Goodbye to the Ethiopia I Invented
I. Departure
In August 2017, I went searching for my grandfather’s home. He had come to what was to later be called Kenya as a teenager in 1917, escaping the slavery and serfdom of southwestern Ethiopia. And now, a century later, I was making the same journey in reverse, seeking to fill holes in the inherited family lore and the narrative of my identity.
All I knew about him was who he had been in Marsabit, the town in Kenya which he had moved to, and where I had grown up. This was a recent heritage. I wanted to unearth what had come before. I spent time re-imagining the life of my grandfather. Dreaming of the abandoned land of Ethiopia. Only seeing and experiencing and seeking answers to the ever-swirling questions was going to hold me.
By the time my father was born, my grandfather had been in Kenya for about forty years. He’d made Marsabit his home, the question of a return to Ethiopia long settled. In 1953, some Burji families had tried to return to Ethiopia, but they’d fled back to Kenya, the demons they’d run away from still prowling the fringes of the Ethiopian state. In 1963, Kenya became an independent country, and people like my grandfather had gotten a final irrefutable claim to a Kenyan identity.
By the time I had organized my affairs to actualize my journey to my grandfather's village, my father was a retired civil servant. I had moved back into his two-roomed house, which he had built before his retirement. I worried that a retired man living alone would succumb to the loneliness of old age. I assumed that by living with him, I was offering him a softer landing. But now I was leaving, abandoning him to his solitude.
My father said little as I prepared to leave. I felt guilty abandoning him. Outside the door, he stopped me and said, “Go along the road of peace.” I looked away as he spoke, then left.
In Marsabit, I took a matatu to Moyale. Moyale is a frontier town on the Kenyan border with Ethiopia, 260 kilometres north of Marsabit. I watched the tarmac pass by, the car going past the low-lying country north of the montane home I was leaving behind, past plumes of dust, and past campaign posters from the just concluded general elections in Kenya. There was an exhilaration in my thoughts. Ethiopia, the grandmother country, offered enough fantasies to displace the silences and the difficult histories of my grandfather’s escape.
Ethiopia’s enchanting myths were endless. Marcus Garvey and Black America’s myth about it as the land of freedom. The claim that Ethiopia was an uncolonized Black country. That it had an emperor. Its emperors had mixed their familial lineages with Biblical legends, the most important stating they were descendants of King Solomon. These myths were beguiling to a Kenyan who was told their grandparents had come from Ethiopia. The myths filled up the grand gaps that Kenya could not fill. They replaced the fear that Kenya gave: of police brutalities and wars, of human rights abuses and the forgotten.
Ethiopia, mass culture showed us, offered the colonial world a salve against all forms of oppression. It offered redemption and liberation. I had grown up on this hope, sold to us through reggae songs on Radio Africa’s session on lazy Sunday afternoons. It soothed me and fired my imaginations of a holy and enchanting world. Reggae’s popularity in Kenya didn’t help. Its iconography was everywhere: The emperor’s face projected as a lion’s mien on a backdrop of khaki, posters that proclaimed him the Lion of Judah. On the radio, I listened to Joseph Hill of the Mighty Culture sing, “There is a land/Far far away/It’s called Addis Ababa.” Ethiopia’s capital gleamed in my imagination, better than anything Nairobi could ever be. Addis Ababa was a land of vibrations, positivity, liberation, and redemption. This fantasy was a lie. The stability of our lives in Kenya sheltered us from the stories of serfdom and slavery, of fleeing women, of Oromo protests, of endless brutalities.
In Kenya, as they slipped into the safety of a colonial outpost, my grandfather and his peers from Ethiopia were forced to marry local Borana women. In time, this meant that very few of the children born in Kenya from the early 1930s spoke the Burji language or knew much about its culture. Later generations, like me, only spoke Borana. We knew very little about our grandfathers’ homeland in Ethiopia. There were some mysteries hinting at great disturbances—whispers of ominous powers attributed to the Burji mountains. There was a malevolent spirit called Gome who reigned in that land. Sad events in Kenya were linked to its workings; children who ran mad, accidents, sudden failures, sons dying unfulfilled, unexplained illnesses and misfortunes. People were told they had to go back to reconcile with their relations back in the old country, or Gome shall follow them.
