On February 25th, an EAL Boeing 737  with 90 people aboard went down on a stormy night about four minutes after taking off from Beirut Airport.  There were no survivors.

From the beginning, the Lebanese government has insisted that the cause of the crash was human error on the Ethiopian side.  In other words, the tower at Beirut Airport bears no responsibility, Beirut airport security is not negligent, Lebanon is not a haven for international terrorists who might be suspected, etc.  Maybe it was human error and Lebanon is in no way responsible.  The fact is that no one knows enough about the accident yet to support any conclusion at all.

Over the past month, various Lebanese officials have continued to claim that the crash was the result of human error. They offered no evidence.  At the same time they say people shouldn’t jump to conclusions.

Girma Awake, the boss at EAL, has said only that all possibilities remain open until there is evidence.  He says it again every time there is another statement from Lebanon.

The black boxes were found, but the physical trail of the cockpit voice recorder from the time the signal of its location underwater was picked up to the current analysis of both boxes in France is raising doubts.  The voice recorder was said not to have been located when the data recorder was found, then this story was changed to mean that the chip containing the actual recorded voices was missing from the voice data box and then it was found.  Found detached and on the sea floor? Now a story apparently leaked by the Ethiopian government through the Reporter, a weekly newspaper with both English and Amharic editions, suggests that the device has been tampered with, adding to suspicion that Lebanon is obstructing an open and impartial  investigation.

From the beginning, the Lebanese government has been acting like it has something serious to hide.  A high level Ethiopian delegation, including several veteran pilots, says that it was given limited access to partial information and no chance to verify anything on the ground in Lebanon.  How could this not give rise to suspicions?

Ethiopia could be exaggerating its suspicions, or worse.  Lebanon could put all suspicions to rest by ending  its secrecy and inviting Ethiopian, Boeing and others  to share the information it has.  Until then, Lebanon is fueling the potential for an ugly international incident.  Under the circumstances, it’s natural to conclude that Lebanon believes it would be damaging to share the information it has and would rather provoke condemnation for being obstructive.

A few weeks ago Ethiopia asked for ‘international help’ with the investigation. This request for help is an indirect way of expressing its increasingly stronger suspicion of  Lebanon’s secrecy.

Last week, Ethiopia sued Boeing, the maker of  the 737.  This was probably a routine legal step, just covering the right for a future claim if needed.  But the suit reminds us that Boeing wants an honest investigation so that aircraft failure doesn’t become a compromise villain that gets both Ethiopia and Lebanon off, if they should want that.   Boeing has been involved in the accident investigation from the beginning as it usually is when one of its planes is involved, It has a lot more clout among governments, and obviously in Washington, than does Ethiopia.

The information from the black boxes will be available soon, but will be tainted by suspected Lebanese tampering.  There are now unofficial but public Ethiopian suspicions that would be unsafe to publish without government approval.  They are provoked by Lebanese refusal to cooperate.  Is Lebanon trying to manipulate the investigation?  Are there several minutes missing from both the cockpit voice recorder and the recording of the tower’s exchanges with the cockpit after takeoff, as is alleged in the Ethiopian press?

Ethiopia’s insinuation is, of course, that the crash was caused by unknown ‘foul play’, that Lebanon suspects this also and is doing its best to suppress evidence of this.  Early news reports mentioned ‘witnesses’ who saw the plane in flames before it hit the water.  The tower says that the pilot disregarded its instructions and turned in the opposite direction.  Did that happen?  Does the tape include an explanation from the plane, if it happened?  Was there a bomb in the luggage?  Did a terrorist manage to get onto the plane and even into the cockpit?

The world press has given little coverage to this story after the initial days, over a month ago.  The Ethiopian press has said little until now, repeating the insistence that all possible explanations must remain on the table until they are eliminated by evidence.

Most of the information presented above comes from the Lebanese press, which has given the story extensive coverage. Local interest is great because there were many Lebanese victims.  Others, including the BBC, Agence France Press, Reuters and the New York Times, cite this same Lebanese source, The Daily Star.

A good record of the press coverage since January 25 can be found at East Africa Forum.  Most items can be found through the keyword ‘crash’ in the search engine.

Here’s a direct link to yesterday’s Reporter story.

Ethiopia lost an airliner in a terrorist hijacking in 1996.  The plane ran out of fuel, made a forced landing in the ocean near the Comoros Islands, and 52 of the 175 on board survived.  The hijackers were Somalis.  Ethiopia-Somali relations are just as bitter today as they were then.  But if it was a terrorist act, the Somalis aren’t the only enemies Ethiopia has.

This clash between Ethiopia and Lebanon shows every sign of growing nastier.  The only way to prevent this is for Lebanon to share fully what it has learned so far and to let Ethiopia confirm the information to the best of its ability.  If Lebanon has nothing to hide, this is the obvious approach.  If it has something to hide, its current approach makes troubling sense.

With every passing day, it seems more likely that Lebanon is engaging in a cover-up to prevent the truth from being known.

A Voice of America news item yesterday had this unsettling headline.

There are still a lot of countries with big numbers of traditional farmers who are deeply attached to their  land. In some of them, foreigners are doing what it says in the headline.

Ethiopia isn’t the only country where this is happening, but it’s one of the biggest, both in the size of its own population (80 million+) and in the number of substantial deals it has signed, where control of land is turned over to foreigners.

Whose land?  Are people being moved out so foreigners can move in, hire a few local people as laborers while the rest go….where?

There have been a lot of articles about this startling — at least to me — development that quote each other and say almost nothing because the terms of these deals are not public.  This is not a good sign.

Or is the land vacant, as the Ethiopian government says?  Is that likely, in Ethiopia?

