Throwing Stones

Dana Roskey

That was the year of the riots. None of the expats in Ethiopia will forget that year. Unless it’s Antoine. I wonder.

I had met Antoine only a few weeks before. It was one of those idle days when I could walk all the way down the hill to Arat Kilo. Arat Kilo is the name of a district in Addis Ababa. It’s a piece of the old city, the imperial city, bestowed with mid-century ministry buildings, Parliament, and expansion campuses for the university. It hosted the city’s Orthodox cathedral and the offices of the Patriarch. But my Arat Kilo was a district of tiny cafes lining dirty streets.

There was one on the road toward Piassa, one that had internet. The storefront room had space for the proprietors to hang two small decks above the cafe floor, making the place feel like a fifteenth-century caravel. Two opposing staircases led an unsteady way up. On each decks were two rows of three computers, facing the wall and facing the plate glass windows. The machines were slow as you could imagine. Each email could take five minutes. I had logged out, and was waiting for the attendant when Antoine came in.

He was a lanky white guy with dreads nearly to his belt. He had a goofy smile. He sat at the station behind me, swung around in the ancient swivel chair, reeled and had to reach for the ground. We laughed. “That’s a long way down,” he cracked in an accent immediately recognizable as French.

He had to wait for the attendant to begin, and we chatted. “How long have you been in Ethiopia?”

“A long time,” he replied.Who could you be writing to?” he asked me cheerfully. “You are more far away.” If the words tumbled awkwardly, his accent was musical. “Nobody writes to me anymore.”

“So why did you come to an internet place?” He shrugged, and said something about hope always pouncing. He had his own set of adages. Being a rather round-eyed Rastafarian, he often reached for Biblical references, and mangled them in some charming way.

He explained himself once, rather cryptically, with a quote: “And now after the king has satisfied the every desire of the Queen of Sheba, she has returned to the land of Cush.” He spread his arms and added, “Here I am.”

We met up again, this time at the Romina Cafe in old Arat Kilo, and we told our stories. His was simple. He had left Paris, predicting plague, and he had come to Ethiopia. Here he had stayed. By the time we met, it had been four years. He had never bothered to renew his visa, so he was illegally in the country, and doubtlessly owing thousands in fines. He was effectively trapped.

Antoine didn’t care. He sat on hillsides and smoked weed. Sometimes he traveled. He said he had children in a few cities around the country.

This he presented with some pride. Procreation was a religious duty.

I visited his latest domicile, a place he rented for about USD 25 per month. It was beyond Kidane Meheret, the church that stood at the end of her curving asphalt road, on a wooded hill. The hut was in the valley nestled behind the church and underneath Mount Entoto. It was a one-room mud house, loosely part of a compound owned by a family of weavers. The man of the house, standing in a dark doorway in the larger house beside the mud path, standing in jeans dyed white in the seat in a sad mimicry of style, eyed us with a malicious glare. I waved, and he slowly nodded, leaned another inch into the doorway.

The bathroom was a shared pit inside collapsing walls of thin branches loosely tied together. It reeked of its years of use. I couldn’t help but retch while trying to pee, standing carefully among the greasy deposits on either side of the hole.

I invited Antoine to crash at my place for a few days. He had announced he would start making his way south to the Bale Mountains by the weekend. I was living nearby, in Shiro Meda, renting two square rooms made of concrete, located in the back of a middle class family’s walled compound, rooms originally designed to be servants’ quarters.

I had been escaping my escape, taking half a year’s break from teaching in Rome. I made rude jokes about trading the American colony for Mussolini’s. Maybe the ruins I would see in Addis Ababa would be legitimately Italian, and not the movie sets crafted by a hundred rich restoration firms. That was all bravado. I was just hoping for something simple.

It wasn’t simple. The streets were intense with activity, dense with crowds and chaos. Every surface was rough: battered corrugated iron, roads made of rocks and mud, or roads made of asphalt pitted and cracked, nothing flat, nothing even. Daily life was a stuttering dance, electricity and water cutting out, food in the restaurants appearing and vanishing, people showing up late and laughing at nothing at all.

A friend had launched a little school a few years ago in the poor neighborhoods below the U.S. Embassy. I volunteered to lead occasional lessons in English language. This school was a work in progress, as it turns out, only the earliest grades to start, but designed to grow a new grade every year, like a Hydra sprouting heads. My lessons were shouting liturgies of alphabet and sight words, spiced with laughter and with songs led by the teachers. The children were amazingly disciplined and modest. They were amazingly poor, some wilting with hunger, like tender shoots left too long in the sun.

Antoine slept on the floor of the second room, and he prepared for his journey by sorting his effects repeatedly and packing his shapeless rucksack.

