I Didn't Do It for You (4 page)
Read I Didn't Do It for You Online
Authors: Michela Wrong
Journalists are mocked for using their taxi drivers as political barometers. But the conversation between airport terminal and city centre can prove more insightful than any diplomatic briefing. I was accustomed to the standard African taxi man's dirge. It started with a whinge about economic hardship, moved to a caustic assessment of both the president and opposition's shortcomings, and climaxed in a predictionâusually horribly prescientâof just how awful things were about to get.
In Eritrea, the first taxi driver I met turned out to be one of Eritrea's longest-serving ex-Fighters. Ministers booked for interview strode past me in reception to knock shoulders with him and pat him on the back. He not only thought the president was a hero, he knew exactly what needed to be done to rebuild a war-shattered country. But then, so did every Eritrean I met. In truth, conducting a range of interviews began to feel like an exercise in futility. Whether minister, businessman, waiter or farmer, everyone seemed to think along identical lines. But this didn't sound like regurgitated propaganda. The need for self-reliance, the miracles that could be worked through discipline and hard work, the importance of learning from Africa's mistakes: such beliefs had been hammered out during committee meetings and village debates, for the EPLF was passionately committed to grassroots discussion. I had the uncanny feeling that I was speaking to the many mouths of one single, Hydra-headed creature: the Eritrean soul.
By God, they were impressive, though it has to be said that one rarely experienced a fit of uncontrollable giggles. The self-deprecating, surreal hilarity I had come to appreciate in central Africa as the saving grace of lives lived in grotesque disorder was absent here: Eritreans did dour intensity better than they did humour. Their wiry physiquesâthe result of not years, but generations of going withoutâspoke of iron control. Their personalities were as starkly defined as the climate itself, stripped of fuzzy edges. If you made the mistake of flippantly challenging one of their black-and-white certainties, you could feel the shutters coming down, as they withdrew into prickly, how-could-you-expect-to-understand-us censoriousness.
A refrain kept running through my head, a catchphrase from a British sitcom of the 1970s. âI didn't get where I am todayâ¦' a beetle-browed magnate would intone at the start of every sweeping pronouncement. Eritrea, it seemed to me, had its
own, unarticulated version of the uncompromising mantra. âI didn't spend 10/20/30 years at the Front to be patronized by a foreigner/kept waiting by a bureaucrat/messed around by a traffic cop,' it ran. Extraordinary suffering brought with it, I guessed, a sense of extraordinary entitlement that easily tipped over into chippiness. âWhy are Eritreans so bad at saying “thank you”?' I once asked an ex-Fighter friend. I was feeling slightly irritated at receiving the classic Eritrean reaction to a gift chosen with some care: an expressionless grunt, followed by the quick concealment of the unopened present, never to be mentioned again. âI bet it's because they feel it's below their dignity.' My friend launched into a long explanation as to how, in rural communities, a peasant was expected automatically to share anything he received with the village. This democratic practice had been maintained at the Front, he said, so gifts had little meaning. In any case, showing emotionâwhether happiness or griefâwas regarded as a sign of weakness, simply not done. Even saying âplease' seemed unnecessarily effusive. The explanation continued, various theories were explored, until finally my friend paused and added, almost as an afterthought, âAnyway, there's a feeling that we fought for 30 years and no one helped us, so why should we thank anyone? We don't owe thanks to anyone.'
Even that small admission felt like a major insight, because Eritreans, famous for their reserve, do not like to talk about themselves. Whether they spoke in Italianâthe Western language of the older generationâor English, taught to the young, it was always a struggle persuading an Eritrean to drop the collective âWe' and experiment with a self-indulgent, egotistical âI'. The flow of words would slow to a dribble and dry up. For the
tegadelti
, in particular, it went against every lesson of community effort and shared sacrifice learnt at the Front. A curious monument taking shape on one of Asmara's main roundabouts
captured those values. Celebrating its victory, any other new government would have ordered either a statue of its leader, a tableau of freedom fighters depicted in glorious action, or a symbolic flaming torch. The Eritreans chose instead an outsize black metal sandal, a giant version of the plastic
shidda
worn by hundreds of thousands of Eritreans who could afford neither leather nor polish. Ridiculously cheap, washable, long-lasting, the Kongo sandalâas it was knownâwas the poor man's boot, perfect symbol for an egalitarian movement. It must be the world's only public monument to an item of footwear.
