NOT SINCE LEAVING Asmara have I seen anything like the crowds that were coming into Dessie this morning. As we descended a steep path through thick eucalyptus woods our pace was slowed by the opposing ‘rush-hour’ traffic of hundreds of pushing humans, scurrying flocks of goats and sheep, scores of laden donkeys, horses and mules and many men and a few women riders, each with an attendant gun-bearer. This province seems to have an unusually big population of packhorses, pack-mules and riding-mules.
At the foot of the mountain we crossed a bright green, semi-waterlogged valley where we were joined by a caravan of six men, ten donkeys, five horses and three mules, on their way home from yesterday’s market. As usual, Jock was keen to trot in the lead – but, alarmingly, he soon lagged behind with the slowest of the donkeys.
A long, tough climb took us to a high pass from which our track dipped and rose through a magnificent wilderness of broken mountains. But it never dipped very far and we were steadily gaining altitude.
Since noon the sky had been cloudy and at 3.30 one shattering clap of thunder was followed by a rainstorm that came sweeping across the slopes before an icy wind with the force of a waterfall. Immediately I was soaked and my companions, now wrapped in heavy blankets, were very concerned about my pathetic state – which was even more pathetic than they realised, for my flea-bag and Huskies on Jock’s back were also being saturated. Here we were at about 10,000 feet and soon the rain turned to painful hail as we sloshed muddily through a premature twilight.
At five o’clock this cluster of compounds appeared on the mountainside above the track and as I slid with Jock up the precipitous path an amiable old man, carrying two new-born lambs, shouted an invitation above the roar of the wind and led us into this already overcrowded tukul. It is the biggest hut I have stayed in – some fifty feet in circumference – and it now contains nine humans, one mule, two horses, three donkeys and innumerable sheep, lambs, goats, kids, cocks and hens. They all make such a din – especially the kids and lambs – that one can hardly hear oneself think.
The design of this tukul is exceptionally complicated. Its outer circle accommodates the livestock – except for one ‘kitchen’ section, where a cooking fire burns – and the stabling for mules, horses and donkeys is lower than the rest, so that their heads are almost on a level with the floor of the (theoretically) human preserve, where their fodder is thrown in heaps.
When we arrived extra wood was piled on the ‘sitting-room’ fire and I have spent the past two hours attempting, rather unsuccessfully, to dry my sodden clothes and flea-bag.
The saddest date – for here I am parting from Jock.
Last night my sleep was somewhat disturbed by dampness, coldness and the occasional sheep or goat strolling over me. During the small hours I woke, reached for my torch and felt a disconcerting substance under my hand; it proved to be the afterbirth of a ewe, who had just lambed by my ear.
When we set out at 6.30 it was a cool, bright and very lovely morning, with a pale blue sky faintly cloud-streaked above wide brown sweeps of mountain. A few round stone huts were visible in the distance and on some lower slopes grew a scattering of twisted trees that might have been evergreen oaks. There was an oddly Scottish feel here. Acres of a green-brown herb, growing densely in little bushes, gave the illusion of heather and outcrops of silver-grey rock gleamed on the peat-dark soil.
Our track continued to climb steadily and I was alarmed to see Jock making heavy weather of it at the start of the day. When we came to a stone shelter where two little boys were selling pint tumblers of tea I stopped and led Jock to a grassy patch – but he wouldn’t eat.
There were two other travellers already in the hut, chewing hard dabo with their tea and, as I drank, a pathetic family group came slowly up the track. The wife was horribly blind – her eyes, face and neck were covered in open sores – and she was being guided by a daughter of about twelve who walked ahead holding over her shoulder a long dula to which her mother clung nervously, whimpering with misery every time she stumbled on the rough path. The father was an advanced tubercular case. After each bout of coughing he wiped his bloodstained mouth with the end of his threadbare shamma and his sunken eyes held an expression of hopelessness that was more harrowing than any physical symptom. He didn’t even beg medicine from the faranj. Indeed, when I paid for the family’s teas and gave them my own dabo he looked utterly bewildered, as though this minute shred of good luck was something entirely new in his life. Clearly, both he and his wife are dying on their feet. One can only pray that they die soon.
Jock and I continued with the two men and their donkeys and half-an-hour later we were overtaken by another caravan of five men, four horses, twelve donkeys and a mule. This party was returning home from Dessie market so most of the animals were unladen; only a few donkeys carried blocks of salt or sacks of raw cotton.
The track fell steeply into a narrow valley, before climbing to a windy pass strewn with drifts of unmelted hail. Here we must have been at about 11,500 feet and we got little heat from the bright sun. On this Semienesque plateau only giant lobelias grew on the level turf, yet there was no Semien atmosphere of desolation and we met several heavily-laden caravans coming towards Dessie. The view from the edge of the plateau was overwhelming; but my appreciation of Ethiopia’s unique magnificence is now tinged with sadness for in less than two weeks I will have come to the end of the road.
