To Asmara

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To Asmara

A Novel of Africa

Thomas Keneally

To my family

who allowed me for a time to travel

with the compassionate Eritrean Relief Association

and

the brave Eritrean People's Liberation Front

The Author's Note

This is an attempt at fiction. There are nonetheless references to Eritrean events of 1987 and early 1988, though these have sometimes been compressed or relocated for fiction's sake.

As for the normal disclaimers about character, I hope the reader will accept the following: If there is a BBC correspondent in Khartoum, Stella Harries is not intended to represent that person. If there are a number of Ethiopian officers held prisoner by the Eritrean rebels, there is no evidence that—though disowned by their government—any of them ever collaborated with the Eritreans in the way Major Fida does in this account. If there is a cinematographer who has chronicled the struggle of the Eritreans, Masihi is not intended to resemble him either in person or family history. Similar reservations could be expressed about Darcy, Lady Julia, Christine and Henry. They merely stand as the author's poor simulacra for those folk, Africans and Europeans, who are drawn to Eritrea and find there all the horrors and all the extraordinary hopes.

Thomas Keneally

May 1989

Editor's Introduction

Recently, Stella Harries went back into the mountains of Eritrea, to the great rebel Eritrean base cantonment of Orotta, by the same route as that taken by Darcy and Henry, Lady Julia and the “child” Christine some months past. Ms. Harries traveled briefly to the front line as well, and even beyond it, but she was not able to visit the area to the west of the city of Asmara where Darcy was last seen. Not only is this region of high plateau a battlefield, now more than ever, but there are rumors too that, with most of its military credit gone, the Ethiopian regime, which is fighting the Eritreans, will resort to unleashing chemical weapons against the rebels.

There are other factors which inhibited Ms. Harries' travel. One was that in Eritrean villages high behind the Nacfa Front and in the dust bowls of Barka province, famine—always there in waiting behind the corner of the next erratic season—has come down harder still. Yet again, the so-called
late
rains have not appeared in what they call the Sahel, the sub-Sahara. Ms. Harries was conscious that the space she might have taken up in vehicles could have been better devoted to a couple of bags of sorghum.

The second factor which limited her movements was the scale of what's been happening there since the time of Darcy's disappearance. In the mountains, and all along the old Italian road where Darcy was last seen, there have been since March massive battles in which thousands of men and women were engaged and which, for all the world heard and hears of them, might as well take place on the moon's dark side. Again, Stella found space on trucks, coming and going, reserved for the wounded, and traveling to any timetable was impossible.

On top of that, she was delayed in Orotta by a recurrence of the malaria she originally caught in the Sudan some time back. The exhaustion of the trip and the weakness caused by continuous diarrhea left her wide open to the malarial infection in her blood. At first sweating and ranting, then helpless and somnolent, she lay in Orotta ten days. On getting up to go on with her inquiries, she collapsed again and had to be trucked back to the Sudan in a weakened state.

We know from Ms. Harries' inquiries, and the mass of taped and written material, including interviews, which Darcy left behind in his pack and which Stella brought back to the Sudan with her, a great amount about Darcy's time with the Eritrean rebels.

With a few exceptions which will become obvious to the reader, we therefore present the story of Darcy's journey into Eritrea with the “child” Christine, with Henry, and with Lady Julia, the elderly English “female affairs” warrior we shall meet later. Among the exceptions, however, are certain events to do with the Ethiopian p.o.w. Major Fida and incidents of which Darcy either could not have had knowledge or else, even given his energy for writing and recording, did not have time to note down.

The Rock Singer

I suppose my connection with the Eritreans, brave and starved creatures of the Horn, began not with my first visit to Africa but a little later, with something I and half the world saw on television. In my case, the television was located in an airshaft-facing room at the Hotel Warwick in New York.

I had just been to Colorado on a cheap flight to do an article for
The Times
, the London not the New York version, on the plight of the Ute Indians. These days getting by on a portion of arid mesa in the southwest of the state, the Ute once owned all that land which is now occupied by a string of glittering ski resorts west of Denver.