Â
My survey done, I took the image of Eritrea away with me, a memory to be treasured and coddled, summoned when bleakness loomed. I was not alone in finding that with Eritrea as an example, Africa seemed a little less despairing, a touch more hopeful. If Eritrea, with its devastating history, could pull it off, surely other nations might too?
Then True Believerdom took a tumble. In May 1998, to general astonishment, Eritrea and Ethiopia went back to war, after a minor dispute over a dusty border village escalated into mass mobilization on both sides. The much-trumpeted friendship between Isaias and Meles had counted for little: the two leaders were no longer talking. Ethiopia accused Isaias of being a megalomaniac, Eritrea regarded the new war as proof that Ethiopia had never digested the loss of its coast and was bent on reconquest. Defying an Ethiopian flight ban, I flew to Asmara with a group of journalists, our chartered Kenyan plane taking a looping route via Djibouti and over the waters of the Red Sea to lessen the chances of being shot down. At the end of a buttock-clenching trip, we landed to find Eritrean helicopters crouched on the tarmac of an airport that had just been bombed by Ethiopian jets. Foreign embassies were
scrambling to evacuate their nationals, the BBC's World Service was telling British citizens to leave while they still could.
The mood in town was bewildering: every Asmarino I met was convinced they would win this new war, albeit at the highest of prices, every foreign journalist believed they must lose. The Eritreans' unshakeable certainty was exasperating, a positive handicap during a crisis that might require for its solution the murky skills of diplomacy, an ability to conceive of shades of grey. As ever, the community stood grimly united. âEritrea is not made of people who cry,' said an old businessman who had just waved goodbye to a son going off to fight. âWe did not want this, but once it comes we will do whatever our country requires.' The Eritrean capacity for speaking with one voice was beginning to sound a little creepy to my ears, as depressing as the belligerent warmongering blasting from television screens in Addis Ababa. In its chiming uniformity, it had a touch of
The Stepford Wives
.
Two years later, after at least 80,000 soldiers from both sides of the border had died, the doubters were proved correct. With Ethiopian forces occupying Eritrea's most fertile lands to the west and a third of Eritrea's population living under UNHCR plastic sheeting, a peace deal was signed and a UN force moved in to separate the two sides. The war had been a disaster for Eritrea. But True Believers, already seriously questioning their assumptions, were about to be dealt a final, killer blow. In September 2001, President Isaias arrested colleagues who had dared challenge his handling of the warâincluding the ex-Fighters who had been closest to him during the Struggleâand shut down Eritrea's independent media, a step even the likes of Mugabe, Mobutu and Moi had never dared, or bothered, to take. So much for Africa's Renaissance. Many of the ministers whose independent musings had so impressed me were now in jail, denied access to lawyers. Plans to introduce a multiparty
constitution and stage elections were put on indefinite hold, bolshie students sent for military training in the desert where no one could hear their views. Aloof and surrounded by sycophants, Isaias clearly had no intention of stepping down. As it gradually became clear that this was no temporary policy change, Eritrean ambassadors stationed abroad began applying for political asylum, members of the Eritrean diaspora postponed long-planned returns. As for the economy, who was going to invest now that the country's skilled workers were all in uniform, the president had fallen out with Western governments, and relations with Ethiopia, Eritrea's main market, were decidedly dodgy? No one cuffed the beggars on Liberation Avenue any more, because the beggars were not chirpy urchins but the old, left destitute by their children's departure for the front.
