‘Twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls!’ an aid worker told me. ‘Such scenes! The soldiers go to these terrible nightclubs and get drunk. You see them staggering around the streets. Drunkenness and prostitution — drugs, too.’
On such a trip as I was taking, the idea of witnessing such colorful depravity and dissipation seriously tempted me. But I settled on the trip to Harar, for I wanted to be traveling south within a few weeks — to Kenya and beyond.
The Dire Dawa train was leaving early the next morning. If I didn’t take it I would have three days to wait for another. I went to the station and bought my ticket, looked at the inside of the train — not bad, not good: most trains in Africa look as if they are on their way to Auschwitz — and the next day returned and boarded it. Apart from the departure time, there was no timetable. No one knew when we were expected to arrive in Dire Dawa. ‘Tomorrow,’ the best guess, was all right with me.
We started with a scattering of passengers and even later in the morning, after many stations, in the canyons and hills that lay east of Addis, we still had collected very few people. At some stations we lay idle for as much as an hour, and twice after dark in the middle of nowhere (but I could hear the wind rising in bare branches) the train dragged to a halt and did not move for several hours. During the day I had sat and read First Footsteps in East Africa: An Exploration of Harar, by Captain Burton. Night came on quickly. I slept stretched out on a wooden bench, pillowing my head on my bag and gritting my teeth, hating this trip and wishing it were over and glad that I was not going onward to Djibouti. Sometime after dawn, as the heat of the day was taking hold, the sun slanting into the train, we pulled in to Dire Dawa.
‘Seems a little empty.’
The city looked abandoned: silent houses, empty streets.
‘It’s a holiday.’
It was usually quiet in Dire Dawa, but even quieter the day I arrived because of this Ethiopian holiday, the 105th anniversary of the Battle of Adwa.
‘When we defeated Mussolini,’ a man named Tesfaye told me.
Not quite, so I read later. The Adwa victory, a sweet one for Ethiopians, an early anti-colonial one, was accomplished in 1896, when 20, 000 Italian soldiers hurrying into northern Ethiopia from Eritrea, met 90,000 ‘perfervid, battle-hungry Ethiopians,’ commanded by King Menelik II and his second-in-command, Ras Makonnen, who in this triumph over the foreign invaders were bonded in a father-son relationship. They were distantly related in any case, but that bond assured the elevation of Ras Makonnen’s eldest son, Ras Tafari — Haile Selassie I — to the throne.
Adwa was crucial in other ways. It was first of all a wipeout. Trying to group for an attack in the rocky landscape near Adwa, the Italians became lost and disoriented. The Ethiopians, outnumbering them more than four to one, surrounded them, harried them with spears and arrows and killed more than 15,000 and wounded or captured the rest. They also had rifles — 2000 of them were Remingtons that Rimbaud had sold to Menelik in Entotto in 1887. Though he did not live to see it, Arthur Rimbaud, former poet, played a part in this historic African victory. As a battle of natives against invaders, Adwa was on a par with the Sudanese dervishes destroying the British square. So famous was Adwa that it inspired Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa Movement, known then as ‘Ethiopianism,’ as well as the Pan-African consciousness that helped transform British, French and Portuguese colonies into independent republics. The last successful African campaign that had won decisive battles against any European nation had been Hannibal’s.
Italy’s defeat and humiliation were especially bitter, since the Fascists, swayed by the Mitty-like rule of Mussolini, saw themselves as new Roman legionnaires reestablishing a great empire. Hurt pride filled the Italians with a desire to take revenge on the Ethiopians. They succeeded in this conquest in 1935, when they invaded Ethiopia, much better armed, illegally so (with poison gas), killing tens of thousands of warriors, who were battling with the same weapons they had used forty years earlier.
The whole world was united in condemning the Italian adventure. Winston Churchill summed up this contempt in a speech in London, at the end of September 1935, when, as he wrote later in The Gathering Storm, he ‘tried to convey a warning to Mussolini, which I believe he read.’ The warning was one orotund sentence, rolling onward on the devastating sonority of its clauses:
To cast an army of nearly a quarter of a million men, embodying the flower of Italian manhood, upon a barren shore two thousand miles from home, against the good will of the whole world and without command of the sea, and then in this position embark upon what may well be a series of campaigns against a people and in regions which no conqueror in four thousand years ever thought it worthwhile to subdue, is to give hostages to fortune unparalleled in all history.
Yet this deadly absurdity was exacly what the Italians perpetrated. What Churchill did not know — what few people knew — was that the Italians were planning to speed and simplify their campaign by using phosgene gas. Italy had signed the 1928 Geneva Protocol against employing poison gas in warfare. Yet in 1935 Mussolini urged his generals to drop phosgene bombs on the Ethiopians, to win ‘by whatever means’ (qualsiasi mezzo).
The Italians began their attack by bombing Adwa — scene of their humiliation — and drove southward. Twenty-four planes, five of them carrying gas bombs, dropped poisonous phosgene on Ethiopian troops in the Ogaden desert. When atrocity stories of dubious authenticity emerged from the battlefields — how Italian captives had been crucified, decapitated, and castrated by the Africans — more gas bombs were dropped. Even shooting dum-dum bullets, the news of which also outraged the Italians, the Ethiopians didn’t have a chance. Haile Selassie was toppled from his throne and sent into exile. A Fascist viceroy was installed in Addis Ababa. The Italian King Victor Emanuel, now styling himself ‘emperor,’ had two semi-precious stones in his crown, Ethiopia and Albania.
Adwa, the Italian defeat which had provoked that second invasion, was being celebrated in Dire Dawa — which is to say that the people of this small town were given a day off from work. But there wasn’t much work in the best of times, just coffee picking and qât chewing. There were no parades. The town was deserted. Dire Dawa, Amharic for ‘Empty Plain’ — a more appropriate name than its former one of New Harar — lay small and horizontal on the hot pale scrubland beneath the big brown hills. The town built on dust and sand was only as old as the railway, a century. It was the stopping-off place for Harar and — much more important — the point of transshipment for the qât crop from Aweyde, about twenty miles up the steep road to Harar.
The informal economy of this area of Ethiopia was based upon the growing of this mildly narcotic qât (Catha edulis), pronounced ‘chat’ or ‘jat’ in Ethiopia, a bush that in leaf shape, color and size looks like a laurel hedge. The other Ethiopian cash crop, of high-grade coffee, also grown here in the hills around Harar, was in demand but negligible in profit compared to qât. This daze-producing bush was so highly prized in the non-boozing Emirates and the other states in the Persian Gulf that Dire Dawa’s airport was very busy with the comings and goings of small transport planes. For the greatest buzz, qât had to be fresh when it was chewed.
Dire Dawa looked like the sort of French colonial railway town I had seen in rural Vietnam, for its lowness and its squareness and its stucco and its dust, the sort of town on any railway line built 100 years ago by Europeans. Indeed, this one had a European pedigree: the Swiss engineer and adviser to King Menelik, Alfred Ilg, had planned it along with the Djibouti railway. Ilg, who also did business with Rimbaud, accused the exile of secretly having ‘a sunny disposition.’