Oromay by Baalu Girma review – an Ethiopian classic
Oromay begins as it means to go on, at hurtling speed. A television journalist wakes late, with 20 minutes to catch a plane. And not just any plane: a plane carrying most of the leadership of Ethiopia. Tsegaye has hardly rubbed the sleep from his eyes when he finds himself in first class, receiving orders. There is to be an all-out push to bring the northern province of Eritrea into line with the revolution. He is in charge of hearts and minds, which must be changed. At once.
Oromay is set in the first months of 1982, seven years after emperor Haile Selassie was killed by a military junta led by Mengistu Haile Mariam, who by then had eliminated almost all opposition. A security agent in Oromay describes Eritrea immediately after the coup: beatings, jailings, extra-judicial killings, “corpses in the streets of Asmara almost every morning” – but this happened all across the country. A 1991 report from Human Rights Watch estimated that a minimum of 10,000 people died in Addis Ababa alone during the Red Terror from 1976 to 78; many more were imprisoned or fled. Those targeted were usually young, urban and educated, even if minimally. “That generation was lost,” the report reads, “with the remainder so cowed and terrified that any expression of dissent in Addis Ababa was unthinkable for a decade.” In Eritrea, which since it was colonised by Italy in the late 19th century had had a difficult and constantly shifting relationship with the Ethiopian capital, the repression had the effect of strengthening resistance. “We share,” says the security agent, “the blame for that” – but this time, he promises, it’s going to be different. With this new Red Star Campaign, two years in the planning, the promise of safety will be paramount. Though of course, “we do have to break the insurgency’s back”.
Baalu Girma, the son of an Ethiopian mother and Indian father, trained as a journalist in the US. On his return he edited journals and newspapers; after the 1974 revolution he became head of the Ethiopian news agency and then, within two years, permanent secretary and de facto minister at the Ministry of Information. He was close to Mengistu, for whom he wrote speeches and policy statements, and Oromay is often admiring of “the Chairman”, though there is a strong underlying sense of threat. He “has the eyes of a raptor, tracking everyone around him. He is both fire and water, a lamb but also a lion. To see him is to believe in him.” All along, Baalu was writing fiction, and had published four novels before Oromay appeared. The 1982 campaign in Eritrea was named after one of these novels, The Call of the Red Star, and Oromay, the story of a journalist tasked with running propaganda for a campaign in the north, was written while Baalu was actually running propaganda for the campaign in the north.
This is fiction as reportage, in a context where the official reportage was effectively fiction. It carries the shock of truth
Oromay often reads like an 80s-era Bond film, in which 007 is not a secret agent but a journalist on a particularly intense deadline (though the novel also has its fair share of agents and double agents). Gorgeous physical settings (palm-lined, Italianate art deco Asmara, the wide Red Sea sweep of Massawa beach, the pitiless peaks of the Nakfa mountains); the dark chess games of the cold war; switchbacks and betrayals, hidden loyalties, cross-loyalties and grudges; a faceless “Bureaucrat”, who in reality will go on to rule Eritrea, spinning lethal webs behind the scenes; macho dialogue and utterly unreconstructed sexual politics; the threat or memory of violent death around every corner; and always that relentless, tightly plotted pace.
Language is power, everyone in the novel knows that; the novel is itself an enactment of it. The wrong word in the wrong place could kill you; equally, the right word – especially if televised, as the Chairman insists the revolution must be – could change the course of a war. Language is risk, and language is a game, and language shapes reality. In Oromay, it is direct, light on its feet, often dryly ironic. “From each according to his ability,” says Tsegaye, deadpan, to a colleague who questions a change in seating plan, “to each according to his need, comrade.” The head of interrogation, famed for his cruel methods, is a “family man … he loves and adores his wife and children, and won’t work late.” Tsegaye is aware of the effect of dehumanising language: of describing insurgents as stray dogs, terrorists, a disease to be eradicated. He makes sure to critique, or at least complicate it – all of which is striking from an author who was simultaneously disseminating the language in which the country was being forced to think about itself: “those who deny you peace are the stooges of crony imperialism”. “Motherland or death.”
There are linguistic and cultural complexities difficult to convey in translation, but what does come through is how alive this novel is, how urgent its writing. The women aside, it is full of credible characters, which in a way is unsurprising, because they are so clearly based on real people with real power, their actions and motivations described in real time. This is fiction as reportage, in a context where the official reportage was often effectively fiction. It carries the shock of truth.
And as the action progresses, it darkens. The womanising, cheeky chappie journalist is embedded with the army. He watches boys marching away, up the raw Nakfa mountains to die. “I don’t recall every face, but they all looked like me. They had my face, an Ethiopian face.” He makes clear how misplaced their trust is in their over-promoted, self-saving superiors. The shock of actual war rises off the page with all the unprocessed, appalled blankness of immediate reaction.
Oromay was published quickly, in 1983, and was an instant sensation. The leadership, recognising themselves, understood why, all too well, and it was just as instantly suppressed. Soldiers snatched it from readers’ hands; some readers were arrested. They could not get every copy, however, and Oromay was passed around, dog-eared, photocopied, or sold for high sums on the black market, only gaining in reputation. Baalu was fired from his job. Six months later, he went for a drink with a friend and never returned. Seemingly light asides – Tsegaye has no interest in being a spy, he tells one double agent; he’s a journalist and will “die with a microphone in my hand” – read now as dramatic irony.
But knowledge of what has happened in the 40 years since means that the dramatic irony is national as well as personal. The Red Star campaign, launched with such fanfare, ended in silence, because it failed. By the time the 30-year civil war ended in 1991, it had cost hundreds of thousands of lives. In 2007 Mengistu was convicted, in absentia, of genocide, while the Bureaucrat, Isaias Afwerki, has for the last 31 years run the now-independent country of Eritrea, one of the most oppressive regimes in the world. Its currency is named for the mountains on which so many died: nakfa.
• Oromay by Baalu Girma, translated by David DeGusta and Mesfin Felleke Yirgu, is published by MacLehose (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
