ASFAW YEMIRU:

‘IN THE FOOTPRINTS OF THE APOSTLES’

   I’ve long been puzzled by heroic human goodness. It seems so inconceivable, so miraculous! And yet, I’ve encountered it. This, in fact, is how I originally became a philosophic theologian: wanting to identify the most basic obstacles to such goodness; and wanting to imagine a culture in which those obstacles might, so far as possible, be disempowered.

   Thus, a key moment in the trajectory that led me to this career was when I first met Ato Asfaw Yemiru. (Ato Asfaw: Mr. Asfaw. Yemiru: this was his father’s name. He was Ethiopian, and Ethiopians use patronymics after their names; they don’t have surnames. In later years, he was increasingly known by the affectionately honorific title Gashe.) I was seventeen at the time. Asfaw was the founder, and headmaster, of the school in Addis Ababa at which I had come to work for a year, as a teacher. This was in 1971 – 1972.

   Paradoxically, the culminating privilege of my own ultra-privileged schooling was a gap-year opportunity, before going on to university, of a job teaching at Asfaw’s school for the under-privileged. Asfaw’s was the only non-fee-paying school in the Ethiopian Empire. Because it regularly had the best exam results, sometimes parents who could in fact have afforded to pay for their children’s education in other schools tried to smuggle them into Asfaw’s. But whenever such cases came to light, he would politely ask the children in question to leave, so as to free up space for those who were poorer.

   The immediate spur to my writing this came from news of Asfaw’s death on May 8th 2021.

   He was mourned by the many, many thousands of those who had passed through his school, the associated orphanage, and the various other social welfare projects he initiated. He called his school the ‘Asere [or Asra] Hawariat’, which is Ge‘ez for ‘[In the] Footprints of the Apostles’.¹ My spell as a teacher there coincided with that of Tim Kinahan, who subsequently went on to set up, and run, the U.K. based Asra Hawariat School Fund, a crucial source of financial support for Asfaw’s work; still ongoing, now in collaboration with Asfaw’s widow Senayet. And I’m most grateful for Tim’s help, with regard to what follows.

   At the time we were there, the Ethiopian intelligentsia as a whole was subject to what was to become a terrible, self-destructive epidemic of partisan lust for domination. Asfaw however stands out as one highly effective, activist intellectual who, by way of exception, remained completely immune to that spiritual disease; one who sacrificed all other ambition for the sake of his pioneering, non-coercive solidarity with, and service to, the poor – in a country where, in those days, approximately 95 % of the population remained completely illiterate.

   He remained immune to the disease, not least by virtue of his faith. Thus, he remained a devout member of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church into which he had been born: the deep-rooted popular Christianity of the Abyssinian highlands. His austere little dwelling-space included a room dedicated as a chapel. Often, he would pray through the night. He was indeed reticent about this. And when it came to the admission of children into his school, he made no distinction between Christians and Muslims. The sole criterion was poverty. His naming the school as he did was, I think, a gesture very much intended to affirm his personal commitment to an altogether non-exclusive catholicity.

A. A Run-Away Child Made Good

   Asfaw was born in 1941; the year that the Italian Fascist invaders of Ethiopia were decisively defeated.² He was the youngest of twelve children. His ancestors, for seven generations, had been Orthodox Tewahedo clergy. They lived in Bulga: a mountainous area north-east of Addis Ababa, adjacent to the Rift Valley. Google Satellite Maps provide a photographic view from outer space. It’s a rugged high-altitude landscape, cold enough in places for occasional snow; split up by gorges, at the bottom of which in the rainy season torrential rivers run, dwindling thereafter. Even today Bulga remains sparsely populated, with (as Asfaw himself described it to me) peasants just about managing to subsist, working their small crofts; plus, here and there a village; the settled areas linked to each other, at best, by gravel tracks. When Asfaw was born, it was a district situated at the heart of Shewa province. In the ethnically divided administrative system of present-day Ethiopia, it has become part of the Amhara Region. The great majority of the population are Orthodox Tewahedo Christians.

   As a young child Asfaw spent his days herding sheep, like all the other young children of those parts. But he also learnt to read and write: with a view to his following the family tradition, of service within the Church. And when he was eight years old, as one of a group of children accompanied by his father, he made his first visit to Addis Ababa, so as to be – in accordance with regular Orthodox Tewahedo practice – ordained deacon.

   Peering down (thanks to Google) from outer space, one can see the roofs of churches scattered over Bulga: octagons of bright, pale blue; more or less encircled by leafy groves. To outsiders, the liturgy of these churches may perhaps appear to be a strange affair. It’s conducted, in partnership, both by the clergy proper and by a semi-clerical class of choristers and dancers, the debteras, who are typically also poets, icon-painters, herbalists, and practitioners of talismanic folk-medicine. It’s chanted in Ge‘ez, a language largely unintelligible to the congregation. And it’s very lengthy; with people continually coming and going. Those who are physically able remain standing throughout. Most people stay out in the churchyard, not feeling worthy to enter the holy building. (Asfaw himself, when he attended services, always remained outside.) Each church is made holy by the presence, within its inner sanctum, of a tabot, a replica of the Ark of the Covenant – the original, it’s believed, being preserved at the church of Our Lady of Zion, in Axum near the border with Eritrea.³ Once a year, during the three-day feast of the Epiphany, the tabot of each church – carried on the head of a priest – is processed out of the building. Under an array of colourful umbrellas, and accompanied by jubilant crowds clad in white, it's carried down to the nearest water-course. Only priests are ever permitted to enter the chamber where the tabot is kept. And only unweaned infants, mostly, are considered pure enough to receive communion. The infants will have fasted, in preparation. So, at the climax of the Eucharist their mothers bring them, wailing, into the intermediate chamber where the sacrament is administered; and then bear them out again, all the while urgently fumbling around to give them the breast. After which: quantities of blessed, holy water are dispensed – poured and splashed – to the congregation at large.

   This is the world for which Asfaw was originally destined. Having for the first time seen the big city, however, the prospects of provincial church life no longer seemed enough, to him. And so it was that eight months later he ran away from home. With just fifty cents in his pocket, he made his way back to Addis Ababa. There, aged nine, he became a street-child. For fourteen months he spent his days as a vagabond: begging; running errands for the traders in the Mercato, the great market of Addis; conversing with the clergy of the cathedral within whose precincts he slept at night, out in the open.

   Then, one day, a Turkish woman – a seller of cheese in the Mercato – was transporting a basket-load of her merchandise along the street, when she tripped or collided with something, and the whole lot spilled out. Asfaw, standing nearby, immediately sprang into action. He gathered up, for her, the fallen cheeses from the ground. The Turkish lady, in her gratitude, stopped to talk with him. And, upon learning of his plight, she there and then made him an offer. He entered her household as a domestic servant; whilst she, in return, arranged for him to attend primary school.

   He stayed in that Muslim household for a further three years. Literate already, he raced through primary school; acquiring, not least, a good knowledge of basic English. When at length he sat the national Standard VIII exam, for entrance into secondary education, he passed with flying colours. Indeed, he gained such high marks in that exam as to qualify for a scholarship to the British-run General Wingate School, a ‘public school’ style boarding establishment for boys, founded in 1946; one of the three elite secondary schools in the then Empire.⁴ Having such a short while before been destitute, here he was, it seemed – to quite an astonishing extent – finally triumphant over adversity.

   But then disaster struck. After all, it turned out that the place he thought he had won at the General Wingate School had gone to someone else: to a rich man’s son, in fact, with lower marks in the exam, whose father however had intervened, and seemingly just could not be refused.

   Asfaw’s immediate reaction was to head for the railway station, and stow away on a cattle train heading down the Empire’s one and only railway line, to Djibouti on the coast. He drank from the same trough as the cattle. The journey took three days.

   Discovered on arrival, he was sent straight back. So, then he made his way to the General Wingate, and asked to see the headmaster. Impressed by the determination of this thirteen-year-old, the headmaster agreed to admit him after all; even though it meant paying the requisite fees out of his own pocket.

