African Camelot

BY THE TIME WE REACHED GONDAR I felt like I’d found my sea legs in Africa, meaning that I’d adjusted my expectations downward and put my guard up. We’d only been in Ethiopia for four days and already I was on a diet of soup and tea. Still, once we’d located a hotel and gotten some rest I realized that I felt far better than I had a right to, considering the ordeal of getting here. The following day I woke feeling right as rain. Hayley, however…

I spent my first day in Gondar going from one pharmacy to another trying to fill the list that my girlfriend had given me when she woke in the clutches of whatever had doubled me over the previous day. “This will be worse,” she said, sounding aggrieved. “I always get it worse than you.” At least she didn’t have to travel with it, but finding the right drugs turned out to be more difficult than I thought. Despite my skill at charades the clerks never seemed to grasp the notion of diarrhea. They either shook their heads or tried to give me antibiotics. Finally, I ran across a pharmacist with rudimentary English skills. She looked to be about twelve years old. After my song-and-dance routine she nodded.

“It is from food?” she asked.

It could have been from anything, but I nodded.

She started to pull a box from the shelf when her assistant, a ten-year old, said something that made her hesitate. They argued for a minute and finally agreed on a different box. The pharmacist pushed it across the counter at me.

“No eggs,” was all she said.

I passed the instructions on to Hayley, who looked skeptical and Googled the medication.

“These are antibiotics,” she said, “and it doesn’t say anything about avoiding eggs.”

Nevertheless, she took her meds and stayed in bed the rest of the day, watching Ethiopian soap operas on the small TV in our room. I’d once read an essay about the appeal of soap operas in America, the gist of which was that they were a form of social control. Script writers were tasked with portraying people whose lives were such a godawful mess that viewers would be inclined to count their blessings and think twice before complaining about low wages and a lack of health care in their actual lives. Although we couldn’t understand the dialogue, Ethiopian soaps seemed to have the same guiding principle. The shows featured poverty, domestic abuse, and people who made such terrible, terrible decisions with their lives that a Sterno drinker would shake his head at their behavior and say, “You need to take a look in the mirror, dude.”

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The reason we’d come to Gondar was the castles. Four centuries ago Gondar was the capital of the Abyssinian Empire, although by then it was an empire in tatters. The kingdom had once ruled the Horn of Africa and held territory across the Red Sea in Yemen, until the rise of Islam cut off their trade and saw the overthrow of their colonies. Before long Muslim armies in Abyssinia itself began to threaten the last vestiges of the Christian empire, until the intervention of the Portuguese in 1543.

Europeans had long cast a hopeful eye on this part of Africa, a region they imagined was ruled by a rich and powerful king named Prester John. The legend was at least as old as the Crusades, when rumors of a Christian kingdom in Africa that was standing against the Muslim horde fired the imagination of the faithful. The legend was just as enticing in the 16^th century when the Portuguese sought the mythical kingdom in hopes of creating a military alliance that would crush the Ottomans and their heretical church in a pincer movement. When the Portuguese arrived, however, they found a weak and besieged kingdom that could not even help itself.

Once the threat from Islam had been quelled the Portuguese set about making enemies of their new allies, demanding changes to the Ethiopian Orthodox church in order to accord with European Catholicism. Intransigent priests were tortured while Jews were persecuted and killed. Civil war threatened until the Portuguese were finally expelled, ushering in a renaissance for the Abyssinian Empire, or at least a period of relative peace during which the castles were built by rulers who rejected the intolerant policies of their former allies.

Despite knowing the history, the castles still looked incongruous in sub-Saharan Africa. This was partly due to the fact that they were built on a medieval European design, but it didn’t help when our guide made a sweeping motion with his arm and intoned, “Welcome to African Camelot!”

The complex of half a dozen castles and outbuildings was situated within a walled enclosure on a bluff overlooking the city. The trim lawns and quiet paths were a welcome respite from the commotion outside. I enjoyed wandering the ruins as our guide filled us in on more than 200 years of royal Gondarine history (which followed the same trajectory as most Hollywood franchises: a strong start, several disappointments, and eventual abandonment of the entire project). The city did not go gently into the night, however. It was twice ransacked in the 19^th century by Emperor Tewodros II who had moved the capital to Debre Tabor and apparently wanted to blight its predecessor. It was later targeted for jihad by Sudanese Muslims (“Mahdists”) and again put to the torch. Finally, in 1941, the city was bombed by the British as part of an offensive to oust the Italian fascists from Ethiopia. Given this litany of destruction it is remarkable that Camelot did not vanish into legend.

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Hayley was anxious to move on, having lost a day to illness, so I steeled myself for another ordeal. The guidebook led us to the general area of the bus station, but we couldn’t locate it in time and the sharks began to circle (“Where are you from? Where are you go?”).

We’d been having good results by ignoring their whistles, but Hayley accidentally made eye contact with one of them and that was enough encouragement for him to rush up to her side and pronounce himself our escort. She tried to ignore him but it was too late. He was on us like a dogged journalist, watching our eyes and trying to tease out our story.

“Taxi? Yes, I can get for you! Hotel? This way, this way! Bus? I will show you…”

We spotted the ticket office but when we tried to enter he wedged himself between me and the door.

“I will show you! I will show you!”

Hayley suggested we duck into a juice shop and wait him out. He watched, sweating and confused, as we left.

“Where you go?”

We downed two glasses of fresh-squeezed juice, then made a dash for the ticket office when the coast was clear. But it was all for naught as none of the buses went to Axum.

“You have to go to the other bus station, south of here,” the clerk informed us. “Take the bus to Shiré, about 100 kilometers from Axum. From there you can get a shuttle the rest of the way.”

I felt like I was talking to Rube Goldberg: How needlessly complicated can I make this for you? So we hopped aboard a bajaj (a tuk-tuk) and soon found ourselves in another chaotic dirt lot filled with a variety of public transport options. We were instantly surrounded by smiling, helpful people who we ignored, and made our way to what looked like a ticket office. The clerk sold us two tickets for 100 birr each and we left, surrounded by scowling, frustrated people. It was a shame that you sometimes had to be cruel in order to protect yourself, but didn’t Whitney Houston say that that was the greatest love of all?

We flagged down a tuk-tuk and the driver asked for fifty birr, dropping the price to thirty birr when he saw my girlfriend’s eyes, then twenty birr as we began to walk away. His last offer, shouted as he cruised alongside, was fifteen birr. I climbed aboard and Hayley followed, annoyed that I hadn’t held out for an extra twenty-five cents. I’m pretty sure this is what she meant when she described herself as “criminally cheap”.