The land was new but the workings of the old spirits were still present.
My grandfather's own story, dug out by curious boyish probing, was filled in year after year. He came to Kenya, and in Moyale met a South African road construction crew. He was employed as a cook. He was diligent. His employer took him to Nairobi via Isiolo. The Catholic Church gave him his second job. They put him in a school. In 1924 he was baptized, and in the mid 1930s he got married. He worked as a catechist near Nairobi. By 1948, he was back in Marsabit and worked for the Catholic Church until his death in May 1978, in the arms of his children.
I spent the night in Moyale. In the morning, I walked past money changers holding wads of green Ethiopian birr notes to the bus stage to take a matatu to Yabello, which was the next big town, 200 kilometres north of the border. In the car, I turned on my Google Maps. The distance from the Ethiopian border to my destination could be made in a day. I wondered how a home so close could have been so far away.
II. The Architecture of Fantasy
My grandfather’s story is told as a story of fulfillment. He had accomplished himself as a catechist, an elementary school teacher, and a farmer. His peers had equally made themselves. Their children had gone to school and into government employment. They had embraced the gospel and remained steadfast in its consoling stories of renewal and re-birth.
The Burji boys, including my father, had provided labour and organized church services for missionaries in Marsabit throughout the 1940s, even as the missionaries and the British fled from Italian bomber planes. But by the 1950s, these farmers were already pushing the limits of the world as planned for them. The general attitude of the British colonial administrators was one of containment in the “slave village” and their ambition was to be limited to the farms as food producers of the tiny imperial outpost. Their sons were not allowed to progress beyond fourth grade; one man saved enough to buy a car but was not allowed to complete the purchase. They protested the limits placed on them, and the first organized group to want to return whence they came left in 1953. This exodus was led by the man who was denied his car. It wasn’t surprising, this departure. Some of those who had come to Kenya had never lost the vision of going back to the Burji mountains.
When Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, the Burji had fought alongside the Italians. When the Italians were kicked out in the 1940s, those who had supported them were hanged in public, and their houses burnt. And so more Burji people fled to Kenya. The exodus into Kenya over the century never lapsed. When the Emperor was overthrown in 1974 before being strangled to death a year later, the new rulers, a military junta called the Derg took over Ethiopia. Forceful conscriptions into the army forced more people to Kenya. Each layer of arrival grafted new dimensions and complicated the still evolving Kenyan story.
The last half of the 20th century came with waves of change. Kenya became an independent country. Somali secessionists, attracted to the idea of a “Greater Somalia” that linked communities in Kenya, Somalia, Djibouti, and Ethiopia, called for Northern Kenya to secede. In Marsabit, the pro-secessionists wrote letters and held political rallies at which the Burji were referred to as visitors for their anti-secessionist stance. The secessionists failed, and a new wave of economic success came to Marsabit. By the 1970s, a lot of the Burji farmers had become economically successful. Their children had been educated and held government jobs. Both my father and I came of age under that prosperity. But even in the 1990s, the threats of being returned back to Ethiopia were still alive. A member of parliament in Marsabit held a political rally in 1995, where he said, “Barefoot you came, barefoot you shall return.” This threat was part of the cradle of fear, and its repetitions on the political front formed an existential threat.
But with age the world reveals itself for what it is and its workings, and the significance of stories become ciphers. I already knew the thick uncertainty surrounding the myths of our Kenyan existence. Things were exiting their shadowy premises. But I wasn’t really prepared for what would come next.
“The land was new but the workings of the old spirits were still present.”
In 2014, a Burji historian added me to a mailing list made for people like me: those who were born in Kenya and had little knowledge of what events led to their grandparents fleeing there. Over the next three years, I read emails detailing dark ominous stories, and I asked questions of my own. Woche Guyo, the historian, provided details and dates of events that had occurred to the Burji community in Kenya. He mentioned the first Burji birth in Kenya in 1933. He explained why the Burjis had come. He laid bare the story of the slavery. Everything that had eluded my impressionable mind's explanation finally found some meaning. My carefully constructed story of Ethiopia — of a land of freedom — was thrown out of kilter. I engaged my father about his father. He shared bits about what he knew, but how had all this history been so carefully locked away? How was this left out of our history books? How could such a story of near tectonic displacement be hidden so well? It was both lazy and easy to blame Kenya’s education or those in authority.