   When Tim and I were teaching at the Asere Hawariat, we were accommodated, and fed, at the General Wingate next door. I still remember the taste of the food: the identical dish of pasta every day. No sooner had Asfaw settled in, than he discovered that, after each meal, the kitchen staff were burning, or burying the quite considerable left-over scraps. Next door, there was a whole community of beggars sleeping rough under the eaves of the Paulos Petros Church, and under the larger monuments in its graveyard. Not much more than three years previously, Asfaw himself had been living the same sort of life. Therefore, he asked for permission to gather up those scraps of food, and distribute them over the wall. Soon, some of the children amongst the scrap-eaters began to ask for basic schooling, as well. He started to teach them, there under an oak tree by the church, at first on Sunday evenings; then also on weekdays, at the end of his own school day, from 4. 30 to 6. 00 p.m. Occasionally, some of the other Wingate boys would assist him. None of them, though, showed much lasting enthusiasm for the job.

   After three years, in 1957, abandoning the prospect of university education for himself, Asfaw dropped out of the General Wingate, to concentrate entirely on this other work. In 1960, the authorities at the Paulos Petros Church, anxious about the growing numbers of destitute street-children clustering on their premises, decided to prohibit it. At this point Asfaw decided to write to the Emperor, Haile Selassie, and petition for a grant of land on which to built a proper school. His friends laughed at him: “Look at the frog, who tried to act like a lion!” And yet, to his own amazement, the emperor wrote back, saying yes – in principle. Armed with this letter, Asfaw spent some frustrating months lobbying the Addis Ababa municipality, trying to get them to comply. But then came a day when the emperor was scheduled to visit the General Wingate School. Asfaw lined up his street-children along the road and, when the moment came, dashed out in front of the imperial limousine. This wasn’t long after Haile Selassie had survived an attempted coup (in December 1960), so he was surrounded with heightened security. Nevertheless, the car stopped. Asfaw was able to make his petition; the emperor reaffirmed his support. It didn’t work at once. Eventually, however, almost a year after Asfaw had received the imperial letter, the mayor gave way; and, with a little more delay at the next administrative level down, so too did the district governor. Asfaw had his patch of land. And he started to build: classrooms of eucalyptus and corrugated iron, to begin with; then, some mud structures; then, a little brick house for himself; then, a cheaply constructed but substantial orphanage.

   Haile Selassie visited the school. So did the Crown Prince Asfaw Wossen. The Ministry of Education started to pay Asfaw a salary; plus, salaries for some assistant teachers. He received some significant financial support direct from the emperor; some from the British staff at the General Wingate; also, some from overseas. Volunteer teachers started to come, from the U.S.A. and the U.K. By the time Tim and I arrived – which was when Asfaw was developing his most ambitious plans for the future – annual enrolment was over 1400 and still rapidly increasing. By 1974 there was accommodation for 380 orphans.

B. The Tragedy of the Ethiopian Revolution

   Originally, the Asere Hawariat was a primary school; by the time we arrived on the scene, a much smaller secondary school had, in addition, emerged out of it. We foreign volunteers were, in fact, largely teaching in the secondary school. And looking back, what I continue to find most deeply thought-provoking is the memory of Asfaw’s relationship with the adolescents in those higher-level classes. For, they were naturally inclined to think about gaining admission to the Haile Selassie I University; at that time, the country’s one and only institution of higher education. He however was absolutely opposed to this. He had not only renounced university education for himself. But he was also anxious to rescue as many as he could from what he had come to regard as the morally quite toxic environment of that university.

   Of course, it seems odd for a secondary school headmaster to be discouraging the ambition of his pupils to go on to higher education! One has to consider, though, the political context. The Haile Selassie I University, inaugurated by imperial decree in 1961, was a struggling, underfunded and under-equipped institution, with a very high drop-out rate.⁵ Nevertheless, it had begun to generate a new social class in Ethiopia: a secular intelligentsia. Many of its brightest graduates went on to study overseas. These formed the core of the new class; and, collectively, they were hungry for power, confident in their ability to modernise their homeland. Many of the Ethiopian students overseas responded warmly to the waves of student protest, during the later 1960s, in North America and in Western Europe. They read the works of Frantz Fanon, and other anti-imperialist texts. Haile Selassie’s regime was in close alliance with the U.S.A., and the student leaders were generally unhappy about this. They deplored the increasing Americanisation of the Ethiopian higher educational system. The corporate self-assertion of the Ethiopian intelligentsia very soon began to coalesce into a great upsurge of self-professed Marxism-Leninism.

   Clearly, there was much to criticise in the old regime. But this opposition to it was driven by an ideology of atheistic philosophic impatience: in spiritual terms, cutting the intellectuals off from their compatriots, whose interests they professed to champion, but who for the most part remained highly religious. And, as elitist Marxist-Leninists, the intellectuals – just as soon as they could – set about forming ‘vanguard’ proto-totalitarian political parties. Asfaw recoiled from this whole ethos. He could not be a follower of Marx and Lenin; inasmuch as his, after all, far more radically egalitarian inspiration was, instead, akin to that of the prophet Amos.

   The process of the Ethiopian intelligentsia’s radicalisation was, in its origins, astonishingly abrupt; and, in its consequences, utterly tragic. Thus, there had been no Marxist-Leninist involvement in the abortive coup of December 1960, led by the brothers Mengistu and Germame Neway.⁶ A few students had spontaneously taken to the streets in support, but the organisation of the coup was very much an affair internal to the imperial palace: Mengistu Neway being commander of the Imperial Guard. The rebels’ manifesto was largely the work of the younger brother Germame. It contained no hint of anti-American sentiment, and no element of socialism; rather, its chief demand was for a constitutional monarchy. The first actual Marxist-Leninist student society at Addis Ababa University was called ‘the Crocodiles’.⁷ The secretive existence of this society was first announced to the world (although without any reference to its Marxist identity!) in late 1964. As for the first overtly socialist demonstration in the streets of Addis Ababa: that took place in February 1965, a rally of university students, chanting the slogan ‘Land to the Tiller!’⁸ This led to nine Crocodile students being suspended from the university. A second march in May, protesting against these suspensions, was beaten up by the police. The emperor, at his most paternalistic, reproached a student delegation as if they were a group of naughty children; and conceded nothing. From then onwards the conflict escalated, inexorably. In 1969 the University Students Union of Addis Ababa elected a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary, Tilahun Gizaw, as its President. On the 28th December Tilahun was ambushed in the street, by two plainclothes policemen, and shot dead.⁹ Student strikes became a regular occurrence, not only at the University but increasingly also at secondary schools. The Asere Hawariat School was one of the few exceptions. Meanwhile, the riot police regularly used violence to disperse crowds of protesting students.

   Hiwot Teffera, in her memoir Tower in the Sky, recalls the struggle, during her days as a student radical at Haile-Selassie I University in the early 1970s, between the two imported ideologies: Pentecostal Christianity and Marxism. Both camps have, in fact, experienced rapid spurts of growth amongst educated Ethiopians; but at different times. And ‘Pentecostals’, she remarks, ‘were then an endangered species in a place where Marxism was the de-facto religion’.¹⁰ That is: ‘religion’ in the sense of impassioned dogmatic intolerance.¹¹

   Then, in early 1973 clusters of hungry people started appearing on the Addis Ababa to Asmara highway, where it crosses what was then the province of Wollo. They were stopping vehicles to beg for food. Shortly afterwards, radical students headed north, with cameras, to record the famine. The government’s response to what was taking place was one of stubborn denial. A march of about 1,500 starving peasants, headed for Addis Ababa, was turned back by the police. Journalists were, at first, refused permission to travel to the affected area. In October, however, a BBC team fronted by Jonathan Dimbleby filmed a documentary, The Hidden Famine. By the end of the year large quantities of foreign aid were at last arriving; delayed only briefly by a dispute, when the aid agencies refused to pay the hefty customs charges which the government had attempted to impose. The imperial regime was rapidly losing legitimacy, at home as well as abroad. Everything depended on the emperor; and now, in his old age, he no longer seemed to be at all up to the job.¹²