The deals are now getting off the ground. As far as I can tell, Tigrean and Amhara land is not included in any of these deals.  Small wonder.  If things go wrong, peasants will pay the biggest price, as usual.

Here’s the VOA link.

Here’s the article.

<strong>February 22, 2010

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The Green Revolution that ended food shortages in parts of the world decades ago may be coming to East Africa, bringing the promise of bountiful harvests in a region more often associated with drought and famine.  But from the Oromia region of Ethiopia, critics see the project as a neo-colonial land grab.

Farming in Ethiopia is a battle for survival. Peasants using ancient methods are totally dependent on the weather, and on the government, which owns the land and provides fertilizer subsidies. When the rains fail, as they often do, their very survival depends on food aid from abroad.

It has proven to be a recipe for perpetual poverty. In a country where 80 percent of the population works in the farm sector, one in six needs food assistance.

To breathe new life into Ethiopia’s stagnant agriculture sector, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Meles Zenawi is wooing foreign firms with offers to lease huge tracts of land at rock bottom prices.

“The policy of the government of Ethiopia regarding agricultural land development has always been based on the small-scale farmer,” said Meles Zenawi. “But the strategy also included the possibility of the private sector playing a supplementary but vital role.”

The offer of cheap land has attracted wide interest, from governments like Saudi Arabia that import most of their food, to multi-nationals like the Indian giant Karuturi Global. At two sprawling farms totaling more than 300,000 hectares, Karuturi earth movers, tractors, and water well drilling rigs are transforming the pastoral landscape.

Critics describe Karuturi as a neo-colonialist or agro-imperialist, grabbing Ethiopia’s land at bargain prices and exporting profits and food while Ethiopians go hungry. But owner Ram Karuturi says food grown here will be consumed here.

“What Karuturi is doing is what Africa needs, wants and deserves,” said  Ram Karuturi. “What we put in is our money into Africa, which nobody else is doing.”

Karuturi says his big machinery more than doubles the output of traditional farms, and creates jobs where there were none. Speaking through a translator, 30-year-old Ababu Nagari says the roughly 80 cents a day she earns harvesting maize is changing her life.

“I don’t have my own land, so I have no way of feeding my family,” said Ababu Nagari. “Now I have work and a little money. I am happy these investors come.”

But not everyone is happy. Four hundred people have signed a petition saying they received no compensation after being evicted from land taken over by Karuturi. They say their families have farmed and grazed their animals here for generations. One farmer spoke to VOA on condition of anonymity.

“We are for development of our country, but we cannot develop our country when land is in the hands of the government,” he said. “You can work on your land, and all of a sudden, they push you out of your land.”

Environmentalists say land already degraded by farming will suffer, and loss of trees will cause an imbalance in the eco-system. Opposition politicians say the government is giving away land to buy diplomatic support, and that wages paid to farm workers are below the World Bank’s poverty threshold.

But Ram Karuturi argues investments like his, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, are revolutionizing African agriculture.

“The Green Revolution missed this continent 20 years ago,” he said. “There are not more than 1,000 tractors in private hands in this country. And for a country of 80 million people and 120 million hectares, that’s a tragic situation.”

So is Africa witnessing its Green Revolution, or simply a neo-imperialist land grab? Ethiopia is betting that the World Bank is right when it says investing in agriculture is one of the most effective ways to speed economic development in Africa.

Maaza Mengiste, Ethiopian-born but US raised, has published her first novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze. Maaza (Ethiopians use first names where Americans use family names) has already gained recognition for her short stories and earned an MFA degree at NYU, where she teaches writing.

Her local reputation (named “New Literary Idol” by New York Magazine and a Pushcart Prize nominee) got a New York Times review that was marred by undigested and misleading Google sludge about Ethiopia and needed a printed correction of a conspicuous error. The Times reviewer seemed clueless about Ethiopia.  More attentive reviewers also lacked a feeling for Maaza’s subject while recognizing that she was a serious and talented writer.

The problem is that Beneath the Lion’s Gaze is in part an insider’s book.  Many will read it with interest, but its heart beats most powerfully for those who know something about Ethiopia and the shock, only 36 years ago, of the abrupt end to its feudal absolute monarchy.

Maaza’s central character is Ethiopia itself, which comes to life through events during two chaotic periods in the lives, in 1974 and 1977, of Dr. Hailu, his family and household, a few humble neighbors and several others who form a microcosm of highland Christian Ethiopians living in the capital, Addis Ababa.  Growing instability burst into violence in 1974 after a group of junior Army officers formed the Derg (committee) to restore order but soon did away with the aging Emperor Haile Selassie, the institution of monarchy itself and massacred scores of senior officials and loyalists. This is not a historical novel in the usual sense, but these historic events dominated everyone’s life, particularly in the capital.

A comment about ‘highland Christian Ethiopia’:  the ancient core of Ethiopia was a northern region that became Christian in the 4th century then took its Christian culture southward through the highlands and extending its authority into the surrounding lowlands. The resulting Christian-dominated Empire was multi-ethnic and multi-religious, with the crown usually held by one of two related highland groups. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church validated the legitimacy of the emperors, and was in turn protected by them.  In Maaza’s novel, this core culture represents all of Ethiopia. Though she greatly oversimplifies a complex situation, it holds up well enough for her purposes.

Inexperienced and insecure as political leaders, the Derg was brutal toward its enemies, both real and suspected.  Its most serious enemies were ideological leftists, most of them connected with the university community, who responded with their own brutality, hoping at first to create a civilian government with the soldiers returning to their barracks. Instead, the two sides descended into a bitter fight for power. The far stronger Derg eradicated its rivals not long after the events in the novel.  The unsophisticated junior officers, not committed to any political ideology when they took power, later found it expedient to turn sharply to the left. By then, most senior officers and the upper class were dead, in prison or had fled the country. A small conservative opposition failed to gain traction.

