms along with a pith helmet and a clutch of crumpled silk ties. There were dozens of Ge’ez prayer books and Bibles as well, and scrolls from monasteries, silver crosses and ebony neck-rests. The back wall was covered in feathered masks and clay lip-plates from the Mursi tribe on the Omo River. Adjacent to them, in the shadow of a forlorn stuffed lion, hung half a dozen crocodile-skin shields, tribal spears and amulets on strings.

‘That’s quality stuff,’ said Franco, leaning over my shoulder. ‘You just can’t get it any more. It’s all from the Danakil.’

He held a bowl up to my nose. It was filled with what looked liked dirty shelled pistachio nuts.

Back at the Hotel Ghion I thanked the hotel cleaner for his tip-off about Abdul Majeed’s shop and showed him my bowl of Danakil testicles, which impressed him no end. I found out later that they were fakes, which saddened me greatly. The cleaner pointed out three businessmen from Shanghai sitting in the hotel’s foyer. They were smoking cheap cigars and sharing a joke. Wiping his face with his rag, the cleaner said they wanted to meet me. The men were cement barons and they were eager to break into the European construction business. Shanghai cement, said my confidant in a whisper, is the best in the world. A man bright enough to buy Danakil testicles and other rare objets would, said the cleaner, surely see the value of an opening like this.

There was no time for cement barons, I explained. I had work to do and pieces of a puzzle to slot together. My quest for Solomon’s mines was far from finished.

Over a pot of tar-like coffee, I thought about the goldsmith’s advice. He was right: the best way to understand Ophir and Solomon was to look forward from the Egyptians, rather than back from the time of Christ.

Queen Hatshepsut was indeed a key. As Abdul Majeed had recounted, in about 1500 BC, a little over five centuries before the time of Solomon’s reign, the Queen sent five great ships to Punt. There, as the hieroglyphs which adorn the reliefs at Deir el-Bahri relate,

We loaded our ships very heavily with marvels of the country of Punt, all goodly fragrant woods of God’s Land, heaps of myrrhresins, of fresh myrrh trees, with ebony and pure ivory, with green gold of Amu, with cinnamon-wood, with incense, eye cosmetic, with baboons, monkeys, dogs, with skins of the southern panther, with natives and their children. Never was the like of this brought for any king who has been since the beginning.

The reliefs at Deir el-Bahri clearly show the Queen’s vessels piled high with exotic merchandise. This wasn’t the first time an Egyptian ruler had sent an expedition to Punt, but it was probably the greatest and most successful of all the Puntian journeys, which explains why the Queen chose to immortalize the voyage in such an elaborate frieze.

The reliefs, which still bear traces of their original paint, show glimpses of Punt. There are beehive-shaped huts, similar to those still found in some parts of Ethiopia, and alongside them there are Hamitic figures with refined features, perhaps related to one of the Ethiopian tribes like the Oromo or the Tigray.

Scholars have pointed out other similarities between modern-day Ethiopia and ancient Egypt. Reed boats like those used in Pharaonic times still ply Lake Tana, and the traditional sistra instrument of Ethiopia is thought to be of Egyptian origin. Incense is still valued highly in Ethiopia, just as it was thousands of years ago in Egypt. Other experts have suggested etymological links between the two cultures. Graham Hancock, the celebrated hunter of the Ark of the Covenant, has spoken of the ancient Egyptian trade in dwarfs, who were needed to ‘dance before the gods’– the Egyptian word dink, or dwarf, is found today in both the Hamitic and the Semitic languages of Ethiopia.

At the time of the great voyage, the Israelites were still an enslaved people, but they would have heard of the mysterious land of Punt, and of the pomp and ceremony that greeted Hatshepsut’s fleet when it returned to Thebes. Such a voyage may well have passed into Israelite folklore, so providing Solomon with a source for the gold he required to build his temple.

I felt I was beginning to make progress, but only by covering more ground could I hope to tease out the clues which, I was sure, lay in the Ethiopian hinterland. Frank Hayter and his fabulous mine-shafts were never far from my thoughts, but first I wanted to go north.

While we were at the mines, Samson had left his taxi in the care of his youngest brother, Moses. The twenty-year-old Lada, which was rented for fifty birr a day, was Samson’s pride and joy. He polished it constantly with a rag, and each morning the seats were dusted down, the windows wiped and the engine checked over. Samson said that if he didn’t take pride in the car, he wouldn’t take pride in the job, and he’d tried desperately to instill the same reasoning in his brother. But Moses was more interested in meeting girls than in eking out a living with the taxi.

