The Narrow Door

Amartya Sen, Be’alu Girma, and the way out of the trap

By E. Frashie  ·  The Ethiopian Tribune

Curtis leaves us in the dark. That is his signature and his limitation. Having shown us the trap with such brilliance, he stands at the closed door of the final reel and offers, in place of an exit, only the suggestion that we have forgotten there was ever another way to be free. It is honest, in its fashion; it refuses the cheap redemptive ending. But it is also, I want to argue, the point at which we must part company with him — because to accept that there is no way out is itself to fall into the deepest trap of all, the one his own method sets.

For Curtis’s method has a secret, and it is the same as his subjects’ secret. He too reaches for a single hidden mechanism that explains everything. He too imposes one tidy model — the suspicious actor, the closing trap — upon the vast and contradictory mess of human life, and makes it account for the welfare state and the family and the war and the self. His films are seductive for precisely the reason the theories he indicts were seductive: they promise that beneath the confusion there is one machine, one key, one story that makes it all cohere. This is the trap of the total explanation, and this series has been in danger of it on every page. Each time the prisoner’s dilemma seemed to explain the militias, each time positive liberty seemed to explain the bulldozer, we were one comfortable step from the theodicy — from the elegant proof that the blood was nobody’s fault, merely the structure working itself out. I have flagged that danger at every turn not as decoration but as discipline, because a lens that explains everything has quietly stopped being a lens and become a faith. The trap is real. It is also not the whole truth, and the moment we forget the difference we are inside it.

Hold that caution, and the search for an exit can begin — not in Britain, but with a man Curtis never names, who spent his life measuring freedom in a different currency altogether.

Amartya Sen — Bengali economist, Nobel laureate of 1998 — began from a memory Ethiopia knows in its bones: famine. As a boy he watched the Bengal famine of 1943 kill millions, and he spent his career proving, in Poverty and Famines (1981), that such catastrophes are almost never caused by a simple absence of food. They are caused by an absence of entitlement — by people losing the capacity to command food that in fact exists — and, most tellingly of all, they do not occur in functioning democracies with a free press. A free press makes hunger visible; visibility makes it politically fatal; and so no government that can be seen and voted out has ever presided over a great famine. The unfree state, by contrast, can starve its people in the dark. An Ethiopian does not need this argument explained. Our modern history is punctuated by famines that helped topple an emperor and outlived a dictatorship, concealed each time by a state that ruled the number and silenced the mouth. Sen’s thesis is the indictment of Part III written a decade in advance: the rule of the metric over the reality is not a technical error but, at the limit, a mechanism of death — and its only proven antidote is precisely the thing a publication such as this one exists to practise.

But Sen’s deeper gift is the concept the whole film lacked. In Development as Freedom (1999) he refused Berlin’s fatal binary. Freedom, for Sen, is neither the mere absence of interference nor the imposition of some authority’s vision of your higher self. It is capability — the real, plural, actual range of things a person is able to do and to be: to be nourished, to be literate, to move, to speak, to take part in the life of the community, to choose among lives she has reason to value. This is a positive account of freedom; it is about capacity, not merely non-interference. And yet it carries none of positive liberty’s poison, for one decisive reason. It names no single destination. It does not tell you who your true self is and then force you towards it. It multiplies your capacities and leaves the choosing to you. It is freedom-to, without a vanguard: the dream of human flourishing, disarmed of its bulldozer.

The measure of a nation’s freedom is not the boulevard it builds but the lives its people are actually able to lead. A corridor no widow can afford to live beside is not development. It is a monument to her exclusion.

Here, then, is the narrow door out of the trap, and it is worth stating plainly, because it reframes everything the Prosperity Party claims. If freedom is capability, then the float that empties the household is not a milestone of liberation but a subtraction of it; the demolition that displaces the poor is not a step towards prosperity but a destruction of the very capabilities — home, livelihood, neighbourhood, the fabric of a life — in which the only prosperity that matters actually consists. Sen lets us say something the milestone-language is structurally incapable of saying: that a development which reduces what people are able to do and be is not development at all, however green its numbers. The dream is not wrong to want flourishing for Ethiopia. It is wrong about what flourishing is — and it mistakes the monument for the life.

And yet I will not end on the Indian economist, because the deepest answer to this series’ own question — is this merely an imported diagnosis? — lies not in Delhi or Oxford but in Addis, and it was written in blood more than forty years ago. Be’alu Girma was among the finest novelists Ethiopia has produced, and for a time a senior figure inside the Derg’s own Ministry of Information — a maker of the regime’s dreams. In 1983 he published Oromay, a novel set amid the Red Star Campaign, the great offensive that was to deliver socialist liberation and national unity in the north. And Be’alu, who had stood inside the machine, told the truth about it: that beneath the intoxicating dream of liberation lay cynicism, corruption, futility and death; that the beautiful words concealed a mechanism of control; that the campaign of freedom was a lie the powerful told the people and, worse, told themselves. The title itself — ኦሮማይ, Oromay, “the end,” “finality,” “no more” — was a verdict on the dream.