I embarked on a search. I read books on expeditions of late 18th-century traveler diarists. I read papers by German anthropologists. Eventually, I stumbled onto a letter written by the Italians to the League of Nations in 1935 which led me to understand the devastation the Abyssinian empire’s subjugation of the South had had on my grandfather’s home:
“As to the effects of slavery and the gebbar system, all who know the facts are agreed: the non-Abyssinian regions of Ethiopia are becoming a vast desert. Every Abyssinian chief sent to those parts finds it necessary on his arrival to provide himself with slaves and his soldiers' families with gebbar. And when he leaves the conquered countries to be transferred elsewhere, he takes away with him, and allow[s] his soldiers to take away with them, the greatest possible number of slaves and gebbar to be employed at his new residence. This constant draining of the population of the subject territories is particularly terrible, because the slaves and gabbar are decimated, during the long journeys, by hunger, thirst and ill-treatment from their Abyssinian masters.”
The effect on the local populations was stark: “The population of Kafa, which Cardinal Gugliemo Massaja estimated at a million and a half before the Abyssinian conquest, is now reduced to 20,000. Again, whereas Vittorio Bottego estimated the population of the Burji in 1895 at 200,000, there are now no more than 15,000 people in the region.”
Arnold Wienholt, a British consul who was based at a town called Mega, wrote in his 1927 book Seven Years in Southern Abyssinia; “Amaro, Alga, and Burji had been sadly devastated quite recently, and very few natives were left there. The responsibility for this rests with a former Governor of Sidamo, named Ato Finkabo, who appears to have carried on a very flourishing business in slaves from these parts. In fact he became so enterprising that most of the natives who were left fled to Konso and Boran to escape falling into his clutches.”
Those who escaped to the Konso and to the Borana were men like my grandfather. Teenagers, forced to grow up fast. But even Konso and Borana had been under the clutch of Hapte Giorghis, an Abyssinian military commander who was Minister of War under Haile Selassie. On old Ethiopian maps, a whole region has Giorghis’s name; it was his to plunder.
If I had been born just a decade earlier. I would have seen those boys who had made their entry into Kenya's colonial records as ex-slaves as aging men, bent over after years of breaking their backs in search of a free new world.
All that had never been explained in my childhood was suddenly spelled out in the mailing list, the past with all its silhouettes. Nightmarish characters were thrown into sharp relief. I now saw how silence was not a strategy but a bequest from their fathers. How do you flee a land in which populations drop—even discounting imperial exaggerations—from 200,000 to less than 15,000 in 25 years? Which tales do you grab as a teenager fleeing home without your family?
III. Through the Anthills of Mega
A hundred kilometres after Moyale, I passed through Mega, where the British consul stood in ruins, crumbling brick by brick. I imagined Arnold sitting at a great oak table writing his big book. The town as it would have appeared in the 1910s emerged in full technicolor in my mind: churches built on top of hills, the elevated location, the grandeur of its past, functionaries, horse riding, letter writing— and Arnold, the officious British agent, dominating the low-lying country below from that height.
After Mega, and after passing through several Borana villages with clusters of traditional huts, I made it to Yabelo town, an administrative hub 200 kilometers northwest of Moyale. I borrowed a phone from the hotel's waiter and called Chonde, a man who had been recommended to me as a host and guide by a doctor I’d met on Woche’s mailing list. After a few minutes, he came to the hotel where I was waiting. His dishevelled hair tapered into a fade and a cut; I was certain that, when bored, his hands reached up and rolled the strands at the top into tiny locks. He was college-boy skinny, dressed in a checkered shirt, black jeans, and sports shoes, right in the alley of mid-20s fashion, uncertainty written in his manners. I had just cleared a similar phase in my own life.
That night, we watched the World Athletic Championship women’s 5,000-metre race. I had chosen where my loyalty lay when I unashamedly cheered for Helen Obiri, a Kenyan runner. Chonde, his mother, and his sister Amirach supported the Ethiopian runner Almaz Ayana, Amirach particularly vocal in her excitement. She turned to me, laughing, and said, “You cannot be in Ethiopia cheering for Kenya.”