As we descended a few compounds appeared, amidst broad strips of ploughland and green pastures. Then the track switchbacked over mountain after mountain and at each ascent Jock moved more and more slowly – until at last, near the provincial border of Wollo and Shoa, he stopped at the foot of a hill, hung his head and could go no further.
By now I had established the usual comradeship of the track with my companions and immediately an agreeable man named Haile Malakot, who seemed to be in a position of some authority, ordered a youth to transfer my sack to one of the free donkeys. Jock then continued wearily and I followed with a heavy heart. Obviously he is so out of condition that he needs a month’s rest, with top-quality feeding.
We arrived here soon after five o’clock and, judging by the temperature and vegetation, I should think we must be at about 9,000 feet. This settlement stands in the middle of a circular, undulating, fertile plateau, bounded on three sides by high mountains, and Haile Malakot’s compound is by far the biggest for it contains three dwellings, two stables and two well-filled granaries. My host is the local headman, yet even so his tukul is shared with horses, calves, sheep and a mule.
Every local detail interests me as I have decided to leave Jock here and to take a donkey instead. Haile Malakot will gain about £12 on the exchange but he is welcome to it, for I feel sure that he will treat Jock properly. I have carefully inspected his horses and donkeys, who are in good condition, with not a sore among them. Another encouraging sign was the welcome given him by his dog as we approached the compound. This big, black, woolly creature (an uncommon type) came bounding and tail-wagging to greet his master, though most highland dogs cower and tremble when their owners appear.
The return of the travellers occasioned much kissing and many elaborate greetings all round, especially between Haile Malakot and his five small children. Instead of those children’s presents which would have been brought from the city in a more affluent society, the youngsters got hunks of stale dabo, left uneaten by their father on his way, which were received with delighted grins and low bows. Their mother was given a present of several cheap, gaudy glass bangles, imported from Czechoslovakia.
Haile Malakot’s family is one of the nicest I have stayed with; depressed as I am tonight, I do realise how lucky we were to meet him on this crucial day. At supper-time it became apparent that he has a total of nine children, four of whom are large, and it’s difficult now to imagine everyone finding sleeping space in this tukul. But no doubt we’ll eventually get huddled down somehow.
We did eventually get huddled down somehow and I slept quite well, though children were packed so closely around me that I could hardly wriggle my toes. When nature called me to the compound during the small hours it was impossible not to waken everyone. The exit was blocked by a complicated web of hide thongs, devised to keep the horses from moving into our compartment, and as I hesitated Haile Malakot impatiently pointed to the animal compartment, where I had earlier heard several human urinations in progress. Obediently manoeuvring under the thongs I added my mite.
At 5.30 my hostess and her eldest daughter rose to begin the day’s grain-grinding in one corner of the dark tukul. Inevitably they walked on me en route, so I lay awake wondering how many hours a highland woman spends each day at this task. It is strenuous work, but this morning mother and daughter were singing softly and happily, as they settled down to it. The rubbing of stone on stone, with grain between, and the calls of shepherd boys in the mountains are the two sounds of Ethiopia that I shall never forget.
As soon as it was faintly light I started to pack, crawling over and around various recumbent bodies. Then Haile Malakot rose, to let the animals out and fetch my chosen donkey. I didn’t say goodbye to Jock, who went cantering off with the rest to enjoy a peaceful day on rich pastures.
Yesterday I had been impressed by the sturdiness and docility of one particular donkey, who now stood meekly while being loaded, and then went trotting briskly before the little boy who led me on to the path for Worra Ilu. However, when the child had turned back disillusion set in. Sturdy this creature certainly is, but nothing less docile can ever have stood on four legs. Very soon I had named him Satan.
To begin with I tried to lead the devil; but highland donkeys are never led, so he reacted by laying back his ears, rolling his eyes malevolently and riveting himself to Mother Earth. For some moments we remained thus, personifying Immovable Object and Irresistible Force. Naturally, Immovable Object won that round, so Irresistible Force decided to take rear action. Administering a whack on the rump, I uttered a fierce appropriate sound in my best Amharic – whereupon Satan wheeled abruptly and headed for home at a gallop. When I had cut off his retreat another whack sent him trotting – momentarily – in the right direction. What I needed now was one of those mountain paths off which you cannot move; on a plateau Satan held all the trumps for there was nothing to prevent him from going wherever the fancy led him.
Over the next ten miles I had to pursue Satan repeatedly, as he fled to east, west or north. Oddly, south seemed the one point of the compass to which he could not reconcile himself. Nor did the weather help. It had been heavily overcast when we started out and soon a gale was sweeping sheets of sleety rain across the plateau and turning the ground to slippery, sticky black mud, which meant that every step demanded twice the normal expenditure of energy. Despite my exertions I quickly became so numb that my stiff fingers couldn’t open the buttons of my shirt-pocket. Not even in the Semiens have I experienced such intense cold.
