The Complete Collection of Travel Literature Page 7

  Outside each hut a woman sat plaiting fibers to make baskets. As the road climbed again, we looked down across a swathe of emerald grassland rolling towards the horizon. When I tried to describe the lushness of the landscape in my journal, I knew that no one would believe me when I got home. We think of Ethiopia as a place of starvation, where the land is barren and the soil scorched by drought. Nothing could be further from the truth.

  Ten miles from Kebra Mengist the bus pulled over at a police checkpoint. We trooped out and stood in line with our luggage. In the flickering light of a pressure lamp all the bags were inspected, and the passengers frisked. Then one of the soldiers climbed up into the bus and searched it. He whistled loudly to his officer. Contraband had been found. A moment later the driver and his companion were being marched away. The search was at an end, said the officer. They’d caught the culprits. The rest of us could go. I had heard that smugglers sometimes slip their goods under the seats of innocent travelers, and one glance at the driver’s face suggested that he wasn’t an innocent. Still, I asked, could he not be allowed to take us the last few miles into town? Quite impossible, came the reply. The driver was transporting contraband and had to be punished. So, like refugees walking with their worldly possessions, we took to the road. I regretted bringing so much equipment with me but none of the other passengers complained. Perhaps they were just thankful that it wasn’t they who were locked up in a cell.

  Fortunately the moon was full and it led us like a beacon through the darkness. The road was flooded with soupy gray mud and we trudged through it like soldiers broken by defeat, our packs heavy on our backs.

  Three hours after leaving the checkpoint, we reached Kebra Mengist and staggered into the Holiday Hotel. It doubled as a butchery — a bull’s heart had been nailed to a post in front of the building, in a crude advertisement. Drenched in mud and aching, I was too tired to complain. I flopped down on the mattress in my room, still in my boots and filthy clothes, and fell into a deep sleep.

  When I awoke hours later, the sun was high above Kebra Mengist. My back and legs still ached and I knew that I needed some pampering. Samson wasn’t in his room, so I walked through the muddy streets in search of some luxury.

  Having listened to Samson’s enthusiastic description of his home, and knowing that on the map the town was s’ ed prominently, I had had high hopes of Kebra Mengist. A couple of minutes’ walk was enough to shatter the illusion. There was no electricity and no running water. No petrol was on sale and there was no tarmac on the roads. Most of the houses had crumbling walls and corrugated iron roofs, rusted through and pocked with holes. The only place to eat was a bar where a dozen or so prostitutes were already touting for business. I sat on the veranda, ordered something to eat and tried to keep the flies away from my face.

  Like so many towns in Ethiopia, Kebra Mengist was living from day to day. No one gave any thought to the weeks or years ahead. They were making do as best they could, struggling through the present. The only certainty was that life would get worse. The streets were teeming with people, many of them drifting desperately from one place to the next offering a single object for sale.

  One woman clutched a bruised apple; others had only a stalk of maize, a worn-out tire, a bar of soap, a basket, or a handful of eggs. And here and there boys pushed home-made barrows over the rocky red dirt, on the lookout for odd jobs.

  A few feet from where I was sitting a cow was licking a discarded engine block. There were goats, too, foraging for non-existent scraps. And all around there were beggars, wrapped in a web of rags, some blind, others lame or maimed with leprosy.

  I sat swishing the flies and sipping sweet tea, and wondered what had happened to Samson. Perhaps he’d sloped off to see his family or had hurried away to church.

  Then, in the far distance, I spotted a well-dressed man walking towards the town centre. Every few moments he would pause to greet an old friend, pressing his shoulders to theirs, kissing cheeks, nodding in satisfaction. He seemed to know everyone. His head was held high and there was a spring in his step. But most surprising was his get-up. He was wearing a mint-green three-piece suit and a scarlet tie. I screwed up my eyes to get a better focus. With each step, the figure became more familiar. It was Samson.

  He saw me and, rather sheepishly, ambled up to the veranda where I was sitting, still caked in dried mud. There had seemed little point in changing my clothes or washing if we were going to go down a mine.

  “This is my home town,” he said grandly, “I have a reputation here. And I’ve been in the capital, so people are asking how well I have done for myself.”