When the novel begins in 1974, opposition to the emperor was unstructured but in the process of forming two centers, one civilian, one military.  At first, both wanted to reform the government, but perhaps surprised by the unexpected fragility of the system, the soldiers took over the government instead. The civilian intellectuals then tried unsuccessfully to influence the relatively uneducated Derg leaders.  As they lost ground, the battle intensified. Maaza introduces her characters within and in response to these events. A young victim of a police shooting is treated by Dr. Hailu. His student son, Dawit, becomes involved with campus radicals.

The fall of the monarchy and the slaughter of many of the country’s elite ignited a full blown national crisis. Maaza’s characters, like everyone else, are stunned.  In the end, like most of Addis, all but a few watched passively, going about their lives and hoping to avoid collateral damage. With increasing force, the Derg imposed absolute control of every aspect of life, and of life itself. Maaza conveys the mood vividly.

Public protests which might have broken out elsewhere were not Ethiopia’s way. Almost all were descendants of peasants, at most a generation or two removed from the countryside, and exhibited the habitual fatalism of earlier generations, accepting in silence whatever happened, hoping to survive, taking spiritual and religious shelter in ways that readers, even some who know Ethiopia, may grasp for the first time. Those who did oppose the Derg were, with some exceptions, westernized, and some had studied abroad.

This was not, at first, a traditional Ethiopian uprising, being based on reform rather than overthrow.  That changed with the emperor’s removal in 1974 and subsequent murder.

After the emperor’s death, the story jumps ahead to 1977, with brief flashbacks giving us bits of the past. The monarchy had already shown itself unable to adjust to changing times, failing to heed the warning of a coup attempt in 1960. The end finally came when images of a catastrophic famine, neglected and denied by the palace, were captured by a BBC television reporter.  Public anger spread quickly, fueled by a series of strikes by soldiers demanding better conditions, taxi drivers and teachers, student demonstrations, and then the announcement that the emperor had been taken from the palace. The single TV channel broadcast footage created by the Derg showing banqueting in the palace inter-cut with scenes of starving mothers and children.  We learn how much harsher life had become since 1974. The Derg’s Red Terror was at its peak. The much weaker opposition’s White Terror, was desperate.

Both the Red and White Terrors were now leftist, fighting for power as Ethiopian oppositions always had. The campus radicals – in the novel and in fact – were influenced by the socialist ideas of students in Europe and North America. The Derg had cooled toward the US when its request for arms was rejected, and joined the Socialist camp when it accepted East bloc arms. Maaza’s passing mention of Cuba refers to the 10,000 troops sent by Castro at Moscow’s request to help Ethiopia repel an invasion from Somalia in 1977. Ethiopia, a firm US ally since World War II, was now a Cold War enemy.

Maaza gives us a fine but subtle portrait of Ethiopia’s character, though there is a set of characters missing which is for me the novel’s only serious weakness.  The battle for power is a common thread in Ethiopian history, but her limited attention to the Derg, whose motives are never examined, leaves the portrait incomplete. Remaining on top always meant constant maneuvering that not infrequently led to violence, sometimes bringing an illegitimate claimant to power. Maaza’s adult characters would have talked about the Derg leaders constantly among themselves, comparing them with familiar characters they had heard about since childhood.

We are left with basic questions about the Derg and its supporters. Who were they?  What led these commoners to aspire to power?  How did they see themselves?  How much public support did the Derg have, and how much passive acceptance?  Maaza isn’t alone in overlooking the Derg, it should be said. Relatively little can be found about them in either journalistic or academic sources.  Ethiopians still seem unready to examine the shadows of their recent past.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Church became dependent on the Derg after its vast landholdings were nationalized. Christian Ethiopia remained deeply pious, clinging to the most visible surviving institution from the past. Power was now in the hands of unknown commoners with unknown intentions. Fear was ever present. Anyone could be arrested and tortured at any moment: a father, sister, even a small child. Thousands were never seen again.  Some were found as corpses dumped from military trucks on nighttime streets emptied by curfews. Several of Maaza’s characters responded to this particular barbarism in both an Ethiopian and Christian manner. Amnesty International has estimated that 200,000 or more were killed during these years, the majority in Addis Ababa where resistance was strongest.

We learn just enough of the sweep of events, including a few references to foreign affairs, to see the broader context. Some of the characters go out during the day, others stay in the compound but all are shaken by the collapse of the empire. Dr. Hailu treats victims of the Derg. Dawit, his sister-in-law Sara, and Melaku, a nearby shopkeeper, become politically active. It is an effective ground level view of history.

At a book reading, Maaza said that she began this novel after learning about Argentina’s years under the generals.  She understood for the first time that there was no “fatal flaw” in Ethiopia that had led to the Derg. Her interest was personal; she had her own trace memories from before her parents took her out of Ethiopia when she was four. A Derg could arise anywhere.

During the five years she worked on this novel, Maaza refined her ideas, responding to critiques of the short story she first produced and expanding it into a novel. She came to realize that while leaders could be equally corrupted by power in Ethiopia and Argentina, there were differences in how cultures absorbed and responded to shocks.

Intimidation and abuse, arrest and torture of relatives provoke similar emotions.  Families everywhere grieve for lost relatives. But Maaza also describes Ethiopia’s particular responses, drawn from its own character. She takes us beyond surface differences in appearance and the common humanity beneath, to a place where Ethiopians and Argentinians are again different because each is profoundly shaped by a different past.

