Africa from the inside

By KIBRET MARKOS

© St. Petersburg Times, published February 18, 2001

My mom and dad looked particularly distraught when they drove me to preschool every morning in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1977. I was not allowed to look out the window because, they said, the sight outside was inappropriate for a five-year-old like myself.

A couple of times I managed to break the rule and see what was so inappropriate. Bullet-riddled bodies were all over the sidewalks.

The military junta which took over power in 1974 was staggering under the pressure from opposition parties that had resorted to assassinating government officials. The junta retaliated by launching the so-called "Red Terror," a bloody campaign of incarceration, torture and summary execution. War broke out on the streets, which the regime finally won, but in less than a year, more than 100,000 people, mostly teenagers and people in their early twenties, had perished.

The luckiest of those bodies, after being displayed on the sidewalks for a day or so, were given to their families for burial, provided the families paid for the bullets that were "wasted" on their loved ones. The less fortunate were buried in mass graves in the outskirts of Addis Ababa. Hyenas -- the notorious dwellers of the city's suburbs -- needed little time to dig the remains out and make room for the next round of bodies to be delivered.

Nega Mezlekia, in Notes from the Hyena's Belly: An Ethiopian Boyhood, was not unfortunate enough to end up literally where he says his notes are from. But he wasn't fortunate enough to be a five-year-old preschooler in the back seat of his father's car, either. He was 19 during the "Red Terror" and had already stood in at least one of those line-ups where cadres randomly picked "suspects" to be executed.

From his hometown, Jijiga, a remote settlement in eastern Ethiopia whose suburbs are even more densely occupied by the traditional suburbanite scavengers, to McGill University in Toronto, Canada, where he is now working on another novel, Mezlekia spins a story of misery and plight. Even the hilarious narration of his memorable childhood days in his cozy village is a satirical illustration of the child's predicament in a culture where childhood is a demonic behavior to be exorcised by the whip first, and by the torturous "therapy" of witch doctors later.

Mezlekia seems to have been at odds with authority through most of his life. In elementary school, he was the rebel against his morals teacher who was quite creative in choosing his weapons of pain and who whipped Mezlekia until he felt he "might burn down from the inside out, turning into an ashen heap." Mezlekia hit back later by injecting his teacher's cows with acidic fluid. The cows went wild, and in the commotion that followed, the morals teacher was knocked down by one of his own cows.

Revenge, however, was harder to exact with the subsequent adversaries of Mezlekia. The beginning of his adolescence virtually coincided with his involvement in politics; Mezlekia went to jail for the first time at 14, for taking part in a land reform demonstration. In prison, the morals teacher's whip gave way to The Snake, "a two-tongued whip fashioned by Satan himself in his own spare time."

Then a high-school student, Mezlekia took turns with his classmates in painting slogans on building walls and spreading pamphlets. The riots of the "student movement" intensified when famine hit the country's highlands hard in 1972. The feudal monarchy collapsed two years later but was replaced by a socialist junta that soon went on with its business of exterminating "remnants of the feudal system." Mezlekia's father, who as a governor of a small town was easily mistaken for a reactionary, was eventually fed to the hyenas.

To settle scores with the junta, Mezlekia and his best childhood friend joined a guerrilla group in eastern Ethiopia. Seven months and a couple of defeats later, Mezlekia gave up his cause and went back to Jijiga. His best friend was killed in one of the battles.

Jijiga was the immediate battleground when Ethiopia was invaded by its eastern neighbor, Somalia, in 1977. Seeking sanctuary in Harar, a town nearby, Mezlekia and his family and friends were among the 20,000 refugees who trekked for two weeks, going without food for days. Many, including Mezlekia's closest friends, were killed by random cannon fire on the way. Once in Harar, a round-up was the reception Mezlekia got. He was released, but only after coming too close to a swift execution.

Before Mezlekia left for the Netherlands in 1983 and to Canada in 1985, he went to Addis Ababa University for a year, that same year when it was not appropriate for five-year-olds to look out car windows. He went back to an agriculture college closer to his hometown. He graduated there and became an assistant lecturer, but as the only person in his family with means, he was instantly overburdened with dependents. And that was soon after Ethiopian politics once again lashed at his family; Mezlekia's mother was killed in a rebel attack in 1978.

By the time, Mezlekia was scribbling the epilogue to his memoir, his sense of humor from the early pages has long been lost in the bitterness he developed for the society that devoured his parents and his best friends, had condemned his younger brother to street life, and had incarcerated him more than a few times.

The Ethiopian Boyhood memoir, with far more chapters devoted to a dreary Ethiopian political history during Mezlekia's grown-up years than to the author's days as a child, has little to do with boyhood. In fact, had it not been for the political component of the story, the boyhood biography by itself would have suffered from absurdity; there is no discernible logic in Mezlekia's transformation from boyhood to manhood. The child Mezlekia is a shrewd calculator who outwitted adults easily. The adult Mezlekia is a stubbornly predictable nitwit who didn't even anticipate an obvious threat.

But Notes from the Hyena's Belly is a decent thesis on why there is genocide in Africa, by someone who was an easy target of a raging genocide in Addis Ababa. It is a monograph on why there is war, famine and poverty in the continent, written by someone who had to eat boiled weeds while fleeing war. If Mezlekia, between the lines of his last paragraph, is equating "sunny Africa" to a hyena's belly, here is an insider's account of the beast's belly.

Notes From the Hyena's Belly

By Nega Mezlekia

Picador, $24

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