Book Review Yacob Wolde – Mariam, Brief Autobiography and Selected Articles (2003)

Review by Mezemir Girma

This review highlights the life and works of a veteran journalist who has had a hand in shaping the local press. Yacob was the editor-in-chief of three monthlies and two dailies, including the Ethiopian Herald. Modestly priced, 20 Birr, this book, which is “dedicated to all authors of change in Ethiopia,” gives a nice lesson on the evolution of our press.

The autobiography that extends over the book’s part one starts by narrating that the writer is from Nekempte, “the [former] capital of minerally and agriculturally rich Wollega” (Yacob, 2003, 18). His family had intimacy with Onesimos Nesib, the former slave who translated the Holy Bible into Oromo; Wollega Governors like Dejazmachs Gebre-Egziabher and his son,  Habte –Mariam, who was “allegedly poisoned by Italian fascists late in 1937” (25).

The author was an elementary student in the “Italian times”. He wrote that he was informed later by authority that Italian troops, who invaded Nakamte in 1936, when he was seven, were numbered 12,000. He is a living witness of the heart breaking killings and injustices then. Let us consider this narration:

            … Ayana Birru – a mining engineer who had graduated from the Imperial College of Science and Technology of the University of London – was a family friend who was giving the Italians a hard time. One day, he was spotted in his hideout in Nekempte and betrayed by an enemy to the fascists. One evening, however, he had staged a dramatic escape from prison and was on the run at a treacherously marshy place below our house. Just before catching him at the marsh and killing him on the spot – a marsh in which he was sinking deeper and deeper – the Italians were, I remember, ransacking our house on suspicion that we had hidden him somewhere. (22)

The writer also remembers what happened when the British forces along with local patriots drove out the Italians. “When the thirst was too much for the Italian soldiers they were drinking their own urine. Many an Italian soldier had committed suicide with the words: ‘Addio Roma’” (23). After the Italians went out, the author resumed his lesson at the Missione della Consolata in Nekempte. He adds, “By April 1945, I was in Addis Ababa – the first and only student to graduate from Nekempte for secondary education in Addis Ababa” (27). He pursued his education in the Haile – Selassie I Secondary School (HSISS) at Kotebe, today’s Kotebe College, and whose teachers’ contributions he acknowledges. They organized for their students a supervised class-work after supper. He gives credit to his expatriate teachers including Abebe Bikila’s coach - Major Onni Niskannen, who was Yacob’s sports teacher in the late 1940s. He tells us that he received prizes from the hands of the emperor in music and sports.    

Yacob “passed the London Matriculation Examination with distinction” (34). Nine students were selected out of 83 and left for London for university education; the others were to join the newly opened University College of Addis Ababa, today’s Addis Ababa University. Endalkachew Mekonnen, Imperial Ethiopia’s last PM, and Iskindir Desta are among those children of the aristocracy who studied in London in Yacob’s time. They did not go to Ethiopian Student’s Association’s meetings, which the writer remembers bitterly. He wrote, “As the English saying has it, pride goes before a fall” (40) referring to their eventual execution by the Military junta.

The presence of dramatic changes in the writer’s life is just one of the reasons you want to keep turning the pages to find out what happens. He lived with host families there in London and failed to bring his lessons to an end since the government in Addis Ababa had forced him to study engineering, a field he detested. It was the field the sponsoring ministry chose that Ethiopian students had to study then. EELPA was Yacob’s sponsor, so that he would work for it after graduation. In his “Life in London” sub-section, the author relates about his time there as a student. According to him, many great fighters for freedom and equality in the world, including the Pankhursts, came from Britain. After Yacob lost the chance to study his choice, physics and mathematics, he was absorbed in wine and reading. He became fond of reading philosophy, literature and journalism.

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 After a four year stay in London, the author came back home. Having taken vacation in Nekemte, he got a teaching job in Amha Desta School in Addis Ababa in 1955. It was during his stay at this school that the author did something against the resumption of his university lessons abroad.  This is because he married a “beautiful 16-year-old half-caste of Yemeni and Oromo (Worji) origin who had run away from her 40-year-old Arab husband as soon as she was married to him” (59).