The race was touted by the commentator as “a great rivalry” between Kenya and Ethiopia. At the beginning of the last two laps, Obiri shadowed Ayana, their steps and rhythm in near perfect sync. When the bell for the final lap was rung, Obiri pulled a move none of us had anticipated—she streaked forward with a new energy, past Ayana, leaving a massive gap between herself and her rival. The commentator’s giddiness and the crowd’s jubilant cheer added to the momentousness of that sneaky dash. Amiratch expressed her frustrations with angry rebukes to Ayana, but she became silent as it became clear there was to be no comeback for the Ethiopian. As Obiri crossed the finishing line, Amirach held her head and cried, “Woynee!”
The win, meaningless for me in Ethiopia, was very necessary for the Kenya I had left behind.
The next day, I left Yabelo. Just past the town, beautiful pastoral pastureland gives way to the forests of the Great Rift Valley. The land beyond the rangelands is prosperous, with verdant endowments in which chlorophyll-rich leaves glisten like mirrors. After a few kilometres, the road passes through a forest whose trees speak of government afforestation policies with monocultures of cypress and eucalyptus trees. In the car, I dug up a report by an older writer, Mude Dae Mude, the first prominent Kenyan Burji writer, who had done this same trip for the first time in 1982. Mude Dae later served as an ambassador, but he had begun his career as an editor for both of Kenya’s big two dailies and even published a novel in 1979. The novel was a tale replete with its time’s themes; an emerging post-independent elite grappling with alienation resulting from a divided allegiance; the question of whether they should forge forward to a Kenyan identity or sink back to an ethno-national affiliation? The protagonist, Galge, asks “What claim did the members of the tribe have over him…he was a Kenyan before everything.” Those in the know say it was an autobiographical book; Woche critiqued it in The Weekly Review as a work of apologia. Mude Dae had shared a copy of his report to a select few of us on the mailing list, and on the way to Hagere Mariam, I opened the file and started reading. The land I was traveling was described in great detail. It was nauseous experiencing the land on both textual and visual planes, and I closed its open pages and took in the land as it whipped past.
When I arrived in Hagere Mariam, a major trade and administrative town 100 kilometres from Yabelo, I was hungry, so I searched for a place where I could replenish my energy. The 4 p.m. sun was cool on the skin. I went from one hotel to another; in each I was asked if I was a Christian or a Muslim. I didn’t care. They cared. They stared expectantly when I refused to answer and I went to the next hotel.
In Hagere Mariam, I slept at Hoteela Abeera, a generic but practical hotel offering all the typical conveniences of small-town lodging. The next morning I called an old researcher whose name had been mentioned in some of the little written literature on the Burji. The man I spoke to, asking for directions, was angry when I told him I had spent the night in a hotel.
“Why?” he asked. “There are many relatives of yours in Hagere Mariam!”
The man connected me to one of these relatives, and my new-found relation, a man named Boru, deposited me at the home of the Burji historian Saale Choota. There, I met people who had known or had heard about my grandfather. An old woman lying in the corner of the house said my grandfather and his brothers had been their neighbors back in the Burji mountains.
This affirmation lit a light in the core of my quest. I felt embraced by the past. Saale Choota brought out his manuscripts and old cassettes he’d collected as a young man. In one slow and mournful song, I sensed the palpable essence of the past century. The song, Saale explained, was sung by people who had returned from a war.
He brought out books written recently by the Burji, efforts directed towards writing their history. He spoke about his manuscript. It was unpublished. His music was on old cassettes and wrapped in an old nylon bag. He treasured them but I wondered if they would ever be available to the world.
I left his house and proceeded to the Burji mountains. From Hagere Mariam, I boarded a green Isuzu bus. It was filled beyond capacity, people standing along the aisle. I had been lucky to secure myself a seat, and it was the last bus of the day. I was going to Soyama, 55 kilometres away, and from there I was to be directed to Kilicho, my grandfather's village.
