Feed the World: Birhan Woldu and Live Aid. Oliver Harvey
before he assumed the crown, Ras Tafari Makonnen, to found a new faith they called ‘Rastafarianism’. Haile Selassie, which means ‘power of the trinity’ in Amharic, was adopted as a living god, Jah, and marijuana as a sacrament. When the Emperor made a three-day visit to Jamaica in 1966, some people there were convinced miracles occurred, much to the bemusement of many Ethiopians. Groups of Rastafarians, encouraged by the Back to Africa movement, even migrated to Ethiopia and the town Shashemene, south of Addis Ababa, became their unofficial capital.
In his early years, Haile Selassie had made considerable efforts to modernize Ethiopia. Slavery had been abolished, schools, hospitals and roads constructed and he authorized the establishment of a parliament. But Ethiopia remained a feudal society in which the Emperor, aristocratic families and the Church owned and controlled much of the land. Birhan points out that women were second-class citizens. They were not allowed to eat their main meals until their husbands were at the table. Around three-quarters of Ethiopia’s peasant farmers were also tenants and Woldu remembers the Haile Selassie years as a time of endemic corruption to the cost of the peasants.
In the 1930s, however, Haile Selassie was hailed in the West, after his nation’s stand against Benito Mussolini, Italy’s fascist dictator. Mussolini, envious of the British and French African colonies, wanted to build an East African empire and he was desperate to avenge Italy’s crushing defeat by an Ethiopian army at the Battle of Adwa in 1896. Like most Ethiopians, Birhan is very proud of her nation’s stand against European colonialism. Italy had been humiliated at Adwa in northern Tigray when its army of 17,000 soldiers advanced into the Ethiopian Highlands but was routed by Emperor Menelik II’s forces. The victory, Birhan explains, is seared into the national consciousness. It only added to the Ethiopians’ belief that they were a special people.
In 1935 Mussolini stood before his supporters in Rome’s Piazza Venezia and bellowed: ‘We have patient for 40 years. Now we want our place in the sun.’ Half-a-million Italian troops poured into Ethiopia using aerial bombardment and banned poison mustard gas in the advance. After a seven-month campaign, Addis Ababa was captured and Haile Selassie fled into exile, choosing the genteel English city of Bath as his new home. But while Ethiopia may have been occupied by the Italians, it was never successfully colonized. The mountains protected the people, just as they had before against waves of invaders throughout history. Birhan believes this independence has contributed to Ethiopia’s evident confidence and selfesteem in the modern world.
In 1941, just five years after Mussolini’s troops had arrived, Haile Selassie slipped across the border from Sudan back into his homeland. With the help of the British-led forces already confronting the Italians, the standard of the ‘Lion of Judah’ was raised once more. The old order resumed, the Emperor took possession of his palaces and the grinding, poverty-blighted life of millions of rural peasants remained unchanged. Under the 1967 Civil Code of Ethiopia, tenants had to pay 75 percent of their produce to their landlord, provide free firewood, free labour on the landlord’s farm and free work as servants, cooks and guards at the landlord’s home. Peasants faced constant fear of eviction. ‘There was a lot of corruption under Haile Selassie. He may have been an honest man but he was not a good leader,’ is Woldu’s summation of that time.
In 1969, with the Emperor’s 40th anniversary approaching, Woldu finally got his own farm. He had to apply to the local elders in Lahama for land and built his own sekela hut. He worked the land until his hands were rough and calloused. He harvested wild plants in the mountains and ploughed four different fields. Eventually, he managed to save up to buy a cow, goats and a donkey. Woldu explains that they are the basic domestic animals that every farmer needs to survive. After a year he had enough saved to buy another ox. ‘I was in my early 20s; I felt fit and healthy and was ready to be with a woman.’ He met Alemetsehay Berhe, who was working at a neighbouring farm.