  I could sense every young man in Kebra Mengist packing their bags for Addis Ababa at that very moment.

  “Aren’t you leading them astray? After all, Addis is awash with people from small towns who can’t get jobs.”

  Samson straightened his tie and dusted an imaginary piece of fluff from his shoulder.

  “Look at this place,” he said gently. “If you lived here, wouldn’t you want a little hope as well?”

  Tesfaye was Kebra Mengist’s barber, an Ethiopian version of Sweeney Todd. He’d have pulled your teeth out, slit your throat and chopped you up for pies before you knew it. His hands were muscular, their veins thick with blood, their nails chipped, with dirt beneath the tips. He invited me to sit in his chair, and he sharpened his scissors on a strip of black leather. They hadn’t been used for months. In times of hardship people cut their own hair. Samson told me to watch my throat. Tesfaye had, he said, worked in Mengistu’s torture-rooms. It didn’t surprise me in the least.

  While Tesfaye chopped my hair, Samson strolled about town in his suit, showing it off to his friends. He was enjoying his newfound status as a celebrity, and he seemed to have forgotten that we were just passing through on our way to the gold mines. When I reminded him of the project, he cupped his hands over my ears and replied that he was doing research. Before we could set out for the illegal mines at Shakiso, we were expected to put some money into the local economy. If we didn’t spend enough cash in town, he said the locals would lay a trap for our vehicle, push it off a cliff, and strip our bodies of their clothes. I was about to curse Samson for talking such garbage, but one look at Tesfaye stopped me. Then, to my astonishment, the barber put down his blunt scissors, picked up his pet tabby cat and blew kisses in her ear.

  We returned to the local bar. I was expected to buy drinks for a string of regulars. Samson said the place was notorious as the haunt of shiftas. Satisfy them, he said, and we’d go unhindered.

  On the porch there sat a tall man whose face was painted white, and spotted with black and red dots. His shirt was open to the waist, revealing a chest smothered in gray ash. He was drinking a glass of tea, and he looked very much out of place. I was overcome with a great urge to stand and stare. I couldn’t help myself. Samson said the man was from the Karo tribe — a people of strong traditions, who hail from the south-west of Ethiopia. I would have asked a dozen questions, but Samson tugged me into the bar by the collar.

  The drinking den was like so many others on the African continent. Before my eyes could adjust to the dark, fly-ridden room, the smell of warm beer, vomit and urine hit me squarely in the face. Around the edges of the room, a handful of prostitutes sat looking bored. Business was slow. In the middle of the room twenty or so middle-aged men were slouched at tables. One of them was polishing a knife blade on his sleeve, and most had scarred faces. They were a rough bunch by any standards, and they were clearly suspicious of strangers.

  “Foreigners don’t come to Kebra Mengist,” said Samson in a worried tone. “So when they see a white face they get nervous, and when they get nervous they get violent.”

  “So what should I do?”

  Samson rubbed his thumb and forefinger together.

  “Spend some more money,” he said, “buy more beer and treat them to prostitutes. Everyone here knows that spies are stingy men. And besides, if they’re enjoying themselves with the
women they’ll leave us alone.”

  So I asked Samuel, who owned the bar, to tell every whore in town to hurry over. His customers were to be treated to as much beer as they could drink, followed by a bawdy time in the back rooms. A wave of anticipation rolled through the joint. The prostitutes winked at me all at once, grateful for my philanthropy, and the male customers raised their beer bottles high above their heads in a drunken salute.

  Samuel took my cash and nodded solemnly. I’d be safe from vagabonds on the road, he said. He had learned English from a book, and he pieced together his sentences with exquisite care. When he had counted my money four times, he asked how much he’d need to bribe the American Embassy to give him a visa. Would a hundred birr be enough?

  Before I could reply, the door was swung back and two dozen working women strutted in, flaunting their thighs and their breasts, and pouting lasciviously. The drinkers saluted again. I’ve never seen so many grinning, glowing faces in a single room. Samson suggested we leave while the men were occupied, so we made a hasty exit.

  To my surprise, a vehicle was waiting to transport us to the mines. It was owned by Peter, one of Samson’s school friends. He was a thin, soft-spoken man and in the first minute of our meeting he told me three times that he was a Christian. He thanked the Lord for bringing us to Kebra Mengist, and then he thanked Him again for blessing his friend Samson with such good fortune.