Shock and terror stripped away ordinary habits and reactions and exposed Ethiopia’s uniqueness, the outcome of over fifteen unbroken centuries of cultural ripening, a period matched by few living nations. Its long history – still an active legacy for highland Ethiopians – has nurtured in its people, and Maaza’s characters, a profoundly original sense of the world, with its own cultural values and expectations and drenched in an indelible and original Christian spirituality. It bonds Ethiopians in a relationship to a past that is still present, becoming in hard times the life preserver they cling to. There were no harder times than these Derg years.

This is an Ethiopia we don’t often see, a deeply spiritual highland society where suffering is mediated by intensely personal, mystical and often superstitious responses. Fatalism, the classic stance of the long suffering Ethiopian peasant, is suffused with religious acceptance of the harshness of life. Several characters cushion the grinding horrors around them with emotions steeped in this spiritualism.  Bow your head and survive, they seem to say.  Raise it, as the campus radicals were doing, and it would be cut off. Feudal times were also harsh, and Ethiopians were prepared by their history to survive the Derg.

The final weeks of Haile Selassie’s reign, including the poignant moment when he was taken from his palace in the back seat of a Volkswagen (as reported in the world press) are memorably presented.  Maaza shows him as a frail, confused old man, past 80, formerly all-powerful, now helpless and alone.  With fine poetic sensitivity, she provides him with an inner voice as he struggles to maintain his tattered dignity and to simultaneously accept and resist his fate, and to express his impotent outrage at the indignities to which he is subjected. There are pages in her brief rendering of Haile Selassie’s final days – not many scenes, not many pages – that are painful but also compelling, even touched with greatness.

Maaza’s characters are an ordinary collection of Addis residents.  Middle-aged Hailu is a doctor at a government hospital, not particularly religious, highly professional and committed to his work, devoted to his family, out of touch with his radicalized son, Dawit. He watches his more traditionally inclined wife waste away from a heart ailment, revealing herself in mystical, devotional language. His older son, Yonas, a decent man of weak character, has a deep love for his young daughter and for his wife Sara. Sara, one of Maaza’s more complex characters, suffers intensely after two failed pregnancies and fears deeply for the safety of her single daughter, subjecting herself to a shocking penance to assure Tizita’s life. She responds to the political crisis with exceptional courage.

Others, most of them little more than walk-ons, include Melaku, the neighboring shopkeeper who becomes the most appealing character in the novel. Several household and compound residents and neighbors flesh out the little community. Maaza uses them effectively.

A small additional set of characters represents the evil loosed on Ethiopia . . . a nameless colonel who is both a torturer and unexpectedly a victim, Dawit’s childhood friend Mickey, who was too poor to attend the university and joined the army instead, where fate involved him in supporting the coup plotters as he inexorably became one of them. In this group, only Mickey has more than one dimension.

By 1977, Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam was the unchallenged leader of the Derg though he doesn’t appear in the novel. In an Author’s Note Maaza tells us that the fictional Major Guddu was ‘inspired’ by Mengistu, remaining a remote, evil figure rather than a participant in her story.

Some reviewers wrote that Maaza’s characters – even the central figures — are not fully drawn.  That is a fair comment, but her focus is less on individuals than on the way they combine to form her picture of Ethiopia. Her characters embody a uniquely Ethiopian response to the trauma they are living through.  Sharply delineated characters might have weakened her group portrait. Each character contributes to the texture, even the torturers and their accomplices, because in Ethiopia, God’s world has always known evil.

Some will find it hard to appreciate Maaza’s portrayal of Ethiopian religious sentiment, or her poetic and sometimes dazzling command of the imagery and iconography of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. At times, as some noted, she tends toward “purple prose.”

One reviewer thought that the plot was “clunky” and ends a bit mechanically.  I agree that the plot was not strong, but it was also not central. I would add that the narrative is unnecessarily fragmented and that it came to a somewhat unsatisfying end which I leave for readers to discover for themselves.

Such complaints do not diminish Maaza’s impressive achievement. Her view of Ethiopia is original, her characters respond to those terrible years believably and sometimes in ways that can be found only in Ethiopia. This is a novel that deserves an attentive audience, not just among Ethiopians.

Maaza is interested in her characters in historic times but is not writing a history lesson. It is a portrait of a society – inseparably both Ethiopian and Christian – under intense stress. The national character that was brought to the surface will be immediately familiar to Ethiopian readers – so familiar, in fact, that they might not even notice it.

An Ethiopian friend I met at Maaza’s reading had a handful of copies under his arm.  “I couldn’t put it down”, he said. “I’m giving copies to all my young relatives who are growing up here and don’t know what we went through.” For a culture obsessed with its past, an uninformed generation is a high price to pay.

Note: Mengistu Haile Mariam ruled Ethiopia until 1991, when he was overthrown by the rebel movement which formed today’s Ethiopian government. He fled to Zimbabwe where he still lives under the protection of Robert Mugabe.  Mugabe is repaying an old debt. Mengistu had hosted and supported him when Mugabe was a leader in Zimbabwe’s fight for independence.

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This blog has been missing in action.  Don’t go away.  The Horn of Africa is in the cross hairs of evil spirits these days.  Hardly anything there is going right.  For now, the unfinished Eritrea-Ethiopia history will be sidelined, though the border between them could unexpectedly become a front line without warning. But today’s news in Somalia and elsewhere in the Horn is more pressing.

In this blog on June 1, 2009 I wrote:  “Without a government, it became global open season on Somalia’s fish.  The local fishing industry was completely disrupted.  Canning for export stopped.  Local fish catches shrank as stocks were depleted by foreign fleets.” 