   Also in October, the Yom Kippur War precipitated a steep rise in oil prices, as the Arab oil-producing nations sought to do what they could in support of the Egyptians and Syrians. The Ethiopian government found it necessary to raise the price of petrol, which it controlled, by 50%. In February 1974, the taxi-drivers went on strike, protesting against the price rise. At the same time, the teachers’ union also called a strike. Militant students participated in riots. Luxury cars were attacked. So were the Addis Ababa city buses; the bus company being owned by the emperor. Already in January two mutinies had occurred at barracks in the south of the country; in February there were further mutinies in Asmara and around Addis Ababa itself. Air force planes circled over the city dropping protest leaflets; not yet openly attacking the imperial regime as such, but coming close. In March there was a major prison riot in the city. The Confederation of Ethiopian Labour Unions (hitherto a very docile organisation) called a general strike. There were strikes by employees of the Civil Aviation Agency, the Ethiopian Tobacco Monopoly, the Telecommunications Board, the Light and Power Authority, the Coffee Board, the Commercial Bank, the Highways Authority, the Water and Sewage Authority of Addis Ababa, the Addis Ababa Municipality, and the Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The emperor replaced one prime minister with another, perceived to be somewhat more reformist; and concessions were made to each of the various protest groups. By May, things appeared to be calming down. But in June the Derg, ‘the Committee’, appeared upon the scene; or, to give it its full original English name, the Co-ordinating Committee of the Armed Forces, Police and Territorial Army. The Derg was a gang consisting – not of the most senior – but of the most discontented, the most ambitious, the most ruthless, the most conspiratorial, officers. Indeed, the most senior officers were deliberately excluded, as being over-identified with the old regime. And the Derg, once established, was soon at work extending its powers. Already in July, the imperial government conceded it the power to arrest, not only other officers, but officials at every level of government. Before long, it was arresting considerable numbers. Finally, on the 11th September Ethiopian national television broadcast the BBC documentary about the Wollo famine, inter-cut with scenes of great banquets hosted by Haile-Selassie, and images of the emperor feeding his pet chihuahuas. Next day, the emperor too was arrested.

   Revolutionary student leaders who had been living abroad started pouring back home, eager to participate in the great events now unfolding. One of the first was Dr. Senay Likke. Senay had been a student of chemical engineering at the University of California; but also, president of the Ethiopian Students Union in North America (ESUNA). During his time as president, ESUNA had been riven between two Marxist factions, with opposing views on the campaign for Eritrean secession from Ethiopia. One faction supported it, just so long as an independent Eritrea was properly socialist. Ethiopia, they argued, was an intrinsically imperialist construct, no less objectionable in principle than the various European empires. The other faction, the one to which Senay belonged, disagreed: they were wary of any tendency to mix pure class struggle with, as they saw it, distracting ethno-nationalist sentiment. When Senay’s faction lost a crucial vote on the issue, in 1971, he had led them in a walk-out, splitting the Union.¹³ The prevailing attitude of the Derg was, also, very much in favour of fighting to suppress the Eritrean secessionists. And Senay admired the ruthlessness of the Derg. As he saw it, the Derg had great potential as a revolutionary organisation. All it lacked was proper guidance in the subtleties of Marxist theory, from an intellectual like himself. So, he set out to remedy this lack. As a means of getting his foot in the door, he began by wangling a part-time job for himself, as a trainer in martial arts for air force cadets. Then, he began networking. One thing led to another. In no time he had a political set-up of his own: the Waz Lig, or Proletarian League, mostly consisting of radical military officers. And he found himself invited to deliver lectures on Marxist theory to the leaders of the Derg, Major Mengistu Haile-Mariam and his colleagues. ‘It can’t be overstated’, the historian Ian Scott Horst remarks, ‘how important was Senay Likke’s role as transmission agent of radical ideology to Derg figures like Major Mengistu … Senay’s tough-guy image and his focus on building power would have absolutely appealed to Mengistu.’¹⁴

   Other returnees, meanwhile, were busy recruiting civilians into Marxist political parties. The two main ones were the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP) and Me’ison (an Amharic acronym for the ‘All-Ethiopian Socialist Movement’).

   The EPRP was created by a merger of Abyot (‘Revolution’), the largest underground Marxist group in Addis Ababa pre-existing the revolution, with the Ethiopian People’s Liberation Organisation (EPLO), a structure originally centred in Algiers, where a group of exiles had settled following the successful hijacking of a domestic Ethiopian Airlines flight in 1969, led by the charismatic Berhane-Meskel Redda.¹⁵ Notable strengths of the EPRP were its formidable Youth League (in which Hiwot Teffera was an activist); its deep penetration into the newly radicalised trade union movement; and its nascent army, with a rural base around Mount Assimba, a remote corner of eastern Tigray adjacent to Eritrea.

   As for Me’ison, on the other hand: it had been founded by members of the Ethiopian Students Union in Europe at a small congress in Hamburg, on the 1st—6th August 1968.¹⁶ Me’ison was, at first, an extremely secretive little group. But on returning to Ethiopia in 1974, its activists acquired a tumble-down house near the university, which they converted into a bookshop, selling all sorts of Marxist literature. And this establishment, the ‘Progressive Bookshop’, became a seething hive of revolutionary activism.

   Tensions between the EPLO and Me’ison were already apparent in August 1971, when the leadership of a long-running peasant rebellion in Bale province attempted to organise a nation-wide coalition of radical groups. Me’ison welcomed the move, whole-heartedly; but the EPLO was altogether more suspicious.¹⁷ This clearly reflected the different ethnic composition of the two sides. A large proportion of Me’ison members were ethnically Oromo, like the rebels in Bale; whereas the EPLO, and the EPRP after it, recruited primarily among Amharas and Tigrayans. Nevertheless, readers of Me’ison’s journal ‘The Voice of the Masses’ and the EPRP’s ‘Democracia’ would have been hard put to it to find much ideological divergence between them in late 1974 to early 1975. Both were, at that stage, calling for an immediate transition to democratic civilian government. And serious negotiations were underway from February to April 1975, to try and unify the two parties. These talks only broke down when the Me’ison leadership decided on a basic change of policy: abandoning their previous critique of the Derg for a new strategy of collaboration and influence-from-within.¹⁸ From that point on, relationships deteriorated steadily. The EPRP continued to recruit radical malcontents. Me’ison members filled the new urban neighbourhood associations, the kebeles, that the Derg had established at the grassroots level of local government in the city. Each side bitterly denounced the other as frauds, or traitors.

   Then, in September 1976, matters came to a head. On the 11th, New Year’s Day according to the Ethiopian calendar, the Derg finally declared all-out war, to the death, against the EPRP. And on the 23rd the EPRP’s Urban Armed Defence force attempted to assassinate Major Mengistu; who wasn’t yet the supreme leader of the Derg, but who was rightly perceived to be the most hard-line of the EPRP’s military opponents. That attempt failed; but in the following weeks it was followed by a series of other, successful assassinations; now, of Me’ison leaders. The regime retaliated brutally, arresting and executing EPRP members in large numbers. And so it was, in effect, that the ‘Red Terror’ began – although it was only some months later that the shameless state propaganda actually began to call it that. In February 1977 it escalated, following a decisive palace coup, when Mengistu rounded up and executed his major rivals within the Derg. Not everything went to plan for Mengistu on the day of the coup. One officer, a bystander observing what had happened, drew his gun and opened fire in resistance. Mengistu’s trusted intellectual adviser Senay Likke was amongst those killed. But now that he ruled as dictator alone, Mengistu’s blood-lust was unchecked. At a speech on the 17th April, to a great outdoor gathering in the city centre, he produced three bottles of fake blood. One by one he dashed them on the floor, where, in full view of the crowd, they shattered and spilled. Just so, he yelled, would the ‘counter-revolutionaries’ be broken; all their plots foiled; vengeance be visited upon them for all their crimes. The ‘counter-revolutionaries’: it was a portmanteau category. It included the little bands of monarchist guerrillas operating from over the Sudanese border; the Eritrean secessionists; the Somali rebels, in the south-east, and the Somali government forces which had invaded in support of them. But above all it meant the EPRP.