Far from learning from the continent's mistakes, Eritrea had turned into the stalest, most predictable of African clichés. What was striking was how far the waves of despair and outrage at this presidential crackdown travelled. For the journalists, diplomats, academics and aid workers who followed Africa, this felt like a personal betrayal, because it had destroyed the last of their hopes for the continent. Had this happened in Zambia or Ivory Coast, we would have shaken our heads and shrugged. Because it had taken place in Eritrea, special, perverse, inspiring Eritrea, we raged. âHow could they, oh, how
could
they?' I remember an Israeli cameraman friend moaning over lunch in London's Soho. This from a man who could not have spent more than a fortnight in Eritrea in his life.
Somewhere along the line, it wasn't yet clear where, the True Believers must have missed the point. They had failed to register important clues, drawn naive conclusions, misinterpreted key events. The qualities we had all so admired obviously came with a sinister reverse side. Had we mistaken arrogant pigheadedness for moral certainty, dangerous bloody-mindedness
for focused determination? I had become intrigued by the Eritrean character, I realized, without digging very far into the circumstances in which it had been forged. âThey carry their history around with them like an albatross,' a British aid worker who had spent years with the EPLF had once warned me, but at the time I had not grasped her meaning. What was it in the country's past, I wondered, that had given rise to such stubborn intensity, so invigorating in some circumstances, so destructive in others? What had made the Eritreans what they were today, with all their extraordinary strengths and fatal weaknesses?
Even the most determined optimist has his moment of reckoning. An instant when he is forced to admit the society he sanctified is far darker, more convoluted, yes, on occasions downright
nasty
âthan he was ready to admit. Increasingly, I found my mind wandering back to an incident I had once witnessed on Knowledge Street, round the corner from the sandal monument. Walking past a moving bus, I had noticed that the passengers were in uproar. At the heart of the storm of gesticulation sat a wizened old grandmother. The bus drove by and I heard it brake suddenly behind me, the doors open, the sound of an object hitting the pavement, the doors close, and then the bus disappeared into the night. Turning, I was astonished to see that the old woman, whom I guessed to be in her seventies, had been hurled horizontally out of the doorâprobably by the other passengers. Certainly, no one had interceded on her behalf. Maybe she had been very rude to the conductor, maybe she was a well-known fare dodger. Tempers, I knew, frayed fast in Eritrea. But I was astonished to witness an incident of this kind in Africa, where respect for old age runs so deep. That collective ejection was the kind of unsettling event that made you wonder if you had ever understood anything at all.
The Last Italian
âWhen the white snake has bitten you, you will search in vain for a remedy.'
Eritrean rebel leader Bahta Hagos warns
fellow chiefs against the Italians
The old man lunged for his wooden cane and began flailing about around our feet. A moment earlier, the yard had seemed at peace, its occupants lulled to near coma in the heat, which lay upon us with the weight of a winter blanket. Now a deafening cacophony of clucks, squawks and screeches was coming from under the trestle bed on which Filippo Cicoria perched. From where I sat, I could see a blur of scuffling wings, stabbing beaks and orange claws. Two of his pet ducks were battling for supremacy. This was a cartoon fight, individual heads and wings suddenly jutting from the whirlwind at improbable angles. I kicked feebly in the ducks' direction. âNo, no,' grunted Cicoria, jabbing rhythmically with his cane. âYou have [jab] to hit them [jab, jab] on the head [jab].' The squawks were rising in hysteria, but his broken leg, pinned and swollen, was making it difficult to manoeuvre into a position where he could deliver a knock-out blow. âThat's enough, you stupid bastardsâ¦THAT'S ENOUGH.' There were two loud shrieks as the cane
finally hit home and the duo fled for safety, leaving a small deposit of feathers behind.
