It's the same thing all over again.
I was riding a minibus from Piassa to Hayahulet Thursday when an eighteen year-old high school student sparks a conversation with me. The exchange is genuine enough. He has a fancy cell phone with a camera feature. He takes my picture and I accept to give him my phone number.
Two days later he calls and suggests we meet for a coffee. The next day we meet (this is like dating!)
We sit down at a cafe not far from my home and within seconds were talking about the political oppressiveness of Ethiopia, how there is no hope. Dreams of a future have been quashed by an increasingly dictatorial regime.
As per usual, I try to steer the conversation to action. How can an individual in this society take action against the hopelessness of the situation?
Because I am right there with him: I can feel the hopelessness. I breathe the injustice. I interact with it every day, through conversations and everyday life with Ethiopians around me.
But the shared intellectual journey with my young café acquaintance ends there. He -like so many others- describes the political oppressiveness and then shifts into a sales pitch.
He paints me a picture of his diligent studies and of a need for a white skinned sponsor at a Western embassy to land a visa to anywhere. His answer to political impossibility is to try to snare me (a stranger) into paying for his studies or, better yet, get him to France or America. This type of request is a pretty standard outcome of serendipity in Ethiopia.
And like many of the young people I meet like this, randomly on the street, yesterday's coffee friend, Himanot, has no parents. His father died in the eighties fighting the guerrillas who eventually became the current regime. His mother died of a broken heart soon thereafter.
If Himanot were in Mexico, he would already be at the border looking for the cheapest Coyote to take him into Arizona. As it is, (since I won't be his sponsor–it doesn't work that way and even if it did, there are a dozen friends before him) I expect he'll be in Kenya within months, beginning a heartbreaking odyssey through country after country, camp after camp, until, if he's lucky, he's charging a barbed wire fence in a country like Morocco towards a country like Spain, the final leap –he thinks– into… Something.
Sitting there at the cafe, across the street from the Bole Cathedral and the rich folk at Kaldi's Coffee, I want to dissuade him from leaving Ethiopia so rashly, but how? Without hope and without the dream of trying your luck elsewhere, you get Nairobi, a city where you can't walk down the block because you'll get mugged by gunpoint. Kenya is a country of thieves. I am convinced that Himanot, or someone like him, will become a thief if he stays in Ethiopia and things don't change.
And why shouldn't he be a thief? During our conversation I had sixty dollars in my wallet and all things considered, wouldn't relieving me of those dollars have been a better use of his time? Practicing English is useful, but 500 birr…
For now, generally speaking, Ethiopia has been spared thieving. Though I have slapped away two pick-pockets and seen one teen grab a cell phone from another teen, Abyssinia is far from Kenya or Nigeria. But if a job isn't possible and you don't flee, what are the other outcomes?
It seems to me that the only real alternatives are first crime and, second, politics, or more specifically, freedom politics.
In conversations I have with folks like Himanot, I'm with them all the way through describing the oppressive regime, but after that agreed intellectual point, the Ethiopian thinks it's best to flee, to find a future elsewhere (in America, France, wherever.) And a few dollars and a letter from me will help them do that, they say.
To me, that desire to flee is precisely the linchpin impediment to achieving development of any kind here. The perceived possibility and wisdom of flight actually enables political stasis. Emigration is the steam valve that allows corruption and dictatorship to proceed with impunity. Emigration in Ethiopia blunts change, which creates more emigration.
But how can I say that to Himanot? How can I tell him that I, secure in my whiteness, strongly believe that accepting poverty and risking his life in politics is his best way forward? Because I really do think that the action to take, the action that will bring hope and give him a good night's sleep, is political action: a steady, conscious (albeit small) effort towards political change here at home in Ethiopia. The rest –the barbed wire fence– is a Hail Mary pursuit into exile, racism, and alienation.
But who am I? I'm a white American who grew up in France double-teamed by the romance of Martin Luther King on one side and the French Revolution on the other. Until coming to Ethiopia, political engagement was something celebrated on holidays and in history classes, not actually experienced, not actually risked in any personal sense whatsoever.
But here in Ethiopia, during these coffees, I finally understand the hero's moment. Himanot has the one opportunity that many white Westerners like myself say they're deprived of: Himanot has nothing at all but a real, visceral, and fist clenched desire to affect change and engage.
I just hope he doesn't use that to flee… Or relieve me of my sixty dollars.
When I first arrived back to France in January 2005, police had just arrested a "terror cell" of youngsters dead-set on doing jihad in Iraq. The men were talked into volunteering by a young preacher, Farid Benyettou, who worked out of the mosque on Rue de Tanger in the 19th Arrondissement. This, the political set claimed at the time, was the beginning of a vicious wave that would connect mayem in the Sunni Triangle to the streets of bourgeois Europe.