   Men in uniform were everywhere, stopping people, checking their papers, and searching them. Almost unlimited license was given to the Me’ison members and their colleagues in the kebeles, to hunt down suspected EPRP sympathisers within their patch; to arrest them, in house-to-house dragnet operations; to lock them up; to interrogate and torture them; and to finish them off. The killing was mostly done at night. Venturing out in the morning, the citizens would encounter the corpses. Often, these were laid out in neat clusters by the roadside: young men and women of the neighbourhood, each despatched with a single gun-shot to the head. Amongst them: children as young as twelve, sometimes, too.

   Imagine. Do you recognise one of the dead as your son, or your daughter; your brother, your sister? No show of mourning is permitted. On the contrary, the kebele officials may well summon you and your neighbours out, for a jubilant sing-song together: “How happy it makes us / to see anarchist blood flowing” (‘anarchist’ here being used as a mere curse-word!) Before you retrieve the body for burial, you’re going to need an official permit from the kebele. And for this they demand a fee: you must pay for the cost of the ‘wasted’ bullet.¹⁹ No pretence was made of judicial due process. The story is told of one roadside corpse tagged with an unsigned cardboard notice saying: “Sorry, this killing was due to a case of mistaken identity.”²⁰ How many other such cases didn’t elicit even that much apology?

   It took over a year. But, by the time that the Red Terror was officially declared to be over, in mid-1978, the EPRP, which had once been such a mighty movement, was virtually eradicated in Addis Ababa. Its journal Democracia was still, somehow, being published, as a last gesture of defiance. But most of its surviving activists who were not in prison had fled to the remote enclave of Mount Assimba; where they found themselves embattled not only against the forces of the Dergbut also against those of the newly emergent Tigray People’s Liberation Front. It wasn’t Me’ison, however, that profited from the EPRP’s woes. Totalitarian regimes cannot tolerate autonomous organisations of any kind. And so, no sooner had Me’ison played its key role in the battle against the EPRP, than Mengistu turned upon it, in turn.¹⁰ The leadership of Me’ison had been critical of the Derg’s increasing entanglement with the Soviet Union. But the members of the Derg were seduced by Soviet offers of military hardware; and by concomitant East German offers to share the technical expertise of their secret police. Soviet advisers denounced Me’ison as a Maoist party, a channel for Chinese influence; Sino-Soviet relations still being at that time extremely hostile. By the summer of 1977 the writing was on the wall. In late August the Me’ison leaders dispersed and fled to the provinces. There, though, they lacked any equivalent to the EPRP’s pre-prepared base on Mount Assimba; and it wasn’t long before they were picked up. Back in Addis Ababa, meanwhile, their followers now underwent the same murderous persecution as the EPRP had, before them.

   It was the group that Senay Likke had founded, the Waz Lig, which lasted longest; preserved for a while by its general subservience to Mengistu. Nevertheless, in the end even the Waz Lig became suspect to the dictator; as having at any rate the potential for independent initiatives. In September 1978 over a hundred of its members were massacred by firing squad. No further capacity for organised dissent was henceforth to be permitted. The Ethiopian intelligentsia, as a whole class, had over-reached. And in consequence, it had been crushed.

   (One little memory, from seven years earlier: I used to take off at weekends, to explore the country, and on one occasion I headed south down the Rift Valley, hitch-hiking into the lake district there. A car stopped to give me a lift, with two young men in it, who immediately introduced themselves as Communists. We stayed in the same hotel overnight, and they very kindly offered to take me out on the nearby lake the next morning. What they neglected to tell me was that they had an antique rifle with them, and that they planned to go crocodile-shooting. I remember, in particular, the momentary lurch of terror as a large crocodile roused by the gunshot came slithering out of the reeds and right under our rather flimsy boat, almost capsizing it. I think, now, of those two friendly gentlemen. God knows what eventually became of them …)

C. Asfaw’s Uniqueness Among His Peers

  THE RESTLESSNESS OF GRADE X

   But how was it for the youngsters of the Asere Hawariat secondary school, in the run-up to the Revolution? The Grade X class, for instance, of 1971 – 1972: a memorably restless, even somewhat truculent group?

   They were being taught, largely, by young American ‘Peace Corps’ volunteers; and by Tim and myself, from the U.K., who were even younger. Indeed, we were scarcely any older than they were themselves. However, the fashionable Marxist-Leninist ideology of their peers, in the other secondary schools of the city, and in the Haile-Selassie I University, was unremittingly hostile to the imperialism of the U.S.A. and the U.K. And their peers were regularly on strike, in generalised protest. The Asere Hawariat students were exceptional, in that they didn’t go on strike; restrained by their respect for Asfaw’s sheer moral authority, personally. And yet, at the same time they also had his voice ringing in their ears, saying things they really didn’t want to hear:

   “Don’t be seduced by dreams of academic success!
Don’t be seduced by the thought of a university career, as the path to a well-paid job, power and prestige!
But do as I’ve done, in my life!
You’ve been given the gift of an education, not just in order for you to get on in the world but, rather, to equip you to serve your brothers and sisters, the poor!
Don’t forget where you’ve come from!”

   And here were these ‘Peace Corps’ Americans, coming fresh from an ultra-privileged university education; this Irishman, this Brit, shortly to take up their ultra-privileged university places.

   Nor could the volunteer teachers in question by any means deny the global injustice of their privilege; with which the situation, in such troubling fashion, confronted them.

  FIVE OTHER REMARKABLE WINGATERS

   In order to gauge the true uniqueness of a free-spirited individual, one needs to consider them alongside the most nearly comparable of their contemporaries. Asfaw was a Wingater, who became a public figure. So, by way of contrast, let us briefly juxtapose his life to the lives of five other notably enterprising Wingaters from the same general period.

   The General Wingate School was destroyed by the Revolution, along with the other ‘elite’ schools in Addis Ababa; closing for good in 1977. But over the three decades of its existence, it had in fact produced a number of leading revolutionary intellectuals. Amongst them: Be’alu Girma, Haile Fida, Tito Hiruy, Surafel Kaba, and Meles Zenawi.

  (a) Be’alu Girma

   Born in 1939, Be’alu was just a couple of years older than Asfaw. He won a scholarship to the General Wingate in 1951. Subsequently, he went on to study Political Science and Journalism: a B.A. from Haile-Selassie I University, an M.A. from Michigan State University in America. Already during his undergraduate days, he was editor of the English-language university newspaper ‘News and Views’. And then, on his return from the U.S.A., he became editor-in-chief, successively, of a series of state-licensed publications: the Amharic weekly magazine ‘Ye-Zareyitu Ityopia’, the English weekly ‘Addis Reporter’, the English daily newspaper the ‘Ethiopian Herald’. In the final days of the imperial regime, 1970—1974, he was editor-in-chief of the main Amharic daily newspaper ‘Addis Zemen’. Under the Derg he was appointed, first, Deputy General Manager, then General Manager of the Ethiopian News Agency; supervising the media. In 1977 he was further promoted, to become Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Information, in overall charge of government propaganda, no less.

