In Ethiopia with a Mule (8 page)

My map proclaims that Mai Cheneta is another town and I’m beginning to get the idea: any village with a police post and a primary school is a ‘town’.

My arrival here almost caused a riot. Hundreds of people raced to stare at me, the children trampling on each other in an effort to see the
faranj
clearly. Then a Muslim tailor invited me into his tiny workshop, ordered tea and sent his son to summon an English-speaking teacher. As I gulped the black syrupy tea three men had to stand by the door, beating back the populace with their
dulas
: in my experience this was an unique scene.

Soon the teacher arrived – a quiet, kind young man named Haile Mariam, who at once offered me his room for the night. I’m now installed in it, being attacked by apparently spray-proof bugs, while small rats scuttle round my feet. The Italians are responsible for most of Mai Cheneta’s solid buildings, of which this is one – high-ceilinged, about fifteen foot square, with a tin roof, an earth floor inches deep in dust, once whitewashed stone walls and a small, unglazed window. When I arrived the only piece of furniture was an iron bedstead with a hair mattress. (All the teacher’s possessions hang on the walls.) Then a battered table and chair were imported from the police station, so that I might write in comfort, and a few moments ago Haile Mariam came in with a big, bright oil-lamp.

When Jock had been looked after the three teachers urged me to visit their school-house on the summit of a hill overlooking the town. This house was built as the Italian CO’s residence and is now a semi-ruin. All the windows and doors have been removed, part of the tin roof has collapsed and hundreds of pigeons roost in the rafters and cover the floor with their droppings. There are four fine
rooms, completely unfurnished save for small hanging blackboards and rows of stones brought in from the hillside as seats for the pupils. Two years ago, when the school opened, there were thirty on the roll; now there are ninety, despite much opposition from local parents and clergy. As is usual in such
communities
many parents are anti-school, preferring their children to herd flocks rather than to study; and the highland clergy resent the recent intrusion of the state on a domain that hitherto has been exclusively theirs.

Looking at a diagram of the planetary system on one of the blackboards I wondered how the parents of these children would react if their youngsters had the temerity to discuss astronomy when they went home from school. The
highlanders
still think that the earth is flat: some imagine it to be square, some see it as a disc and others believe it to be limitless. For them day and night are caused by the rotation of the sun above the earth, and the moon is responsible for the crops’ progress after the sun has brought the seedlings above ground.
Theoretically
it is desirable that such ignorance should be dispelled; but will these children be any better off, as they till their fields throughout the years ahead, for having had their conception of the cosmos thoroughly disorganised?

On returning here I found the Chief of Police, the headman and a character described as ‘the Sheriff’ sitting in a row on the bed debating how best to deal with the problem of me. A group of privileged children – presumably the offspring of the officials – had been permitted into the room and were squatting motionless along the walls, gazing at me as though hypnotised, while various other locally important personages stood around joining in the argument.

Had I been willing to ‘do in Rome …’ I would have accepted an escort for tomorrow’s trek; but escorts are so ruinous to my enjoyment that I remained obstinate – and eventually won the battle. I was then asked to write out and sign a statement (in triplicate: one copy for each official) declaring that I had been warned of the dangers and offered an escort, but had insisted on continuing alone. Obviously if I believed in these dangers I wouldn’t be such a fool; but the risk of being shot at by
shifta
while walking through Ethiopia is probably no greater than the risk of being strangled by a maniac while hitch-hiking through Britain.

In the course of our argument Haile Mariam had said reproachfully, ‘It is not part of our culture to travel alone’; and I suspect that the
unconventionality
of my trek upsets these people as much as the possibility of a
faranj
being murdered and local officials getting the blame. They cannot understand why anyone should want to travel alone – and not understanding they disapprove.

