Ethiopia After the Revolution: Vultures Return to the Land of Sheba
“The vultures will first peck out your eyes and then tear out your livers.”
–Ernest Hemingway to American journalists, in Ethiopia, 1935
Dogs bark all night in Addis Ababa, a sprawling city that rides high (some 8,000 feet) on the western crest of Ethiopia’s central highland. On my first night here I thought I heard gunshots above the yelping of dogs, but the dizzying altitude and sleeplessness from two days of travel left me unsure. At 4 a.m. I walked onto the balcony of the huge, empty Addis Hilton and searched the horizon for the vultures I’d been told returned to the old land of Sheba after many years to feed off the refuse of revolution.
I was staring into the twilight, watching the colors change on the sides of the mountains, when I heard a strange, cadent sound, a sort of muffled slapping that was soon louder than the incessant barking. After several minutes I went down to the street and stood behind a wall in the receding darkness. I saw columns of young children – most of them under 10 years old – being herded through the thin air at gunpoint. They looked straight ahead, hoisting their knees high, as children do when they march, then slapping their bare feet to the pavement in unison. The men leading them shouted commands in Amharic (dominant among the four Semitic languages spoken in Ethiopia), and the children began to run, looking like tall, graceful machines despite their ragged clothes.
I later found out that children all over Ethiopia are kept in prisons at night and then marched through the streets at dawn. They are undergoing “political reeducation” conducted by a four-year-old government that feels their homes lacked the proper atmosphere for them to become good revolutionaries. Residents of Addis reported that the marching had been going on for several months. They said these children were lucky to be involved in “revolutionary training” because it was more than likely their families were already dead.
I arrived in Addis on a certain Ethiopian Airlines flight – a condition of my visa, which had been granted suddenly. There were no messages at the hotel, so I called diplomatic contacts who told me that this seemed strange and that I should expect to be contacted and followed if I left my room.
The phone rang once that night. A voice asked, “Are you black?” When I said no, the caller hung up. At 6 a.m. the next morning, a 21-gun salute began the “spontaneous celebration” of Ethiopia’s Victory Day. The morning paper promised that “the broad masses of Ethiopia will celebrate the 37th anniversary of victory over the Italian fascists with popular enthusiasm and patriotic sentiment.” The streets of the capital were filled with children being gently led toward a full day of “patriotic fervor.”
The parade appeared to encompass most colors and all shades of khaki. There were peasant lancers from the countryside and fierce-looking Shoan (a highland province) warriors on short, powerful horses occasionally breaking the long lines of troops, camouflaged jeeps, and thousands of unarmed “urban dwellers” who seemed to be arranged by height. Cripples struggled to maintain formation, wincing in determined denial of pain.
Men, women and children filed by with rifles slung backward and upside down over their slender shoulders; many of them pressed their palms over the tops of the weapons and stuck their fingers in the hole at the end. One teenaged soldier asked me to touch his carbine for luck because a “white curse” had been placed on it when he was fighting in the desert. He jabbed the barrel within an inch of my chest and smiled.
A prominent resident of Addis had agreed to meet me at the rally under a tree. The pained lines across the man’s forehead told of the difficult changes in his life over the past few years. He said that many of his old friends were dead. “It was always a kids’ revolution,” he whispered under his breath, watching the chanting crowd, “but look into their eyes now. Look at those faces and see that they no longer believe in anything. If you can’t see it now, you will before you leave. Children with guns – it makes me ache. The revolution was supposed to be so much better than this.”
Forty-three years ago Benito Mussolini drove deep into this mysterious highland kingdom, and six years later Ethiopian and Allied forces drove him out again. Victory Day used to be celebrated in early May, on the day Emperor Haile Selassie returned to Addis Ababa from exile in England to reclaim the throne. Ethiopia’s new rulers moved the event from a day that marked the return of “the royal family from Bath in England where they lived a pompous and luxurious life” to a day when “the broad masses entered the city.”
The abandoned and surprisingly unpretentious royal palace has been empty since the fall of the emperor, Haile Selassie, the Lion of Judah, King of Kings, and Elect of God. The diminutive autocrat had ruled Ethiopia for 57 years, the longest absolutist reign in contemporary history. But by 1973, the world surrounding Haile Selassie’s empire had changed so drastically that he’d become a kind of anachronistic figurine who continued to rule the ancient amalgam of kingdoms and sultanates, never doubting the myth of his own invulnerability. He imported prestigious international organizations (the Organization of African Unity headquarters, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa) to Addis, but 90 percent of the people continued to live in a social system that closely resembled slavery.