For years — ever since the Somali government collapsed in 1991 — no one protected Somali interests in its well stocked coastal waters.  Soon they were being over-fished, mainly by foreign poachers.  Local fisherman were increasingly abused and pushed aside.  

As catches declined in their home waters declined and abuse grew, outraged Somalis responded with low tech but effective attacks on the intruders.  They paid off so well that the local vigilante pirates were pushed aside by well financed high tech criminal pirate gangs, often foreigners with lawyers in London to negotiate ransoms and arrange payoffs.  Somalis provided the cheap labor and took risks,  but the big money went to the few at the top, not Somalis, or to wealthy Somali expatriates.  

Without a government, no one protected Somali coastal waters from illegal  and hostile raids bigger, more modern fleets. The local fishing industry was completely disrupted. Canning for export stopped. Local fish catches shrank for those fishermen daring enough to go out at all, as stocks were depleted. An AP report  confirms the harm done. What little fishingvives is showing better results as fish populations recover, but the catches are only for local consumption. No canning or exporting is possible in the present madness. 

Large scale piracy in Somali waters by foreign fishermen (including some from Europe and Asia) has now become too risky because of the other pirates — the ones in the headlines.  

One of these days the Somali nightmare will end and a government will emerge from the ashes.  When it does, a commercial fishing industry in a hungry world can help get the national economy get back on its feet. 

All it would take is a little help from a small fraction of the international naval fleet now patrolling the Indian Ocean.  They could easily deter the fishing mafia that turned a local nuisance (occasional seaborne coastal crime) into an international problem. 

When that day comes, will the world help Somalia fend off the fishing fleets of a dozen nations?

The Eritrea colony got off to a bad start.  It was brutal to the Eritreans and attracted few Italian settlers, mostly hustlers.  With the defeat at Adua in 1896, Eritrea hit bottom.

A civilian governor, Ferdinand Martini, replaced the sleazy and incompetent military administration.  During his nine years, Martini moved the capital from steamy Massawa into the cool highlands at Asmara, threw out the worst of the officers and parasites, created an effective civilian administration with departments for finance, education, health, police and courts, and divided the territory into locally administered districts.  His goal was to prove the superiority of Italian culture.

Martini was no less a European supremist than others. He had coauthored a report that described Eritrea as “a fertile and virgin land…stretching out its arms to Italian farmers”. Eritreans were considered inherently inferior, less able to learn, not fully human.

Martini understood, however, that Eritrea wasn’t ready for an influx of Italian colonists. Most of whom would be little more skilled or educated than Eritreans and would not be able to compete with cheap Eritrean labor. He also knew that quiet borders with Ethiopia would give him time to build the colony. Eritrea became, for a while, a good neighbor. Soon a well ordered modern colony began to take shape, able to absorb settlers.

To make sure that Eritreans knew who was boss, Martini reacted immediately to acts of resistance with whippings and imprisonment, frequently enough fatal to convey his message.  Things were looking up for Italy, but Eritreans were losing their freedom to colonial masters who treated them with contempt, valued them mainly as cheap labor, household servants, cannon fodder (to help subdue Libya and Somaliland, Italy’s newer colonies) and, notably, bedmates. When the mostly male Italian population was still under 5000, Eritrea already had an estimated 1000 mixed-race children.

Martini knew that Eritrea’s future was in the highlands. The short distance from Massawa’s stunning heat to temperate Asmara included a steep climb above 7000 feet. He envisioned a railway up the escarpment that was considered impossible by many but which came to be seen as an engineering marvel. Railway construction went on long after Martini was gone, eventually reaching nearly to the Sudan. He began the network of roads, telegraph lines and electrification that remained a legacy long after Italian rule ended.

The beginnings of a modern economy appeared, and with it a small working class with some literacy and modern skills. The first schools offered Eritreans only a fourth grade education – as much, the racists believed, as they could absorb and enough to make them useful. As both participants and observers, growing numbers of Eritreans were leaving feudalism behind.

Eritrean culture survived in the spaces left to it, tolerated as long as it didn’t interfere. Family ties remained, but traditional authority and social structures were easily ignored. The daily insults and humiliations of colonialism replaced the highland pride of independence. A monetary economy arose for the first time. Eritreans were paid, however poorly, as shop clerks, servants, soldiers, waiters, construction laborers, watchmen, etc. Shops and cafes opened, selling imported goods and serving pasta and caffe latte. A few were opened by Eritreans, for Eritreans.

The impact of these changes was enormous. Formerly, a boy’s future was determined by his family’s social status and land holdings, if any. A girl’s future depended on her marriage prospects. Now their worth depended on their value to the colonial economy and government. A clever boy might find a place in school, become literate, learn to drive a car, become a soldier or operate a machine. A girl could serve in a household, a shop or café. Sex was a constant commodity. Inexorably, the colonial impact penetrated ever deeper into rural areas, creating a new Eritrean society with a European dimension.

Cohabitation with Eritrean women was so widespread that the colonial administration was pressured from home to respond. Madamismo, as it was called, was officially banned.  The decision is blamed for the unintended spread of prostitution in Eritrea and later in Ethiopia under Mussolini for which they became known, that became the new sexual marketplace.

While colonialism was transforming the lives of Eritreans, relatively little was changing in Ethiopia. Addis Ababa became the capital, and with the completion of the railroad from Djibouti and the revival of European interest after World War I, foreign influence grew. Ethiopia remained fully under Ethiopian control. Traditional authority gave in very slowly to modernization.

Compared with Eritrea, Ethiopian society remained nearly frozen in time. Until the coronation of Haile Selassie in 1930 the threat of a power struggle was not completely eliminated. Few schools or roads were built and electrification spread slowly. The first ministries to manage finance, education, etc. were set up, but with limited real authority and of course without experienced Ethiopians.

