I mentioned that I had seen the ruins left by the American bombing. I wondered aloud how he felt about relations with the United States. After all, although we had an embassy residence and a big embassy building we had no ambassador, no American staff here, and only the most tenuous diplomatic relations carried out in whispers by officers who came for the day, some from Cairo and others from Nairobi.
‘Clinton had something like ideological blinkers about the Sudan,’ Sadig said. ‘He thought it should be part of the Horn of Africa, so that America could be in charge, using the Horn as a springboard.’
‘Somalia is not much of a springboard,’ I said.
Somalia was famously a fragmented clan-ridden country we had tried to pacify and control, but one we had fled after our first casualties were inflicted by a howling populace, who hated foreigners much more than they hated each other. It was a country without a government, without a head of state, without any of the institutions of society, no courts, no police, no schools; a country of embattled warlords and clan chiefs, and in the hinterland little more than opportunistic banditry.
‘We prefer Bush’s ignorance to Clinton’s wrong thinking and know-it-all attitude,’ Sadig said.
The talk went on until after midnight — the writers talking about their favorite Sudanese novels — one, Dongola, by Idris Ali, had been translated by my brother Peter. They told me about memorable trips they had taken in the country — to the south, to the west, and by train north to Wadi Halfa and Egypt. How people had been kind, taken pity on them, and how the women in the countryside had protected them and preserved their modesty.
That was when Sadig said, ‘The criterion is how you treat the weak. The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.’
A Sudanese basket and a clay coffee pot were brought out and presented to me.
‘When you drink, you remember us,’ Sadig said.
Abd-allah the taxi driver complained most of the way back through Omdurman and over the bridge. But I was smiling, vitalized by the talk and bewitched by the Nile, which was coursing from the heart of Africa, and the sight of the moon shining on it, filling its surface with shattered oblongs of light in brilliant puddles.
6. The Djibouti Line to Harar
Only two trains a week ran on the Ethiopian line to Djibouti, across the low hills east of Addis Ababa and the rubbly plain to the Ethiopian town of Dire Dawa. From there I could go by road into the mountains to the old walled city of Harar. Harar was a place I had always wanted to see, for its associations with Sir Richard Burton, the first European to visit. And the boy genius Arthur Rimbaud: after he forsook poetry and civilization Rimbaud had been a trader there off and on for ten years. In spite of his whining in letters home, he had liked Harar for its remoteness and its wildness. Rimbaud took a quiet pleasure in Africa’s motley and unexpected satisfactions, its dusty congeniality. He was seeking relief from metropolitan phonies, literary trend-spotters, hangers-on, time-wasters, and ambitious importuning twits. ‘I’m through with those birds,’ he said in Africa. His mood I shared, his quest I celebrated.
Haile Selassie had an intimate connection with Harar, too, having been born there and served as governor of Harar province before becoming Ras Tafari Makonnen, Lion of Judah, Elect of God, Power of the Trinity and Negusa Negast, King of Kings — in a word, emperor. His career had been patchy. King to Ethiopians, descendant of the Queen of Sheba, mocked as ‘Highly Salacious’ by Evelyn Waugh, he was divine to Rastafarians. Exiled in England during the Italian occupation, he returned to rule as an absolute monarch to whom his subjects bowed low for thirty years. At last he was overthrown by the Derg (the Committee). When I was in Harar the government revealed that the 83-year-old emperor had died in 1975 having been choked to death personally by the Derg’s leader, Mengistu Haile Maryam, who flaunted the emperor’s ring on one of his own strangling fingers.
Famous for its fierce jut-jawed hyenas and its handsome conceited people, Harar I regarded as one of the great destinations in Africa. For its exoticism, its special brand of fanaticism and its remoteness, Captain Burton had compared Harar to Timbuktu, saying that, ‘bigoted and barbarous’ — but also unique in its languages and customs — it was the east African ‘counterpart of ill-famed Timbuctoo.’ At last I was near enough to go there by train.
‘Maybe I should go to the station for a ticket,’ I said, when I arrived in Addis from the Sudan — by plane, because the border was closed.
The Ethiopian manager was a skinny fine-featured man with popping eyes and a shabby suit and the welcoming even courtly manner of his fellow countrymen, who proved to be very polite if a bit melancholy. But then the unsmiling Ethiopians looked brokenhearted even when they weren’t.
But the hotel manager was laughing to reassure me. ‘No worry. The train is not popular.’
My first impression of Addis Ababa was: handsome people in rags, possessed of both haughtiness and destitution, a race of aristocrats who had pawned the family silver. Ethiopia was unique in black Africa for having its own script, and therefore its own written history and a powerful sense of the past. Ethiopians are aware of their ancient cultural links with India and Egypt and the religious fountainhead of the Middle East, often claiming to be among the earliest Christians. When your barbarian ancestors were running around Europe bare-assed with bellies painted with blue woad, elaborately clothed Ethiopians were breeding livestock and using the wheel and defending their civilization against the onslaught of Islam, while piously observing the Ten Commandments.
Relatively new as a city, a brainstorm of Menelik who craved his own capital, Addis Ababa was a sprawling high-altitude settlement with the look of a vast rusty-roofed village, scattered over many hills. It was 100 years old but had a look of timeless decrepitude. Unprepossessing from a distance, up close it was dirty and falling apart, stinking horribly of unwashed people and sick animals; every wall reeking with urine, every alley blocked with garbage. Loud music, car horns, diesel fumes and pestering urchins with hard luck tales and insinuating fingers and dire warnings, such as ‘There are bad people here.’
But even at best African cities seemed to me miserable improvised ant-hills, attracting the poor and the desperate from the bush, and turning them into thieves and devisers of cruel scams. Scamming is the survival mode in a city where tribal niceties do not apply and there are no sanctions except those of the police, a class of people who in Africa generally are little more than licensed thieves.
Ethiopia had just ended its border war with Eritrea. Because of the rumors of that war, and Ethiopia’s neighbors of low repute — Somalia and the Sudan — and the paranoia of travelers, Addis had no foreign tourists. Empty hotels — wonderful for me to behold because I never made forward plans; just showed up, and hoped.
Not many Ethiopians took the train to Dire Dawa, and certainly not onward to Djibouti. Djibouti had a terrible reputation locally. Djibouti is one of the notches on the African coast, at the upper edge of the Horn, an age-old point of entry, and exit too — for centuries it was a slave port, then part of French Somaliland, and finally what it is today, a thorn in the side of Ethiopia, an independent republic. Its oppressive heat was not relieved by the scorching breezes off the Gulf of Aden, nor was there any terrain except the landfill look of reclaimed swamp, and baked architecture that was either Frenchified (biscuity, officious, departmental) or else Arabesque (pillared, scalloped, scowling). French soldiers still garrisoned there had made the place notorious for their enthusiasm for child prostitution.