Africa's ashes

>> Another dark, remarkable childhood in Notes From the Hyena's Belly

by JULIET WATERS

"In 1958, the year of the paradox, I was born in Ethiopia, in a hot and dusty city called Jijiga, which destroyed its young," writes Nega Mezlekia in his memoir Notes From the Hyena's Belly.

It was the year that Queen Menen, Haile Selassie's wife, lay dying. The royal Devil-Tamer pronounced his cure: the sacrifice of the young. "Candidates must be free of any form of body piercing; they must have no wounds or scars that would compromise the quality of the blood," he announced.

Arid, dusty Jijiga is built on a vast plain where even the smallest breeze creates wind devils--whirlwinds of dust that rise high into the sky.

"By day we children chased wind devils, poking holes in their bellies with knives. By night we huddled in bed, remembering our mother's warning to tell strangers that our ears were pierced..." So begins the story of boyhood in a culture which destroys its young in so many other ways than by barbaric superstitious rituals.

There's the social oppression within the Amhara community, of which Mezlekia is a part. It's normal and expected for a stranger to spank a child for violating the strict moral code of respect for authority. Infraction of rules as small as putting one's hands in one's pockets when answering an elder could mark a child as undesirable and unfit to be friends with the other children.

There's the brand of corporal punishment in schools. Students are routinely tortured, and one is thrown out a window by a teacher. A natural rebel, Nega receives regular beatings from "The Persuader," a whip made out of a bull's penis. But with each lash he receives he "plotted vengeance," launching a campaign that includes anally injecting a hated teacher's cows with a chili pepper solution in a water gun, causing a demonic, chaotic stampede.

And there's war. Nega loses both his parents in the civil wars that erupt after the Marxist coup against Selassie.

Yet nothing manages to break Nega or his best friend Wondwossen's spirit. "The lesson--that life was an entrapment to the young, and bliss to the dying--was not for us, but for the world around us." At 18 he is well prepared for becoming a guerrilla, albeit a reluctant one. Despite his lack of sentimentality, Nega has an artist's soul. He's too sensitive to become a competent killer, a realization that becomes more concrete when Wondwossen is killed in combat. And even more so as 100,000 political opponents are massacred by the government during seven months in 1977.

Notes From the Hyena's Belly has been compared to Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, and even if Ireland seems pretty far removed from Ethiopia, the comparison is a good one. Despite several engineering degrees (one from McGill--the author escaped Ethiopia as a political refugee at 25), Mezlekia is a poet whose simple lyrical style is hypnotic. Like McCourt, Mezlekia has a storyteller's affection for the worst characters: dilettante conmen, religious fanatics, a hateful legless elementary school teacher who drags himself across the ground in a flour sack. Where the two books are most similar is in the bitter comedy created out of the bleakest circumstances.

But where they differ is in Mezlekia's political intentions. His epilogue is a subtle condemnation of Canada's indifference to Africa. After pages of beautifully written memories, Hyena's Belly ends suddenly with a sharp unembellished paragraph:

"In 1991, the military junta that had ruled Ethiopia for over a decade was finally deposed by one of the guerrilla movements. I did not break open a bottle of champagne to celebrate the occasion, because by then I'd realized that what had happened in Ethiopia was not exceptional. To varying degrees, it had happened all over sunny Africa, and still does."

Notes From the Hyena's Belly by Nega Mezlekia, Penguin, pb, 355pp, $22.99