   Between 1970 and 1983, Be’alu also published six novels.²² Indeed, he has a reputation as one of the greatest novelists in the Amharic language.²³

   In April 1984 he disappeared, presumed dead. His car was found deserted, by the edge of the road near the town of Debre Zeit / Bishoftu. He had a little while earlier fallen into disgrace with the regime; been sacked from his job, and banned, by Mengistu’s personal order, from any other employment. This was in consequence of his 1983 novel Oromay, the narrative of which has, as background, the regime’s ‘Red Star Campaign’, launched in January 1982, against the secessionist Eritrean People’s Liberation Front.²⁴ Be’alu himself had been in charge of propaganda for the Campaign. But the offence of the novel simply consisted in its having shone a spotlight on what was – in actual fact – a catastrophe for the Derg, both militarily and politically. The central character, Be’alu’s alter ego, emerges at the end still driven by the propagandist revolutionary zeal proper to his job, yet at the same time altogether drained of hope; disgusted with civil war, as such; acutely aware of the hypocrisy of so many others on his own side. ²⁵ It’s a novel of zeal versus despair. The trouble was that the despair here rings far truer than the zeal. Did Be’alu really think he could get away with this? Perhaps he did. It may be that he relied upon his hitherto seemingly excellent personal relationship with the dictator. Mengistu is said to have encouraged the writing of the book; and to have granted him several interviews to help with it. Be’alu, it seems, showed Mengistu some early drafts of the text. And Mengistu had even contributed a Prologue.

   Be’alu’s earlier novel Ye-Qey Kokeb Tiri is a disturbing work, inasmuch as it amounts to a propagandist apologia for the Red Terror. And when Mengistu appears in Oromay (as ‘The Man’, or ‘Comrade Chairman’) Be’alu’s alter ego is shown virtually swooning with hero-worship. He knows that others will accuse him of sycophancy, but he indignantly rejects the criticism.²⁶ Nor is it only the narrator; everyone is represented as admiring Mengistu.²⁷ Is there an element of veiled mockery in the sheer extravagance of all this flattery; somewhat in the old Ethiopian tradition of ‘wax and gold’? If so, it’s well veiled.²⁸ Or is it just intended by Be’alu as a safeguard, to protect him against his enemies? Whatever is happening, it’s very troubling. And, at all events, whatever disguised irony he intended, if any, its disguise didn’t, in fact, save him.

   The book was published. Five hundred copies were sold in twenty-four hours. Then, in an abrupt change of policy, it was banned. Mengistu – confronted, it’s said, and persuaded, by his understudy Fikre-Selassie Wogderess – changed his mind. Indeed, the whole business was chaotic. The entire editorial staff of the publishing house involved was sacked. All remaining copies of the work in bookshops were removed. Anybody caught in possession of one was arrested. Photo-copies were soon circulating in every urban centre; government officials were selling confiscated copies on the black market, at sky-high prices. But what exactly happened to the author, in the end, remains a mystery.

  (b) Haile Fida

   Also born in 1939, and thus a contemporary of Be’alu at the General Wingate, Haile was on the one hand the most prominent leader of Me’ison; and on the other hand, a pioneer in the writing-down of the Oromo language in modified Latin script, the method (called Qubee Afaan Oromo) that has now in fact become the norm.

   From the Wingate, Haile moved to Haile-Selassie I University, where he graduated in Geology. After which, from the early 1960s, he was in Paris: an M.A. in Sociology and Social Anthropology, followed by a Ph.D. in Philosophy. In 1966 he was elected president of the Ethiopian Students Union in Europe. As regards the French context, he was politically very much a fellow-traveller of the neo-Stalinist Parti Communiste.

   Returning to Ethiopia in early 1975, Haile played a key role on the Me’ison side of negotiations with the EPRP; dealing with Berhane-Meskel Redda on the EPRP side. After the Me’ison leadership decided to abandon those talks, and to collaborate fully with the Derg, he was recruited (alongside Sisay Hapte, the chairman of the Derg’s political Affairs Committee) to a diplomatic initiative, on the government’s behalf, seeking to gain the support of six major Arab countries against the Eritrean secessionists. In December, when the Derg attempted to restructure its publicity efforts under the guidance of a so-called Provisional Office for Mass Organisational Affairs (POMOA), Haile was appointed its first chairman. And, in that capacity, he drafted a manifesto document, ‘The Programme of National Democratic Revolution’; which at a mass meeting on the 20th April 1976 Mengistu proclaimed to be a definitive statement of official government policy.

   Haile was a proud Oromo, originally from Wollega province in the west. The Oromo people are the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia; today, approximately one third of the total population. And there has now developed a strong Oromo secessionist movement. For his part, Haile himself never supported secession. But, clearly, he cannot have supported official Derg linguistic policy, either; which, in continuity with the policy of the imperial regime before it, strongly privileged Amharic, and allowed the writing of the Oromo language (Afaan Oromo) only in Ge‘ez / Amharic script. The issue had long been contentious. There’s a substantial Oromo oral tradition, but no ancient body of Oromo literature. Shaykh Bakry Sapalo (Sheek Bakrii Saphaloo, 1895—1980) was a notable Oromo intellectual, writing in Arabic on Oromo history, and on Muslim religious matters; but also pioneering the composition of Oromo poetry. In 1965 the imperial regime had placed him under house arrest. And in 1978 he fled from the Derg, to Somalia. The traditional transcription of Afaan Oromo into Ge‘ez / Amharic script is problematic, inasmuch as the latter is a syllabary rather than an alphabet, and Amharic only has seven vowel sounds to form syllables, whereas Afaan Oromo has ten. Shaykh Bakry, in 1956, therefore developed his own fresh syllabary for Oromo. Haile, however, developed a much simpler alphabetic (Qubee) alternative, which he demonstrated in a 1973 Afaan Oromo grammar book (published in France) and various other writings.²⁹ In so doing, he was adapting the work of nineteenth century German missionaries, working amongst the Oromo before the Emperor Menelik had conquered the Oromo lands and initiated the imperial policy of Ethiopianisation. But Haile was the first actual Oromo to apply systematic principles to the alphabetic orthography of his people’s language. And, following the downfall of the Dergin 1991, it was his version of Qubee that was by consensus adopted.

   Haile, following the downfall of his party, Me’ison, was captured by the forces of the Derg on the 26th August 1977. He was imprisoned. And then at some point in 1979 they executed him.

  (c) Tito Hiruy

   Tito was a somewhat younger Wingater. As a leading activist in the EPRP’s Youth League, he features prominently in Hiwot Teffera’s memoir. Thus, Hiwot was recruited into the EPRP by the man who was her lover, Getachew Maru; a prominent member of the Party’s Central Committee.³⁰ But when, in October 1975, Getachew decided that she should become enrolled in the newly formed Youth League, it was to Tito that he sent her. The meeting was clandestine, like all the EPRP’s activities. She remembers seeing Tito, for the first time, as arranged: ‘a young man with a huge Afro’ (matching her own) ‘a brown turtleneck sweater and a black leather jacket standing beside the [designated] bus stop. He was reading a newspaper.’ They had a little dialogue ready.

   “What time is it, please,” I asked the youngster casually and politely, pretending to be a passer-by.
“Sorry, my watch is broken,” he recited.³¹

   But then she got into a muddle, using the code name she had chosen and not telling him her real name. So that when a day or two later he rang, to inform her about a forthcoming cell meaning, and her little nephew answered the phone, the child was bewildered. No one in the family was supposed to know about her political activities. But the boy cried out, “Mummy, Hiwot has changed her name!” So, she was initiated into the complications of the cloak-and-dagger world she had entered.

   Hiwot and Tito became good friends. ‘We enjoyed our small talks during our individual meetings in cafés,’ she writes.

   We talked about the paternalistic attitude of the Party and how things were much slower there in contrast to the [Youth] League that glided on the fast-track. Meetings in the League IZ [Inter-Zonal Committee] were full of fire and enthusiasm. Tito’s dynamic personality inspired vigor and ardour. He brought energy, radiance and the sense of urgency to meetings.³²

   In the end, she remarks: ‘Of all the people I had worked with in the League, [Tito] had impressed me the most.’³³

   It was Tito who transmitted instructions to Hiwot, from the leadership: sending her on (extremely risky) expeditions north, with resources and information, for the comrades in Alamata and Mekelle. And it was also through Tito that she learned the tragic news of Getachew Maru’s expulsion from the Party; then, his detention by his former comrades; and, finally, his murder by them. Embattled loyalty to the Party constrained Tito from expressing anything more than the most tight-lipped sympathy. Yet, she does not blame him.

