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To Asmara
A Novel of Africa
Thomas Keneally
To my family
who allowed me for a time to travel
with the compassionate Eritrean Relief Association
and
the brave Eritrean People’s Liberation Front
The Author’s Note
This is an attempt at fiction. There are nonetheless references to Eritrean events of 1987 and early 1988, though these have sometimes been compressed or relocated for fiction’s sake.
As for the normal disclaimers about character, I hope the reader will accept the following: If there is a BBC correspondent in Khartoum, Stella Harries is not intended to represent that person. If there are a number of Ethiopian officers held prisoner by the Eritrean rebels, there is no evidence that—though disowned by their government—any of them ever collaborated with the Eritreans in the way Major Fida does in this account. If there is a cinematographer who has chronicled the struggle of the Eritreans, Masihi is not intended to resemble him either in person or family history. Similar reservations could be expressed about Darcy, Lady Julia, Christine and Henry. They merely stand as the author’s poor simulacra for those folk, Africans and Europeans, who are drawn to Eritrea and find there all the horrors and all the extraordinary hopes.
Thomas Keneally
May 1989
Editor’s Introduction
Recently, Stella Harries went back into the mountains of Eritrea, to the great rebel Eritrean base cantonment of Orotta, by the same route as that taken by Darcy and Henry, Lady Julia and the “child” Christine some months past. Ms. Harries traveled briefly to the front line as well, and even beyond it, but she was not able to visit the area to the west of the city of Asmara where Darcy was last seen. Not only is this region of high plateau a battlefield, now more than ever, but there are rumors too that, with most of its military credit gone, the Ethiopian regime, which is fighting the Eritreans, will resort to unleashing chemical weapons against the rebels.
There are other factors which inhibited Ms. Harries’ travel. One was that in Eritrean villages high behind the Nacfa Front and in the dust bowls of Barka province, famine—always there in waiting behind the corner of the next erratic season—has come down harder still. Yet again, the so-called late rains have not appeared in what they call the Sahel, the sub-Sahara. Ms. Harries was conscious that the space she might have taken up in vehicles could have been better devoted to a couple of bags of sorghum.
The second factor which limited her movements was the scale of what’s been happening there since the time of Darcy’s disappearance. In the mountains, and all along the old Italian road where Darcy was last seen, there have been since March massive battles in which thousands of men and women were engaged and which, for all the world heard and hears of them, might as well take place on the moon’s dark side. Again, Stella found space on trucks, coming and going, reserved for the wounded, and traveling to any timetable was impossible.
On top of that, she was delayed in Orotta by a recurrence of the malaria she originally caught in the Sudan some time back. The exhaustion of the trip and the weakness caused by continuous diarrhea left her wide open to the malarial infection in her blood. At first sweating and ranting, then helpless and somnolent, she lay in Orotta ten days. On getting up to go on with her inquiries, she collapsed again and had to be trucked back to the Sudan in a weakened state.
We know from Ms. Harries’ inquiries, and the mass of taped and written material, including interviews, which Darcy left behind in his pack and which Stella brought back to the Sudan with her, a great amount about Darcy’s time with the Eritrean rebels.
With a few exceptions which will become obvious to the reader, we therefore present the story of Darcy’s journey into Eritrea with the “child” Christine, with Henry, and with Lady Julia, the elderly English “female affairs” warrior we shall meet later. Among the exceptions, however, are certain events to do with the Ethiopian p.o.w. Major Fida and incidents of which Darcy either could not have had knowledge or else, even given his energy for writing and recording, did not have time to note down.
The Rock Singer
I suppose my connection with the Eritreans, brave and starved creatures of the Horn, began not with my first visit to Africa but a little later, with something I and half the world saw on television. In my case, the television was located in an airshaft-facing room at the Hotel Warwick in New York.
I had just been to Colorado on a cheap flight to do an article for The Times, the London not the New York version, on the plight of the Ute Indians. These days getting by on a portion of arid mesa in the southwest of the state, the Ute once owned all that land which is now occupied by a string of glittering ski resorts west of Denver.