The morning after our return from Kebra Mengist, Samson slunk into the Hotel Ghion. The bounce had gone out of him, and his conversation lacked its usual religious undertones. I wondered what had happened.

The first problem was that Moses had crashed the taxi. While it was being repaired, they would earn no income but would still have to pay the rental, not to mention the bill for the repair work. In addition the police had been called to the scene of the crash because the taxi’s passenger had sustained injuries. Who knew what further bills would follow? But that was only the beginning. On our arrival back in Addis the night before, Samson had gone out to buy some food. In the few minutes he was gone, Moses had managed to burn down the one-room shack in which they lived, and most of their possessions had been incinerated in the blaze. It seemed amazing that Moses had survived to tell the tale.

‘He put a candle on my radio,’ said Samson, ‘and then he fell asleep. The candle fell and set fire to the mat, and then the bed and all my books. I came back with lots of food, but our house was in flames!’

Samson stood tall and tried to hide the burns on his hands, but there were tears in his eyes.

‘I’ll never forgive him,’ he said. ‘There are some things so precious that they can never be replaced. You see, my Bible was destroyed in the fire.’

Samson’s shack lay in a compound walled with a thorny hedge on the outskirts of Addis Ababa. As we neared the burned-out building, I could smell scorched plastic, and then I spotted a pile of charred belongings. Moses was sitting on a stool dolefully sorting through what was left. Samson gave him a poisonous glare and then led the way to the spot where their home had stood. It had been a rectangular mud-built structure, about the size of a family estate car. He had rented the room from a widow who lived opposite with her seven dogs, for 120 birr, ten pounds, a month. By Ethiopian standards, rents in the capital are extortionately high. The widow was sympathetic towards the brothers’ plight, but she needed money to rebuild. In the meantime, Samson and his brother had nowhere to live.

That afternoon, I bought a few token objects and handed them over with a wad of low-denomination birr notes. Samson was bright and hardworking, and he had given himself an education but, like most Ethiopians, he lived on a knife-edge. Destitution was never far away, and a disaster such as this could ruin him.

Despite his troubles, Samson had managed to find a car for the next leg of our journey. It sounded exactly what we were looking for—a brand-new Toyota Landcruiser with air-conditioning, off-road tyres, a spare fuel tank and a skilled driver. When I asked the price, Samson said we’d have to negotiate, so we went to have a look at it and meet the owner.

I cannot remember when I last saw such an exemplary vehicle. It was exactly what I had had in mind. The bodywork was immaculate, the tyres had hardly ever been used, and the seats were upholstered in an attractive shade of lilac. My chest tightened in expectation.

Standing next to the car was a man whom we took to be the driver. I asked the price. Samson translated the question.

‘I’ve made a mistake,’ he said, ‘this is not the vehicle. It belongs to the French Ambassador. This man is his driver.’

Samson pointed to a second vehicle which was parked at an angle behind the first. My face fell. A much earlier model of Landcruiser, it had seen its fair share of Ethiopian roads. In fact it looked as if someone had taken a mallet and struck every inch of its off-white body. The tyres were balder than bald, and the back doors were welded shut. I peered through the cracked windscreen. A man was stretched out asleep on the back seat.

The last thing I rented was a rotting hulk of a riverboat in which I sailed up the Amazon. It looked like the African Queen shortly before she blew up. My Amazon trip had been fraught with incidents, many of them the result of the riverboat’s condition. I’d also had problems with the crew. This time I was going to make sure that the vehicle and its driver were carefully vetted.

I clapped my hands to wake the driver up but he didn’t stir. So I leant through the passenger window and yanked his big toe. The man sat up with a start and then peered out of the window. His eyes were bloodshot and a trail of spittle ran down his chin.

I said we were interested in hiring the vehicle. The driver got out of the car and did his best to stand to attention, though his gaze never strayed from my feet.

We weren’t to be deceived by the rough condition of the vehicle, he said. Beneath the dents was a chassis of iron. We could search the whole of Addis Ababa and never find a car half as sturdy. Then Bahru lowered his voice.

‘This Jeep used to be very important,’ he whispered. ‘It once led the imperial convoy of Haile Selassie.’

