One of the benefits at these stripped down African places was no muzak, no funk, no artwork, fliers &etc. The Muslim Eritrean in particular carried almost no decoration, providing an unusual kind of refuge.
And a guy coming into a cafe with a transistor hadn’t happened anywhere the last thirty years at least.
Election Day up in the north; here there seemed to have been a real war declared somewhere. A new war, with no apparent advance notice, no lead up.
War? Where?
Only slowly the man answered, as if he had been pressed to own up to something untoward. Ethiopia.
The guy at the table behind with the radio, sitting with this compatriot he had to be, said he was Ethiopian.
The man was not from Tigray himself, but from the east, the Somali border region. In fact looking at him he had been guessed to be Somali; not one of the regulars at Faisal’s, or his brother Fausi’s place.
Mid-forties and older than the companion who kept quiet, the one holding the radio in hand for the pair of them.
Ethiopian; not identifying as Somali-Ethiopian, as some did in the borderland. (The third largest group in the country were Somalis, though far smaller than either the Amharic or Oromo.)
The book being read was appropriate and especially timely then, even though it dealt with a war of another era—the mid ’30 attack by Mussolini’s forces.
The Shadow King, recent Booker shortlist. It was one of those rare books you persevered with despite the conventional, overblown prose. Airport fiction really that might make a movie were it not for the setting.
You read for the history and the granular cultural matter, Wikiped on hand for filling in the gaps. In one paragraph passing references had turned up such buried items as the Italo journo wiring back home who had bought himself a 12 y.o. Eritrean girl. After she had been used up, as used to be said, the girl was sold on to a general.
In the Wiki listing the man concerned, Indro Montanelli, who went on to become a notable historian and opinion writer for a major newspaper, slipping around in his politics like so many of that generation, and not only that generation, once Montanelli was quoted referring to his child sex slave as “a small animal.”
This was Africa. The reminder lagged a little that it was also the time of racist lynchings and murderousness in so many locales.
Years later in Milano Brigate Rossi had attempted to assassinate Montanelli.
In the same paragraph another of the mentions of reporters turned up the US journalist who had first interviewed Castro up in the Sierra mountains in the early phase of the rebellion against Batista.
Faisal at the cafe didn’t know Montanelli, but added his own grandmother had been married at the age of ten. Children, however, Faisal was quick to add, did not come until the grandmother was nineteen.
109m population; second largest in Africa. Could be explosive, worse than Yemen, Iraq or Libya, commentators suggested. Just last year the President Abiy Ahmed had won the Nobel Peace Prize, largely for finally managing to bring the war with Eritrea to an end and beginning normalisation. Mixed Oromo and Amhara, brought up by his mother and like his wife, despite the name Abiy was Christian.
The Tigray region that bordered Eritrea and was resisting rule from Addis was another small component of the Ethiopian nation state, but with outsized wealth and former influence.
On the footpath in Irving Street someone with prior knowledge had already scrawled ABIY MUST GO! In the days later the same had cropped up on shop shutters elsewhere in Footscray.
In Melbourne the numbers of Eritrean and Ethiopian were equal, no sign of trouble between them to date.
In 1935 the Italians had gone down through Suez to Masawa, the Eritrean port, forging south toward Addis from there. A few short years later of course they would take the shorter crossing to Montenegro; (in the European theatre the Italians had needed to wait on Hitler’s lead). Dondo Nikola, who married Bab’s younger sister, had lost a sister of his own in a Partizan bombing of one of the occupier’s lorries. Selling the produce on the coast with a companion from the village, the girls had caught a lift with the obliging foreign gallants. Great Aunt Jane settled down on the waterside at Kostanica had lost a cat to a guardpost near her house. A short while before the zabari, frogs had attempted to buy her handsome gato. Having been refused they simply stole her. It was well known the Italo predilection for frogs extended to cat meat too.
Most of the men at Faisal and Fausi’s cafés had had their grandfathers conscripted into Mussolini’s army, mostly willingly it seemed. Tensions across the Horn on that territory went back numbers of generation through successive Ethiopian overlords—Yohannes, Menelik and others were mentioned.
It had always been a pleasant surprise how much friendliness and intermingling had occurred between Christian and Muslim Eritreans, then also the Somalis, Sudanese and the others into the bargain.
Not unexpectedly given Faisal’s nature, his grandfather had preferred prison rather than fight against his brothers over the other side of the river in Ethiopia. Later he and men like him were transported to the warfronts in Libya and Somalia.
Tribal leaders had been bought off by the Italians, Faisal suggested, selling off their fellows. Other men suggested enlistment in the fight against Ethiopians was perfectly willing. In the online potted histories pre WWI army service was said to be one the chief income sources for the male population of Eritrea.
1935 when Shadow King opens was the year before Lazar went up to the house at Savici with his older brother and brother-in-law seeking a wife. Six years later during the Italian occupation the couple parted after the elder brother’s ruse to get himself and his brothers out of harm’s way there on their hill at Bijela. Uncle Jovan had been drawn into interpreting for the Italians. A former gendarme commander was automatically marked by the Red Partizans.
Never to return to their home the brothers, leaving their bones in the foreign land. Immigration. Australia. Melbourne. A rupture that is a whole other long story.
Smallest incidental and tangential fragments from the era and the region were valuable, even from a theatre of war many hundreds of kilometres south. The brothers would travel through the Red Sea coming out, right past the Eritrean port of Masawa.
The murderousness was possibly even worse, and possibly much worse, in Libya, Somalia and Ethiopia. And all the new friends of the last twenty years from Eritrea had, like our Croat Slav compatriots, come from families who had “collaborated” with the Italians in the assault on their neighbours. Fuller comprehension of political movements and events had been a necessary lifetime study. The late German and Italian attempts at empire. The earlier “successful” English, Spanish, French, Dutch and Portuguese. The current American. Threads brought together. One had been a political animal from the outset without too much consciousness earlier. From early childhood there were only ghostly memories of men gathered around the kitchen table sitting close in conversation; replicated in the Eritrean cafes.
Marking the blunt, bald prose in the book with squiggles continued to the end pages. One needed to be better than that. And the outrageous blurbs from Rushdie, the NYT &etc.