Inevitably, the growing colony of Eritrea began to attract Ethiopian labor from just across the border in Tigre Province. Eritreans saw them as ignorant bumpkins, fit only for the most menial jobs. The abuse they received from their colonial masters was now passed on to hapless Tigreans, derisively called Agames from the name of a border district in Tigre.

This Eritrean air of superiority would infect relations with Ethiopia on more than one occasion. When Italy sent its Eritrean troops into battle during the Fascist invasion in the 1935, for example, some shared the emotions of the Italians, feeling both superiority to Ethiopians as well as the Italian lust for revenge after Adua, when Eritrean prisoners had limbs cut off before being freed.

The breach that had opened at Adua steadily widened. Suddenly the path of local history changed when the British liberated both Ethiopia and Eritrea from the Fascists in 1941. A new era in their relations now began.

A good read about Eritrea is “I Didn’t Do It For You” by Michela Wrong, published in 2005.

Colonialism is a form of societal rape, and Italy in Eritrea was a typical rapist. Almost immediately, Italian police began killing civilians and sometimes dividing up their wives among themselves. They took the best land. Existing traditional relationships and institutions were eradicated or gutted. The conquest of the future Eritrean people was total, both physically and psychologically.

In their first colony, Italy did what the British and French were doing in theirs. Desperate to catch up, Italy invested heavily. It looked greedily at the fertile highlands across its southern border in Ethiopia and quickly began nibbling away.

As usual, there were winners as well as losers among Eritreans. The Italians needed cheap, skilled labor and began to train their colonials. Talent, not traditional status, led to advancement so clever peasant boys could become clerks, drivers and housekeepers as easily as well-born sons and daughters. The less talented did manual labor. Women also served their masters in the usual way. Colonialism became a leveler among Eritreans while inflating the egos of many barely literate Italians.

Like other colonial powers, Italy also recruited and trained soldiers, as they would do in Libya and Somaliland in later years. The officers were always Italian, of course.

After Emperor Yohannes’ unexpected death in battle in early 1889, Ethiopia once again came under an Amhara emperor, Menelik. Addis Ababa, a new city he co-founded with Empress Taitu, became his permanent capital.

Even before Menelik’s coronation, Italy announced to European governments that Ethiopia had become its Protectorate, as agreed in the notorious Article 17 of the Treaty of Wichale. It was diplomatic fraud, soon exposed. In the Italian version, Ethiopia agreed to deal with foreign governments only through Italy. The Amharic version said that Ethiopia could, if it chose, avail itself of Italian diplomatic services.

Menelik discovered Italy’s trick in a letter from Queen Victoria congratulating him on his coronation. She expected future communication with her government to come through Rome, she wrote.

For the next six years Menelik tried unsuccessfully to persuade Italy to admit their ‘mistranslation’. Italy refused, all the while continuing its provocations in Ethiopia’s Tigre Province.

Menelik used the time to import arms through the French port in Djibouti. When he finally called on his people to rise up against Italy, 100,000 fighters responded and marched north, led by Menelik and his feisty Empress.

Italy was confident of an easy victory against an African army. It had a well-armed force of 6000 European and 11,000 Eritrean in uniform (sources disagree on exact numbers). Their supply lines were short. Their Italian officers were professionals and their soldiers were also trained and disciplined. Defeat was inconceivable.

Nevertheless, on March 1, 1896, the Italian force was wiped out at the Battle of Adua, their dead and wounded reaching a staggering 70% of the attacking force. They were done in by incompetent leadership and mindless pressure from Rome. Also significant was the betrayal of Italian plans by Eritreans coming to Menelik just before the battle. Faced with the choice, some Eritreans still preferred Ethiopia to colonial Italy. Four thousand Italians were killed along with several thousand Eritreans. Thousands more were taken prisoner.

Europe was shocked. Italy was disgraced. When Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935, capturing Adua was an immediate objective to erase the stain of a humiliating defeat.

The battle almost didn’t happen. Menelik was within a day or two of dissolving his huge army, which had already stripped the countryside bare to feed themselves. The Italians were on the verge of their own withdrawal, for a similar reason. Fearing criticism of withdrawal without victory, however, the generals instead chose to attack.

Menelik’ did not press his advantage after Adua, suggesting a shrewd long-term vision. He couldn’t keep his army in the field much longer despite his victory, nor could he prevent the Italians from coming back even if he threw them out of Eritrea altogether, which was not assured. Assembling a similar force in a year or two would be impossible.

Ethiopia was generous in victory and relations with Italy were restored surprisingly soon.

A critical line was crossed at Adua. The still small breach between Eritrea and Ethiopia widened dramatically when, for the first time, Eritreans and Ethiopians fought and killed each other while fighting under different flags. The Ethiopians considered Eritreans to be traitors and cut off their prisoners’ right arms and left legs to prevent them from fighting again.

Both sides took home bitter memories from Adua. They had now started down the road to Badme, and to today’s armed standoff.

Some Eritreans like to say that their country has a long, separate history. This is true in the limited sense that Brooklyn has a separate history from Manhattan, or North Carolina from South Carolina.

The northern third of highland territory of ‘Abyssinia’ and down to the coast at Massawa was once the Empire of Axum from about the first to the tenth centuries.  It was ruled from the city of Axum, which is in today’s Ethiopia just south of the border with Eritrea. Around the tenth century Axum fell into the hands of the Zagwes, and the center of power moved southwards into the mountains.  These were the builders of the churches of Lalibela. They ruled until 1270, when the last of the Zagwe emperors was killed by the first Amhara emperor.  The center of power continued southwards.