We negotiated over the price for an hour and ended with a figure twice my original budget. Bahru agreed not to drink and drive, and that he’d provide his services free of charge and find his own place to sleep at night. I stressed that I wouldn’t pay for his food. It seemed miserly in the extreme, but through bitter experience I have learned that it is best to promise little and then to reward hard work with generosity. Finally, I gave him a list of repairs that I wanted carried out before we left Addis.

Bahru said the Emperor’s Jeep wouldn’t be available for two days. A feud had arisen between his family and another. He couldn’t leave town until it was sorted out. Samson muttered that it was a mistake ever to use the services of a Somali, but I ignored him.

Bahru rolled his bloodshot eyes. Then he licked his thumb and pressed it to his throat.

In Addis Ababa I kept seeing Rastafarians. Most were from Jamaica, although some had come from Europe. They would stroll about the streets with an air of confidence which many Ethiopians lacked. Intrigued by the Rasta link with Haile Selassie, and in turn with the line of Solomon, I had started reading books on the movement.

As I understand it, the Rastafarians are concerned with the plight of black people. Yet they are not a political party nor a religious sect. Instead, like the Israelites, they see themselves as a people waiting to be reunited with their Promised Land—Africa. They believe that Haile Selassie is their Messiah, their redeemer.

These days when we talk of Rastafarians, we think of their music, most notably the songs of Bob Marley, but the man who established the precursor of the modern Rastafarian movement, Marcus Mosiah Garvey, has all but been forgotten.

Garvey was a Jamaican, and in the 1920s he promoted the Universal Negro Improvement Association whose aim was to return all black people to Africa. Blacks had become ‘mentally enslaved’ by white people, he said. The only way to restore their dignity was to get them back to Africa. So Garvey used a black-owned steamship line to effect a mass migration to Liberia.

Garvey’s work to repatriate African Americans failed, but his great interest in the continent survived. ‘Look to Africa,’ he said, ‘when a black king shall be crowned, for the day of deliverance is near.’ Soon after, in November 1930, Haile Selassie was crowned in Addis Ababa, fulfilling Garvey’s prophecy. Garvey himself died in 1940, and in the years that followed, his influence waned, but the Rastafarian movement has grown. A line from Leviticus (‘They shall not make baldness upon their head’) is taken to mean that Rastas should grow their hair, and another line from the Psalms (‘He causeth the grass for the cattle, and the herb for the service of man’) lies behind the Rastas’ adoption of ganja, or marijuana.

At breakfast next morning I asked Samson what he thought of the Rastafarian movement. He screwed up his face and stuck out his tongue.

‘They’re not good people,’ he said. ‘They come in my taxi and order me around. They pretend to be Ethiopians, but they don’t know anything about our country.’

An hour later we arrived at a shanty town on the northern fringes of the city. The shacks were made from little more than cardboard, which was melting into the mud now. Here and there sheets of plastic sacking offered some protection from the rains. In the gaps between the buildings, raw sewage flowed, and the alley-ways were full of vicious dogs and even wilder children. Women were washing clothes in buckets, struggling to achieve cleanliness, while their husbands and teenage sons sat about laughing and watching the women work. As we approached, we saw a snaking line of people walking slowly through the slum towards us. They were all dressed in simple white shammas, their faces solemn.

Sure enough there was a body in the middle of the cortège. As we bowed our heads in respect, I wondered if our visit was appropriate.

One of Samson’s contacts had said that a splinter Rasta group was living in the shanty town and that they were anxious to get back to the grassroots of the Rastafarian creed. When the funeral procession had passed us, Samson went in search of the leader of the group. A few minutes later he hurried back and led me to the hideaway. The headquarters of the Rastafarian New Order lay in a steep-sided house. The place was well swept and lit by natural light which flooded in through a pair of large windows adjacent to the door. A single figure was sitting at the back of the room. His name was Jah and it was he whom we had come to see.

Jah didn’t get up, but even before I saw him walking, I knew he was the kind of man who walked with a sway of the hips. He wore a denim jacket torn at the collar, stone-washed Levis and a red mohair waistcoat, with no shirt underneath it.

‘All white men are sinners,’ he said in a thick Jamaican accent. ‘The whiter you are, the more you have sinned.’

I thanked him for the information and introduced myself. I was pleased we’d managed to meet with so little trouble. I was looking forward to talking to him.