   Tito’s older brother Aklilu was Secretary General of the Youth League; and when Aklilu was arrested, in early June 1977, Tito succeeded him. In late November Tito in his turn was also arrested. At one point he was paraded on national television; and subjected to a humiliating interview.³⁴ Then, in April 1979 he was shot.

  (d) Surafel Kaba

   Surafel was also a Wingater-turned-EPRP-activist; but not in the Youth League. Rather, he became the head of the Party’s ‘Urban Armed Defence’ apparatus: dedicated to general banditry, and assassinations. His role was to organise death squads for the Party. Thus, it was Surafel who plotted, and led, the fateful assassination attempt on Mengistu Haile-Mariam on September 23rd 1976. The would-be assassins came close: one bullet hit Mengistu in the pelvis, as he dived for cover in his car. But he was only lightly wounded.

   And it was Surafel, also, who plotted the subsequent, successful assassinations of Me’ison leaders.

   This campaign was justified by the majority faction in the EPRP Central Committee on the grounds that the Party was already in mortal danger: over the summer Haile Fida’s party and Senay Likke’s Waz Lig had been busy compiling lists of EPRP members and sympathisers, to be shared with Mengistu’s people in preparation for all-out warfare. And, already, EPRP members were being arrested.³⁵ The writing, so the majority faction argued, was on the wall. Better take pre-emptive terrorist action! Nevertheless, at the crucial meeting of the Central Committee in August, there was fierce debate. A minority, most notably including Hiwot Teffera’s lover Getachew Maru, along with the famous veteran Berhane-Meskel Redda, remained implacably opposed to what they considered to be a suicidal course of action.

   In the hysterical atmosphere prevailing once the EPRP terrorist campaign was underway – and once the Derg’s Red Terror was surging in response – the majority in the EPRP began to wonder whether they could any longer trust the dissidents not to betray them to their enemies. So, they expelled Berhane-Meskel and Getachew. Berhane-Meskel left Addis Ababa. But Getachew didn’t. Invited to a meeting with his erstwhile comrades, he turned up – only to be imprisoned by them. The Derg’s forces were searching for the EPRP everywhere. Eventually, a time came, for the little group guarding Getachew, when imminent discovery seemed inevitable. Getachew knew where all the safe houses were – how could his guards let him fall into the hands of those who were searching? According to the story Tito Hiruy initially told Hiwot: when they heard soldiers knocking at the gate of their refuge, Getachew had insisted that they all try and escape. The squad leader refused, saying “You’re going nowhere!” and drew his gun. Getachew karate-kicked it from his hands, and jumped out of the window. Then one of his former comrades shot him in the back, and killed him. Later, Tito added other details he had learned. Having killed Getachew, they threw acid on his face, to render him unrecognisable; put his body in a sack, and dumped it in a corner of the lavatory.³⁶

   Years later, on the other hand, in prison Hiwot heard another version. The squad leader in question had been Surafel. And Getachew wasn’t shot. Surafel, she was told – after he had also been arrested – with a sort of perverse, wondering pride, boasted during interrogation that he had, in fact, personally beaten Getachew to death with a club. “We beat a comrade like Getachew Maru to death. We didn’t even have respect for a founding member such as him ...!”³⁷

  (e) Meles Zenawi

   As for Meles: he graduated from the General Wingate School just two years before the outbreak of the Revolution. (Presumably, when Tim and I were sharing the Wingate boys’ meals, he will have been there amongst them.) Unlike the four others discussed above, he didn’t die as a victim of Mengistu’s totalitarian regime. On the contrary, he became leader of the coalition that, in 1991, eventually put an end to it. And then he continued to be the dominant figure in Ethiopian politics, right up to his sickness and premature death in 2012.

   Like the other four however, Meles also began as a Marxist.³⁸ Dropping out of medical school in Addis Ababa, in 1975 he returned home to Tigray, and, out in the bush, joined what was shortly afterwards to become the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). There, he also founded the Marxist-Leninist League of Tigray (MLLT). This was a faction within the larger TPLF, which had originated as a purely ethno-nationalist guerrilla organisation. He became a member of the leadership committee of the TPLF from 1979; its chairman, from 1983. His power-base within the TPLF, the MLLT, adhered to Marxism-Leninism of the Hoxhaist variety: denouncing the Communist Parties both of the Soviet Union and of China for their supposed back-sliding, and siding with Enver Hoxha’s Albania instead. The MLLT became an increasingly dominant element within the TPLF; just as, later on, the TPLF as a whole became a dominant partner within the wider Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), battling Mengistu’s forces.

   But Meles was a political opportunist; not a doctrinaire bigot. And by 1991, when his army drove and marched triumphant into Addis Ababa, Marxist rhetoric had ceased to be opportune. The Soviet bloc had dissolved; and the Hoxhaist regime in Albania was clearly on the brink of collapse, as well. Visiting the U.S.A. in 1990, Meles had delivered a speech announcing the good news, to his hosts, that the TPLF’s platform was no longer best described as ‘Marxist-Leninist’, but that it had mutated into general advocacy of ‘Revolutionary Democracy’.

   In one respect Meles, to a large extent, achieved just what the activists of Me’ison and the EPRP had originally dreamed of. Namely: in place of the old aristocratic order, the creation of a highly centralised system of civilian meritocracy; rule by an enlightened ‘revolutionary’ intellectual elite, with authority grounded purely on appropriate expertise. Only, he abandoned their old – essentially dishonest – Marxist rhetoric of class warfare. Now that his own class, the class of intellectuals, was at last resurgent, why after all continue to pretend, as Marxist ideology in effect does, that they are not a class with distinctive corporate interests of their own? Why continue trying to cover up those interests with noisy propaganda, glorifying the proletariat and peasantry? Instead, in the period of Meles’s regime, it was ethno-nationalist sentiment – far more than any professed difference of class allegiance – which became the prime determinant of competing partisan identity amongst intellectual politicians.

   Meles presided over twenty-one years of relative stability and accelerating economic growth; accompanied by ruthless repression of dissent, especially after the general election of 2005, when the electorate, trusted for the first time ever with something genuinely approximating a free vote, returned (from his point of view) the wrong response – not actually toppling the regime, but giving it a serious fright.

   And, for good or ill, he was also amongst the most intellectual of rulers.³⁹

§

   As for Asfaw, on the other hand: coming from the same educational background as these others, he too was an intellectual, just as much they were. An avid reader, he was forever fizzing with ideas.

   But what above all marked Asfaw out, in this context, was precisely his quite different – far more critical, far more self-mistrustful – attitude towards the blinkered class-interests tending to be bound up with intellectuality, as such.

   For Asfaw, solidarity with the poor wasn’t just a matter of propaganda slogans. It wasn’t bound up with ‘scientific’ dogma, licensing rule by intellectuals, as the expert interpreters of that dogma. It wasn’t merely rhetorical accompaniment to coercive, pre-ordained projects of social engineering, directed from above. Far rather, it was what he had given up his whole life to, immersively; and it was what he longed for his students likewise to give up their whole lives to, immersively.

   Notwithstanding the personal backing he received from Emperor, Asfaw had on occasion fallen foul of elements in the chaotic old imperial regime; briefly, taken away by the police, handled roughly and interrogated. He didn’t like to talk about it. Then, in the early days of rule by the Derg, he was arrested again. Indeed, he was roughed up by the self-same interrogator, he complained, as under the previous regime. But now – the interrogator having switched loyalties – it was the fact that the Asere Hawariat School had in the past been given financial support, and had been visited, by the emperor that prompted suspicion. It was his cordial relationship with conservative figures in the Church. And it was his contact with foreign aid agencies. Yet, what was there in the actual work of the school to complain about? Asfaw wasn’t a politician, aspiring to a share in state power; he wasn’t a threat to the regime in that sense. And the Derg, too, wanted to do whatever could be done, to spread literacy. For one thing, if one’s spewing out written propaganda, one does rather want people to read it.