The highlands north and south shared a culture and Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity, and mostly spoke cousin languages (predominantly Tigrinya and Amharic) that came from Ge’ez the way French, Spanish and Italian come from Latin and eventually became mutually unintelligible languages.

Except for several limited periods, Ethiopia’s capital was wherever the emperor and his entourage lived, in a tent city that descended on some unlucky nobleman until the emperor took pity and moved on. Gondar was the biggest exception, built of stone as a capital, which it remained for 150 years.

The reach of each emperor’s rule depended on his political and fighting skills. It varied from a big and expanding empire to as little as the room where the crown sometimes rested on figurehead while real power was fought over by local noblemen.  Powerful or weak, from 1270 until 1868 the emperor was an Amhara . The fight to replace Emperor Tewodoros, who committed suicide in 1868, was won a few years later by a Tigrean named Kassa, who took the throne name Yohannes IV.

Tewodoros had committed suicide to avoid capture by the British, which is too complex a story to be told here.  For a broad picture, see A History of Ethiopia by Harold Marcus, U. of California Press, 2nd edition. For a dramatic but somewhat lopsided version, see:  The Barefoot Emperor: An Ethiopian Tragedy , by Philip Marsden, published so far in the UK only;  used copies are available online or in a Kindle version.

For several centuries before the time of Yohannes, the area call Tigre today had been under only occasional control by emperors.  Further north, what is highland Eritrea today had been too far away for the emperors to control at all.  The nearby coast was often in Muslim hands now, along with trade, so emperors had little reason to venture up there.  The Christian faith and highland culture were still shared throughout the highlands, however, even without an Imperial presence.

Yohannes was a capable leader who had every intention of being a strong ruler.  Among other things, ruling meant collecting taxes from regions where it hadn’t been collected for decades, even centuries.  Ruling from Tigre, the far north was again within reach of imperial authority. Yohannes sent his enforcer, Ras Alula, to represent him.  Alula’s memory is still cursed there.

Yohannes and Alula had a bigger impact than just making people mad at the tax collector.  It happened that the Italians at that time were starting to sneak into the highlands from Massawa to create a colony.  In their first encounter, Yohannes beat them up badly (the Piazza dei Cinquecento in Rome, about which most guidebooks say very little, might suggest a glorious moment in Italian history.  In fact it is named for the 500 Italian soldiers who died at Dogali just inland from the port of Massawa, at the hands of Yohannes’ soldiers.  It was Italy’s first, failed, attempt to move inland from Massawa.

The Italians kept up the pressure and eventually succeeded, with help from local enemies who were angry at Yohannes and Alula.  Their reward was to see an Italian colony named Eritrea proclaimed in 1890.  They might have been better off paying their taxes.

A wedge was now in place in old Abyssinia in the form of a European presence and border where there had formerly been only home-grown competition for dominance.  Italian success was likely even without have a local conflict to exploit.  Yohannes had died in battle in 1889, fighting the invading Mahdi on the Sudan border.  A year later Italy formally claimed and named its colony. The new emperor, Menelik, was based too far south to stop them.  Eritrea, an ancient name for the Red Sea, the Erithrean Sea, appeared on a map for the first time.

I’m back from Ethiopia; these comments are a bit delayed.

There was a specific reason for my trip to Ethiopia.  In the 1960s I was in Ethiopa as Peace Corps staff after a few years as a lecturer in English and education at Haile Selassie I University, now Addis Ababa University, one of a lot of campuses – I don’t know how many — at least a dozen, I was told.

While supporting PCV English teachers with demonstration classes and lesson plans, I had put together a set of English lessons that combined simplified versions of Ethiopian folktales with classroom exercises.  I used them for demonstration classes and then gave them out to PCV and other English teachers.  A lot of teachers had few if any teaching materials except those they created.  Others had materials that were wildly unsuited for 12-14-year-old Ethiopian kids, with tales about snowy winter nights or knights in shining armor.

The lessons eventually came to the attention of the Ministry of Education and were collected and published as a textbook called Ethiopian Folktales.  The book was reprinted a few times, most recently in 1973.   I don’t know why it fell out of use.  Maybe the fall of Haile Selassie in 1974 had something to do with it…the publisher included a sketch of his face as the only illustration in the book.

A few years ago I started a campaign to get the book back into the schools.  First, though, it badly needed updating.  I was startled to realize how culturally biased the book was.  Changes were needed. Back then, no one noticed that I had used mostly boys’ names, that the names were almost all Christian in a country with a very big Muslim population, and that I had used almost no names from the biggest ethnic group in the country, the Oromos (whom we referred to as ‘Gallas’, without realizing that the term was offensive to them).

My attempt to outsource the book design from the US to someone in Addis led to delays and then failure.  I had the work redone before I left and brought the revised book with me to Addis on a disk, this time with black and white images.  The artist is Kebedech Tekleab, who agreed to do them on the condition that she would have complete artistic control.  She did not consider herself an ‘illustrator’, but a fine artist, which she is.  I accepted her terms, but had a condition of my own: the images had to be recognizable to Ethiopian students so they could be talked about in an English class.

Her participation is a break for me.  Kebedech now has exhibited widely, including the Smithsonian Museum of African Art, and recently sold an important piece to the Holocaust Museum that drew on her own years in a refugee camp in Somalia. Her original approach to illuminating a textbook is striking.

Having a mission is my favorite way to visit a country.  It gives me and local people something shared to deal with, and takes me out of the hotel/restaurant/taxi circuit.  I had to dump the book designer who promised a lot but delivered nearly nothing.  I talked to printers and found that for some this was their peak season…calendars and other New Year printing, start-of-school printing, etc. that provided one more reason to be late, miss appointments, make hasty estimates that were full of errors, etc.  Then came a meeting with a publisher who agreed to publish the book as part of his plan to strengthen his line of education texts.  Mission accomplished!