On my way back to London, while I ate my breakfast in my hotel room in New York, I saw the rock star appear on the screen, saw that solemn, youngish, straw-hatted man with dark, lanky hair, that face so familiar to people in the West, so drawn down by the weight of its own humanity.
The news segment we all saw that day went like this: The rock star stands by a small tor of bagged wheat. The wheat itself, the rock star tells us, lies outside a famished town called Mekale, in the Ethiopian province of Tigre. Behind him and beyond the wheat pyramid rises a great cliff of primal rock, and beneath the brow of this escarpment sits a crowd of villagers, their wives, their children. The men all carry wands in their hands: They are goat herders, though as the rock star soon tells us, most of their goats have died. They crouch on their haunches. Their free hands are cupped over the skulls of girl or boy children with hair cropped in an African manner, only a forelock growing freely.
These gestures of the fathers in the newsclip, this framing of the children’s shaven heads with the fathers’ hands, seems to be a statement: “Here is my child, precious above all others.” Nonetheless the viewer is aware that a frightful patience and etiquette restrains the peasants from being vocal. They are stoical people. They deserve—you feel—a benign prince, even a benign God.
Still in the television clip, the famous singer in the straw hat shows us a particular child. Ethiopian officials seated at a table in the open are measuring it for height. Next, through an editorial cut, he makes some comments on the measurement of the same child’s arms and legs. The sad dimensions of the child’s hunger are marked down in a book by the Ethiopians at the table. The singer remarks that these meager centimeters shame the world.
Then, shaking his head at the camera, he begins to display more than a mere editorial outrage. His authority to be angry in an ancient, prophetic way arises—as I know—not only from what he sings to the world’s young. Because the truth is, his songs aren’t particularly well known. His authority comes from this: that the last time Ethiopia starved, he persuaded the big groups—Heaven Sez, The Judge, Messiah, and so on—into a performing consortium called Worldbeat, to sing on behalf of the stricken peasants of Ethiopia. Money was raised from records, tapes, and performances. Western governments were shamed into matching gestures of goodwill. Foods and medicines were packed into donated Hercules aircraft and flown to Ethiopian provinces where the greatest need lay. The Ethiopian government had been able to restrict and dominate the movements of most aid bodies, even of the Red Cross. But the singer and the Worldbeaters were too famous for Ethiopia’s handsome dictator Mengistu to hamper and tyrannize. Hence the rock groups’ grain went wherever the famed singer on good advice—on somewhat better advice than the sort of advice you get from dictators—wanted it to go. Worldbeat was a song, a s
urge of rock and of goodwill, to end all famine.
And yet now again, the rock star in the film clip tells me in my hotel room and the world in all its diverse locations, the catastrophe has repeated itself.
You could gauge from the suppressed anger in his voice that he is wondering how he will find the strength to do it all again, to appeal to the groups and to the youth of the West, who believe they’ve already dealt with the problem last time and for good. A genuine fury enters his face and makes his mouth taut. People still remember now, a year or more afterward, what the rock singer says then: Despite the cries of these children, a food convoy of some thirty trucks, on its way to an area just as stricken as this one, has been attacked by rebels and destroyed with grenades. These rebels are the Eritreans from the north, he says. They have fallen on a line of vehicles on its merciful way from the city of Tessenai and have obliterated hundreds of thousands of dollars of aid. The trucks in question, the singer assures us all, bore the insignia of the UN, the Red Cross, Worldbeat, other humanitarian groups. The Ethiopian drivers of the trucks have been harassed, and one was killed as his truck exploded.
These Eritrean rebels then, whose name the rock singer uttered so tightly, a little like a curse, were fighting against the central Ethiopian government, and had been for more than a quarter of a century. The rock singer had little patience for the willfulness which made them fight. There is no pity from them, said the rock singer. There is no pity. There is only the ancient lunacy of politics.