IV. Arrival: The Fantasy Meets the Ground
This was my family’s ground zero. For 400 years, we had been static here. But what brought me to this place now? Not a way of life, not memories, not a language, not a string of ancestral names. My inventions had brought me back, even though some of them were built on teenage fantasy. When I got off the bus, I was too excited to consider the import of my arrival. I had not had lunch and this, too, didn't allow me to relish the moment. I looked around and walked out of the bus stage. I walked into a shop and tried to buy a soda and some biscuits. The woman in the shop could not understand anything I said and neither could I make sense of her words. But I bought some airtime and called Ahmed, a cousin whose number I’d gotten from his father, Donche Gude, the elderly male relative to whose home I was going.
In the cold air of Soyama, I waited for Ahmed to come pick me up. As I waited, I practiced some of the Burji words of greeting that I knew on children playing near me. After a few minutes, Ahmed arrived. He was a few years older than me and had a no-nonsense intensity about him. He was in a rush. He picked up my bag and led me to his waiting motorcycle. I buttoned my trench coat, held my small backpack, and got onto his bike. As the motorcycle sped towards Kilicho, my final destination, I could not stop marveling at the vastness of the landscape and its impressive cleanness. A proprietary sentimentality struck me as we rode further into the area. It was cold and the sun bounced off the bronze teff stalks. The air was thin, a hallmark of the high elevation. The sun seemed new as it emerged from beyond thick clouds, and I saw fog rising as if smoke from a smoldering twig fading into the air.
We passed a group of festive women and children escorting a bride to her new home. They clapped and danced in front of her, while others, drumming, walked besides her. The bride walked in the middle of the entourage covered in a loose dhira shawl. Behind the festive crowd, a short lady stood in front of a house. She was my host's wife. She sent for someone else, and an old man walked towards me. This was Donche Gude. The two of them gave me tea and cold injera to eat. I was disappointed; I had expected a better reception, not plain injera and tea without milk. I was home, after all, newly arrived at the land of my grandfathers. I had made it known that I was on my way. There should have been more ceremony. Did they not know what my journey here meant?
Donche invited me to go with him to the wedding. It was his neighbor’s son getting married, and we were welcome. I agreed to go, curious about the wedding, but I also supposed there would be some meat there. I sat outside with the elders. People came up to me and asked after their relatives back in Marsabit. Did I know the family of so-and-so? Where I didn't know the people mentioned, I got directions to where they lived in Marsabit, down to their neighbors and the specific plots and descriptions of their gates. They knew Marsabit like they knew their homes. Some dug deep into their memories and brought out dusty Kiswahili phrases to try on me as a show of their mastery of Kenya.
The procession I had passed arrived at the home singing. After the bride had entered the house and with the onset of the evening, the elders were asked to follow. Inside, bluegum tree leaves and supple branches were spread on the ground. We walked on and sat on the leaves. There was no meat at the wedding. We were given injera and beans instead.
This was a microcosm of how my fantasies of a homeland would end up disrupted by Ethiopia. The prospects here were miniscule. One of the old men said that the groom's father was still having children. The groom himself was a boy of eighteen who had dropped out of school. My host’s wife told me I was lucky: “You came at a time of plenty.” At first I assumed it was harvest season, but she meant the wedding. Little boys stood at the entrance of the groom’s room watching us eat. Once we were done eating all the beans and the soup-smeared injera, they were then invited inside. They fell onto the leftovers. At night, a mattress was laid out for me in a corner of the sparse living room. The children of the house slept on mats laid out on the empty sitting room floor. I suspected I had displaced the old man and his wife from their mattress, but this was hospitality I could not turn down lest I hurt the feelings of my hosts. I felt guilty at the hallowed treatment I was receiving.
Early the next morning, I was woken by my great-aunt Ako Dansoye, who it seemed had not slept much. She came in and sat on the edge of the mattress and spoke to me for a long time in the Burji language. I couldn’t understand her. She didn't care whether I did; she kept going, on and on. All I understood was her refrain. “Ayiii,” she would say, at the end of a long sentence. This made me feel, in abeyance of all that had separated us, an immense sadness. When my cousins spoke to me all I understood was “ayiii.” It was a haunting, ancestral loss. It gutted me even though I kept smiling at these strangers. A hundred-year separation had removed us from each other. I had no words or messages for my cousins.