Feathers, I now saw, lay everywhere. A breeze from the sea, a narrow strip of turquoise behind him, lifted a thin layer of white down deposited by the pullets cheeping softly in the hutches above his bed. A dozen muscovy ducks dozed in the shade, their gnarled red beaks tucked under wings, while at the gates grazed a gaggle of geese. The air was rich with the acid stink of chicken droppings. The man, it was clear, liked his fowls. But not half as much as he liked old appliances. Cicoria's scrapyard, perched on the last in the chain of islands that forms the Massawa peninsula, held what had to be the biggest collection of obsolete fridges and broken-down air-conditioning units in the whole of Africa. Testimony to man's losing contest with an unbearable climate, the boxes were stacked in their scores, white panels turning brown in the warm salt air. They lay alongside piled sheets of corrugated iron, abandoned car parts, ripped-up water fountains, discarded barbecues and ageing fuel drums. Chains and crankshafts, girders and gas cylinders, tubes and twists of wire, all came in the same rich shade of ochre. The entire junkyard was a tribute to the miraculous powers of oxidization. Once, Cicoria had been Mr Fix-It, the only man in Massawa who knew how to repair a hospital ice-maker, tinker with a yacht's broken engine or get a hotel's air conditioning running. Now, hobbled by a fall and slowed by emphysema, he was just Mr Keep-It, struggling for breath inside a man-made mountain of rust.
I had telephoned from Asmara, keen to meet a man who I had been told personified a closing chapter of colonial history. âHe's the last one in Massawa,' an elderly Italian friend in the capital had said. âWhen all the other Italians left, he stayed, through all the wars. He can't come up to Asmara now, the air's too thin for him.' When Cicoria lifted the receiver, I heard a
farmyard chorus of honks and clucks, so loud I could barely make out his words. He had sounded ratty, but not openly hostile. âIs there anything you'd like me to take him, since you haven't seen him for a while?' I asked my friend. âErrrâ¦No.' âWell, I'll just pass on your best wishes, shall I?' I suggested. âYes, hmmm, that would be nice.' The reticence was puzzling.
The Italians have a word for those who fall in love with Africa's desert wastes, putting down roots which reach so deep, they can never be wrenched up again. We say âgone to seed', or âgone native'. The Italians call them the
insabbiati
âthose who are buried in the sandââpeople', as Cicoria pronounced with lip-smacking relish, âcompletely immersed in the mire'. At 77, Cicoria was happy to count himself amongst their ranks and indeed, when I'd arrived for my appointment with Massawa's last Italian, my gaze had initially flitted to him and skated on, looking vainly for a white face. Cicoria was as dark as a local, evidence of a lifetime spent working in the sun and the squirt of Eritrean blood that ran in his veins, inheritance of an Eritrean grandparent. A skinny wreck of a man, wearing a T-shirt that drooped to reveal his nipples, he sat hunched on the bed he had ordered to be carried out of his house and deposited in the centre of his metalwork collection. âIn there, I felt like a beast in a cage, out here, at least I can swear at my animals.' They say men's ears keep growing when everything else has stopped, and in Cicoria's case it seemed to be true. The onslaught of the years had turned his face into a gargoyle of ears, nose and missing teeth. Shrunken by time, this once-active man had gathered on the table before him what he clearly regarded as the bare necessities of human existence: two telephones, a roll of toilet paper and a slingshot.
He was as ravaged and pitted as the port itself. Massawa is a town with two faces. At the setting of the sun, when everyone
heaves a sigh of relief, it becomes a place of hidden recesses and mysterious beauty, the lights playing softly over warm coral masonry. Tiny grocery shops, their walls neatly stacked with shiny metallic packets of tea and milk powder, soap and oil, glow from the darkness like coloured jewels. As the cafés under the Arabic arcades spring into life, naval officers in starched white uniforms sit and savour the cool evening air, watching trucks from the harbour chugging their way along the causeways, taking grain back to the mainland. Crouched in alleyways, young women sell hot tea and hardboiled eggs, the incense on their charcoal braziers blending with the pungent smell of ripe guava, the nutty aroma of roasting coffee and an occasional hot blast from an open sewer. But in the squinting glare of daytime, when only cawing crows and ibis venture out into the blinding sun, Massawa is just an ugly Red Sea town, scarred by too many sieges and earthquakes.