Instead of adjusting to his new situation Satan became increasingly xenophobic and when we arrived here I felt too demoralised to continue without a donkey-boy – though I guessed that it wouldn’t be easy to find anyone willing to accompany me into Manz.
Worra Ilu, the birthplace of the Empress Zauditu, is the usual spread-out collection of tin-roofed mud hovels, set among blue-gums. The ‘hotel’ is a tiny doss-house, run by the Amharic wife of a Yemeni trader who settled in Ethiopia fifteen years ago. This man now speaks fluent Amharinya and has successfully adapted himself to the local way of life. These Yemeni small-town traders are more integrated with the highlanders than any other foreigners, yet the moment I met Hussein I was aware of a strong bond between us. He doesn’t speak one word of English, but he and I have established the kind of intuitive understanding that could never exist between me and the local English-speakers. As I now feel so at ease with the highlanders this is a significant measure of the extraordinary degree of ‘ingrown-ness’ that marks their character.
I had just changed from my soaked shirt into my slightly less soaked jacket when Worra Ilu’s four hundred schoolchildren, freed for their midday meal, ‘discovered’ me. Not since my arrival at Mai Cheneta have I been so enthusiastically mobbed. Despite this town being only two days’ walk from Dessie few of these children had ever before seen a white person (though their parents must have seen many Italians) and, because education of a sort has made them aware of the faranj world, they were avid to meet a real live European. For seven hours I was submerged by them, often almost to the point of suffocation, as scores of bodies seethed around me. When it was time for afternoon classes the eleven teachers found it impossible to reclaim their pupils from my ‘hotel’, where the senior boys were packing the restaurant–kitchen–bedroom, while the juniors rioted outside the door, impatient for their glimpse of the faranj. As the teachers were scarcely less interested than the children I was invited to the new school – a handsome stone building – to make a lecture tour of the classrooms, so my afternoon was even more exhausting than it would have been had I continued towards Manz with Satan.
An hour ago the headmaster produced a twenty-year-old schoolboy, fittingly named Assefa, who will drive Satan to the bus terminus at Sali Dingai if I pay his bus fare north to Dessie. He doesn’t mind walking alone from Dessie to Worra Ilu, but he says that it would be ‘dangerous’ for him to return alone through Manz, where the people are ‘very wild’. The fact that he will miss a week’s schooling seems not to worry anyone, and I gather that many of these pupils attend classes only irregularly.
On our way out of Worra Ilu I stopped at the school to say goodbye just as that familiar ceremony, which marks the start of each highland schoolday, was about to begin. Every morning all the pupils line up in military formation around a tall flagstaff to sing the National Anthem while Ethiopia’s flag is being raised, and this attempt to foster nationalism in a tribal society is followed by a prayer for the Emperor. One boy faces the assembly, bent double, and gives out the prayer – to which everyone else, also bent double, vigorously responds. Today, however, the Worra Ilu assembly didn’t bend very far, most eyes remaining on me.
Satan’s mood was no less satanic this morning. He tried to bite my leg as he was being loaded, and for the first five miles Assefa and I were fully occupied keeping him on the right track. Crowds were coming to market, many carrying balls of wool measuring at least two feet in circumference, for we are now in Ethiopia’s only wool-producing area. Elsewhere, highland sheep are rarely sheared and the idea of breeding sheep to sell their wool is unknown.
Here Satan allowed little leisure for admiring the landscape, but occasionally I paused to gaze over the rain-freshened miles of boulder-strewn turf that swept to the horizon on our right, or to peer into the chasm that separated this plateau from the next. Then our path temporarily left the edge of the chasm and wound across a few miles of pasture and ploughland, scattered with compounds enclosed by solid, shoulder-high walls. Some of the stone tukuls were two-storeyed and all seemed to have been built with unusual skill.
Soon we were again overlooking the gorge, from the point where our track began a four-hour descent. Visually, this was among the most dramatic moments of the whole trek. Standing on the edge of the escarpment I had an unimpeded view of the floor of the gorge 4,000 feet below, and the Uacit river was barely visible though it is now a considerable torrent. Beyond the gorge another long, level tableland rose sheer and to the south-east stretched a third, which was Manz.
The descent took us gradually south, on a giants’ stepladder formed by three flat, wide ledges. An almost vertical rock stairway led down the escarpment but from its base the gradient was easier and sometimes we were walking on level ground, through thick forest above tremendous drops, as the path sought another point from which it could continue the descent.