‘She was a hard worker and extremely beautiful,’ Woldu recalls, smiling. ‘She was trusting, calm and quiet. We didn’t get married; there was no church service, nothing. We couldn’t afford any celebration. We relied on trust and our belief in God. She helped work the fields with me, weeding. It was hard and dirty work but Alemetsehay never complained. We were just pleased to get through each season with enough to eat.’
In 1973, though, famine devastated Wollo Province next door to Tigray. Estimates of those that died vary between 40,000 and 200,000. In Lahama’s winding river valley, Woldu and Alemetsehay managed to withstand the hardships brought on by the failed rains.
‘There was a bad drought, a terrible time, but it wasn’t everywhere,’ Woldu remembers. ‘If you had money there was still food in the markets. I was fine, I had made sure I had stored grain and had enough animals to get me through.’
The imperial government knew of the disaster unravelling in the north of Ethiopia but did little to help the peasants dying in their tens of thousands. To spare its reputation, Ethiopia also failed to seek international aid. British ITV correspondent Jonathan Dimbleby alerted the outside world to the catastrophe in Wollo. His raw documentary The Unknown Famine showed graphic scenes of the wasted cadavers of children who had starved to death. The impact in Britain was enormous, resulting in a public appeal that raised £6 million.
In early 1974 Haile Selassie’s reign began to unravel. Units of the armed forces mutinied and there were student demonstrations and strikes by teachers and taxi drivers. There were also suggestions that Haile Selassie, then in his early 80s, was losing his faculties. US lawyer and historian Dr John Spencer, who had advised Ethiopia on international legal matters for decades, visited the ageing monarch that year. He says: ‘It became apparent to me… that Haile Selassie was already retreating into a dream world. I withdrew with the piercing realization that the curtain of senility had dropped.’
In September 1974, a group of Marxist army officers became determined to overthrow the Emperor. Known as the Derg (meaning ‘committee’ in Ethiopia’s ancient language Ge’ez), the cadre of revolutionaries showed Dimbleby’s film, re-titled The Hidden Hunger, on Ethiopian national TV. Scenes of starving peasants were intercut with shots of Haile Selassie and his entourage sipping champagne, eating caviar and of the Emperor feeding meat to his dogs from a silver tray. It was the end for the Lion of Judah. Bundled into the back seat of a green Volkswagen Beetle in his palace driveway by rebel army officers, he was never seen alive in public again. The ‘King of Kings’ would die a prisoner on August 27, 1975, the cause, according to Derg officials, ‘respiratory failure’ following complications from a prostate operation. His followers, however, insist the 3,000-yearold Solomonic dynasty ended when the Emperor was smothered with a wet pillow. His remains were buried under a lavatory in the palace grounds, only to be discovered 16 years later.
The Derg was led by Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, who soon developed a bloodthirsty lust for absolute power. Former BBC news correspondent Michael Buerk, who would famously alert the world to Ethiopia’s 1984 famine, described him vividly as ‘an outstandingly evil bastard, even for a continent stiff with vicious dictators’.
High in Tigray’s secluded mountains the farming families of Lahama were anxious about what the fall of the Emperor would mean. ‘When the king of bees dies you worry what will happen to the rest of the hive,’ Woldu comments. ‘We worried after the Emperor went. We were scared there would be chaos and anarchy. We had no TV, radio or telephones. We had to rely on what people told us about the Derg. In the beginning Mengistu was a good man. He wanted equality and said he would cut out corruption. But then the terrible Red Terror came. Life was cheap. People were killed for no reason.’
The Derg revolution was followed by the mass murder of sympathizers of the previous regime and of university students. One hundred thousand people are said to have been butchered in the Red Terror. Their bodies were left littering the streets of Addis Ababa on the orders of Mengistu. To lie unburied in such a religious country is a terrible humiliation for the relatives of the dead. When family members came out at night to bury their loved ones, Derg soldiers were waiting for them. They hung the bereaved from lamp posts as a warning to others of what might come.
Mengistu attempted to force the teachings of Marx and Lenin, as well as the purges and forced resettlements of Soviet Communist leader Joseph Stalin, on an African subsistence-farming