‘I’ll talk,’ he said, ‘but I need some cash for ganj. No cash, no ganj, no talk.’

It was a firm line to take, but I respect a man with principles, so I slipped him a torn fifty birr note. Jah stuffed it in his jacket pocket and pulled out a cigar-sized joint. Then he leaned back on a dilapidated couch, thrust back his mane of dreadlocks, lit the joint and inhaled.

He asked if I knew of the history of the movement. I said I’d read a certain amount. I knew about Garvey and the steamship plan. He nodded through a haze of smoke.

‘Garvey had a goal: Africa. That’s why I’m here,’ he said. ‘He knew the work can only start when we’re on this holy ground. But Garvey got lost and Marley got found.’

‘Screw the music, man. Bob Marley got it wrong. We are the new path . . . we’re gonna retrace the steps . . .’

‘Yeah, man,’ said Jah in a fog of smoke, ‘we’re gonna recraft the message. Black takes white.’ He paused for effect. ‘Checkmate.’

‘Ras Tafari was a dude,’ said Jah, ‘so was Solomon. They understood about the Rasta Way . . . the Path. Yeah, man, those dudes were Rastas.’

When Jah had finished his joint he lit another. I asked him what he knew of Solomon.

‘King Solomon was the wise king,’ he said. ‘Think about it. If you were as wise as he, wouldn’t you line your pockets too?’

‘What are you on, man?’ snapped Jah. ‘Solomon just said he needed the gold for the temple.’

Jah inhaled until his lungs were bursting. His nostrils flared and his eyes widened so much I thought they’d fall out on to his lap.

Mariam was arthritic, had flat feet, and a taste for chewing chicken bones. He kept a plate of carcasses within easy reach and sucked on them between meals. Samson had taken me to the old prospector’s shack which was lost in the sprawl of Addis Ababa’s bustling Mercato area. Mariam, he said, was a regular in his taxi cab and had mined in the north of Ethiopia forty years ago. I wasn’t sure why Samson hadn’t mentioned the old man before.

Mariam must have been eighty though he didn’t look it. The grease from the chicken bones had kept his skin soft and oiled. It was his speech that gave away his age. It was punctuated by wheezing, as if an enormous weight was pressing down on his chest. Even so, he spoke fluent English and Italian as well as four Ethiopian languages. He had never met Frank Hayter, but he remembered his friend, a cantankerous Irishman called Thaddeus Michael O’Shea.

‘Everyone knew O’Shea,’ he said, fumbling for another bone, ‘he was a legend. He claimed to have found a cave full of gold . . .’

‘There’s more than one treasure all right,’ he said. ‘O’Shea found the cave while prospecting. But he never mined any gold there. He was terrified by the curse.’

‘Anyone who mined gold in the cave would have their body ripped limb from limb by wolves. Then the wolves would hunt down the victim’s family and eat them as well.’

The curse reminded me of the hyenas in Harar. I wondered if there was a link. The stories credited to Hayter and O’Shea spoke of caverns filled with gold. No one seemed to know for certain whether they were the entrances to mine-shafts or simply caves in which treasure had been stashed. If they were old mines, then it was more than likely they’d been mined out in ancient times.

I told Mariam that we were planning to follow Hayter’s trail to Tullu Wallel after we had been north.

‘Tullu Wallel is a savage place,’ he said. ‘Only a fool would head that way, especially now the rains are here. The mud will be three feet deep, and four feet in places. You’ll need a great many mules and ropes, and some good men.’

‘I’ve hired a Jeep,’ I said, gloating. ‘It used to be in the imperial motorcade.’

Later, at lunch, Samson picked at a bowl of spaghetti without speaking. I knew his thoughts were on his taxi repair bills and his burnt-out house. As his employer I felt it was my responsibility to weigh in and help get him out of the quagmire of debt. So, overcome with weakness, I doubled his salary and slid another wad of cash across the table. A faint glimmer of a smile appeared. I asked him what he thought about the story of Thaddeus O’Shea and the cave filled with gold.

‘I think Ethiopia is different from your country or America,’ he said. ‘People here cannot afford to go around looking for treasure in caves. That would take time, and they need their time to earn money. If they don’t earn, they starve.’