On each ledge were a few impoverished compounds and once we stopped to ask for talla. Approaching the tukuls, I saw a sight that briefly curdled my blood. In a stubble-field, beside a pile of red embers, an old man was hacking the head of a hideously human-looking form. When I came nearer, and realised that the corpse was a roasted baboon, I felt quite weak with relief. In this area baboons do enormous damage to crops so they are sometimes pursued by men and dogs and clubbed to death when cornered. The victim is then roasted and fed to the dogs to increase their enthusiasm for the chase.
In this compound we were warmly welcomed by two old men and three old women. They gave us many pints of rough talla, many cups of weak coffee, an unfamiliar kind of chocolate-coloured dabo which was surprisingly palatable though it had a strange consistency (perhaps half-set cement would be similar), and cold stewed beans which both looked and tasted repulsive. The squalor of the tukul was extreme and the old people were grief-stricken because yesterday their only cow – due to calve soon – and their only ox died of some disease which has dysentery as its chief symptom. The magnitude of this disaster is hard for us to grasp. These animals were their most valuable possessions – worth at least two hundred dollars – and they have no hope of replacing them. The women wept as they told us, the men sat gazing dully at the floor. Now they are without an ox to pull the plough and the neighbours are too poor to lend them one. Yet when we left, full of their food and drink, they refused to accept any money.
During the rest of the descent it got hotter every moment and on the floor of the gorge the temperature must have been about 90ºF. When I looked up at the plateau from which we had come it seemed utterly inaccessible: and when I looked up at the plateau to which we were going that seemed equally inaccessible. Here we stood at the confluence of two rivers, both about two hundred yards wide. A week ago they would have been almost dry and even today they were hardly one-third full, but several streams of new flood-water (the colour of strong milky tea) went racing over boulders from between which little shrubs were being uprooted and swept away towards the Blue Nile, the White Nile and the Mediterranean.
Having crossed the Uacit we turned west up the tributary gorge. At the foot of each colossal mountain-wall strips of rich arable land were being ploughed and irrigated by men from invisible settlements on the plateaux, and twelve times we had to cross branches of the river. As we ascended, the ravine narrowed and the streams became deeper and faster, until we found it difficult to keep our feet on the stony bed against the powerful, waist-deep current. Here a slip would have been unfortunate, for no one could possibly swim in this swirling, boulderous torrent. Satan tackled these fordings gamely – give the devil his due. Half-way up the gorge we had been joined by a young priest riding a white horse and by two men driving donkeys. Undoubtedly this asinine company heartened Satan, who has probably never before travelled alone.
Even between wadings the going was tiring – over deep, fine sand or across stretches of big, loose stones. The discomfort of these stones was compensated for by their variety of tints – pale pink, primrose yellow, dark and light green, mauve, silver flecked with white, dark red, and a few chunks of what looked like Connemara marble.
The gorge had narrowed to about fifty yards when we came to the start of a two-hour climb as severe as any Semien ascent. Before going up we paused to rest and I offered the wilting Assefa some dabo, which Hussein had given me as a farewell present. Knowing it to have been baked by Muslims he sniffed at it suspiciously and asked if it contained milk, which would break his Lenten fasting laws. I took a chance and said ‘No milk – water’, and at once he ate it ravenously.
At 5.45 we began to climb and by 6.45 daylight had become bright moonlight, without any perceptible dusk. The exhilaration of such an ascent is so tremendous that I enjoyed every sweating step, though we were at the end of a long day. There was only one brief, unpleasant stretch, where the moon was hidden by an immeasurably high cliff. My torch didn’t help much and on one side of the rough rock stairs lay a deep ravine.
Then I heard a sound that took me back to the Semiens – the barking of hundreds of Gelada baboons. From every side they were abusing us and their shrieks, yells and screams, amplified and distorted by echoes, created an unearthly effect on this moonlit mountain, where previously the immense silence had been broken only by our footsteps.
I paused to wait for the others at the base of the escarpment and never shall I forget the beauty of that scene. Around me jagged escarpments rose sheer, and beyond the gorge lay the symmetrical, ebony line of the opposite plateau, and beneath a brilliant moon the strange splendour of this landscape seemed utterly unreal, with every abyss a well of blackness and every rocky pinnacle a monstrous tower of silver.
When we reached the top of the 10,000-foot Manz escarpment my shirt was sodden, for the normal highland evaporation had been unequal to the sweat produced by this climb. Here, to heighten the other-worldly feeling of my arrival at Manz, lightning such as I have never seen before went spurting in quivering flares of red and orange along the cloudy north-eastern horizon. I had expected an easy walk at this stage but several steep hills lay ahead and when the priest had remounted he led us towards them. During that last half-hour I exulted in the simple romance of our little procession, as we climbed a high ploughed hill towards the tall black trees on its summit, following by moonlight the white horse with his white-robed, white-turbaned rider.
In this large compound the circular top storey of a stable is the guest-room. Within moments of our arrival a big fire had been lit so I took off my drenched shirt and sat close to the flames, eating new-baked dabo and curds. The local talla (karakee) is the best of all the highland beers – dark, slightly thick, bitter as unsweetened lemon-juice and miraculously restoring.
