Peter Gill, in his book, Ethiopia and Foreigners: Ethiopia since the Live Aid (Oxford University Press, 2010), describes Professor Mesfin Wolde-Mariam as “a formidable fighter in every cause he has adopted.” Excerpts:
At the outset of his career it was famine. Then it was human rights. In later life it became outright opposition to the government.
He started out as a geography lecturer and became the head of department at Addis Ababa university. He wrote influential books. He was the founder member of the Ethiopian Rights Council. In 2007 he emerged from twenty months in jail for his role in the political opposition. When some Ethiopian opposition leaders went into exile and started calling for the violent overthrow of the government, Prof. Mesfin stuck to political campaigning at home and faced the consequences.
‘The simple answer is that I had nowhere else to go,’ he said and chuckled. We met in his flat where he chain-smoked Kent cigarettes for two hours. A few weeks before he had been hit hard by a soldier’s rifle butt while protesting at the treatment of a fellow opposition leader. He was then approaching his 79th birthday.
A famine fifty years ago, almost unremarked on by the outside world, started it for Prof. Mesfin. In 1958 he had just married and joined the teaching staff at the university. He told me how he used to visit the home of a classmate whose wealthy mother was also an exceptional philanthropist. ‘She was very kind, a lady who if she saw someone ill on the streets would stop the chauffer in her Mercedes and carry that sick person and have him treated.‘
The woman’s name was Ghenet Wolde-Gabriel. From Roman Catholic nuns she had heard of a terrible famine unfolding in Tigray and she was sending food and clothes through them to the North. Ghenet asked the nuns to bring famine orphans back to her home in Addis Ababa where in her own yard, she built accommodation and a school building and then another.
Mesfin went to see the editor of the Ethiopian Herald, then as now a government mouthpiece, and urged him to cover this story of great suffering. Not a word appeared. He decided to see for himself what was going on.
He took the bus to Tigray, up those hairpin bends to Korem, beyond them towards the capital Makelle, and further on to the towns where the hunger was at its worst. ‘What I saw was horrible, I could not take it. The money i had taken was all depleted when i came back. My wife had to carry me home from the bus. I was starving and shivering. I’d hardly eaten for the last three weeks.
Prof. Mesfin has since developed a deep antipathy for officialdom, but on this occasion he began to pester ‘high official dignitaries’ in the imperial in the government to back his plan for fund-raising drive. Emperor Haile Selassie was was on an official visit to Moscow at the time, and the minister of the interior suggested that a donations committee be set up under the crown prince and that they should approach, as Mesfin put it, ‘the duke of so-and-so, and His Highness so-and-so, and i told him it would take me a year to get to see these people and by that time the problem would be solved.‘
The young lecturer wrote a letter to the emperor and enclosed a few slides he had taken of the suffering. ‘A few days later I received a letter from the minister of the pen [on the personal orders of the emperor] telling me that I was to go to Tigray to distribute the grain that His Imperial Majesty had graciously donated–about 20,000 quintals [2,000 tons].’
Only about 500 tons of the grain authorized by the emperor ever got to Tigray, but Mesfin spent another gruelling month in the region face to face with famine. By then some American food was beginning to trickle in, but it was too late for many. One hundred thousand may have died in northern Ethiopia in 1958. ‘For me the experience was a nightmare,’ said Mesfin. ‘A young woman with a baby whom I had befriended was in terrible agony, along with her baby. She was coming in my dreams the whole time. She was haunting me, and it was that which eventually drew me to write about famine.’
Prof. Mesfin published his Rural Vulnerability to Famine in Ethiopia almost thirty years later in 1986, in the immediate aftermath of the worst tragedy to befall northern Ethiopia in modern times. In that interval there had been other famines, one of them more severe than the one of 1958. It was this event which undermined and finally sealed the fate of the empire of Haile Selassie.
Mesfin was appointed to chair the commission of inquiry into that 1973 famine, and this was an opportunity to search the files at both national and district level. The very first famine records he found at the Ministry of the Interior were those of 1958. From then on Ethiopia and the outside world had begun fitfully to acknowledge the outrageous human cost of death from starvation and had begun imperfectly to address it.
Image: Siye Abraha, Mesfin Wolde-Mariam, and Negasso Gidada, exchanging greetings after bumping into each other at a demonstration in 2010 by Sisay Guzay.