  At some point in the recent past Peter’s Toyota van had been in a head-on collision. Its front was hideously disfigured. In any other country the vehicle would have been condemned, and flattened into a block of steel for recycling without so much as a second thought. The doors had been welded shut, which meant you had to climb in and out through the windows. The steering-wheel had been replaced by an iron spike, a severe hazard in itself. As for the windscreen, it was so cracked that it seemed miraculous it hadn’t shattered.

  Peter agreed that there”d been trouble on the roads and said he’d lost a wagon-load of passengers. The carnage had been terrible but, thankfully, his vehicle had been resurrected from the dead.

  The ends of two wires were touched together to create a spark. A moment later and dense blue diesel fumes were billowing around us. Then we were off, crawling out of Kebra Mengist and heading south-east towards the mines.

  The first small community we reached was Shakiso, a frontier town in the gold-mining belt. We halted for a cup of freshly roasted coffee, while Peter carried out emergency repairs to his vehicle.

  The main street was lined with shops selling Western contraband – Walkmans and televisions, Swiss Army knives, Russian vodka, lacy underwear, Marlboro cigarettes and CDs. Profits from the gold mines put luxury purchases within the reach of ordinary men.

  There were a few vehicles too. Most of them were painted yellow and belonged to Midroc, the only company licensed to mine the Adola gold seam, at a place nearby called Lega Dembi. Midroc was founded and owned by Mohammed Al-Amoudi. In fact Al-Amoudi seems to own almost every major enterprise in Ethiopia. His photograph greets you wherever you go in the country, smiling widely, with a scrap of beard on his cheeks. As well as the gold mine, he owns the leather tanneries, the foreign car dealerships, the main construction company, mineral companies and soft drink franchises, office blocks and even the new Sheraton Hotel in Addis Ababa. I had known that getting access to the legal gold mine at Lega Dembi would be very difficult. Everyone I asked, including Samson, had said there wasn’t any hope. Even so, before leaving Addis I had sent a gushing letter to the chief executive of Midroc, asking for permission to visit. But African bureaucracy is never fast moving, and in the end I had decided to forget about Lega Dembi and concentrate instead on gaining entry to the illegal mines.

  Shakiso doesn’t feature in guidebooks, nor was it on my map. In more usual circumstances it would have been a place to avoid. The central bar in town was full of surly customers. I assumed they were miners, but they made the shiftas at Kebra Mengist’s drinking den look like saints. We sat down at an empty table near the far wall and waited for the coffee. A man of about forty reeled in, already drunk. He made for our table and ordered a bottle of beer. The whites of his eyes were straw yellow and his brow was a mesh of interwoven lines. When he spoke, his lips trembled and splayed outward, revealing flushed gums. I paid for his drink, hoping it would ease the tension. Then I asked his name. He spat on the floor. Names, he said, were for friends, and I was no friend of his. Samson kicked me under the table and suggested we leave before there was trouble.

  Two hours later, when the sun was high in the sky, we saw the first signs of mining. A row of elderly women were panning a river, swirling the dirt with a smooth sweep of the arms. Around their necks were leather pouches in which they kept the precious gold dust. We had reached the Adola greenstone belt, Ethiopia’s richest gold seam.

  The authorities had licensed the one official mine at Lega Dembi, but they were powerless to stop the dozens of small illegal mines dotted throughout the region. The illegal mines all focus on alluvial gold, that is gold which has been washed down by rivers and which is panned from the silt. Solomon’s miners would have used the same technique, for blast-mining didn’t develop until the nineteenth century. Modern gold mining concentrates on breaking down the rock around a gold seam, pulverizing it into dust and extracting the metal from that dust. It is, however, an extremely expensive process. In most places alluvial deposits do not contain enough gold to make modern, large-scale industrial mining worthwhile.

  Samson warned me that the illegal mines were dangerous — a place where there was no honor, no brotherhood of men, and where Christianity was a dirty word.