Our host and his sons are delightful, though very shy of the faranj. Oddly enough, no women have yet appeared. I asked if the locals often go to Addis – the capital is less than a week’s walk away – but none of the company had ever been there.
During supper Assefa told me about his own family, who live beyond the gorge. A year ago his two brothers and an aunt were killed by lightning, while sitting chatting in the aunt’s tukul, and he is the only surviving son. Because his parents are poor – ‘a little land, one donkey, one ox, two horses and three cows’ – his schooling is being paid for by a rich uncle who works as a waiter in Addis. Assefa’s intelligence is so limited that schooling is unlikely to be of the slightest benefit to him. But his parents imagine that once ‘educated’ he will be able to support them in their old age so, despite his brothers having been killed, they allow him to remain away from home and provide all his food – flour and spices.
This morning the clear dawn air felt icy. While Satan was being loaded I looked around my first Manze compound, which was built on a steep slope, with giant Semien-type thistles growing above it. There were three large dwellings, four two-storied stables-cum-granaries and three unusual igloo-type stone grain-bins. Everything had been solidly constructed with exceptional skill. Unlike the Semien people, these Manzes have been architecturally inspired by their climate. I noticed that cow-pats, with halved egg-shells embedded in them, had been stuck to the wall at eye-level beside each tukul door – presumably to ward off evil spirits.
By 6.30 a.m. the priest was leading us around the flank of the mountain on to a wide plain, dotted with round hills and flat-topped protuberances of bare volcanic rock which was riven by spectacular chasms.
On this vast expanse of yellow-green turf grazed thousands of tiny sheep. Their colouring was remarkably varied – black, red-brown, white, nigger-brown, grey and every combination of all these colours. Many cattle also grazed here, and mules, horses and donkeys: but I saw no goats.
At ten o’clock we stopped at the priest’s wife’s grandmother’s compound and were entertained for two hours on roast barley, coffee, injara, bean-wat and, for the non-fasting faranj, three gourds of curds. This was a typical Manze compound with an attractive thatched archway over the entrance in the enclosure wall. Two cylindrical, straw-wrapped mud and wickerwork beehives were hanging below the eaves of the granary, each about four feet long and eighteen inches in circumference with a hole two inches in diameter at one end. Assefa told me that the highlanders consider bee-keeping ‘men’s work’ and traditionally the hives are cleaned on New Year’s Day, in September. Most of the honey is used for making tej, but sometimes it is eaten plain, as a delicacy. In Lalibela, at the Governor’s home, I was given a toffee-like confection made by spreading honey on a tray and leaving it beneath the sun for a few hours.
The priest was staying with his in-laws for the day so we continued on our own. All the morning Satan had been trotting contentedly behind the horse but now he lapsed into his evil ways and Assefa, who was complaining of leg-pains and general debility, left most of the work to me. However, on these glorious uplands – where the wind was cold, the sun warm and the sky patterned with high, white clouds – I felt so jubilant that the chasing of a demoniacal donkey seemed just another pleasure.
At three o’clock we reached this village, which is soon to be made the district administrative headquarters. Sheets of tin and piles of stones and building timber lie all over the place and I was startled to see a small tractor amidst the half-built houses. In the six years since Donald Levine wrote Wax and Gold there have been many changes here. He was the first faranj to explore Manz, but now a rough motor-track links it with Addis and during the dry season a slow bus rattles through twice a week to Mehal Meda, where one can buy Italian-made wine and beer. The rapid ‘progress’ of this area is perhaps owing to Haile Selassie’s special affection for Manz – the homeland of the present dynasty.
I wanted to spend the night in a settlement, and after half-an-hour at a talla-beit we continued down the main street. Then someone shouted and looking round I saw two angry men pursuing us. Within a moment we had been overtaken; they gripped my arms and claimed to be policemen, saying that I must come with them for questioning. One man was obviously drunk, neither wore anything remotely resembling a uniform and both were behaving outrageously. I therefore ‘resisted arrest’ and during the brawl that followed – watched by half the village and by a cringing Assefa – the metal buckle of my bush-shirt was bent, my arms were bruised and the drunk gave me an agonising punch in the stomach. Then a third man intervened. He was wearing the remains of a uniform beneath a filthy shamma, and in poor English he confirmed that my attackers were policemen and explained that they wanted to see my passport. I replied furiously that though I have been in Ethiopia for three months the police had never before demanded my passport – which I don’t have with me, since the Begemdir Chief of Police had advised me to send it to Addis lest it should be stolen on the way. At this the third man accused me of lying, twisted my arms behind my back and marched me off to the police station – with the other two in attendance and a trembling Assefa driving Satan in our wake.
