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The United States, as in everything else, paved the
way. Added atop their already formidable length and
breadth of the wall surrounding their embassy up on
Intoto Avenue, they attached rolls and rolls of
thin, especially toughened security barbed wire.
But these rolls were different. Every six or nine
inches, there are the most hideous attachments:
razors, four or five to each cluster, sharp and
deadly as they glisten in the sun. A grim warning,
if ever it was needed.
If the barbed wire, as we know it today, was
considered inhuman when it was first used in South
Africa against the Boers by the British, this new
twist to concentration camp security and compound
safety, can only be described as gruesome in the
most extreme.
Barbed wire, when first used to keep prisoners
confined to their Prisoners of War (PoW) compound,
was considered to be the worst and cruelest
invention that man had designed against his own
kind. This did not, of course, keep the contraption
from being used by all and sundry. It was, in its
own way, in fact considered to be the most cost
effective method of corralling prisoners, whether
they were PoW's or petty criminals.
Use of barbed wire flourished during World War I and
from there, it was an easy leap forward to private
use; it was utilized to keep people out of
compounds, rather than to keep people in, as
originally envisaged. It says something for the
barbed wire that it is associated with wars and the
various contraptions of war, and of confinement.
Mines and trenches are the first things that come to
mind when thinking of barbed wire and war, with
desolate smoke-covered fields and stumps of trees
littering the landscape. A veritable no-man's-land.
In today's perspective of wars, the barbed wire has
been replaced by the razor wire, the Mach 2 version,
as it were. It has replaced the ubiquitous wire of
old completely.
Paradoxically, and if you look closely, it even
adorns armoured personnel carriers. But things have
not stopped there.
Traveling in the hinterland of Ethiopia, in any
direction of the compass, the famous and ubiquitous
tukuls are skirted with bushes and the ever faithful
Acacia tree. Look closely and you will notice that
protection is provided by thorns: Nature's free gift
to the hard-working farmer and his family. No
self-respecting hyena will attempt to scamper
through the enclosure.
Move more inland, into urban areas, and this is
replaced by shards of broken glass from bottles,
cemented in on top of walls. Very rarely does one
see barbed wire. At most, as dwellers became more
affluent, they would affix ornamental spikes.
The message that was being imparted from these
dwellings was that this was the Ethiopian's castle:
the house, containing his precious possessions, his
family; surrounded by a high wall of finely chiseled
stone. Not so high that it could not be scaled. In
the days when he was armed, it was said that he
would occasionally saunter out into his compound and
let off a couple of rounds from his faithful FN or
Mauser and go back to bed. Thieves had been warned.
And that was all to it, and all that had to be done.
The only kind of thievery that worried him was the
'inside job' kind.
The city of Addis Abeba was never the city of
marauding gangs, or even of 'enterprising' thieves.
Even during lawless disorders, there have been no
large scale ransacking of homes and businesses.
Daytime, or even at night, armed burglary is unheard
of, either with the owners in or out of their homes.
True, there have been reports of collusion between
zebegnas and thieves, when everything in the house
was loaded onto lorries and carted off, but nothing
stops that kind of thievery. Not even the razor.
Moving around the city today, though, one draws a
depressing picture. Like the United States Embassy
in Intoto, homes have become fortresses. Unheard of
just a few years ago, homes have razor wires strung
along their, sometimes, decorative outside walls,
looking for all the world to be nothing but desolate
islands in a sea of teeming tranquility.
And, to top it all, and horror upon horror, quite a
few of these bales of monstrosities are electrified,
with the proud sign shouted out to prove it.
Addis Abeba and Ethiopia do not need these relics
and leftovers of the apartheid era of South Africa.
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