Passing these chapters of life, the author joined the press, the Ethiopian Herald in particular, in 1959 at the time when Americans were editors-in-chief of the major papers in English here. He recounts the attempted coup and Abebe Bikila’s victory in Marathon in Rome Olympics in 1960. Due to disagreements in the Herald, “dealing with unmentionable issues” (86), he moved to the Menene magazine in 1962 and became its editor shortly afterwards. Later, he became the joint editor of this magazine and the Voice of Ethiopia. He repossessed the editorship of the Herald in 1964 to help it get rid of its nickname at the time – ‘the daily rag’.

Yacob wrote that he is contemptuous of authority, nonetheless, he seems calculative. He worked calmly under three regimes as an editor of the major state owned papers, whereas he ‘laughs at’ his colleague, Bealu Girma: “It was a pity, however, … that one has to thrust one’s finger into the fire to learn that it burned – as he did with ‘Oromai’ and perished by ridiculing (unlike journalists) those in power who were taking themselves very seriously” (96-7).

Yacob is articulate and at times courageous. He says that he helped in bringing the emperor down by writing satirically. He was told to write the ‘developmental journalism’ way rather, but to no avail. He shares to his readers other writers’ encounters like Negash Gebre – Mariam’s who once asked the Emperor a question and made him “throw off his gown in anger, as he had often done” (103). The question Negash asked was “Your Imperial Majesty, what provisions are being made for a smooth succession to the Ethiopian throne” (103)?  Yacob wrote about the people’s plight as in the following: “there was no denying the fact that the system of land tenure which had prevailed in Wollo was a living monument to man’s eternal injustice against man” (108). He appreciates the Dergue for redistributing land and denounces it for harassing the press.

Unlike other autobiographies, the book showcases the writer’s selected articles covering different issues and published in his years of service - a nice variety. In these articles, he scorns us for our wastage of resources such as governmental budget, and time, on which he wrote “his majesty the Emperor admonishes us to be the masters and not servants of time”. Moreover, the handling of pack animals in our country, witchcraft, the sophisticated ornamental needs of our women and their adverse effects are some of the issues he addresses bitterly.

The veteran comments our society more. He says that we regard our servants as sub-human: “Master, give unto your servants that which is just and equal”.  For egalitarian matrimonial atmosphere he fights. The experience that green graduates are required to have for an employment worries him. Don’t we have this problem now? Bachelors, who use their cars as mobile dwellings going to bed in them, he laughed at. Their cars’ tires are stolen as the bachelors are slept in. Wolves in sheep’s clothing - policemen in civilian clothing committing acts of robbery - he criticized. Their meager salary is also considered. What about now? Really, Yacob’s ideas are felt after many decades now, I feel.

Yacob attempted to modernize this nation in his sharp toned articles as the instances to come exemplify. How should we handle women? He advises men to act on an equal basis to them in our relations. Noise from cars and loudspeakers disturbs the writer. On the role played by hyenas in cleaning our cities and on the traditional belief that ‘evil eyed’ people change themselves to hyenas in the evening he wrote committed; he paid tribute to hyenas killed by a falling electric wire by dedicating an article to them; the body parts of hyenas the society badly needs for magic concerns him.

“What price matrimony?” is written for people who had to endure 100 lashes in public and other severe things in different cultures to get the woman they loved as a wife. Even nowadays, Indian unmarried women or their parents move around the world and toil to pay dowry. Among some pastoralist societies in Ethiopia, Yacob says, a man was expected to present “some ghastly trophy to prove that he has killed a member of a rival tribe” (173).

Finally, I wind up my review by presenting to you some other areas of concern to Yacob and by inviting you to read this interesting book written in the Queen’s English. Corruption and the “breast- son” practice illustrated by the story of a member of President Nkrumah’s Cabinet, who “[gave] rise to an international scandal by ordering a luxury bed framed in solid gold from London” (202), and the need for research on holy water in particular and reform on the Orthodox Church in general are dealt with. Yacob worries about our imitation of unnecessary foreign lifestyles, and he recommends our society to imitate the West in its scientific advancements.

N.B. Copies of the book are available at AAU’s book centre. 

The Environment: A Life through Experience

Mezemir Girma
Note: This article was published in the quarterly magazine of DBU's college of Agriculture and Natural Resource.