  As he spoke, I made out a line of thatched huts in the distance. It was hard to see much through the windscreen’s cracks, but it looked as if we had reached a village. The driver said the encampment had been deserted. The gold had run out, so the miners had moved on a few miles down the road. The empty village, its ghostly huts sloughing their walls and roofs like an unwanted skin, was my first glimpse of a mined-out seam. With so much at stake, the miners were willing to leave perfectly good huts and build new ones elsewhere.

  Eventually we spied another village on the horizon called Bedakaysa. It was framed by eucalyptus trees which grew straight up from the ocher-red earth, and above it buzzards soared, riding the thermals of the late afternoon air. The village was made up of dozens of simple thatched huts bordered by enset, or “false” banana trees. And this time there were people, hundreds of them.

  A river flowed between us and the village, but it was almost dry: its waters had been redirected to feed panning pools. There must have been about sixty houses, each roofed with long, gray grass, packed cheek by jowl. Narrow plumes of smoke rose from cooking fires, and there was the occasional shriek of a child or the bark of a dog protecting its territory. The closer we got, the more people we saw. They were like ants on the jungle floor, all busying themselves with work.

  Samson said the community was no more than a year or two old.

  “They come and they go,” he explained, “rising up from nothing, becoming more and more sordid, and less Christian, as the miners waste their money on drink, gambling and girls. Then, when the gold dries up, the village breaks down and moves on.”

  “The Devil is all around us,” added Peter. “Be careful that he doesn’t tempt you.”

  We unloaded our belongings from the van. Samson had not wanted to stay in the encampment, but I’d insisted. How could I appreciate the community, I asked, without experiencing it at first hand?

  After we’d stopped Peter had kept the engine running. When I looked round again to say goodbye, he had gone, leaving us with no choice but to enter the village.

  In moments of great uncertainty on my travels, I have always felt that something is protecting me, that I will come to no harm. Samson would say that God is watching me. I am not so sure, but, as we stumbled down the hill towards the mining village, I sensed a protective arm embracing me.

  A v
oice was calling out to us from the river bank.

  “Sammy! Sammy!”

  One of the miners had recognized Samson and ran up to us. The two men embraced, nudging their shoulders together in the usual prolonged Ethiopian greeting. The miner was about my age but he was built on a superhuman scale, standing as tall as a black bear on its hind legs. His arms were like pistons, capable of exerting a great force for a long period of time. A halo of hair ran round the outer edges of his balding head in a natural tonsure. His skin was very dark, almost the color of Indian ink. Samson introduced him as Noah, a miner whom he’d known since childhood. Noah came from Gambela in western Ethiopia, on the border with Sudan, a land where all men are as tall as trees and as dark as charcoal, or so he said. Then, without another word, he heaved my army kit bags on to his back and led the way into the encampment.

  An Ethiopian mining village has to be seen to be believed. The camp was like the Wild West – stakes were high, hard liquor flowed, and the value of human life was almost non-existent. Samson likened it to a diabolical inferno. I followed Noah between the rows of thatched huts, struggling to keep up with his giant strides. Many of the huts were drinking dens selling home-brewed araki, marked by an upturned can on a pole outside. In others, prostitutes were servicing the needs of young men whose bodies were raw and aching after a shift in the tunnels. More still were packed with gamblers, waging gold dust on the turn of a card.

  The main street was a quagmire of mud where forlorn dogs roamed. The place stank of sewage. Despite the dirt and the depravity, there was an air of excitement, a sense that fortune was within any man’s grasp. As well as bars, there were other entrepreneurs too. One man was selling old clothes from a wagon. A neighbouring stall offered bruised vegetables, and next to that there was a cobbler who would repair flip-flops for one birr.

  Our arrival in the village attracted attention. A gang of drunken young men clapped and whistled when they spotted us and began to follow us, but Noah threatened to tear them apart with his hands. He dumped my bags and Samson’s Chinese tartan case in his hut and said we were welcome to stay there. The room was entered through a low doorway outside which there was a home-made rack for shoes. The floor was carpeted in spotlessly clean nylon sacking. Above the bed hung a hand-crafted cross, and beside it stood a row of worn paperback prayer books sandwiched between a pair of bricks. Pride of place was given to a bulky black stereo powered by a car battery. There was no electricity in the village. Noah reminded us to watch out for thieves. Nothing was safe, he said. Then he led us up the hill to the mine.