The Emperor’s Jeep lurched up the hill to the Hotel Ghion at six o’clock the next morning. Only three cylinders were functioning, and none of the repair work had been carried out. Bahru shook my hand violently. The car might look in bad shape, he said, but it was as strong as an elephant. I was so pleased he’d actually turned up that I decided to believe him. We loaded the bags, some sturdy three-ply rope that I’d bought in the market, a pair of Chinese-made jerry cans, a charcoal brazier and forty square feet of tarpaulin. Bahru had left the vehicle running and was forced to admit that the starter motor didn’t work. The engine could only be turned off if the Jeep was pointing downhill.

When everything was aboard, Samson climbed into the front seat and I got in the back. Our first destination was to be Lalibela, where the ‘Gold of Sheba’ was supposedly kept in the treasury of a church. Looking at my Michelin map I judged the distance from Addis Ababa to be about four hundred miles. I asked Bahru how long it would take to get there, but he refused to say. Samson had no idea either. In the end it turned out that neither of them had ever been north of the capital.

On hiring the vehicle I had given Bahru seven hundred birr to fill up with petrol and to change the tyres. After that he would be responsible for all breakdowns and punctures. Now the tyres were as bald as ever and the tank was almost dry. I kicked myself for having believed that the money would ever be used for the correct purpose. As I’d discovered in Peru, when people are living hand-to-mouth, funds are spent on necessities, though in Bahru’s case I suspected he’d had a night on the town instead.

Before setting out on the Amazonian riverboat journey, I’d watched my guide, a Vietnam veteran called Richard Fowler, publicly humiliate and then fire one of the employees. He told me later that he’d done it as a warning to the rest of the crew. Fowler said you had to be cruel to be kind. Following his example, I launched into Samson and Bahru. If I had any trouble from either of them, I said, they’d be returning to Addis on the bus. They looked at me with long faces. The journey north had begun on a sour note.

We drove out of Addis Ababa at low speed. The Emperor’s Jeep wasn’t a patch on the French Ambassador’s car but it was a great improvement on the local bus. Although it was still early, hundreds of people were walking into the city through the platinum light. Most Ethiopians living in rural areas have no choice but to walk. Some of them were herding flocks of animals down the main road and must have come from far away. Long-horned cattle were goaded forward with the swish of a cane, their backs steaming, their heads bent low. There were donkeys as well, all laden with merchandise: sacks of coffee, baskets and firewood, earthenware pots and pans, scrap metal and hides. And on the edge of the road hundreds of barefoot children staggered along beneath piles of sticks.

We passed through the first of many small towns. The street-sellers were getting ready, placing potatoes and dung patties in neat clusters on their pavement stalls. Others were laying out fresh animal hides to dry in the sun, or slaughtering chickens and draining their blood. Morning in Africa is the most peaceful time and place I know. There’s a gentleness about it which is hard to describe, except to say that it’s framed in a naturalness which has been knocked out of our own world.

We drove through forests of eucalyptus and out over a pancake-flat plateau. We passed a church, at the steps of which a pair of elderly women were kneeling while the priest beat a row of carpets with a baton. The rough fields were awash with children dressed in rags, many no older than four or five. Most of them had been out all night tending the goats. Their noses were streaming and their faces pale with cold.

The Emperor’s Jeep ground along in fourth gear at fifteen miles an hour. Bahru had already demonstrated an alarming habit of waiting until he was on a blind bend before overtaking. Most of the vehicles on Ethiopian roads were gargantuan trucks, overladen with goods. Private cars were almost non-existent, except for those owned by aid organizations. Samson said that people in Addis preferred to stay there. The roads were too dangerous and besides, once you’d tasted life in the big city, village life seemed dull.

Outside a hamlet Bahru slammed on the brakes. He’d spotted a man selling some qat by the side of the road. The Jeep took a hundred yards to stop. I made a mental note to get the brake-pads seen to.

The qat-seller had a strand of turquoise cloth wound in a crude turban around his head. He pointed to a pit which could only be seen by leaning over a craggy stone outcrop. The Italians, he said, had once killed seventy children and hurled their bodies into the pit. If we looked hard we’d see their bones.

Gradually the round huts were replaced with square ones that had tall thatched roofs. Wood smoke spiralled up from fires in the forest, and dry stone walls divided the fields. Then we came to meadows and terraced hillsides where nothing but tiny purple flowers grew; and we passed through a series of tunnels hewn out of the rock, their rough sides glistening like cut glass. Further on we passed camels chewing listlessly at the cacti that grew along the road. High above, rain clouds threatened a monsoon downpour.