On the rare occasions when I lose my temper the loss is total and I was shaking with rage as we entered the mud shack ‘police station’. The police CO matched his subordinates. He sat behind a wobbly desk in a dark little room, wearing a four-day beard and a torn army great-coat under his shamma. Pushing my way through a group of arguing men I told him exactly what I thought of the Mehal Meda police force. Then insult was indeed added to injury, for the man who had arrested me said sneeringly, ‘Don’t be so afraid!’ Glaring, I snapped that fear was the last emotion likely to be aroused in me by such a dishevelled bunch of no-goods; and I observed spitefully that he and his companions would have their own reasons to be afraid when I reported this incident to the Addis authorities. For good measure I threw in the names of Leilt Aida, Ras Mangasha and Iskander Desta – whereupon everyone stopped yelling at me.
After a moment’s silence, the CO remarked that I had better see the local Governor. I was then conducted to a recently-built shack, where a neatly-dressed but unimposing man sat rather self-consciously behind a brand-new, mock-mahogany desk with a pile of virginal ledgers on either side of the blotting pad. He was soon taken far out of his depth by the situation, as four men were simultaneously giving him different versions of the story of my arrest. He brusquely signed that I was to sit on a bench by the wall and wait.
Ten minutes later an adequate interpreter appeared. Amsalu is the local Medical Officer and a most agreeable young man. He begged me not to be so angry, though my rage had already gone off the boil, and he clearly explained the situation to the Governor, Ato Balatchaw. Now the Big Man was awkwardly placed. To release me would be to admit that I had been ‘wrongfully detained’; to keep me in custody, after all this talk about royalty, might prove calamitous. I suggested, as an honourable compromise, that Leilt Aida be telephoned by way of establishing my credentials. However, Mehal Meda has no telephone, so after much discussion and deliberation it was decided that a police officer would accompany me to Molale tomorrow morning and telephone Makalle from there. This satisfied everyone – though the Governor looked slightly apprehensive at the prospect of my discussing his police force with Leilt Aida.
I was then escorted back to a subdued CO who spent the next forty minutes ‘taking my statement’ for the records, with Amsalu’s assistance. Obviously my account of the incident was being carefully edited and I would give a lot to know what sort of statement I signed at the end of this performance.
I am now relaxing in a minute ‘hotel’. Its one earth-floored room contains two small iron-beds, with broken springs and revolting sheets. Bugs abound and the wallpaper consists of pictures from American, English, Italian and French magazines, many of which have been stuck on upside-down.
Mehal Meda is suffering from collective guilt this evening. Crowds of men and women have come to call, deploring my unlucky encounter, emphasising that none of the policemen involved was a Manze and consoling me with gifts of talla, tej, coffee, tea, roasted grain, stewed beans, curds and hard-boiled eggs. Nowhere in the highlands have I met with greater kindness.
Meanwhile Amsalu and the local teachers have been asking me the usual questions about my own country and my impressions of their country. When Dr Donald Levine was mentioned affectionate smiles lit up the grave faces of the non-English speakers who were sitting around us and one elderly man asked eagerly if I knew ‘Dr Donald’. I replied that I hadn’t the honour to know him personally but that I had read his book, and at once Amsalu seized my arm and begged me to send him a copy. He is prepared to spend almost a month’s salary on it, but inevitably Wax and Gold has been banned in Ethiopia. This political censorship of books seems to me a serious mistake, for it arouses suspicions that things are more rotten in the state of Ethiopia than they actually are. Several English-speakers have asked me what scandalous governmental secrets are revealed in Wax and Gold, and they look understandably bewildered when I explain that it is not an exposure of official iniquities but a scholarly study of their culture at its present stage of transition.
When I opened my notebook, for Amsalu to write his name and address on the back page, I noticed a folded bit of paper tucked away there. Examining it, I found that it was the ineffectual chit from the Governor of Lalibela to the priests of Imrahanna Kristos so I tossed it towards a pile of litter on the table. Then Amsalu caught sight of the Amharic script and the countless seals and stamps that bedeck every Ethiopian document, however insignificant, and glancing through it he exclaimed, ‘But this would have done the police, instead of your passport!’ I stared at him, and confessed that faranjs don’t think of offering chits as substitutes for passports; but he insisted that any officially stamped paper serves the purpose and said that if we brought this chit to the Governor’s home I would immediately be freed.
The night wind felt icy as the four teachers walked with me through the village. Approaching the Governor’s shack we heard horrible noises emanating from his transistor radio and when Amsalu shouted loudly for a servant to come to announce us no one could hear him. I suggested knocking on the tin door but this appalled my companions, as it is bad manners for the hoi-polloi to communicate directly with a Big Man. However, when Amsalu had again shouted unavailingly, several times, I gave up pandering to local etiquette and hammered the tin sheets resoundingly.