The town's geographical layoutâtwo large islands linked to the mainland by slim causeways built by the 19th-century Swiss adventurer Werner Munzingerâalways meant it was an easy town to hold, a difficult place to conquer. In the Second World War, a defiant Italian colonial administration had to be bombed into submission by the British and the port was then crippled by German commanders who scuttled their ships in a final gesture of spite. When the EPLF guerrilla movement first tried to capture Massawa from the Ethiopians in the 1970s, its Fighters were mown down on the exposed salt flats. Thirteen years later, the rebels succeeded, but the town took a terrible hammering in the process. Pigeons roost in the shattered blue dome of the Imperial Palace, shrapnel has taken hungry bites out of mosques and archways, walls are pitted with acne scars. Near the port, a plinth that once carried a statue of the mounted Haile Selassie, pointing triumphantly to the sea he worked so hard to claim on Ethiopia's behalf,
stands decapitated. The Marxist Derg regime that ousted him tried to destroy the statue, the EPLF made a point of finishing the job. Occasionally, you'll come across a building in the traditional Arab style, its intricately-carved wooden balcony slipping gradually earthwards. But some of Africa's most grotesque modern buildingsâpyramids of glass and cementâleave you wistful for what must have been, before the bombs and artillery did their work on the coral palazzi. The handwritten sign propped next to the till of a mini-market round the corner from Cicoria's workshop captures what, in light of Massawa's history, seems an understandable sense of foreboding. âOur tripâlong. Our hopeâfar. Our troubleâmany' it reads.
Cicoria had lived through it all, surviving each military onslaught miraculously unscathed. âOnce, they were shooting and one person dropped dead to the left of me, one was killed to the right and I was left standing in the middle. I've always had the devil's own luck.' He'd come to Massawa in the 1940s, a 15-year-old runaway escaping an unhappy Asmara home. âMy mother had died and I never got on with my dad. I hated my father terribly. He was an ignorant peasant.' His grandfather had been one of the area's first settlers, a constructor dispatched by Rome to build roads and dams in an ultimately fruitless attempt to win the trust of Abyssinian Emperor Menelik II. âMy family has a chapel in Asmara cemetery. You should visit it.' Cicoria must have inherited from his grandfather some technical skill that drew him to the shipyards, where Italian prisoners-of-war and Russian, Maltese and British operatorsââthe ones who'd gone crazy in the war'âwere repairing damaged Allied battleships. After the machinists clocked off, the boy would sneak in and mimic their movements at the lathes. âI learnt how to make pressure gauges, spherical pistons and starter machines. No one ever taught me anything, I just
watched and learnt. I can make anything, just so long as it's black and greasy,' he boasted.
This was the talent that had allowed him to play the inglorious role of Vicar of Bray, adapting smoothly to each of Eritrea's successive administrations. When Massawa's other Italians were evacuated, Cicoria's skills meant he was too valuable to lose. Under the British, he worked on the warships, under the Ethiopians he was summoned to repair damaged artillery and broken domestic appliances. âAll the Derg officers used to bring me their fridges to repair.' When the Eritrean liberation movement started up, he claimed, he turned fifth columnist and joined an undercover unit, using his privileged access to sabotage the Ethiopian military machine. âI'm one of theirs. I'm
Shabia
, a guerrilla.' But his eyes darted shiftily away when I pressed for details.