As captivated as I was by the rock singer’s authentic grief, I had a sense of the man’s knowledge of the television medium working under the surface of the footage. He knew how long he would get on network news. He knew there was time for him merely to state a scenario: a disaster and a cause, a crime and a culprit. Forty-five seconds. Given this rigid scale, and his genuine outrage, he knew that you didn’t muddy the prime-time water by suggesting that the story might be complex, that there might be more than one evildoer.
So, as we all saw on our television screens, apart from the inhuman drought at which no one could be personally outraged, the rock star blamed above all the rebel Eritrean attack for the just fears of these stark-eyed Tigrean farmers, of their wives swathed in the eternal patience of many-dyed cloth, and for the unsatisfactory thickness of the limbs of the pot-bellied children. It was in these Eritrean rebels that the human malice of famine was found.
At that time, I knew very little about this satanic rebel movement in the Eritrean highlands of the Horn of Africa. During my earlier assignment in the Sudan, and throughout my friendship with the generous Stella Harries, the BBC’s official correspondent in Khartoum, I’d met a journalist or two who had been over the Red Sea border into Eritrea. I’d been impressed by a French cameraman who worked for the rebels, an exotic, turban-wearing figure called Masihi, who brought a few rough-cut film documentaries out of Eritrea to show to interested people in Khartoum. There could be found in Eritrea, according to the few journalists who knew, a massive war which went largely unrecorded, except of course by the French cameraman. Even in Khartoum, this war in progress in the Eritrean mountains, on the flank of the Sudan—this war which had now begotten a string of burned-out aid trucks—seemed to rouse only occasional interest.
About the same time as the rock singer’s broadcast, Stella herself visited these rebels for a few weeks and came out very thin but—if you could judge from her letters and the radio programs she made—very partisan about the Eritreans. The situation she described was a complex one, and her programs were broadcast in Britain late at night, when I’d been drinking, and when the chains of political causation Stella describes were a little hard to follow.
Just the same, I began to seek out a little literature concerning these Eritrean vandals. One night, in a church hall in London, I attended a lecture by a Labour member of Parliament on the topic “Free Eritrea Now!” The event was one of those dismal, ill-attended, cold, damp, but lively sessions of the type you often see advertised in The Times. The politician’s remarks were punctuated by plumbing noises from the nineteenth-century walls.
Drinking coffee in the lobby of the hall after the lecture ended, I was aware of the reserved presence of half a dozen Eritrean men and women. Two of the women wore padded jackets of military origin, as if they’d recently been engaged in the sort of attack the rock singer had denounced. The men wore sportscoats and watched me calmly over their mugs of steaming coffee. They were old soldiers of the Eritrean cause, these men and women—I’d heard from Stella Harries that only the most brilliant of the veterans of the Eritrean war with Ethiopia got these overseas postings, representing their rebel movement in Europe as once Benjamin Franklin and John Adams had represented the American revolutionaries.
I considered their well-made African faces and their limpid eyes. I tried to envisage them destroying with grenades the food of the nine-centimeter-arm-diameter children of the Horn of Africa.
A French Girl in the Sudan
It is four months since I saw the rock singer’s newsclip, and three of us are waiting on the Red Sea coast of the Sudan in heat so downright it’s best to ignore it. Besides myself there is a lean, Nordic-looking American aid worker called Mark Henry, and the French girl. We are in an old barracks from the days of General Kitchener, a barracks—it seems to me—built for Rudyard Kipling and his h-dropping Cockney redcoats. It is time to begin writing things down and muttering things into my tape recorder. Because at the start of such a journey I’m frankly apprehensive of what I will perceive and meet, because perhaps of what my wife, Bernadette, would call my primness, I’ll work in the past tense. It’s a good way to put a distance between myself and the rawness of events.
First though: An outsider going into the rebel-held parts of Eritrea for whatever purpose can travel only by way of the Sudan. You fly to Khartoum and then to Port Sudan and then come south on the back of a truck to a town of ruins called Suakin—this town with its barracks. The Eritreans run a clinic here for their maimed.