On my way back to London, while I ate my breakfast in my hotel room in New York, I saw the rock star appear on the screen, saw that solemn, youngish, straw-hatted man with dark, lanky hair, that face so familiar to people in the West, so drawn down by the weight of its own humanity.

The news segment we all saw that day went like this: The rock star stands by a small tor of bagged wheat. The wheat itself, the rock star tells us, lies outside a famished town called Mekale, in the Ethiopian province of Tigre. Behind him and beyond the wheat pyramid rises a great cliff of primal rock, and beneath the brow of this escarpment sits a crowd of villagers, their wives, their children. The men all carry wands in their hands: They are goat herders, though as the rock star soon tells us, most of their goats have died. They crouch on their haunches. Their free hands are cupped over the skulls of girl or boy children with hair cropped in an African manner, only a forelock growing freely.

These gestures of the fathers in the newsclip, this framing of the children's shaven heads with the fathers' hands, seems to be a statement: “Here is my child, precious above all others.” Nonetheless the viewer is aware that a frightful patience and etiquette restrains the peasants from being vocal. They are stoical people. They deserve—you feel—a benign prince, even a benign God.

Still in the television clip, the famous singer in the straw hat shows us a particular child. Ethiopian officials seated at a table in the open are measuring it for height. Next, through an editorial cut, he makes some comments on the measurement of the same child's arms and legs. The sad dimensions of the child's hunger are marked down in a book by the Ethiopians at the table. The singer remarks that these meager centimeters shame the world.

Then, shaking his head at the camera, he begins to display more than a mere editorial outrage. His authority to be angry in an ancient, prophetic way arises—as I know—not only from what he sings to the world's young. Because the truth is, his songs aren't particularly well known. His authority comes from this: that the last time Ethiopia starved, he persuaded the big groups—Heaven Sez, The Judge, Messiah, and so on—into a performing consortium called Worldbeat, to sing on behalf of the stricken peasants of Ethiopia. Money was raised from records, tapes, and performances. Western governments were shamed into matching gestures of goodwill. Foods and medicines were packed into donated Hercules aircraft and flown to Ethiopian provinces where the greatest need lay. The Ethiopian government had been able to restrict and dominate the movements of most aid bodies, even of the Red Cross. But the singer and the Worldbeaters were too famous for Ethiopia's handsome dictator Mengistu to hamper and tyrannize. Hence the rock groups' grain went wherever the famed singer on good advice—on somewhat better advice than the sort of advice you get from dictators—wanted it to go.
Worldbeat
was a song, a surge of rock and of goodwill, to end all famine.

And yet now again, the rock star in the film clip tells me in my hotel room and the world in all its diverse locations, the catastrophe has repeated itself.

You could gauge from the suppressed anger in his voice that he is wondering how he will find the strength to do it all again, to appeal to the groups and to the youth of the West, who believe they've already dealt with the problem last time and for good. A genuine fury enters his face and makes his mouth taut. People still remember now, a year or more afterward, what the rock singer says then: Despite the cries of these children, a food convoy of some thirty trucks, on its way to an area just as stricken as this one, has been attacked by rebels and destroyed with grenades. These rebels are the Eritreans from the north, he says. They have fallen on a line of vehicles on its merciful way from the city of Tessenai and have obliterated hundreds of thousands of dollars of aid. The trucks in question, the singer assures us all, bore the insignia of the UN, the Red Cross, Worldbeat, other humanitarian groups. The Ethiopian drivers of the trucks have been harassed, and one was killed as his truck exploded.

These Eritrean rebels then, whose name the rock singer uttered so tightly, a little like a curse, were fighting against the central Ethiopian government, and had been for more than a quarter of a century. The rock singer had little patience for the willfulness which made them fight. There is no pity from them, said the rock singer. There is no pity. There is only the ancient lunacy of politics.

As captivated as I was by the rock singer's authentic grief, I had a sense of the man's knowledge of the television medium working under the surface of the footage. He knew how long he would get on network news. He knew there was time for him merely to state a scenario: a disaster and a cause, a crime and a culprit. Forty-five seconds. Given this rigid scale, and his genuine outrage, he knew that you didn't muddy the prime-time water by suggesting that the story might be complex, that there might be more than one evildoer.