At once Ato Balatchaw appeared, wrapped in his shamma. He beckoned us crossly into his living-room, where an apologetic Amsalu produced the precious chit – and, realising that I need not discuss his police force with Leilt Aida, the Governor stopped being cross. Five minutes later we were departing, with a written permit for me to proceed to Molale unescorted. It surprised me to find that a piece of highland ‘official business’ could be transacted so briskly.
Both geographically and historically there is a certain fitness about trekking through this region towards the end of my journey. In Manz the beauty of these highlands reaches a triumphant crescendo of light, space, colouring and formation; and here one is in the homeland of the House of Shoa, whose head now occupies the Solomonic Throne.
If the highlands in general seem remote from the rest of the world, Manz in particular seems remote even from the rest of the highlands. Its atmosphere is unique. This is partly because of physical differences – well-built stone dwellings replace flimsy tukuls, heavy, dark woollen cloaks are used instead of shammas, the average altitude is 10,000 feet – and partly because of the character of the people, who seem to have more individuality than most highlanders. They also seem more mentally alert, more physically vigorous and more arrogant. Even within Manz, communication between the three districts has always been difficult because of the chasms that split the plateau and today we crossed three in fifteen miles. This morning crowds were coming to market as we approached the first gorge. It is inhabited by Gelada baboons, scores of whom were sitting near the path saying uncomplimentary things to the passers-by, and at its head is a hundred-foot waterfall which must be gloriously exciting during the rains. Most of the women were wearing brown, or brown and black, ankle-length gowns and the barefooted men, in their long, rough, brown cloaks, looked like so many Franciscans. The more prosperous also wore sheepskin capes around their shoulders for at this height the mornings are bitterly cold.
The ascent from the bottom of the third gorge was exhilaratingly difficult. Assefa and Satan went a long way round while I rock-climbed straight up the smooth, slightly sloping grey cliff. With Addis so near, I am getting an extra, bitter-sweet pleasure from every highland experience.
Beyond the gorges our track wound between low, brown hills, before bringing us on to a wide plain planted with barley – some silver-green, some ripely golden. Here we began to meet the crowds returning from Molale market. Many women as well as men were riding on mules, who wore silver necklaces and most people greeted me with bows and smiles. I noticed an unusual variety of skin-colour, from almost black to palest brown – which is surprising, for unlike most parts of Shoa Manz was never overrun by the Galla. Perhaps the darker-skinned inhabitants are the descendants of slaves captured by the renowned Manze warriors when they were recovering Galla-conquered territory for their Emperor Menelik II.
On our arrival at this little town, soon after three o’clock, Assefa abruptly announced that he was too exhausted to walk another step. Satan was also looking sorry for himself so we pushed through the still-crowded market-place to a talla-beit, accumulating the inevitable retinue of schoolboys. Ten minutes later the Director (Headmaster) of the school appeared in the doorway, expressed disapproval of a faranj drinking with the peasantry and invited me to be his guest for the night.
Ato Beda Mariam lives in a row of stable-like dwellings behind the three-year-old, two-storied school which is Molale’s biggest building. There are eight grades in this school (twelve is the maximum) and ten teachers cope with about four hundred pupils. Here again I found that merely knowing the name of ‘Dr Donald’ sent my status rocketing. Americans in general, and the Peace Corps in particular, are unpopular among Ato Beda Mariam and his staff, as they are among the majority of the English-speaking Ethiopians with whom I have discussed them. Yet in Manz Dr Levine is hardly regarded as a faranj, and only those who have experienced the highlanders’ aloofness can appreciate what a compliment this is.
My thirty-two-year-old host has been in charge of this school for the past five years. His English is excellent and I was astounded to hear that he only began his schooling at the age of seventeen. The traditional opposition to state-sponsored education is so strong in Manz that many of Molale’s pupils have run away from home and are paying for their own education by doing odd jobs in the town; but parental opposition is lessening yearly because of the infectious illusion that a state-school education means ‘instant wealth’.
Ato Beda Mariam rejoices at this change but I do not. I disagree with the argument that Ethiopia cannot afford to postpone the education of the masses until a sufficient number of adequately qualified teachers is available. Apart from two Gondares in a remote settlement, he himself is the first rural teacher I have met who possesses both the ability and the outlook required for this vocation. Nothing in this country depresses me as much as the harm being done to Ethiopia’s children by half-baked, cynical, unworthy teachers. I have become so fond of the highlanders that this problem distresses and alarms me as would the illness of a friend. It is a problem common to all ‘undeveloped countries’, but highland children seem extra vulnerable to the terrible consequences of having a mock-Western education unskilfully thrust upon them. In Asmara or Addis, faranjs may study statistics and be impressed by the Emperor’s zeal for educating his subjects, but in the little towns and villages one is swamped with despair when one meets either teachers or pupils. Here again one feels guilty on behalf of Western civilisation. What damage are we doing, blindly and swiftly, to those races who are being taught that because we are materially richer we must be emulated without question? What compels us to infect everyone else with our own sick urgency to change, soften and standardise? How can we have the effrontery to lord it over peoples who retain what we have lost – a sane awareness that what matters most is immeasurable?