I am a man of limited mobility who spent his formative years in Sasit, a small town 90 kilometers north of Debre Birhan. There, I saw to what extent the area is devoid of trees. If you at least go to Google maps and notice the condition of this area, you may see the trees surround the houses there as a bracelet surrounds a girl’s wrist. As a part of the Shewan plateau, this place has been inhabited for a long time, exposed to erosion and parts of its 60 degrees plus steep mountains are ploughed. Degraded, it has been giving food for the people.
When I was as young as ten, a grade five student, I used to climb eucalyptus trees and fetch home bundles of dry tree branches I broke. There were fresh, red and shocking marks on my chest which the trunks rubbed. I would also collect and take home sacks of leaves of trees. It was as if I accidentally got a thousand birr on the road that I used to feel when I got the whole tree dry; one of the few times I felt happy in my life! I would break such small trees to pieces just using stone wedges. If I used axes, the authorities would be mad at me. So, this made me an expert in using stone tools. Now, this forest area is cleared and half of it is used as the compound of a newly built health center and the rest as a market. The market was changed to this area thirteen years ago after the former market almost vanished. Some Sasites whose houses are found around that market included parts of it into their compounds year by year by extending their fences to the center of the market and that big market dwindled to less than a hectare. People even started buying and selling commodities on the road and they had a threat of a car crash. By the way, I cannot tell you how people killed, quarreled, and sulked each other there just because of an inch of land or a glance one has at them! Fuel wood is a very hard question no one answered for Sasit or other area people. Recently, a woman from this town told me that one morning she ordered her servant to fetch a sack of dung from the fields where it was found in abundance not more than a decade ago. The fields would be cleared of their dung by the cattle owners themselves and the residents of the small town could no more get anything to put in their stoves. If they saw you roam the fields, they would attack you with slings, sticks and/or stones. That woman told me that the girl she sent to fetch the dung said she went more than ten kilometers and could get nothing. “Madam, I tell you for real that there is nothing in the fields,” she exclaimed weeping. Most people already used their fences as fuel wood. Stealing trees from the protected public forest is a must that the people cannot avoid. Now the protected forests are almost empty. What would agriculturalists suggest for this? This is a tangible problem. Isn’t it? Sometimes I wish I were the governor of that district or an NGO chair only to solve such problems.
The place I went to as a reporter for my school’s mini media when I was in grade six was my district’s capital, Sela - Dingay. This Moja and Wedera district’s capital is 72 kilometres north of Debre Birhan. The district was formerly known as Tegulet, whose name is attributed to three legends. First, it is said to be the name of a local chief after which King Zera - Yacob named the district since he urgently fulfilled the latter’s order of building the Debre Mitmak church. Secondly, it is said that the people who migrated from the area to other fertile areas of the country say, “Let me go to my Gult, individual land,- Tegulte (my Gult) -” when they feel sad. Thirdly, they say it is because the people worked hard for the development of the area – in Amharic this means ‘taggullat’. The heart of the district, Sela – Dingay town, is, like Sasit, almost tree - free. Don’t we have hardworking people these days? Why is Moja/Tegulet dry, dusty, stony, and why is the sun always scorching there. There are no sleeping people, but in my view the problem is their energy is unfairly wasted on unfruitful daily chores.
When I was in grade eight, I visited one of the four Debre towns I have been to so far. This town was Debre - Sina. Seen from the Tarmaber Mountain, Debre Sina’s view is really breathtaking. Even if I was thirteen then, I could see how this area was evergreen and full of eucalyptus and tid trees. If these were not there, there would be no Debre - Sina town in our maps as the steep hill would beckon flooding. As you read above, eucalyptus trees and I had dangerous encounters. English professor friend-cum- colleagues of mine here at DBU would laugh at me reading this account of mine in which as usual I talk about and get obsessed with nature. One of them said to me, “While people carry with them girls’ pictures, you carry in your cell phone photos of natural things you shoot.” Anyways, eucalyptus trees have an attachment with me because they are common in my area. If you asked me, till recently what ‘tree’ was in Amharic, I would say ‘bahirzaf’, which is the Amharic term for eucalyptus, while, normally, tree is ‘zaf’. Farmers in my area don’t accept seedlings of any trees other than eucalyptus because of the benefits this tree gives them and their love for it. To mention a damage of eucalyptus, at least it made my grandfather’s spring dry. I think this is the place to share with you about my granny’s friend, Gash Gebre Meskel, who gave me a three – hour interview at his house two years ago. I asked him if there were trees in the area when he was young. He told me that there were no trees. “What was there then? What was the area covered with?” I asked shocked. “It was covered with Tid, Weyra, Bisana, Girar, Kitkita, Kechemo ….” He kept mentioning indigenous trees. “But not with trees,” he responded and we agreed. Look! At least there is a place called Kechemo opposite his house named after an indigenous tree even if there is no trace of that type of tree.
