‘It was politics. I was on the wrong side.’ He laughed at the very idea of charges or a trial. He had simply been picked up one day and thrown in the slammer, where — and he a man who was used to reading and writing — there were no books, nothing to write with, nothing to write on.
‘I would go crazy in jail,’ I said.
‘You would learn patience,’ he said.
‘That’s true!’ the other ex-prisoners said.
‘One day, after I had been there about a year, a man was brought in by the guards. He had been searched but somehow they had missed the book he was carrying. It was Gone with the Wind. We were so happy! We were all educated men. We took turns reading it — of course, we had to share it. There were 350 men in my section, and so we were allowed to have the book for one hour at a time. That was the best part of the day in Central Prison — reading Gone with the Wind.
‘I decided to translate it. I had no paper, so for paper I smoothed out the foil from cigarette packs and used the back side of it where there was paper to write on. A pen was smuggled in. I wrote very small. And I was Entertainment Officer, so every night I read some of my translation to the other prisoners.
‘But still I had to share the copy of the book — I could only have it for one hour. The translation took two years. I wrote it on 3000 sheets of cigarette foil. One by one, I folded these up and put them back into cigarette packs and when the prisoners were released they took them out of prison — just tucked them in their shirt pocket.’
Nebiy remained in prison for seven years. On his release, he looked for the 3000 sheets that contained his translation of Gone with the Wind. Locating them and gathering them took him two years of travel and inquiry. At last, he published his translation of the novel and this is the translation that Ethiopians read.
‘What’s your favorite part of the book?’
‘I don’t know. I read it over and over for six years. I know the book by heart.’
At the end of Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, the captive Tony Last is condemned to sit in a jungle clearing and read the works of Dickens, over and over, to his crazed captor, Mr Todd. It is improbable, so it is funny. But Nebiy Makonnen’s story was much better, and its hilarity more horrible for being true — six years squinting at Scarlett O’Hara in an Ethiopian jail.
After that, whenever I met an Ethiopian man over thirty or so I asked whether he had been in prison, and the answer was usually yes.
Wubishet Dilnessahu had done seven years. He was now a businessman, living in California, and was only in Addis Ababa for a few days in furtherance of a lawsuit. A man of seventy-seven, of a good family, he had been one of Emperor Haile Selassie’s ministers, concerned with cultural matters. He saw the emperor every day. He did not have to kowtow, as I had been told, but had to show respect. ‘I bowed very low, of course.’
After the Derg takeover, Haile Selassie was strangled — Wubishet said that Mengistu had personally choked the emperor to death. This information had just been revealed. At the time (August 1975) it was reported in the newspaper that the cause of death was ‘circulatory failure.’ The body was put in a hole at Menilek Palace and a structure (perhaps a latrine) built over it. Early in the 1990s the body was disinterred and the emperor’s remains kept in a crypt in a church in Addis. In November 2000, in an elaborate ceremony, the emperor was at last given a solemn burial in Holy Trinity Cathedral.
‘The Russians said, “We killed our king. If you kill yours there will be less trouble,” ’ Wubishet said.
A few days after the emperor was arrested, Wubishet was clapped in irons, charged with ‘helping the former regime,’ and taken to the Fourth Division Military Camp, where he was locked in a barracks-like hut with 120 other men. He showed me the prison, which is still a prison, and was that week bursting with political prisoners — university students who had just recently been arrested during a demonstration against government policies. Hundreds were arrested, many injured and forty of the students had been killed by police truncheons and gunfire.
‘You see the tin roof? The long building on the right? That was my prison building,’ Wubishet said. There were eight other buildings just like it, looking like hen coops, and they had also been full of prisoners. None of the men was charged; there were no trials. Most of the prisoners had no idea why they were there. ‘Many of the young men in there could not read or write, so we started a school, we taught literacy. And we just waited.’
‘Did they allow visits from friends or family?’
Wubishet laughed in the dark contemptuous way of the Ethiopian conditioned to be cynical after a lifetime of national catastrophes.
‘In seven years I saw my family once, for fifteen minutes.’
The royal apartments where Wubishet had worked for the emperor still stood. We went there in a taxi, for the Palace Gannah Le’ul (Princely Heaven), the emperor’s residence, built at the turn of the century by Haile Selassie’s father, Ras Makonnen, had been occupied variously by Makonnen; by the Italian viceroys, including the Count of Aosta; by the Italian Army; by one brief usurper (a rule of three days in 1960); by Haile Selassie, and now by the administrators of the University of Addis Ababa. It had been Wubishet’s own idea to convey the palace building to the university, which was in need of space. At first he had been too timid to suggest the idea to the emperor, but finally blurted it out. The emperor said nothing. ‘But he summoned me in the night and said, “Okay.” I was so nervous and excited I could not sleep.’
Although this building still looked like a royal residence, if a seedy one, with high doors and ornate trim and two baroque statues in front, there was a Fascist relic in the forecourt. This bizarre monument was a staircase of mildewed cement — fifteen steps representing the years that had elapsed since Mussolini entered Rome in 1922. The sculpture still stood after sixty-five years of war, monarchy, dictatorship, socialism, anarchy, and political asininity, a Fascist staircase, leading nowhere.
As Wubishet had worked in the emperor’s office I asked him if he had been aware of Haile Selassie’s relationship with Rastafarians. The very word had been coined in homage of the emperor’s birth name, Ras Tafari.
‘I know about the devotion these people have for him, but the emperor didn’t think about them very much,’ Wubishet said. For example, the emperor never mentioned Rastas in conversation. Wubishet said he knew nothing about Shashemene, the Rasta town on the road south of Addis; he was not even aware of the established fact that the emperor had given land to the Rastas. ‘Of course, he was a proud man and enjoyed respect, but the way they treated him was embarrassing for him.’
‘But he went to Jamaica and saw them there,’ I said.
‘They made him very embarrassed. They were kneeling! They thought he was God.’
Wubishet flapped his hand, dismissing the whole movement in a gesture.
‘You see, Ethiopians are Christians,’ he said. ‘We don’t worship human beings. Even a simple Ethiopian wouldn’t do it. They would think it’s stupid.’
‘But you bowed very low to the emperor,’ I said.
I liked his answer to this. He said, ‘That shows respect. That’s not worship. Worship is the forehead striking the ground. The emperor was a very small man, so you needed to bow extra low.’