Today we walked only sixteen miles, but the three-hour descent from Manz, into another low, hot river-gorge, and the tough climb to this 9,000-foot plateau have left Assefa semi-invalided and Satan too dispirited even to attempt to go home.
When we left Molale a steely sky hung low and the wind blew harsh, but soon the sun was shining and at midday the bottom of the gorge felt equatorial. Yet a few hours later, as I climbed the escarpment below Sali Dingai, Manz was hidden by dark clouds, thunder was crashing nearby and a sleet-laden gale was tearing at my sweat-soaked shirt. Assefa and Satan were a long way behind so I sat near the edge of the escarpment overlooking the country we had just crossed – a scene made all the more dramatic by swiftly-moving cloud-masses and sulphurous flickerings of lightning. Then, thinking of the beauty that I had seen, even within the past eight hours, I felt very sad. Yet it is not only through their beauty that these highlands have enchanted me. I love them, too, for their challenging brutality, and had I seen the beauty without meeting the challenge I could not now feel so attached to Ethiopia. Its muscle-searing climbs and nerve-racking descents, its powdery dust and vicious thorns, its heat, cold, hunger and thirst, its savage precipices, treacherous paths and pathless forests – these, as much as its wide, proud, chaotic landscapes, are the characteristics that have forged the bond.
Assefa and Satan ascended by a steep, roundabout path that avoided the escarpment. Reunited, the three of us climbed from this broad ledge, over a still higher summit, to the big village of Sali Dingai – an outpost of ‘motor-road civilisation’. A new fifteen-mile track links it to the main Asmara–Dessie–Addis road and there is a daily bus-service. Where the track ends a few square shacks and a small school have recently been built; otherwise Sali Dingai remains unspoiled, though one can foresee it changing soon.
By this time Assefa and I had but a single thought and, as we searched for talla, a cheerful man emerged from a mud shack and invited us to help celebrate the christening of his fifth son. In the dark, straw-strewn room about forty men sat on mud benches around the walls, fondling rifles, while a minstrel played in the centre of the floor and a tall, elderly woman sang and danced with strange, fierce gaiety.
This invitation was providential, as no one could long remain sad at a highland party. After an enormous meal, accompanied by much talla, I found myself holding a half-pint tumbler brimming with araki, which normally is served in tiny vessels. I sipped the burning spirit slowly, but was soon cut off from reality by a sentimental haze through which I regarded myself, my host, his fifth son, all his other sons, my fellow-guests, all highlanders, the world in general – and even the prospect of arriving in Addis – with benevolence.
At seven o’clock Samuel, the Director of the school, waveringly led Assefa and me towards his home. Evidently I was then at the maudlin stage; on looking up at the brilliance of the storm-cleared sky I wanted to weep because in comparison Irish skies seem to have so few stars.
Lots of strong black coffee sobered us and when I was again able to focus I saw that my hostess is a most beautiful and charming young woman. Both she and her husband are Addis-born and educated but here they are living – resentfully – at a level little higher than that of the local peasants.
With sobriety my gloom returned and as I sat dolefully thinking of the motor-road ahead it was ironical to hear Samuel and his wife envying me because within three or four days I will be in Addis.
An abrupt ending – but my arrival here without Jock would in any case have been imperfect, and it was almost a relief to have the painful farewell stage cut short.
This morning I found Satan severely lame in both hind legs. Were I a highlander I would have loaded him up regardless and beaten him on his way. Not being a highlander I gave him to Samuel, as a present of doubtful value, and a little boy shouldered my sack to the bus-stop.
It was a wonderful morning, in this high, cool world of clarity, spaciousness and quiet; but such a curious numbness had crept over me that I observed it without feeling it. The bus was due at eight o’clock and I was being seen off by three teachers and half-a-dozen other men. To them I was at last doing the normal thing by getting on a makeena, after walking through Manz for some infinitely obscure reason. They had no conception of the significance of the occasion for me and I chatted casually with them while inwardly trying to adjust to the fact that now – already – my trek was ended.
The minibus arrived on time and Samuel carefully explained that when we reached the main road I must change on to the big Dessie–Addis bus. He added, wistfully, that by midday I would be in the capital of the Empire; and I politely pretended to be pleased at the thought.
Waiting for the bus to start I took out my notebook and totted up the miles I have walked – according to my pocket pedometer – since landing at Massawah. As I passed the 800 mark, and got to 900, and then 950, I became aware of a childish suspense. At the end I checked and re-checked; but there was no mistake – the final figure was 1,024 miles.