While our dispute was in progress a touching number of gifts were being brought to me by the locals – dozens of eggs, gourds of curds, flat slabs of different kinds of
dabo
and four chickens, all squawking frantically in
premonition
of the pot. (The teachers will benefit greatly from my visit.) Meanwhile the headman’s wife was pouring us tea from a kettle and handing round an earthen bowl of damp, roasted flour, rather like the Tibetans’
tsampa
: we all dipped in for our handfuls and then kneaded them into little balls. The curds, too, were delicious; they tasted strongly of wood-smoke, as do some types of
talla
. One of the chickens became
durro-wat
for my supper, which I shared with the teachers.

Like many semi-educated young highlanders, these teachers despise their own Church. Haile Mariam ridiculed the Ethiopian fasting laws and said that the people endure them only because of a superstitious fear of the priests. Perhaps there is an element of truth in this, yet fasting is so emphasised by Ethiopian Christianity that to the average highlander ‘keeping the fast’ and ‘being a Christian’ are synonymous. These fasts have long been known to weaken the highlanders. Both Muslims and Gallas repeatedly attacked the highlands during Lent, but throughout the centuries the Church has been increasing the strictness of the laws, until now the average highlander is expected to fast on 165 days each year and the clergy and elders on about 250 days.
*

Donald Levine states that ‘the rationale commonly given for the extensive schedule of fasting is that man’s nature is wicked and only by weakening himself in this manner will he be turned away from some act of aggression against others’. This reason for the imposition of such irrational laws is interesting. It hints that from the outset Ethiopian Christianity found itself incapable of
effectively
spreading Christ’s teachings among a people temperamentally opposed to any gospel of gentleness: so a desperate remedy was adopted and the
highlanders
’ harsh aggressiveness countered by an equally harsh code of mortification – which in time came to assume a disproportionate importance at the expense of most other aspects of Christian teaching. Yet even in the curbing of
aggression
the Ethiopian Church has not been very successful. It is still regarded as an
honourable act to kill anyone who has given even the mildest provocation, and the lines of a popular Amharic poem say:

Haile Mariam and his two comrades are natives of Aksum, the religious capital of Ethiopia, and all three accused the priests of living in luxury off the peasants – and of being far too numerous anyway. Whatever about the former hackneyed accusation, the latter is evidently true; in Asmara I was told that Ethiopia has an estimated 70,000 Coptic clergy – and fewer than seventy doctors.

Which reminds me – this morning we met a comparatively well-dressed man, carrying a rifle, who produced a phial of penicillin and asked me in sign language to inject him. I tried to explain that even if I had a syringe I certainly wouldn’t inject anyone without knowing his medical history; but sign language is not really up to this sort of explanation and my would-be patient went on his way looking aggrieved. The Amharic word for ‘needle’ – and therefore for ‘injection’ – is ‘
murfee
’: so my name always causes great amusement.

Trachoma and other eye-diseases are tragically common here; also a number of men are blind in one eye – possibly as a result of injuries received while fighting.

I set off at 7.30 a.m. and arrived here ten hours later, having ambled along happily for eighteen miles, seeing only five adults and a few young shepherds.

All day the track climbed gradually between ridge after ridge of low hills. For miles a narrow river ran beside it, the water moving clear and green among gigantic, rounded boulders – many of them looking remarkably like Henry Moore’s reclining figures – and twice the temptation of deep, wide pools proved irresistable. Saying ‘Hang bilharzia!’ I turned Jock loose and jumped in, clutching a bar of soap.

At 11 we stopped for brunch beneath a grove of tall, wide-spreading trees, and here I saw my first African monkeys – a troop of capuchins racing and swinging through the branches above me. Also – walking with bird-book in hand – I identified today the Lilac-breasted Roller, Bataleur, Namaqua Dove, Purple Grenadier, Red-cheeked Cordon Bleu and Black-billed Wood Hoopoe. These birds were marvellously tame; as Jock and I plodded quietly through thick
dust we were often within a yard of them before they moved – and even then many only hopped or flew a few feet further away.