Later, Ahmed drove me to the hill that overlooked Kilicho. Boohee it was called.
There was a big rock on the way to Bohee that other Kenyan Burji had visited. It was an emblematic totem, an anchor on which the elusive past and the disjointed history of the present could be mounted on. In Kenya, visitors to the place spoke about the sight of the rock in tones of achievement and historical amazement. Like religious sojourns to a holy shrine. It was all they could say about the place in a simplified and distilled way, about the quest that had brought them, a continuation of the romance created about the place.
We made it to the top of the hill. This was a node in Burji history, past and present, they had said, but when I got there there were no epiphanies or profundity. I couldn’t imagine the past prosperity of this place. The boy who had brought me there told me that in the past the hill had housed at least 1,000 families. But I had turned cynical already. I didn’t think of the overcrowded hill of the past as a thing of amazement. My ignorant teenage excitement had fled and left an emptiness in my chest.
Everything lacked the drama of the mailing list. The land bore no memories of the drama that had unfolded here. Where did the Italians hang the Emperor’s supporters in the 1930s? Where exactly was the village that the Fano militia had burned when they kicked out the Italians in the 1940s? It was as if the land had cleansed itself. Whence the horror? What of the extended silences? The land and the people here did not remember as much as those who’d fled it.
When I left home, there had been a logic to my visit, but the method of extracting value from all this had not been thought through. The lingering notion I’d had was that by merely showing up at a village my grandfather left 100 years earlier, everything would be handed to me: history, culture, lineage and its inner workings. My illusions were being shattered.
On the second day, on the way to the market in Kilicho, I bumped into a man I recognized from Marsabit. We greeted each other and I asked how he was and when he had arrived in Kilicho. Four years ago, he said. He started to share his problems. At first, his laments were of his alienation—but slowly they became of the problems of returning back to the homeland. As a result of this displacement, he shared a deformed vision of Ethiopia and of the Burji people. He was a musician, he said, but he felt unwanted by his people. He had gone to a recording studio in Addis Ababa, and the pain of the rejection there was so oppressive that he cried on the streets afterwards. He said they were jealous of his talents. He was hopeful to receive money that could help him buy a car.
He didn't say who was jealous. He seemed to be in a bad place and at a bad time. He said when his music was released, it would be better than anything that had come before it. Just by invoking the mysterious “they,” he assumed I was supposed to know and share in his struggles.
V. Shattered Fantasies
There was nothing to buy in Kilicho, no memento to carry home. It wasn't that kind of place. When one of my grand-uncles had come to Kenya for my grandfather's funeral in 1978, I was told my grandmother had given him a cross. The cross had come from Rome, a gift from the Pope for my grandfather's 50-year service to the Catholic Church. At Ako Bansoye's house, I secretly hoped to see this cross. It was a sign that could have connected my grandfather's service to the Catholic Church back to his village of origin. How profound it would have been for a sentimental seeker. Ako Bansoye sat on the floor of her house in a long undergarment and spoke endlessly in Burji. I could not get to her. She had a bad ear. She was worried about Kenya. The cross quest died down immediately. Ethiopia was a great land of crosses: orthodox crosses, wooden crosses, metallic crosses. The Roman cross of the Pope's gift would not have stood out.
That day, I walked around the village. Unsure of anything. Sorry to have arrived without knowing which lines to pursue. Resigned to the fact that all my trip would be was an encounter with the outer margins of what would never be a full recovery.
On the evening of my last day there, after dinner, I sat down with Doche Gude. I asked him, “How are we related? Which great-grandfather did we share?”
He listened to me like a man being called to a difficult task. He moved closer, and repeated my words as if they were answers, as if he needed to mouth them himself to understand its import. He told me about my grandfather Dalle Boru. He said Dalle had brothers called Thato and Shannah. Your great grandfather, he said, was the son of Gude the son of Doche. I wrote all these in my notebook. Doche Gude looked closely at the notebook as if what I had written was producing pictures of the men he was mentioning.
On that floor, with the old man’s improvisational fable of shadowy provenance, I saw things clearly. My quest, and the accompanying notebook and pen, was in search of something irrecoverable. When something grand and tragic happens to a people, when great movements and displacements occur, memories shift. Intimations of the past linger as distant sensations. Names start to sound like shadows moving invisibly in a dark historical night. Maybe my father should have travelled with me, to this land of his father to listen to these names, as they, I was almost sure, were being manufactured to cement some kind of fictive kinship.