Is it too fanciful to say that my companions and I are suspended between states? Between the Sudan and the unfulfilled Republic of Eritrea; between the desert coast we still inhabit and the mountains we’re bound for? Even our passports are behind us, deposited with the intellectual veteran who manages the Eritrean guest house in Port Sudan.
My marriage is somewhere behind, too, but inadequately discarded, and the other two carry the same sort of freight—the girl Christine carries her peculiar childhood, and Henry his oddly noble attachment to his Somali woman.
Enough heat-induced portentousness, though!
The eastern gate of the barracks at Suakin opened directly onto the Red Sea; it was only a step or two from the lintel to the fever-blue water. Latrines for the damaged veterans of Eritrea hung rakishly out over the sea. With the consent of the Sudanese government, the rebels brought their maimed up here to the coast, to Suakin and Port Sudan, because there was nowhere farther south, in Eritrea itself, where the limbless or crippled could wheel their chairs safely by daylight.
The three of us stood by this gate and inspected the richly blue Red Sea. It hurt the eye, yet Christine held its gaze, lifting her chin and mopping her neck—which like the rest of her stopped just short of being bony—with a brown bandanna we’d bought together in Khartoum. She turned to me and arched her eyes in a way that said, “Well, the Red Sea. Close up!” Then she turned back to the courtyard, and Henry the American and I followed.
A young Eritrean man missing a leg sat there in a wheelchair surrounded by a fence of Eritrean false limbs. On the foot of each prosthetic leg sat a black, lace-up shoe. He held one such leg-and-shoe combination in his hands and rubbed black polish onto the leather. This fresh-faced shoe shiner had already carried on a conversation with us in excellent English, telling us in its course that he’d trodden on a Russian mine down near Asmara.
“We saw them in Port Sudan,” Christine had said in her flat yet quite exact English. “All the young Eritreans
at the clinic. They shined their shoes, too, and went out for a walk in the afternoon.”
Though I remembered sharply they hadn’t walked—they’d wheeled their chairs and lurched along on crutches.
“Walking is very good for those in the clinic,” the shoe shiner told us, closing the subject.
Now he was still preparing the boots on all these disembodied legs so that at sunset his brothers and sisters in the clinic could don them and set out on their crutches or in their wheelchairs for an evening promenade. They would flash their dazzling toecaps around the little bay where the scrawniest of Mecca pilgrims bathed—the ones who couldn’t afford anything better than the old steamer between Suakin and Jeddah.
As the three of us could hear just at the moment, in a ward by the second gateway, the one into the lane, less proficient English speakers than the shoe polisher were holding class. “Hamud lives in the city of Asmara,” they called from their beds and their wheelchairs, “but his cousin Osman is a farmer in a village in Barka.”
The shoe polisher told us, “Yes, I know Masihi well. There is no one in the Liberation Front who does not know Masihi.”
I noticed that the shoe polish had turned nearly to oil in the heat, but he scooped it all up deftly with his cloth. There were no drips. I looked at the girl. She was agog for news of Masihi the cameraman.
“I remember,” said the polisher, “when we took the town of Barentu. I was in the infantry then, the Hallal Guards. At dawn we were already all around the enemy, the soldiers of Ethiopia. We sealed the road to the east. Then we came forward over a plain of stone and we saw the buildings of the town, naked in front of us. As we went, I heard a noise behind me, and I thought, Tanks! for the noise was the noise of a machine. But instead it is Masihi and he is carrying his big churning camera, sixteen millimeter, which makes the same noise as a Russian bus, and he follows us, right behind! The stones in front of us, in front of the buildings on the edge of the city, are bouncing with bullets. For still Ethiopians remain there, and their officers have told them we will cut their arms off if they become prisoners, cut off their feet and stuff them in their mouths. And then Masihi and his camera and his sound machinist … they pass right through our line of infantry, they move faster than us, and they seize the town. They step over the outer trenches. Ethiopians are running away all around Masihi—he could reach his hand out and touch them. He has taken their spirit though. He has conquered them with his camera lens. They think he is a weapon. Masihi, who wants to capture only the morning light! He turns around in those houses on the outskirts and photographs us as we arrive …”