The road was not good, but it was far superior to the others I’d seen in Ethiopia, though every mile of it was dotted with the rusting chassis of wrecks. In the West we hold roads in high esteem. They lead us from one place to the next. We care about their condition and their straightness. But in a land where most people travel by foot, and where so many road journeys end in fatalities, roads are not held in high regard at all.

Samson hadn’t forgiven me for berating him before setting out. His taxi had crashed, his house had burnt down, and on top of all that, I’d yelled at him for the sake of it. At the third stop for qat I took him aside and apologized. I’d shouted, I said, to make sure Bahru didn’t take advantage of us. It had been nothing more than an ingenious ploy. Samson’s expression warmed, and the dimples returned to his cheeks. He rummaged in his tartan bag and took out a large brown manila envelope. It was a gift, he said.

I broke the seal and took out several sheets of paper. Samson had found an article on the Copper Scroll, the one which Jah had spoken about. Though I’d actually seen the Copper Scroll in Amman’s National Museum a few years before, I hadn’t understood its importance at the time.

The Copper Scroll was found along with the other Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran in 1952. While most were written on papyrus, the Copper Scroll’s text was, as its name suggests, etched on a sheet of beaten copper eight feet long but less than one-twentieth of an inch thick. The text listed sixty-four locations in the Holy Land where an enormous quantity of gold and other treasure acquired from a great temple was hidden. Scholars have postulated that the temple could have been that of Solomon.

Copper was an expensive metal in ancient times, and writing on it an extremely slow business. It is hard to believe that anyone going to the trouble of writing on such a rare medium would have made it up, and it is clear that the Essene priests at Qumran used copper because they didn’t want the text to deteriorate. Biblical scholars agree that the text speaks of a monumental hoard of gold and silver but, depending on the translation, the weight of the gold varies from twenty-six tonnes to forty-four tonnes. More aggravating still is the fact that no one has determined exactly where the treasure is buried.

That evening we slept at a roadside bar in a village of uncertain name, perched on a steep hill. Night fell after a thunderstorm of astonishing force. The Emperor’s Jeep had overheated, requiring us to stop. Bahru promised that he’d fix the car’s leaking radiator by dawn and, since morale was low, I decided to treat him and Samson to a dish of injera, fermented Ethiopian bread, and a mutton stew.

As we ate a teenage boy hobbled over, his weight supported by a pole. His right leg was wasted and bent sharply at the knee. The foot beneath it was curled and withered. Ethiopia’s villages are full of such people whose dreadful deformities could have been prevented with a single dose of polio vaccine. He was too proud to ask for food but we could see his ribs and knew he must be desperately hungry. Samson asked him to join us. The invalid refused politely, as if he had a better invitation elsewhere. Again, Samson asked, and again the boy refused. Only when Samson stood up and led him to our table did he give way. Then Samson selected the best pieces from the stew and made sure our guest ate them all.

As I sat there after the meal, touched by Samson’s thoughtfulness, I reflected on Ethiopia. The country was once occupied by the Italians but it was never colonized. As a result it has retained its own very distinctive identity and sense of pride. Ethiopians listen to Ethiopian music, they wear Ethiopian dress and they eat their own traditional food. Though many want to emigrate to America, they know very little about Western society. The only flaw in this cultural homogeneity is the absence of an awareness of their past. The more time I spent in Ethiopia, the more I came to understand how incongruous this was. There is no other sub-Saharan country with such a rich cultural heritage and it seemed extraordinary that the wealth of its history was not being harnessed.

Unlike most of his countrymen, Samson had studied the nation’s history. He was a self-schooled expert on the Kebra Negast and the other important Ge’ez texts. His strength was founded in his knowledge of Ethiopian history. It seemed a terrible waste that such a solid member of society should be so desperate to leave, to go to America.

‘There is no future here,’ said Samson after the meal. ‘You come from a country where people have choices, even though they may be unaware of the fact. We’re looking for Solomon’s gold mines because we have food on our plates and we’re healthy. We can wake up in the morning and not have to worry about getting enough money to eat. But put yourself in the place of the boy who was our guest tonight. Most Ethiopians are like him. A few birr in his pocket and a little education would allow him to think of the future. But that boy and millions like him don’t have that layer of fat to support them . . .’

Samson stopped mid-sentence and then took off his wristwatch and put it on the table.