An Asiatic man screaming at an Ethiopian woman in a curio shop one day caught my attention. The woman apparently owned the shop, or at least worked there.
‘You give me for 400 birr!’ The man was moon-faced and his tone of voice was harsh and bullying. But he wore a white shirt and tie and looked fairly respectable, which made his anger all the more disconcerting.
‘No. Six hundred birr. Last price.’ The woman turned away.
Shaking with rage, the Asiatic man said, ‘No! Four hundred! I come back! You give me!’
I listened with interest, for one of the curiosities of travel is hearing two non-native speakers of English venting at each other in English. The dispute went back and forth for a little while longer, the man growing shriller and a pinkness blooming in his cheeks as he became enraged and incoherent. Finally, wordless, he left in a minivan with some other grim-faced Asiatics.
Four hundred Ethiopian birr was $47, 600 birr was $72.
The shop was empty. I said to the woman, ‘I’ll give you 600. That seems reasonable.’
‘It is a good price. Best price. I sell him some before for 500 but it low quality. This maximum quality.’
‘What is?’
‘Ivory.’ She looked closely at me. ‘You give me 600?’
‘New ivory or old?’
‘New! Tusks! Big ones!’
Any trade in ivory was illegal, and so I pursued the subject. Ivory from poached elephants was available in large quantities, so I had heard; but though I saw chunks of it in shops, I never saw tusks and didn’t know the market price — indeed, though I had been told the trade flourished in Harar and elsewhere, I had no idea that I could just walk into a little store in Addis Ababa and say: How about some elephant tusks, please?
‘How many tusks do you have?’ I asked.
‘How many you want?’
‘Let’s say, quite a few.’
‘I have much. Fifty, sixty. Each tusk ten kilo, average. When you buy?’
Imagining a half ton of ivory stacked on the ground, something that would satisfy the greed of Mr Kurtz, I said, ‘Would these be Ethiopian elephants?’
‘Ethiopian.’ Ityopian, she said, the usual pronunciation for the Greek word meaning ‘the Burned Ones.’
The Ethiopian elephant, Loxodonta africana orleansi, is a severely endangered species — so endangered that an elephant sanctuary had been established at Babile, near Harar, to protect the creatures. Keeping the elephants in this special area made it much easier for poachers, and this place (as well as Kenya) was the source of the ivory.
So, when you come back? You come today?’
I havered and said, ‘I have a little problem. I’m sending the ivory to the USA and that’s illegal.’
No problem. You got friends?’
What kind of friends?’
‘Embassy friends. Diplomat people. They buy it,’ she said. ‘That man you see shouting? He Third Secretary in Korean Embassy.’
‘So embassy people buy ivory?’
Yah. Chinese. Japanese. They buy it.’
I see. They put it in the diplomatic bag and ship it home?’
‘Yah. No one look.’
‘The American Embassy might not want to ship a thousand pounds of elephant tusks in the diplomatic bag.’
‘Yes, you ask them, you ask them,’ the woman said, now getting a bit impatient with my questions.
Just to satisfy myself I looked around Addis and asked for elephant ivory at two other shops. The only quibble was: How much do you want? Four years before the price had been 200 birr ($23) a kilo. Now, elephant tusks were harder to find and in great demand, so the price had risen. And there would come a day, not far off perhaps, when there would be no more elephants, although no shortage of devious diplomats, stuffing diplomatic bags with contraband.
‘No, I don’t think we can help you send any elephant tusks back to the States,’ the Information Officer at the United States Embassy in Addis said. He chuckled glumly and made a note to alert CITES, the Campaign on International Trade in Endangered Species. He was Karl Nelson, who had served in the Peace Corps in the early to mid-sixties in the Philippines; at that same time I had been a volunteer in Malawi.
‘How was Malawi?’
‘It was heaven.’
‘I loved the Philippines, too,’ Karl said. He had been a teacher, he had married a Filipina, had taught in the Pacific island of Yap for eleven years, had wandered the world a bit, and then joined the foreign service. He was exactly my age, and our lives had been somewhat parallel. He said, ‘I joined late. I didn’t make anything of my life,’ but he was wrong: he had a happy family, he loved his wife, he had raised five sturdy, successful children.
‘You say you’ve just come from the Sudan?’ he said. ‘And I know you’ve written about India and Singapore.’
‘I lived in Singapore for three dreadful years.’
‘You’ll appreciate this, then,’ he said. ‘A Sudanese, an Indian and a Singaporean were asked, “In your opinion, what is the nutritional value of beef?” The Sudanese said, “What is nutritional value?” The Indian said, “What is beef?” and the Singaporean said, “What is an opinion?’ ”
I laughed and realized I was in the company of a man whose manner of discourse was jokes and anecdotes. When his turn came in a political discussion with a bunch of bores, he would say, ‘Bush walks into a delicatessen and says, “I’ll have a sandwich.” Fella says, “What do you want on that?” Bush says …’ And Karl would make his point. They were jokes with a point, but gentle, and usually deflationary, intended to demonstrate the absurdity of the proposition being debated.
‘You’re going to Nairobi by road?’ he said and laughed his wheezy laugh. ‘Well, of course you are. Flying there would be too simple for you. It’ll take a week or more — you’ll have a terrible time. You’ll have some great stuff for your book.’
‘My idea is to get to the border. African borders are full of revelations. Have you been to the Ethiopian border at Moyale?’
‘No. So please write your book, and then I can read about it.’ Then he added, ‘Did you know, in any group of half a dozen Ethiopians, five of them will have been in prison?’
Is this a joke?’
‘This is an invitation,’ Karl said. ‘I want to introduce you to some people.’
We had lunch at his house in a back street of Addis, a bungalow behind a high wall, with a flower garden and bird houses and a dovecote. Five Ethiopians and two Filipina women doctors, who were also Catholic nuns. The nuns, friends of Karl’s wife, who was in the Philippines, were in Addis for a few days. They lived in a remote part of Ethiopia, where there was a large Muslim population, and their mission was providing medical treatment to Muslim women, an altruistic and thankless task which, judging from their uncomplaining dispositions, they performed cheerfully.
One of the Ethiopians was a woman who had worked at the embassy for many years. She said, in a tone of resignation, ‘Women have no status here. They are pushed aside and beaten.’
The four men were all writers, editors, and journalists. Each of them had been in prison. One had been jailed under three successive regimes, a total of twelve years. ‘I was even in the emperor’s prison — the palace jail!’ It was something of an accomplishment to have annoyed both Haile Selassie and the Derg, the monarchists and the Marxists. Another man had been in prison for most of the Derg years. The two other men had the same story. None of these men had ever been formally charged or brought to trial, just tossed in jail and left to rot.
Ethiopians are vague on western, that is, Gregorian calendar dates because their calendar is four years behind the western one (and of course the Jewish one is 2000 years ahead, and the Muslim one 600 years behind). When I asked an Ethiopian the date of something that had happened in the past he began to count on his fingers. To the best of his calculations, Nebiy Makonnen, an ex-prisoner of about fifty, had been languishing in Central Prison from 1977 until 1987 — ten years anyway.