One quality his survival had certainly not relied upon was personal charm. As his Eritrean wife, a statuesque woman of luminous beauty, prepared lunch, I began to grasp what lay behind the hesitation in my Italian friend's voice. Cicoria, it turned out, was good at hate. During a career in which I had interviewed many a ruthless politician and sleazy businessman, I had rarely met anyone, I realized, harder to warm to. His malevolence was democratically even-handedâhe loathed just about everyone he came into contact with, the sole exception being the British officials who had recognized his skills all those decades ago. The American officers he had worked for had been âcrass idiots', the Ethiopians hateful occupiers. He despised his contemporaries in Asmaraâmy friend, it emerged, was a particular object of scornâfor not bothering to learn Tigrinya (âa bunch of illiterates'). Modern-day Eritreans were useless, cack-handed when it came to anything technical. His life had been a series of fallings-out with workmates and relatives, most of whom were no longer on speaking terms. Perhaps
they'd been alienated by Cicoria's weakness for drink, or his habit of taking a new wife whenever he tired of an existing mate. âIt's not legal, but if you knew my life history, you'd understand.' Leafing through a smudged photo collection he pointed to a first wife (âas black as coalâcan't stand the sight of me'), a daughter (âthat bitch'), a brother (âa real shit') and a son (ânothing in his head'). The 16-year-old son running errands around the yard scored little better. âLook at him. Strong as an ox,' he shook his head pityingly. âBut he's got no brain, no brain at all.' Even the muscovy ducks were viewed with jaundiced eyes. âMy fondness for them only goes so far. Then I eat them.' Only the latest of the many wives, whose face lit up with extraordinary tenderness when it rested upon him, won grudging praise. âShe's a good woman. Incredibly strong,' he said, watching admiringly as she manoeuvred a fridge out of the house. âBut she's too old for me now. What I really need is a nice 19-year-old.' Most depressing of all, Cicoria really did not seem to like himselfââI've always been a rascal, a pig when it comes to women, and I drink too much'âwhile clearly finding it impossible to rein in a fury that kept the world at bay.
His view of Eritrea's future was bleak. âThis war is never ending. Believe me, these imbeciles will be fighting each other till the end of time.' Ill-health had deprived him of his one pleasureâhis joy at hearing the stalled and obsolete revving back into lifeâand gravity pinned him at sea level. With the loss of his beloved lathes, which lay exasperatingly out of reach, something had died. âI used to have high hopes,' he muttered, âbut this fall has been the last blow. Now I can't see things improving.' He had been to Italy for hospital treatment the year before and the trip, his first to the ancestral motherland, had been a revelation. He was now planning a permanent move there, he said, once he found a buyer for the scrapyard. I
nodded, but found it impossible to imagine. The
insabbiati
do not travel well. Transposed, too late in life, to Europe's retirement homes, they fade away, pale and diminished, smitten by the syndrome Italians call â
mal d'Africa
'. Far better to sit sweltering in this Red Sea cauldron, king of all he surveyed, compliant family at his beck and call.
Before saying goodbye, I put the question that had been niggling me. âWhat's the slingshot for?' His eyes lit up: âAny moment now, a crow will land on that telephone line. I'm a very good shot, but the bastards are canny. If you watch, as soon as my hand moves towards the slingshot, he'll be off.' We waited. On cue, a crow landed on the line. âNow watch.' Cicoria's hand travelled smoothly across the table to the slingshot. The crow cocked its head. With impressive speed, he lifted the weapon and fired. But the bird had already taken off, flapping its glossy black wings across the translucent waters of the Red Sea. Cicoria shook his head. âBastard.'
Â
A crabby geriatric, surrounded by the detritus of 20th century civilization, hating the world. With Cicoria, I felt, I had tasted the sour dregs of an overweeningly ambitious dream. The Italians who established their Eritrean capital in Massawa in 1890, the officials in Rome who fondly believed Africa's original inhabitants were destined to wither away, ceding their land to a stronger, white-skinned race, could never have imagined that their bracing colonial adventure would splutter to this bad-tempered, seedy end.
They had come to the Horn with grandiose plans, buoyed by the bumptious beliefâshared by all Europe's expanding powers at that timeâthat Africa was an unclaimed continent, theirs not only for the taking but for the carving up and sharing out amongst friends. It was an assumption that held true
nowhere in Africa, but least of all when applied to what was then known as Abyssinia, the ancient Ethiopian empire that lay hidden in the Horn's hinterland, beyond a wall of mountain.