For writing it, Be’alu Girma disappeared in early 1984, taken by the state he had served; his body was never recovered and his novel was banned. He is the answer to every accusation that this frame is foreign. Ethiopia did not import the critique of the dream of freedom. Ethiopia’s finest storyteller died of it, decades before a British filmmaker gave the idea a montage and a name. The trap is not a European notion we are trying on for size. It is a machine we have run before; one of us named it, and it killed him for the naming.

And lest this seem a wound sealed safely in the past, consider how recently the same machine has run. Gedu Andargachew helped to build the post-2018 order from its highest chambers: chief administrator of the Amhara region, then minister of foreign affairs, then national security adviser to the prime minister himself — an architect of the new dispensation, not a bystander to it. And when he broke with it, publicly and in unmistakable terms, accusing the government of betrayal, of authoritarian rule, and of answering the country’s crises with force rather than with politics, he was — by opposition-linked accounts the Tribune cannot independently confirm — placed under house arrest in his own home in the capital, watched and cut off from visitors. Four decades separate him from Be’alu Girma, and the particulars differ; the one was disappeared, the other reportedly silenced behind his own walls. But the grammar is identical: the insider who saw the machinery from within, said so aloud, and was removed from the conversation by the state he had served. This is not ancient history. It is the same door, closing again.

That is the tradition this series stands in, and it forbids both despair and comfort. It forbids despair, because Be’alu Girma wrote his sentence knowing what it might cost, which means the sentence was worth writing — the free word is not nothing; it is the one thing the trap cannot fully absorb, the reason Sen’s free press is the antidote to famine and not merely its witness. And it forbids comfort, because he was killed all the same, and the dream ground on regardless, and to pretend that truth-telling is a guaranteed deliverance would dishonour him. There is no guaranteed deliverance. There is only the narrow door, and the daily, unglamorous, dangerous labour of keeping it open.

So we return, at the last, to the spring of 2018, and the doors that swung wide, and the freedom that was real. It was real. That was never the illusion. The illusion was that freedom, once handed to us, would keep itself — that we could receive it as a gift from above and not have to make it, again and again, from below. We know now what was folded inside the gift: the suspicious constitution, the ruling number, the coercive dream. But the knowing is itself the beginning of the refusal. A people that can see the trap is no longer wholly caught in it. It can choose, in Sen’s terms rather than the vanguard’s, to measure its freedom by what its poorest citizen is actually able to do and be. It can refuse the model of itself as a nation of rational defectors and perform, against the structure’s every incentive, the irrational and founding act of trusting first. It can insist that the corridor is not the country, and the milestone is not the meal, and the palace on the mountain is not the nation.

None of this is inevitable, and none of it is safe. The door is narrow, and it does not stay open by itself. But it is a door, and Curtis was wrong to imply there is only wall. Be’alu Girma found it. Sen described it. And every citizen who says the true sentence aloud — this is not freedom; this is its counterfeit — is, in that moment, standing in the doorway, holding it open with their body, for whoever comes next. ኦሮማይ, the dream said. The end. No more. We are not obliged to agree.

Sources

Turning the lens. On the totalising tendency of single-cause explanation — a caution the series applies to Adam Curtis’s own method as much as to his subjects.

The way out. Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1981) and Development as Freedom (1999); Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, 1998. The link between famine and the absence of a free press is Sen’s argument and is presented as such.

The Ethiopian witness. Be’alu Girma, Oromay (1983); his role at the Ministry of Information, the Red Star Campaign context, and his disappearance in early 1984 are drawn from the public record of his life and death. The gloss of Oromay follows common usage; the novel remains a landmark of modern Amharic literature.

A contemporary witness. Gedu Andargachew served as chief administrator of the Amhara region (2013–2019), minister of foreign affairs (2019–2020) and national security adviser to the prime minister (2020–2022); his public criticism of the Abiy Ahmed government (2024) is on the record. Reports that he was subsequently placed under house arrest originate with opposition-linked outlets citing anonymous sources and are presented here as reported, not independently confirmed by the Tribune. Note: a separate viral image purporting to show him working as a parking attendant has been assessed as AI-generated and false by the fact-checking services HaqCheck and MultiFactCheck (October–December 2025), and is deliberately not used in this series.

THE TRAP · PART V OF V · THE ETHIOPIAN TRIBUNE