For Doche, Kenya was a painful memory. When he was a teenager he had lived there, learnt Kiswahili, and only returned to his village to marry when his father, blaming his advanced age and need for care, had stopped him from returning to Kenya. The same thing had happened to Doche’s son. Ahmed had moved to Nairobi, learnt Kiswahili, become a butcher, acquired a Kenyan ID and become a Nairobian—but then Doche, reprising his father’s role, had called and instructed Ahmed to come back to Kilicho. How readily both of them had acquiesced to return to the place where curses and Gome resided, and where poverty and a lack of education had trapped people in cyclic suffering..
Entrapment. Choice. The workings of paternal control. The existential question of return had always been framed as a collective nightmare but this was the first time I was encountering the slow, invisible, and more painful return of individuals.
“I now saw how silence was not a strategy but a bequest from their fathers.”
The night came and the day broke bright, a sun made for basking. I sat in the sun and took pictures with my family. I promised to return for a longer stay. I was dropped off in Soyama. There were no cars going out of Soyama. I went to a restaurant with one of my relatives and his friends. Afterwards, we went to an easy bar and drank the afternoon away. One of the men, Keku, spoke an uncertain English in which he switched between different accents. It was strange. At first, I thought he was trying to mimic me and later I realized he was trying to impress his friends. His dark sunglasses and Ethiopian frilly afro were as memorable as his accents. He had learnt English from movies, and so each word or phrase was pronounced on its own, the sentence out of sync. He spoke in this disjointed way, occasionally turning to his friends and saying something to them in Amharic and turning again to me. It seemed like two different people speaking.
“Hey men,” he would say when he called for my attention. “Hey men, In Kenya, what. you do?”
“I work for an NGO.”
“Aaah,” he would say as if he had known this and I had just reminded him.
He’d then turn to his friends and go into a long commentary. Perhaps of my world. Perhaps of his own thoughts. He was the authority in our midst. We spoke in this way about music and about work and women and religion, leaders and alcohol and the way to Addis Ababa and the work the government was doing, the road being constructed. They sometimes completely forgot about me, switching to animated Amharic conversation. I sat in silence. On the wall behind us there was an image of St. George. I studied the drawing of the saint stabbing a green dragon. The artistic turns of the image, its bold contours and colour saturations. The way the armored George rode a powerful horse, stabbing the dragon, and how the dragon’s agony was dramatized in a childlike impression, a red tongue out, curving at the center.
One of the men was called Sofoniyas Eyob. I asked about his name. Keku’s movie English didn’t help. I searched for the Bible character on my phone. I thought maybe it was Stephen? But with a Latin inflection? Stephanius maybe? Stephanos?
Was he stoned to death?
“No.”
What’s his story?
There was a debate. They couldn’t come to a conclusion, but Sofoniyas rested the matter with his small small English.
“Maybe pagan!”
We laughed.
It was in one of those empty silences in my head that I heard, distinctly, the word “camaraderie” in Keku’s long Amhara talk. And I was startled. I interjected. Did he just say camaraderie?
He repeated. “Kamardari.”
“Kamardarra,” he said, is a motorcycle tube, and continued on with his conversation. I had hoped what I heard was right, that I now understood the language—a small reward to lift my deflated spirit. I went back to my thoughts and Keku back to his animated chatter. It was more of the same: Another letdown piled onto the grand disappointment of my grandfather’s village.
Maybe for my sorry and pensive silence, Sofoniyas would sometimes turn to me and say, “Pisno?”
I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I responded, “Peace-no.”
He would lift the beer bottle and say, “Arrifno?”
And I would say, “Arrifno!”
He ordered more rounds.
About the Author
Dalle Abraham is a writer based in Marsabit, Northern Kenya. His fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous local and international literary journals and anthologies, including The Chimurenga Chronic, Kwani?, Adda Stories, Errant Journal, Down River Road and Debunk Quarterly.
Read Dalle “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Edited by Carey Baraka.
Header photo by Gift Habeshaw.
