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.

.

 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.