Ethiopia: Ancient and Modern
BY THOMAS HODGKIN Asmara TO arrive in Addis Ababa from Nairobi is like finishing a highly organised nightmare and beginning a vague but pleasant dream. The only people in Nairobi who seem entirely happy and sure of themselves are the giraffes. Addis Ababa remains a kindly society, not too much disturbed by the fetish of efficiency. Streets wander about the hills and animals wander about the streets. Good manners are highly regarded. When a small European boy gets into a bus all the Ethiopian passengers make an enormous fuss of him and give him conflicting advice about where to get out. The Head- master was -not at school when we had expected to find him, since he ' had gone to mourn '—a proper sense of values. There are old men in white leggings (one of the Emperor Menelik's innovations), fringed togas and sun-helmets; women in flowing white gowns, their hair swept forward over their foreheads, and bound with kerchiefs—white, black or coloured. Much time can profitably be spent in conversation and drinking fel (a kind of mead); and (I was told) Ethiopians can always be relied on to see safely home any European who is too drunk to find his way alone. When we talk, the frame of reference is still essentially Ethiopian, not African. The Council of Chalcedon, Tekla Haimonot and the Graziani massacre are much more living and real than white settlers or Mau Mau. The Sudan still tends to be associated with the Battle of Gallabat, and the death on the battlefield of the Emperor John„ rather than with the policies of Al Azhari. Yet in its own way Addis Ababa is modern and cosmopolitan ----with its Swiss hotel-keepers; Italian contractors, barbers and pastrycooks; Indian merchants; British schoolmasters; Soviet doctors; American specialists and project-designers. There are various grades of public transport, according to Your means : taxis (only for the rich); pale green three-wheeled Italian motor-scooters (for the middle income-groups); brightly Painted mule-drawn traps (for those who are not in a hurry); and red and yellow buses (for the masses). And there is an efficient internal air service, with aeroplanes (also red and row) inscribed in Amharic and embossed with the imperial n rampant. I travelled to Gondar in one of these, with fa crowd of cheerful, friendly. schoolboys. on their way home ,or the holidays, with tin trunks, mattresses and geometry 000ks It was early morning, and the mountains surrounding Addis Ababa were covered in white clouds, like thick pads of cotton wool. We were taken in hand by a young Eritrean student, whom I had met five hours earlier, dancing tnrough the night at the University College ball—now, smartly diessed In Ethiopian Airways uniform, starting on his vacation job as a booking-clerk. The educated young are very precious in contemporary Ethiopia. The Italians succeeded, during ' the five years' tIffering,' in wiping out almost the whole of the pre-war intelligentsia. Immediately after the liberation, in order to recreate a civil service and avoid excessive dependence upon foreign Powers, the Ethiopian Government was compelled to c(locentrate on the effort to push a small number of hand- ticked young men through secondary and university education. t he results have been interesting. Inevitably the educational Pattern has been distorted : primary, as compared with higher, education has till recently been at a disadvantage. And the very young frequently find themselves in positions of great fielsPonsibility. For instance, the present Directors-General of -,C new Departments of Civil Aviation and the Merchant Marine, two very intelligent young men, were both a little while ago at Oxford reading PPE. There is much, I believe, ° he said for this government by the young. But the relations lo_Ftween the new elite, with their greater awareness of the kind of world with which Ethiopia has to deal, and the old bureaucracy, with their feel for diplomacy and politics, can sometimes be troublesome. After Addis, Gondar is a quiet pool. At the airport (where you can buy glasses of sweet tea and 'May ping-pong) the schoolboys were welcomed by a crowd of parents and friends. going through this pleasant ritual of four kisses—two on each cheek. From the hills above Gondar you can see the yellow expanse of Lake Tsana. The town is dominated by a magnificent group of castles, with round tapering towers and tall keeps, within a twelve-gated enceinte, attributed to the Emperor Fasil. Fasil made Gondar his capital, after the expulsion of the Jesuits (favoured by his father, Sisinnios) in 1632 and the restoration of the authority of the Coptic, Monophysite, Church. 'Present-day Gondar is the kind of friendly provincial town where everyone knows everyone else; where' you can meet the mayor, and the director-general of police, and the headmasters. easily in the street; and there is always a crowd of people, with business to transact but appear- ing in no hurry to transact it, standing in groups outside the Government building. Traditionally a town of forty-four churches (though some have been destroyed), abounding with priests, with their white turbans and fly-whisks; round stone churches, with paintings of Saint George and Saint Theodore on the walls; devout old men saying prayers outside; and children teaching one another to read Amharic by what educationalists nowadays call the Laubach method—' Each one teach one.' One very small boy—he looked four, and couldn't have been more than five—was sitting with his friends in a tower beside the Bdsilica of Debra Berhan, reading the Bible in Ge'ez (the ancient liturgical language) to them. In the view of the Governor-General of Begemder and Semien. Asrat Kassa, a very intelligent and liberal man (and incidentally a subscriber to the Spectator), about two-thirds of the popula- tion of the province can read—though fewer can write— mainly through this traditional Church education. But modern State education is also being expanded as rapidly as resources allow. There are now four eight-grade Government primary schools—including a girls' school—in Gondar, and a secondary school is being built. Over a hundred teachers from the province were gathered at the Girls' School for a four-weeks vacation course in their teaching subjects. I listened to an able young Ethiopian teacher explaining the principles of Amharic composition to a class including elderly priests, old enough to be his grandfathers; and making them write essays for homework on, either,' the life of a farmer '; or,' the history of a soldier '; or, ' a book which I have read and found interesting.'
The Italian Fascist guide-book to ' Africa Orientale Italian' (1938), in the section headed Contact with Natives,' explains that ' L'A bissino . . . e di carattere chiuso, motto orgoglioso, volubile, e, come tutti gli orientali, dissimula- tore. . . .' However, it goes on reassuringly, ' in generale, tutti coloro the sono venuti a contatto con gl'Italiani riconoscono la nostra superiority e i vantaggi della nostra civilta.' A good example of the principle that whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad. (Here, in Asmara, are some of the trappings of the superior civilisation: palm- bordered boulevards; smart shops selling vanity bags and petits fours; a horrid neo-Romanesque cathedral—with campanile; the cinema Impero; and prostitutes with faces like Nefertiti, earning £6 a month basic rate.) In fact Ethiopians, now as formerly, are firmly convinced of the advantages of their own civilisation. But,. as in the time of the Emperor Sisinnios (or indeed of Theodore and Menelik), they are also anxious to absorb new techniques and ideas. The Emperor's great prestige is based paCtly on the fact that, during his twenty-five years of power, he has been successful in main- taining an equilibrium between the Westernisers and the Traditionalists—keeping himself (like Roosevelt) always a little Left of Centre. In the Period of Sisinnios it was the • Jesuits who were the chosen instrument for the assimilation of western thought. Today—with the battery of Point Four agreements—it is the Americans. Have the new Jesuits learned the lesson of the hubris of Patriarch Mendez—that Ethiopians - will welcome foreign techniques, but will certainly resist any attempt to impose a foreign theology ?
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