Spring began just as I was leaving…cool sunny days without rain.  Global warming has made Addis warmer than it was, with surprisingly hot days to come despite the altitude.  The hillsides are green and gorgeous but it was still too early for the Meskal flowers.

I was sorry to leave Addis but not sorry to escape from the terrible air, which had started to cause me problems.  I went to the Swedish Clinic, where the stunningly beautiful Norwegian Dr. Maria B. had her own impact while confirming my feeling that something was physically wrong. It was the first time I had ever had a problem with breathing in Addis. Like her father and grandfather before her, Dr. Maria, as everyone calls her, is the chief doctor at the clinic (and at 29, the same age as my daughter).

My email access disappeared for a while, so this post is a bit after the fact — but not as badly as it seems.

The usual ban on driving flocks of sheep through the city streets of Addis Ababa is suspended before a few holidays each year, including the New Year on September 11, 2002 on the Julian calendar [referred to as the Ethiopia Calendar (EC) in Ethiopia and is 7 years earlier than our Gregorian Calendar]. Clusters of 20 to 50 sheep are everywhere, making traffic even worse than usual. Impromptu sheep markets have sprung up everywhere. The big feast day will be Saturday because the first day of the year is on a Friday – a normal Ethiopian Church fast day (no animal products of any kind, including dairy and eggs). Last minute buyers on Thursday have to pick from runty sheep but they can bargain for lower prices because sellers don’t want to take the sheep back to the countryside.

This week’s Fortune, a weekly newspaper, has an article that reminded me of the Second Millennium celebration two years ago – a very big deal in a country so conscious of its long history. Ethiopia’s richest man — Sheikh Mohammed Al Amoudi, born in a small town in Wollo Province to a Yemeni-Saudi father and an Ethiopian mother — is also Africa’s richest man, in the top 50 globally, according to Forbes Magazine. He is officially a Saudi citizen now, because that’s where his family ties led to his great wealth. The Sheikh, as he is often called by Ethiopians, is Ethiopia’s biggest investor and, after the government, its biggest employer.

Like rich men everywhere, the Sheikh hangs out with celebrities. In honor of the Millennium bash, he brought Beyonce to Addis for a concert at a reported cost of $1.75 million. Beyonce took the country by storm. A generation ago an American woman caused a riot by organizing a charity fashion show at Haile Selassie I University that included a coed in a miniskirt. Times have changed. Beyonce flaunted her sexy self on stage as usual and was a huge hit. The elderly President Girma Wolde Giorgis received her and was visibly bowled over by her magnetism — as a video on YouTube made evident. She was even presented to the Archbishop – utterly unthinkable not long ago. Grainy videos of Beyonce’s triumph on stage and all around town were on YouTube immediately after the events. Beyonce pronounced herself thrilled and moved by her Ethiopia experience.

But apparently not enough for a return engagement. Fortune reported that it had been definitively cancelled after weeks of negotiations. Her management refused to allow the entire concert to be shown on local TV. The Sheikh said he would not finance the event unless it was broadcast to all Ethiopians on TV, including on the huge outdoor screen in Meskal Square, which several hundred thousand could watch. Her management would only let a few songs be broadcast.
Was Beyonce a party to this or was it just a few shortsighted greedy business jerks throwing their weight around?

Addis has daily blackouts usually rotating by neighborhood every other day but it’s unpredictable. Everyone is affected  — offices, shops, restaurants, homes — costing the economy a lot. Addis now has some light industry — shoes, clothing, leather jackets, small things made of plastic and metal — that often has to close several days a week. Outages used to be announced beforehand. Now they are more unpredictable but a little less frequent. It’s just something more to work around, says my host. She’s happy in Addis, loves her work, has found a companion and treats Addis frustrations like weather — you can’t change it. About the blackouts she says, “Just remember to charge your cell phone whenever you can.”

Life without a cell phone — or mobiles, as they are called (pronounced “mo-buy-l”) — is impossible in Addis these days. Traffic makes going places harder, so you have to tell people how late you will be. The middle and working classes — who can afford mobiles  — are large enough to swamp the capacity of the system during the peak hours that coincide with peak traffic hours, so getting through by phone can take repeated dialing. Still, the system works well in some ways. You buy minutes via a card from a street vendor, 50 birr (about $4), scratch off a patch and call in the number revealed. The system recognizes the mobile from which the call was made, credits it with the money and tells you your balance. Local calls are just under one birr (around 8 cents) for 3 minutes. It’s startling to me that you can dial someone in Jimma or Gondar on your own mobile from the US. And the person you call doesn’t pay anything. The US is the only place I know of where the massive rip-off of charging both ends of a conversation happens. Why do we stand for it?

But a lot of calls lead to messages that state that the mobile you called is out of the service area — even if you know the person is in a café down the street. Or you are told that the line is busy or the phone is switched off, which may or may not be the case. These messages are delivered in Amharic and then British English by the same female voice that makes you feel that she would be as indifferent if you were face to face.

Addis calls itself the capital of Africa because so many international organizations are based here — the African Union, Economic Commission for Africa and a lot of others. Almost everyone has an embassy here (there’s even a sign on Bole Road for an Embassy of Palestine with an arrow pointing down a narrow lane that I haven’t yet explored), and some 250 NGOs are said to be here. Add in the tourists, consultants, businessmen, etc., and the number of people who don’t speak Amharic is large. English is the common language. There’s even an all-English FM station now, just launched, with minimal programming so far except pop music and some news.