   So, he was at least able to survive. The basic work of the school continued. In fact, the annual intake of new children continued to grow throughout the 1970s and 1980s, peaking at 4,174 in 1988; with more or less equal numbers of boys and girls, and with Christians and Muslims indiscriminately mixed – the great majority of them, admittedly, Oromo by ethnicity, but that just reflected the make-up of the local population. The school had meanwhile evolved to become quite exceptional in Ethiopia for its strictly non-violent ethos. That is to say, it had become a school in which there was no use of the cane. And in what was still at that time a distinctly poor neighbourhood, it remained strictly a school for the poor.

  A SPONSORED WALK

   Yet, Asfaw’s wings were clipped. It was in those last days of Haile Selassie’s empire when Tim and I were there that he was really dreaming big. He was planning to develop the school into what, in Amharic, he called a ‘moya’. That’s to say: a would-be self-sufficient educational co-operative. His idea was that, if the experiment was successful, it would serve as a model for replication throughout the country; eventually transforming the whole culture.

   In the Easter school holiday in 1972 Asfaw organised a sponsored walk from Addis Ababa to Harar in the east, with a view to raising funds towards the initial establishment of the moya. As I remember, he was accompanied on this walk by seven or eight kids from the school, both boys and girls, plus myself. Tim being sick at the time, I was the solitary pink participant, a conspicuous anomaly. (The Americans, from the Peace Corps, joined us just for a single afternoon.) Altogether, the distance is officially about 322 miles by road.⁴⁰ In those days, it was by no means a well-kept or busy road. Sometimes we followed it. But we also attempted numerous short-cuts; some of which, as we had no map, ended up being considerable diversions. The terrain, along the southern fringe of the Danakil Desert, was gruelling. A fortnight in, I collapsed with heat exhaustion. Luckily, we were not too far from the road at that point; and providence intervened to rescue me, in the form of a Swiss doctor, driving west.

   It was above all during this fortnight that I feel I really got to know Asfaw. As a fund-raising event, the walk wasn’t actually much of a success. But I don’t think fund-raising had, by any means, been his only motivation in undertaking it. All along the way, he was keen to stop and talk with the people we encountered. His curiosity was aroused, he was exploring. This was a stretch of the Ethiopian hinterland quite different in kind from Bulga, the highland environment of his early childhood. In each place that we came to, I guess he was asking himself – since he envisaged moyas ideally being developed throughout the country – what it would take to develop one, say, in this sort of environment, or in this one ...

   Not long after we had left the big city behind us, we found ourselves in quite another world. We were sheltering from the mid-day sun under a tree when an elderly woman appeared, out of a nearby mud hut, kissed the tree and introduced herself as priestess of the spirit that dwelt within it. Did we see that nail, driven into its bark? From us, a bank-note impaled upon the nail would likely be an acceptable offering.

   Then, we started encountering Kereyu pastoralists, with their camels and cattle.⁴¹ Their arms stretched out along sticks or guns held behind their shoulders, hands loose, bandoliers containing ammunition slung across their chests, great curved knives in their belts, butter in their Afro hair, bodies theatrical in slender elegance. What was spooky, though, was their complete lack of eye contact with us. After all, we must have been, as an ensemble, quite an odd sight to them. And we were told such terrifying tales of their ferocity. We were told that, in order to marry well, the tribesmen of this region were more or less obliged, as proof of manliness, to present their prospective fathers in law with the severed testicles of a man they had killed. We were also told that they were currently in uproar against the government: furious about the enclosure of good pasture land by the Crown Prince’s farm along the banks of the Awash River, and by a newly opened phosphate mine. We were warned, repeatedly, that it was very dangerous to walk through this territory just now. I remember one night we got lost, and hid ourselves within some bushes; but could not sleep, for fear of those warrior-herdsmen. Before setting off, Asfaw had indeed notified the national police headquarters in Addis Ababa. He was hopeful of being granted an armed escort if at any point one was needed. A week into the walk, he rang them again, and when at last he got through, thought that he had been promised one, once we crossed the river into the next province. No one was there, at the bridge. He decided to press on. I was less sure. But we got through.

   Upon arrival in Harar, on the other hand, he defiantly announced that he would also walk the whole way back – was this, in part, to reassure himself, that he hadn’t been excessively reckless? If so, it didn’t exactly work out that way. At one point in the return journey, I was told, he heard gunfire. Ran. And saw a dead man sprawling in the dust.

  THE FATE OF THE MOYA

   Above all, Asfaw was now preoccupied with the needs of the peasantry. In 1968, when figures were compiled, it had been found that about 60% of the urban school age population in Ethiopia were actually attending school, whereas only 3.7% of the (at that point over ten times larger) rural school age population were. Asfaw envisaged the moya, eventually, as a model for spreading appropriate education and training to areas where there were no schools at all.⁴³

   But first he needed to develop a prototype in Addis Ababa, drawing upon the resources he already had. So, in 1972 he bought 86 ½ acres of mostly eucalyptus forest out on what was, at that time, the far edge of the city, about a mile further out than the original school, to serve as a second campus and main site for the additional elements required to convert the two campuses, together, into a moya.

   As Asfaw envisaged it, the purpose of a moya was to be a financially self-sufficient community, independent of the state, dedicated to the education and training of self-sufficient individuals, with a wide range of technical skills. The prototype would be built around his existing primary school, admission to which would continue to be free; and then there would be a smaller secondary school, admission to which would simply be conditional on a readiness to assist in the teaching of the primary school, and to participate in other aspects of community life, as required. There was to be a farm attached, and various workshops. A number of destitute families would be housed on site, to participate in the work. The community would hopefully subsist on the proceeds of selling its products: its members’ carpet-making and other forms of weaving; their embroidery; their tailoring; their carpentry; their pottery; their animal husbandry; their dairy products; their honey; and their vegetable production. Ideally, the moya would also include a clinic, serving the whole local neighbourhood; it would run a credit scheme; it would provide a marriage counselling service. There would be a library, with space for free film shows, public lectures and other meetings. All the building work would be done by community-members themselves. Besides a residential orphanage, there would be a ‘Child and Family Aid’ programme, seeking to place orphan children in foster-homes, and to support their foster-parents. Adult literacy classes would be provided; and the school-children, in general, would be encouraged to pass on as much as possible of their own learning to the adults in their families.

   With an army of children, he set to work: felling trees on the new campus; building classrooms – eucalyptus frames plastered with mud – and cadging broken bricks from the neighbouring brickworks to build the library, the weaving hall, and a substantial administration-cum-dormitory building. Over the following two years, substantial progress was in fact made, towards fulfilling his plan.

   But then, the imperial regime collapsed. In all the turmoil, it became unsafe for volunteer teachers to come from abroad. And without them, Asfaw judged it no longer feasible to continue with the secondary school he had developed for those graduating from Grade VIII. So, in 1976 it closed. Disastrously moreover for the moya project, the mass exodus of foreigners following the Revolution, along with the collapse in the real value of wages, also meant that the market for craft items of every kind drastically contracted. In 1975, the Derg nationalised all rural land, most urban real estate, and most industrial enterprises throughout Ethiopia. The nascent Asere Hawariat moya School, although still employing teachers funded by the state, remained in its commercial aspect an independent private enterprise. But state-owned enterprises were given privileged access to all sorts of scarce equipment and raw materials. The private sector was progressively squeezed out.

   In order for the moya as Asfaw conceived it to succeed, it needed to become financially self-sufficient. However, in these circumstances that was clearly impossible. The Derg had established a totalitarian state; not an environment at all favourable to free spirits of Asfaw’s kind. Asfaw might be tolerated, in view of the obvious good he was already doing for the poorest of the poor. Children still poured into his school. Meanwhile, the number of homeless street-children in Addis Ababa was rising fast: according to government figures there were about 60,000 of them in 1981. And at one point, Asfaw was caring for almost four hundred resident orphans; whilst the number of those whom he managed to place with families rose to about five hundred. However, the moya experiment as a whole had not yet had time to prove its worth. No one in the regime was at all likely to go out of their way to promote it.

