It takes something as dramatic as wholesale destruction to make one notice and to react. The demolition is around Mekanissa, where the city fathers, in their infinite wisdom, have given our metropolis and its citizens, something to be quite proud of: an underpass. No more freezing of city traffic around antiquated round-abouts, but it is hoped, there will result a continuous and unhindered flow of traffic in all directions.

At least, that is the ardent hope espoused in the excavations. Time will tell.

The excavation will result in the moving to the left, by a hundred yards or so of the tunnel, of a statue - or really a bust to be more precise. It will be moved towards an unoffending shopping center, poised, it seems, to embrace a symbol of modern, galloping times.
 

Questions about the bust, of the learned Russian poet and writer Alexander Pushkin, were being asked well before the tunnel was a gleam in the eyes of any of the architects, first Ethiopian then Chinese. These questions, well intentioned from the beginning were, and still are, singular in their intent: Why does a bust of Pushkin adorn what will eventually become one of the city’s main thoroughfares?
 

Why, indeed?

True, his importance to literature, both in his country, Russia, and globally are immeasurable. It might not be fair to either, but he has been called Russia’s Shakespeare. He was many things, and he was also half Ethiopian, the product of an Ethiopian father and a Russian mother: All born of nobility, with lines going back to Peter the Great.

Without taking anything away from “Comrade” Pushkin and his internationally recognized stature, and, even if there is Ethiopian blood running in his veins; it should be pointed out that there are other well-deserving Ethiopians that ought to have a statue erected in their name - in recognition of their body of work and their contribution to Ethiopian literature.

Two names come to mind without too much effort: Beälu Girma and Paulos Gnogno. Alas for all generations, Beälu was killed by the Derg in 1976, and old man Paulos died from bone cancer just 10 years ago.

Beälu Girma is a colossus, but, until his untimely death, remained an undiscovered one. He was read, but by a very few, becoming a much larger figure after his death.
 

A graduate of Columbia University well before it was understood what that meant, his contemporaries were from either the same institute, or Harvard or other American universities whose true standings in the academic world of Ethiopia had not yet been absorbed. European universities and their graduates were very much in vogue.

Beälu was vice minister in the Ministry of Information when he was killed. To this day, no one, except the killers themselves, knows what happened to his body. It was never found. One day, he drove out of his house to go to work and just disappeared. His car was found parked on Bishoftu Road. It was later returned to his widow, who was told never to ask questions of anyone.

He had always been a fastidious dresser, well groomed and handsome, and had three children and a loving wife at the time of his death. But in his spare time, at home, he wrote and wrote volumes of literature. But it was just one tome that got him killed.

The book was written in Amharic, titled Oromaÿ. It caused a rumpus when it came out because the title was confusing and could have meant anything but what the author intended. It took his death to explain what his intentions were.

It had nothing whatsoever to do with Oromia or its people, the Oromo, although he himself was half Oromo. Even the censor of the time was hoodwinked. He glossed over it and let the whole book go up for sale. The book flew off the shelves. Much later on, it became an instant best seller; and getting a copy was nearly impossible. There were three re-prints at the government printers, and each time they sold out.

Oromaÿ means “Enough” in Italian. The book was, from the beginning to the end, a daily chronicle of events as they unfolded in the “Red Star”, the military campaign to defeat the insurgents in the north of the country, the Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front (EPLF).

What was so surprising to the unbelieving readers was that he pulled no punches in his descriptions. Using a reporter as the kingpin around which he drew the main characters of his book, Beälu wove a not too intricate tale of deceit, double dealings and utter callousness and inhumanness.

It was not too difficult to see the characters in real life come to life in his ‘fiction’. That included, of course, the main personality in the Ethiopia of the day: Col. Mengistu Hailemariam, the giver and taker of life, who lorded it over 60 million Ethiopians. It was Beälu’s belief, and he said so in no uncertain terms in his book; that all the blame of what was going wrong in the country could, and should be, placed squarely at Col. Mengistu Hailemariam’s highly polished military boots.

To add salt to the wound, Beälu used an Amharic proverb to describe the state of affairs: a fish rots from the head on down.

It was too late to stave off the damage caused: the book was already out, and tens of thousands copies had been sold. It was easier to kill the author, and perhaps to get people to ‘unread’ and forget the book, in a true Orwellian fashion. That was the way of thinking in those terrible days.

The book got to be read by nearly every one, as well as being spread by word of mouth; but it got the author of Oromaÿ killed. No one dared to go to his house to pay their respects to the widow, the house was ringed, anyway, by heavily armed security forces.

His children are now grown, and it is reliably reported that one or two of them are budding writers in their own right. His memory burns alive, both in the book that got him killed and in the minds of those that read his work and admired the man that was brave enough to buck the trend, taking on the military head on. He lost the skirmish, of course, but not the war.
 

Paulos Gnogno, on the other hand, was a maverick from the beginning. He was a homegrown boy. A student of the hard knocks, a man’s man. A scrapper, a pugilist with words, a man that used words and short, sharp phrases to demolish half-baked, official mumblings and ideas. His columns in government newspapers over three decades overwhelmed the pompous. He left many an official begging for mercy, all of them dreading the appearance of his daily column. Magnanimous in his praises, when deserved, but scathing in his criticism when wrong had been done, he was a hero to all his readers, a bastion of the down trodden. His barbed sentences are still used as lances to put the unwary bureaucrat down.

Books written by him on past emperors of Ethiopia are, to this day, quoted as the final word. His well researched and thought provoking books on Ethiopian history are a byword for generations that follow him. Having produced two volumes on Menelik, the second is still to be published by his widow; and his biography of Emperor Tewdros is a classic, used as reference.

His death was both a shock and a dreadful omen, as questions were bandied about: who will, or even, who can possibly step into his shoes?

These two giants, these two men of letters that Ethiopians to this day still quote, are not faded from memory, even from those that were too young to know them. Their works are still read. They are much admired and emulated.

And yet, a fellow countryman of theirs, one Alexander Pushkin, has replaced them, although he has not been read by most Ethiopians, except perhaps, by those that had been in the former Soviet Union when it was the ‘most favoured state’ of the whole wide world.

There is one other thing the three have in common: their ancestry.

If the exercise was to choose a person of mixed parentage, a mixed Ethiopian, then surely both Beälu and Paulos would pass with flying colours. Beälu Girma’s father was a gracious Indian from the Asian sub-continent and his mother an elegant Ethiopian. Paulos Gnogno’s father was Greek, his mother,  Ethiopian.

They surely pass muster.

By Musie Ayele