During the afternoon we passed a herd of over a hundred camels, all
purposefully
chewing the highest branches of small thorny trees and big thorny shrubs. One was pure white – a rare and beautiful animal. Probably this herd recently brought salt from the Danakil Desert and is now being rested in
preparation
for the journey home. Camels don’t survive long in the highlands, as the British Army soon discovered when it invaded Ethiopia from the Sudan in January 1941. Out of 15,000 camels fifty reached Addis Ababa in May and an officer reported that ‘a compass was not needed; one could orient the column by the stink of dead camels’. Various reasons have been suggested for the camel’s allergy to the highlands – thin air, precipitous paths, the cold and wet of the rainy season, the lush grass of some areas and the fact that camels have never learned to avoid certain unfamiliar herbs which lethally inflame their stomachs. In the past this allergy has saved the highlands from sharing Egypt’s fate and being repeatedly invaded by neighbouring camel-nomads.

This has been a day of deep contentment – wandering alone along a
makeena
-free
track, seeing only hoof prints in the dust, with all around the healing quiet of wild places, unbroken save by birdsong. The loveliest time is from 4.30 p.m. on, when the light softens and colours glow. This afternoon, brown, red and yellow cliffs, flecked with white marble, were rising above dark green scrub, and on every side the outlines of high mountains became clearer as the heat-haze thinned.

At 5.30 we came to the crest of a hill and there, half-a-mile away, was Adua – a white-washed town at the foot of a splendidly distorted mountain-range, with lines of slim green trees between its houses. On the outskirts we were captured by the inevitable English-speaking schoolboys, who led us to this brothel, thinly disguised as a hotel. Bedrooms lead off the central courtyard on two sides, on the third are the cooking-quarters and stables, and on the fourth is an Italian-type bar, from which frightful wireless noises emanate continuously. Groups of girls lounge around the courtyard giggling and smoking – in this country cigarettes are the prostitute’s hallmark – and, though no one is overtly hostile, the
faranj
is aware of being regarded with contemptuous amusement. There could be no stronger contrast to my reception at Mai Cheneta.

When we arrived a rather tiresome young teacher was in the courtyard, bargaining with one of the girls – whom he temporarily abandoned to practise his English on me. I asked him to help me buy barley for Jock, but he seemed to think that this would entail too much delay so making an evasive reply he
returned to his girl. Luckily the schoolboys proved more cooperative and while I was unloading Jock – watched by grinning servants who made no attempt to assist me – they fetched the grain in my bucket. Their profits must have been considerable, judging by the meagre change they returned out of a five dollar note: yet they demanded a fifty per cent tip each. By now Adua has become
semi-Westernised
, being on the Asmara–Gondar motor-road.

While I was unpacking another teacher appeared and, explaining that I wished to make a telephone call, I asked him to direct me to the post office. For some quaint reason Adua’s telephone lives in a chemist’s shop, to which this young man kindly guided me through steep, pitch-dark laneways. Before
discovering
that I had governmental connections my companion was rabidly
revolutionary
in his political views and he got an obvious shock on hearing me ask for the Palace at Makalle. While we were waiting for the call to come through he tried awkwardly to retrieve the situation, then finally decided to be frank and begged me not to repeat anything that he had said lest he should lose his job.

Most English-speakers soon ask me why my government ordered me to come to Ethiopia and how much money was granted for my expenses; and they are bewildered when I say that my government doesn’t even know I’m here and wouldn’t dream of paying my expenses. The average highlander cannot imagine a country in which people are free to go where they choose when they choose, without governmental permission – not can he imagine any ordinary individual being rich enough to travel abroad.

This little room has freshly whitewashed walls and the cotton sheets are spotless; yet appearances can be deceptive and the bugs are busy as I write. An electricity supply functions from 6 to 10.30 p.m., but there are no switches in the rooms and the bulbs give the dimmest possible light. However, one
worthwhile
local amenity is the crude and stinking loo next door; throughout the countryside the loo-problem is acute in every settlement – to my mystification, discomfort and embarrassment. (Here sign-language can always be used
effectively
in emergencies, but its use leads to a certain loss of dignity.) Squatting just anywhere is not customary, yet I never can find an authorised squatting-spot and sometimes wish that I were back in Nepal, where one simply goes outside the door like a dog.