Richard French, click
here to update your pages on AuthorsDen.
Blogs by Richard French
A Significant Journey: Hiwot Teffera and Political Misery 1/31/2015 8:33:03 PM
A friend of mine who comes from Ethiopia leant me a book called "Tower in the Sky" by Hiwot Teffera. He said that this book would tell me what has been going on Ethiopia since the overthrow of Haile Selassie. I was happy to read this memoir, since I knew nothing about the history of his home country. As it turns out, I got more than I expected.
"Tower in the Sky" gives an abundance of information about Ethiopian political life, with a special focus on a rivalry among left-wing groups. One called the Derg prevailed in the mid-1970's, received support from the Soviet Union and became unspeakably brutal. Wikipedia reports that under the leadership of Mengistu Hailemariam the Derg was responsible for killing two million Ethiopians. The regime collapsed in 1991 when the Soviet Union fell. The former dictator fled to Zimbabwe, where he now lives in safety. He refuses to go home to face serious charges.
Hiwot Teffera joined the Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary Party (EPRP), one of the Derg's rivals, when she was barely twenty. She met the man she considered the love of her life through the EPRP, where he was a rising star. Her turn away from the politics of collective action began after leaders of the EPRP murdered her sweetheart because he disapproved of their policy of urban warfare. She stayed in the party, however, and continued to dream about helping to create a better world.
To reveal even more of the story, agents of the Derg arrested Hiwot because she was a leader in a rival political faction. She received a fifteen-year prison sentence. At this point, for me, about halfway through, the book became especially significant, for Hiwot passed through a remarkable transformation.
Intelligent and highly sensitive, she describes the rigours of prison life, the camaraderie that developed among the prisoners, and their work to civilize their environment. She also had time, opportunity, and talent to think and reassess.
I found three passages to give a sense of her growth from days when she let feelings do her thinking to independence and maturity:
"My mind connived against my cherished Party....Without the illusions, myths, and sacred taboos...it became just an ordinary bunch of people trying to find their way in the dark...
"I dared to lift the sacred halo surrounding Marxism ...How did it dare impose inevitability on life that is too uncertain, too ambiguous, too fleeting, and too arbitrary? The nationwide massacre perpetrated
by the Derg and its allies...taught me that life did not go in a straight line." (p. 355-6)
"Life in (prison) taught me that what people were actually going through was much more important than striving to build a rosy future...Guarding my own freedom and integrity is much more important and has primacy compared to building a utopia..." (p. 423)
"Prison was meant to crush our spirits and depersonalize us. However, it turned out to be a place where I learned what it meant to be human. It was there that I discovered the value of freedom and realized that personal responsibility , individuality and moral integrity are much more important in life than trying to build a utopia." (p. 437)
Some Internet exploration showed me that "Tower in the Sky" is a contemporary classic of Ethiopian literature. It deserves to be more widely known than that..
