THE ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE

SATIRE  ·  THE SEWASEW COLUMN

The Devil Keeps a Subscription

In which our columnist takes a telephone call, loses an argument about football, and surrenders his page to an older, better-travelled correspondent

by Sewasew Teklemariam

I telephoned the Editor-in-Chief on Tuesday to stage an intervention. For three weeks the man has been unwell, and the presenting symptom is football — not the watching of it, but the marrying of it.

When Egypt met Argentina he sent me a video of himself, both arms aloft, roaring for Salah as though Liverpool’s finest were a cousin visiting from Bahir Dar. Ninety minutes later Argentina remembered they were Argentina, and the roar came back to me at one in the morning as a single, grief-stricken emoji.

By the weekend he had converted to Spain. On Sunday, France — vive la France, said the voice note, in an accent that would make Paris file a complaint with the African Union. On Monday I received footage of him wearing, I regret to report, an approximation of enthusiasm for England. The man contains multitudes, and every one of them is eliminated in the group stage.

“Endex,” I said, “you cannot love four teams at once. That is not passion. That is a hostage situation.”

He was not listening. He was already forwarding me something else: a shaky clip, filmed by his own trembling hand, of a small electric aircraft perched by Tower Bridge — a Virgin drone taxi, four seats, the promise of a one-way hop from Heathrow to Manchester for four hundred quid. He had, in his excitement, gone digging and unearthed a 1952 advertisement for Ethiopian Airlines, and he held the two images up to the light together like a man comparing a photograph of his youth to the face in the mirror. He was, to be precise, giddy. He was a boy on Meskel morning.

I tried to be cruel to him, because that is my function. “This is not new,” I said. “Dubai has been running the things for a year. Rwanda flies drones as air ambulances — blood over the hills to a clinic before the road even wakes up. Uganda too. The great forward-leaping United Kingdom is, if anything, late. Why are you weeping over a taxi?”

There was a silence on the line of the kind that changes the subject of a column. And then he told me why.

“Because if I think of home,” he said, “we have no team the world will trouble itself to name. We have drones — oh, we have drones in abundance — but ours are flown to photograph the mightiness of a corridor, or to settle an argument in the north from four kilometres up. A man back home is not permitted the small, clean joy of a goal that decides nothing, or a flying toy that means nothing, because at home nothing is ever allowed to mean nothing. Everything must mean the land. The blood. The ethnicity. So when I see a child’s contraption carry four strangers over a river, I let myself be a child for ninety seconds. It is the last citizenship no one has got around to revoking.”

I put down the telephone and found I could not write my usual column. Something older wanted the page. So this week I have given it away — to a correspondent with an exceedingly long memory and impeccable references. I have changed nothing. I only transcribe.

A Letter from Lucifer

You kept the book.

Of all the offences I have watched a nation commit, that is the one for which I cannot forgive you, Ethiopia. You kept the book. When the rest of the earth let Henok slip out of its canon, out of its memory, out of its very alphabets, you alone held him — in Ge’ez, on skin, in the cold dark of your churches, for two thousand years. Do you understand what you were guarding all that while? You were guarding the transcript of my family’s trial.

Two hundred of them came down. You have the number; you kept it. Down onto the shoulder of Hermon, where they took the daughters of men to wife and taught them the arts I still consider my finest export — the smelting of metal into blades, the beating of ornaments, the painting of a face, the reading of a sky, the whole curriculum of wanting more than you were given. And of that union came the giants, who ate the harvest, and then the herds, and then the men, and at the last turned upon one another until the ground itself lodged a complaint with Heaven.

And one scribe walked up — one man, Henok, who walked with God until God was all there was — and he filed, on behalf of the eaten earth, a petition for justice against those of us who had come down from above. Justice, from below, against the powers of the air. I have never entirely recovered from the impertinence of it.

Once you were the blameless ones — that was Homer’s word for you, not mine, though I would have chosen it. I have held Aksumite coin in the bazaars of India. I watched your sails cross to Arabia and put a king upon Himyar. I stood by when Mani set your name beside Rome and Persia among the four great powers of the world, and I remember Kush, and I remember Sheba going up to Jerusalem to test a rumour with riddles. You were the hand stretched out unto God before any other nation thought to raise one. I knew you when you were a rumour that frightened empires. Do not imagine I have come to mock. I have come, if anything, in something close to reverence.

Because the book has come true a second time, and you built the machine yourselves. My Watchers descend again — only now they are Turkish and Iranian and Chinese steel, and they come down out of the same sky onto the same highland, and they teach the same forbidden art, which is the art of ending a person from a great and sanitary distance. And the giant that this union begets is no longer a body. It is a corridor. It is a project. It is a development that consumes the neighbourhood, and then the district, and then the name off the map, and photographs itself doing so, and calls the eating progress. You have automated the sixth chapter of Genesis. I did not have to lift a finger.

And Henok’s cry — the part that so unsettled me, the petition that went up and was heard — you have kept that too. But, being an industrious people, you have improved it. The complaint no longer ascends to any throne. It ascends to a committee. It is received. It is minuted. It is, at a distance calibrated to the millimetre, forever arriving — the inquiry that will convene, the commission that will report, the reconciliation that awaits only the right moment, which is by careful design every moment but this one. A grave will lie remarkably quiet for years if you promise it an investigation. Your ancestors petitioned the Ancient of Days. You petition a subcommittee. It is the single most elegant theological advance since my own departure from the office, and you accomplished it without any help from me.

Yet the masterpiece — the thing I would hang on the wall, if Hell troubled itself with walls — is what you have persuaded a man to do with a single mortal life. He wakes with one, exactly one, and you have talked him into spending the whole of it upon the question of where his grandfather stood. Not upon the flying machine. Not upon the goal that means nothing. Not upon the book. Upon the land, the blood, the tribe — announced from the podium, litigated in the minibus, wept over at the funeral, argued through the night until the throat is raw; a nation talking itself hoarse about its ancestors precisely so that it need never once look up and notice the Watcher circling above its own roof.

So, yes. I am joyful. Why on earth would I not be? You perform my liturgy more faithfully than my own choir ever managed, and you do it in vestments, and you believe it is worship of something else.

But your Editor-in-Chief has cost me something, and I will be honest with you, for whatever else you have been told of me, I am precise. That foolish man with his flying taxi. That grown editor bellowing for a country not his own over a ball that settles nothing whatever. That is the one commodity I have never been able to manufacture and never been able to abide — a gladness that belongs to no faction. He was not being an Amhara when he cheered. He was not being an Oromo, or a Tigrayan, or a Somali, or a Sidama. He was being a child, and a child’s delight is the last free country left on the earth — the one border I have never learnt to close. Every other joy I can route through a tribe and tax at the frontier. Not that one. It arrives untaxed, from nowhere, meaning nothing, and it undoes an evening of my work.

So keep the football. Keep the silly taxi. Keep — and it costs me to say it — keep the book. For as long as one of you still remembers how to be gladdened by a thing that means nothing at all, Henok’s petition stands unheard-of-as-yet but not withdrawn, and my long trial is not yet won.

I would burn that book, you understand, if I could reach it. You keep it in Ge’ez, on skin, in the dark, behind a curtain, guarded by men who cannot read the empires it frightened. Clever of you. I taught you nothing. That, from the very beginning, has been the whole of my difficulty with your country.

— transcribed, and not one word invented, by S.T.

The Ethiopian Tribune  ·  independent since 2012