Events overtook us. The elections in May had been hotly contested. Against the party in power were ranged a handful of others, but none as popular as the one that seemed to have been exported from the U.S., the one gestated among the Diaspora. The leadership were largely intellectuals living abroad, humanists delivering a platform of common sense. It was patently obvious what would happen.

Things never quite settled down after the disputed election. There had been riots at the time. Some people were shot, some were jailed. Suddenly, in late autumn, it all sparked up again. The catalyst was something to do with the announcement of election results, delayed and delayed again for fear of protest. The cab drivers of the city had lined up behind the opposition. On this day, they had agreed to sound their horns all morning in support of the CUD party. An innocent enough appeal to the people, but somehow it ended in bloody clashes with the police.

Antoine and I knew nothing about this. We were at my friend’s school. I had been bringing Antoine to school, thinking that with his goofy ways he would be great with children. I was mistaken. He stood aside with grim detachment. I had assigned him to teaching the kindergarteners some French numbers and Suddenly, in late autumn, it all sparked up again.

phrases. He did so with a gruff voice, standing at the head of the class and bending forward at the waist in an oddly formal, solicitous way. The teacher was a slight young Ethiopian, very lively. She translated Antoine’s Spartan lessons with much theater, and the children managed to have some fun and some laughs anyway.

Suddenly, the parents had returned to the school, and they were gathering their kids and taking off in a hurry. The kids had only been there an hour or so. The teacher started getting calls, and started getting scared. The school guard, a dark-skinned local youth, built like a bullet, advised us to stay at the school for a while. Antoine didn’t like taking orders, and he tried to convince me to leave, but just about then we heard the first shots.

The violence began that morning in the Mercato, in the west side of the city, and in the northern precincts. Shiro Meda was one of the latter. The school was located on a side road, several hundred meters off the larger, dirt road that led steeply down the hill, down from the asphalt road by the embassy.

We were hearing guns, and the sound of people wailing and howling and whistling. Antoine and I step out of the school grounds. Standing in front of the school, we were relatively safe. From there, we were able to witness several waves of confrontation on the dirt road.

As we watched, several boys run up the hill, throwing stones. As they run back down, they were followed by federal police with guns. We watched as they stopped to shoot. Then they pursued. They were accompanied by the hooting and whistling of women in their houses. It was the very sound of shame.

Antoine and I just stood there stunned. It was the first time I had seen men shoot at men. I was powerless to form a thought. Antoine’s face was a study of concentration. But he said nothing.

If someone had been hit, would we have heard? Were the police aiming over the kids’ heads to frighten them? Even so, releasing live ammo among our hills, our hills full of people! The truth is we would never have heard about it if someone were shot. Bullets were fired, and the hills absorbed them. It’s as if time, the ultimate arbiter in Ethiopia, took them, like fog swallowing light.

We retreated into the school. The guard and the teacher took care of us. No one left the school that day, once the children had all been retrieved. The staff all lived too far away, and they would not let us leave. All day we heard the sounds of strife, and at night we camped out in the classrooms. The guard and a visiting friend teased the teacher, as she bustled around a propane stove warming bits of food for us, preparing tea. We gathered around the guard’s portable radio, and it felt like we were dissidents in old Eastern Europe.

By morning, things had settled down sufficiently for us to return home. We had to walk; all taxi services had stopped. Shops and businesses, and our little school, were all closed down. This would carry on for a week. I spent my idle days walking all the way down the hill to old Arat Kilo, where a few canny shopkeepers broke ranks. Otherwise, I would not have eaten. I walked slowly back up the hill to my house in Shiro Meda, amid the stream of hardy citizens lining each side of the road, chatting and laughing, as though, in the end , this will have been little more than a holiday.

I lay in bed at night, staring blankly into the darkness. I might have been excused if I had longed for “civilization,” if I had wished for Roman cobblestone at sundown. But I didn’t. I was mourning, but I wasn’t scared. And I couldn’t despise the place for its turmoil.

The spontaneous strike was eventually broken. The government declared that business licenses would start being pulled. Magically, taxi pulled out from their alleyways one day, and all was back to its shout and growl. It was like a Hollywood stunt: city comes to life.

By then, Antoine was gone. I never saw him after we left the school. We walked up the dirt road together, and his jaw was set. He never uttered a word about what had happened. We bid each other be safe, and that was it. He walked away, kicking dust down the margin of the embassy road.

I wondered about him after that. I pictured him lying back on the grassy slopes of the chilly

mountains down south, meditating on what had happened. I was pretty sure nothing he saw would make him reconsider Ethiopia. And nothing would challenge his stern and strangely permissive Old Testament visions. If anything, he would shake his head when thought of Addis Ababa. And of me. He would tell his grandchildren that he had prophesied the events of that year.

“Vanity is vanity,” he would say, quoting Ecclesiastes, “and nothing under the sun will have its season.”