Alfred Ilg planned and oversaw the building of Dire Dawa in 1902 to serve the railway from Djibouti. Fifteen years later the line was extended to Addis Ababa. Dire Dawa was a Swiss-French notion of what a respectable African town ought to look like: one-story tiled-roof houses of yellow stucco, most of them cracked, with a precise geometry of streets, with a little plaza here and there — one honoring a dung-streaked statue, another a patriotic plaque and a dusty cannon. Dire Dawa’s trees had died in the last drought, but the leafless limbs and twisted trunks remained.
At the heart of Dire Dawa was the market, an important center of commerce, and even on this national holiday a few people were selling fruits and vegetables — bananas, lemons, potatoes, carrots, piles of leafy greens, all of the produce from higher up in the region nearer Harar. Nothing grew in the hot dusty soil of Dire Dawa.
Walking through the market, wondering how I might get a ride to Harar, I came upon a big black woman in a red dress hawking bunches of herbs. To start a conversation I asked her what they were, and she laughed and said, ‘No English! Galla!’
‘No Galla,’ I said.
But as I turned to walk away she said, ‘Habla Español?’
Spanish was not a language I expected to hear from a market woman of the Galla people in northeastern Ethiopia, though every now and then I met an older Ethiopian, Somali or Sudanese who was fluent in Italian — the result of a mission school education or communicant of an ethnocentric pastor, such as Father Cruciani in Aswan.
‘You speak Spanish?’ I asked.
‘Of course,’ she said in that language. ‘I learned it from the Cubans.
There were many Cuban soldiers here in the time of the Derg. I liked them, and they liked me. We had good times. That was when we had another government. The Cubans all went away.’
‘I suppose they left some children behind?’
‘I think so! They liked us very much.’
The Cuban episode occurred when Mengistu Haile Mariam took over in 1974, and declared a Marxist state, renamed streets and squares, killed Haile Selassie and his entire family and erected ridiculous obelisks here and there, displaying the crimson star of socialism. Tens of thousands of Ethiopians were imprisoned without trial. This was also the period when Ethiopia was in the news for its terrible famine. The name Ethiopia became synonymous with tyranny and starvation. Food was airlifted by western charities but Ethiopia’s official friends were Cuba and the Soviet Union. Cuban aid included soldiers, doctors and nurses. All you saw then was footage of rickety children and enfeebled adults, the walking wounded — and these are the lucky ones.
After another famine in 1984–5, and the pressure of opposition parties, the Derg was finally overthrown in 1991, and Mengistu hopped a plane to Zimbabwe and was allowed to reside there on condition that he keep his mouth shut. Ethiopia dropped out of the news, but life went on, the rains brought fresh harvests, war was declared on the secessionists in the province of Eritrea, a war that had ended (triumphantly for Eritrea) with a ceasefire just a few weeks before I arrived at Dire Dawa station one very hot morning in February.
Except for the misleading road squiggles on a very poor map, I had no idea where Harar was or how to get there; no knowledge of Amharic, knew no one in the province — or indeed in the whole of Ethiopia. I was aware of the fact that Harar was more than a mile high in the Chercher Highlands. I was the classic traveler, arriving bewildered and alone in a remote place, trying to be hopeful, but thinking, What now?
I stopped several Ethiopian men and asked, ‘Is there a bus to Harar?’
Grinning with bad news, they said: ‘No bus today.’
Stepping into the shade, for the day was very hot and the wind off the plain scorched my face, I saw an Italian-looking woman in the modern habit of a nun (brown cowl, brown dress, serious shoes). She was carrying a bag and walking with the sort of self-contained and single-minded directness of a punctual person determined to be on time for a meeting.
Yet she smiled and paused when I said hello.
‘Excuse me, do you speak English, sister?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you tell me the way to Harar?’
She sized me up and said, ‘You are alone?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Then you are very lucky. Come with me — I am going to Harar,’ she said. ‘Ah, here is my driver.’
Saved, I thought, perhaps because the day was auspicious, my mother’s ninetieth birthday. Within a few minutes — blessing my dumb luck, blessing this Samaritan — I was seated in the back of a Land-Rover and being driven through the back lanes of Dire Dawa to the bumpy winding road that rose into the hills that were so dusty and windblown that the air and the sky were tawny too.
‘I am Sister Alexandra,’ the nun said. ‘From Malta.’
She turned out to be a great talker, sitting sideways in the front passenger seat, occasionally addressing the driver in Amharic, not looking at me, but now and then calling attention to a curious feature of Ethiopian life, such as the shepherds with their flocks of goats, or the children playing with such contentment that they wrestled and rolled in the middle of the road, while the cars — ours for example — detoured around them.
‘You see, they are not afraid. They are quite free here,’ Sister Alexandra said, and waved to the frolicking kiddies.
She did not seem surprised that I should want to visit Harar, she wondered whether I had been to Malta (I had, on my Pillars of Hercules trip). At first we made small talk, about her family, her girlhood, her law studies, her choosing to be a nun, her missionary instinct; and then I understood that she was circling around one subject, a theme she returned to from time to time, which was, ‘I have been loved.’
She was much younger than me, just about forty, full of life and that Maltese vivacity that is so compulsive it is adjacent to hysteria — I had had a glimpse of it in the way she had walked, with a passionate purposefulness, in Dire Dawa. Not a dry dull nun at all but a full-blooded one with a tale to tell.
‘I had a fiancé, I was studying to be a lawyer,’ she said. ‘I have always been very free — my father encouraged me to believe in freedom. I was happy, I was going to go into a law partnership with my brother. I had a ring, I even had a date for the marriage.’
Children were lying flat in the middle of this mountain road on a hairpin turn, tickling each other and laughing, absolutely heedless of the fact that cars were speeding past them.
‘No, it is their playground!’ Sister Alexandra said. I had not said anything but she had anticipated an obvious question. Then she said, ‘I began to have thoughts of being a nun. I prayed for guidance and when I was twenty I made the decision.’
‘What did your family think?’
‘They were shocked. Shocked!’ In her solemn dramatic way she seemed to enjoy the memory.
‘And your fiancé?’
‘My fiancé wanted to send me to a doctor in Italy to see if I was insane.’ Now she smiled. ‘Or had a mental problem.’
‘I suppose he was worried.’
‘He was sick with worry and very disappointed. The wedding was cancelled, everything called off! My family — well, you can imagine. They didn’t understand. Only my father saw what was in my heart. My fiancé was desperate. I loved him but I knew I had a vocation. Before I took my final vows in Addis he flew here to Ethiopia and pleaded with me.’