Debre Birhan is where I did my high school. It was when I was in grade 11 that I visited Debre Libanos. There, I met many Sasit people who came on foot to the area making their three day pilgrimage scorched by the sun and having no tree for a shade during breaks. When I spent a week there, I really could picture Ethiopia of the olden days whose forty-three percent land was covered with trees. The air you breathe, the water you drink, the natural way of life you live there brings the real setting of our great grandparents’ days. The secret of all the green scenery there lies in the people’s fear of God’s punishment for cutting the indigenous trees. Indigenous trees, indigenous beliefs, indigenous wearing, speaking, and living styles help you renew your acculturated self. Oh Debre – Libanos! I have understood now why Fitawrary Woldu of Daniachew Worku’s novel, The Thirteenth Sun, pledged to be buried there. A green oasis! If only DBU agriculturalists visited it and modeled it to cultivate our area!
A DBU professor asked me last time to tell him about any a protected natural forest area I know in North Shewa and I said I heard of none except of Wof Washa. That man told me this week that he is conducting his research on Mugeriza, a forest in Ginager. Look! Isn’t it a shame not to be able to have trees? Not a shame of my own, but of the whole society; not of the society alone but of its learnt people; not of the learnt people alone but of the NGOs; not of the NGOs alone, but of the government. I told the aforementioned professor to go to Adabay, not knowing that it almost vanished. The Adabay forest was a shelter for people who travelled to and fro Tegulet. But now the trees in that watershed are cleared and their roots made into charcoal and sold in Debre Birhan markets and Tej is drunk by the money from the charcoal sale. The locals used to sing this about Adabay:
Oh Adabay! Your mighty trees are felled
Unlike my crooked brother, you were my shelter
Unlike my bad friend, you were my shield.
I am a man who saw a motorbike for the first time when I was in grade three, a TV set in grade six, telephone in grade nine, elevator in university and had a cell phone of mine after I became a teacher. If you are born and brought up outside our capital, when did you first visit Addis Ababa? What did you feel then? Who were you with? What did you notice? When I was in grade 10, I was lucky enough to visit the place I knew from books and the media alone. I was able to see the compound walls of Addis Ababa University. Addis is really rich in plantations and it is the second green place I saw after Debre Libnos. From the Entoto forest to the university and other public compounds, and the streets, Addis Ababa is really a green city. I feel how the lack of trees is hard when I go to Mercato, where, unlike Sidist kilo, I pant due to the heat and dust. Sidist Kilo compound is like heaven. But I think at this time city planners have forgotten the fact that our capital needs ample green areas as they almost forgot our English Premier League fan youth need sporting places.
On my way to Langano, the resort where I spent two days with my undergraduate classmates, I saw scattered acacia and other tress which mankind may clear in the future. How can one forget the anthills on one’s way to Langano? Adama/Nazareth is the last town I know. Last year, I spent three weeks in this town which is full of trees. The wind power generating towers are other technological trees that can help us save our trees from vanishing. EEPCO, may your life be filled with joy!
Debre Birhan town is another place where eucalyptus reigned. Seven years after its foundation, Debre Berhan University (DBU) has been able to grow trees a bit taller than a man. I understand that the weather is hard to bear for such trees, but we can do something at least to teach our students who should have something to do with trees. This year is special in the intensity of the chills and the frequency of the frost. DBU is not to blame for that – it is nature to blame. Most of the trees and other plants in the compound are dying albeit the effort even to clothe them. If all this effort had been made six or five years ago, if the compost had been scattered then, if the buildings had been built fast, we would see a university with tall trees for the students to shade themselves from the scorching sun. We are too late, but let us think that we still have time. Whenever drought comes almost every ten years and we are under problems we say ‘the god’s must be crazy.’ But, I think we must be the crazy ones who are making nature not give its fruits to its children. You give nature something, it gives you back; you take something away, you should compensate by some means; you take and don’t put back, you suffer. I understand the pain you have, but let us build our home together! Let me close with how Saleamlak quoted Blair last time during our tête-à-tête at Mulugela saying, “This generation plants trees, and the next generation enjoys the shade”