  JANURY 1987

   There’s a rather poignant report on the school, dated January 1987, by the Harvard-educated expert in child development, Almaz Eshete, who was at that point an Assistant Professor at Addis Ababa University. The Swedish branch of Save the Children International, Rädda Barnen, which had long been a major sponsor of the school, commissioned her to write it. Almaz’s report is partly a picture of decay:

   The duck farm which at one point had a hundred ducks has stopped functioning. The school has fifteen bee hives, but there has been no production since 1982. The sheep breeding project has also stopped functioning. In the handicraft sector, the weaving school which … trained 271 people is no longer in operation.⁴⁴

   The projected moyaclinic had never quite materialised.⁴⁵ As for the seventeen destitute families cared for by the moya ‘Family Living Plan’: in 1980 a fire had destroyed their living quarters. Asfaw had in any case always envisaged weaning them, one day, from their dependence on the scheme. And they had been asked to leave.⁴⁶

   But this report also depicts an institution under constant pressure, from demand. Every year there were far more applicants than there were places in the school.⁴⁷

   Almaz describes the division of labour between the two campuses. On the one hand: the old campus accommodating the 34 first to fifth Grade classrooms, with 11 more under construction; plus, the head office and Asfaw’s ‘modest residence’; a big assembly hall; football and volleyball fields. On the other hand: the new campus accommodating the 26 sixth to eighth Grade classrooms; the library; the dormitory, then in the process of major renovation, with the boarders temporarily sleeping in classrooms; the kitchens; the poultry houses and the 5-hectare farm. ‘In contrast to the old site,’ she remarks, ‘this section of the school is located in a beautiful landscape with a well-planned compound adorned with trees and flowers’.⁴⁸

   When it comes to the living condition of the boarders, Almaz comments that ‘the children, especially the young ones, do not present the scrubbed, clean look usually found in child welfare institutions.’⁴⁹ She recognises that it was a matter of policy for Asfaw never to do things merely for show; a principle applicable to the outward appearance of the children in his care just as it was, also, to the outward appearance of the nevertheless quite serviceable classrooms that he built. And yet, there’s a hint of concern here. Was this, after all, a symptom of Asfaw taking on, at any rate when it came to the orphans, more than he really had the resources to manage?

   Overall, however, Almaz’s verdict remains overwhelmingly positive:

   The term ‘school’ is an inadequate description of AHS. It is more an exercise in community living and self-help, and a successful one at that. It is unique in many ways: in its idea, history, programme and concept of child care and education. The visitor to AHS leaves bewildered by the absence of fancy buildings and administrative infrastructure and by the presence of children, many children going their ways with very little commotion; a tractor parked here, hens … over there, cows mooing in the fields; the clatter of bricks being laid; and a middle-aged, drained and shaggy man, Asfaw the director, emerging out of it all.⁵⁰

   The main worry that Almaz registers is the apparently complete dependence of everything in the Asere Hawariat School on its founder. Besides him, at its administrative core there were, she reports, three secretaries, one treasurer and one record keeper. ‘They are all graduates of AHS and highly dedicated and protective of the school and Asfaw.’⁵¹ In 1987, he was still running everything quite single-handedly.

  LATER YEARS

   Eventually, on the 21st May 1991 – following a series of decisive military defeats inflicted by the rebel army of the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, backed by Eritrean forces – Mengistu Haile-Mariam resigned as president, after fourteen years of absolute power. One week later, at dawn on the 28th, the insurgents entered Addis Ababa: a column of tanks, accompanied by smiling troops in tattered uniforms. Two hours of fighting, around the presidential palace, ensued; plus a few other skirmishes. After which, Meles Zenawi’s people accomplished a remarkably smooth political transition. Mengistu fled to Zimbabwe, where he was granted asylum.

   The taking of Addis Ababa by Meles’s army involved just two incidents involving significant loss of life. One resulted in the death of 13 people. (That got significant international coverage, since one of those killed was a BBC cameraman.) The other (less widely reported) occurred about half a kilometre from the school, and resulted in 1,912 dead. A large crowd had, for some reason, gathered around a government facility, in fact an arms dump, which then exploded. Judging from the nature of the injuries received, some of what was in that facility was undoubtedly napalm. The result was catastrophic; many of the injuries were life-changing, and appalling. Asfaw, for his part, immediately opened up the school campus on the ‘Old Land’ to become a temporary field hospital.

   In addition, the school at this point also became a transit camp for demobilised soldiers, from both sides, who needed to return to their home villages. This was far from easy, as many had never ventured far from home and knew little of the geography of their country. Prior to being conscripted into one or other of the opposing armies, many had probably never travelled more than a few miles from the place of their birth. Once their place of origin had been ascertained, however, they were provided with a blanket, some cash, and a bus ticket home. 

  And after that?

   Asfaw’s entrepreneurial spirit still smouldered on. One other notable fresh initiative, in the 1990s, was located in a slum district close by the presidential palace. Much of the population consisted of young women, sex workers initially assembled there to serve the soldiers of the Imperial Guard and then, long after the emperor had gone and the Guard disbanded, also other clients. Many were little more than children themselves; the area was home to a large number of teenage mothers. Popularly known as a ‘place where people cry and nobody hears them’, this was a neighbourhood characterised by extremely high population density, poor housing, poor infrastructure, low literacy levels and, apart from prostitution, poor employment opportunities. In 1993 the local kebele administration asked Asfaw to come in and take over the running of a small kindergarten there. The project was largely funded by the building of public toilets and a shower block, the proceeds of which covered almost all the kindergarten running costs. Its full capacity, achieved by 1997, was 260 children – and it became a haven of almost rural tranquillity in a squalid urban environment. In addition, the Asere Hawariat moya ran training courses in the neighbourhood, so that local people could have marketable income-generating skills. And a micro-credit scheme, run by the local people themselves, was also successfully initiated.⁵²

   Otherwise, however, the final three decades of Asfaw’s life were to a large extent consumed in a constant, frustrating struggle simply to keep the Asere Hawariat School, and its associated projects, going; with all too limited funds.

   The environment changed, as the country prospered: the city rapidly grew, both upwards and outwards; and, in fact, the immediate neighbourhood of the school started to go somewhat up-market. Meanwhile, two sources of funding on which Asfaw had once relied fell away. From the 1960s onwards, the Ministry of Education had paid the salaries of about half the teachers. Under the post-Derg regime, however, the Ministry decided that Asfaw had a choice: either to integrate his school fully into the state system, or else to go fully independent. He chose independence, and they withdrew their support. The Swedish charity Rädda Barnen had for a time been Asfaw’s other mainstay, supplementing the Ministry’s contribution. But then Rädda Barnen’s income from the Swedish church tax system fell. And in view of the steady growth of the U.K.-based Asra Hawariat School Fund run by Tim Kinahan, they too decided it was time to withdraw. Thus, the support provided by the Asra Hawariat School Fund became increasingly vital. Although the number of students enrolled in the school each year dropped somewhat during the 1990s – from the peak of 4,174 in 1988 – it then plateaued at around 1,200 to 1,500. ⁵³ The work continued; and, as I’ve said, still continues today, under the capable leadership of Asfaw’s widow Senayat.

   In vivid token of his hero-status in Addis Ababa itself, numerous taxis, for example, emblazoned with his image circulate through the city; alongside others similarly celebrating sports and pop stars, and popular politicians. In 2001, moreover, he was one of the very first recipients of the World’s Children’s Prize – sometimes known as ‘the Children’s Nobel Prize’, being similarly based in Sweden, although the selection-process for laureates involves school-children from around the world, voting. And in 2010 he was awarded the biennial prize of Tierra de Hombres, Spanish branch of the international federation of children’s work charities Terre des Hommes.

   His bold dreams of the early 1970s, on the other hand, were never fulfilled. With regard to those dreams, fate defeated him. Yet, he surely was a sort of saint.