Casa di Bambini in Asmara

KIDIST PAULOS ASRAT, who lives in Canada today, was born in Ethiopia. Her father worked for the government of Emperor Haile Selasie and the family fled to France during the civil war of the 1970s, which was followed by catastrophic famine. Miss Asrat is at work on a memoir of her life, and it is a fascinating story. Her first chapter is online. It begins:

My earliest decisive moment was when I was left behind for the first time for school. I was a little more than two years old, and my father had moved us to the northern province of Ethiopia, which was later to be the ground for bitter civil war, and its eventual secession.

It was part of the government’s program to fill official posts by the Emperor’s Men, so to speak, throughout the country, to quell dissatisfied grumblings of the influential ethnic groups like the Tigray (of the north) who wanted to end the centuries-old stranglehold on Ethiopia by the Amhara. But the Amhara were confident in their quest, and in the correctness of their quest. They were on a mission to make Ethiopians out of all the ethnic groups of the country: Tigray, Eritrea, Gojjam, Somali. To be a nation was to be modern. 

The Amhara, or as they would call themselves, the Ethiopians, were confident, and even cocky. It was 1963, and the Organization of African Unity had been formed led by Haile Selassie and Ethiopia. The OAU headquarters were established in Addis Abeba with a modern building designed by Arturo Mezzedimi, an Italian architect. Haile Selasie had made his second visit to the United States in 1963, with President Kennedy, which was even more successful than his first visit with President Eisenhower in 1954. The United States recognized this outpost of an African country, and was generously offering scholarships to talented students to pursue graduate and post-graduate degrees in America.

Many Ethiopians came back with the dream of America, the large, confident, friendly and happy country, and were determined to transform their own country with its example. The Americans sent assistants, teachers, consultants, and experts to help this curious, remote country, with an intricate culture and an undecipherable people. Ethiopia embraced modernism, and archaic regional discordance was not tolerated. The country had to stand in unity as a modern country and as a leader for the rest of Africa. Schools, institutions, and homes were rising up in Addis Abeba, making it a modern and cosmopolitan city.

The world looked beneficently at this land in the northern tip of Africa, which boasted 3,000 years of history (and 360 days of sunshine), and was mentioned in the Bible twice. What country could show such closeness to God? Even that admirable Great Britain, with its Queen Elizabeth, whose ancestor Queen Victory had received a marriage proposition from Emperor Menelik, an ancestor of Emperor Haile Selaise’s, was just another European country, more admirable than others, but still the land of the whites, the fereng. The golden-skinned Amhara, with their God-given country, surely surpassed them all.

Yet, the tight knit Amhara, which had settled on the central highlands of Ethiopia, and over the centuries established themselves as the leaders of the disparate groups that surrounded them and whom they led with careful magnanimity, still couldn’t control these surrounding territories. The centralized government, which Haile Selassie had constructed, writing the country’s first constitution in 1934, and finding it necessary to amend it in 1963 to give him more power, was not working as well as the tributaries which his predecessor Emperors had ran, where they gave much of the reign over to the regional leaders, and periodically insisting some kind of token loyalty, and the rise to arms in times of war. Rather than this patchwork of unity, what Haile Selassie wanted was a true, unified nation, with one language, one religion, and one people. It was a naive ambition, with dire consequences.

My two-year-old mind was surely not concerned with such lofty revolutionary thoughts, but rather with getting through the day without crying. I think I made it, since I have never been one to cry.

[See more here.]

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