Searching for Africa’s heroes

Less known to Abuja’s taxi drivers is a massacre in Addis Ababa on November 23, 1974. Under floodlights, Mengistu Haile Mariam’s military group, the ‘’Derg’’, shot  59 ministers, generals, members of Haile Selassie’s royal family and the prime minister following a rumour that the CIA, America’s intelligence arm, planned to mount a counter-coup and reinstate […]

Less known to Abuja’s taxi drivers is a massacre in Addis Ababa on November 23, 1974. Under floodlights, Mengistu Haile Mariam’s military group, the ‘’Derg’’, shot  59 ministers, generals, members of Haile Selassie’s royal family and the prime minister following a rumour that the CIA, America’s intelligence arm, planned to mount a counter-coup and reinstate Haile Selassie in power.  This was a follow up to a failed coup in December 1960; some of whose leaders committed suicide and others were hanged in public. The students who rushed out to celebrate Mengistu’s coup would, however, be decimated in their thousands when he turned against them as ‘’renegade socialist’’ children of the aristocracy. His giving land to serfs; showing them a government that brings development to the poor; contrasts with his ruthless killings in Ethiopia and decimation of Eritrea to create a muddy record of a hero.
Mengistu seems to have particularly detested Haile Selassie’s idea of self heroism as expressed in his numerous titles, namely: ‘’Emperor of Ethiopia, King of Kings, Lord of Lord, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Elect of God, and Light of the World’’. His eyes were set on the hundreds of thousands of serfs who died from famine periodically while the aristocracy who took 75 per cent of harvests  each farming season were also being pampered by salaries and contracts paid with American aid money. Haile Selassie had cleverly offered Ethiopia as a base for Americans to spy on space programmes by the Soviet Union; as well as protect flows of oil from the Persian Gulf into the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea.
After expelling the Italians from Ethiopia, the British army had looted 80 per cent of equipment Italians had installed in Ethiopia. Michela Wrong claims that the ransacked items included: road-making material; mining machinery; saw mills ; bridges; diesel tractors; soap-making equipment; an electricity plant; printing press; ‘’medical stores valued at 4 million pounds sterling’’, etc. Haile Selassie manoeuvred to get the Americans to reclaim Ethiopia’s lost road to modernisation. The military officers he sent to study in America’s military academies would, however, turn against him with a rare fury. Wrong alleges that Mengistu built a toilet over the Emperor’s grave. Ali Mazrui has invoked Edmund Burke’s wit never to depart entirely from antiquity. The place of justice in nation-building is a delicate one.
The Eritreans had their own revenge against Haile Selassie and his military successors. Mengistu abandoned Selassie’s American friends and lured in the Soviet Union with his turn to socialism. Massacres by a flood of Soviet weapons forced a rare creativity and resilience out of leaders of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF). Not only did they flee to the mountains – like Fidel Castro and Mao Zedung before them – but survived by cutting through rocks to build hospitals, offices, technical colleges, schools for children inside rocks leaning on steep sides of valleys. They lived under the ground and the darkness of mountain rocks. Ethiopians were flying Soviet bombers and carrying out over 240 attacks daily. Going under the ground was a matter of strategic survival for a victory that came 20 years later.
Tijan Sallah and Ngozi Okonjo- Iweala in their book: Chinua Achebe Teacher of Light, share Achebe’s condemnation of V.S. Naipaul’s wrath against industrially underdeveloped peoples of the world. Naipaul wrote: ‘’The world is what it is: men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it’’. It is a view recently expressed by Campbell, former American ambassador to Nigeria, in writing off Nigeria’s place in 21st Century politics. Naipaul first spilled out his venomous wrath against India, on his first visit to an ancient civilization from which his Trinidadian parents left to sweat in British-owned sugar plantations. Indian intellectuals reacted with fury; but Indira Ghandi heard him and made India’s scientists create a nuclear bomb. Achebe and others have seen Naipaul as a racist.
Yet, there is a vindication of Naipaul by the creativity, grit and resilience of the Eritreans. When Mengistu slaughtered EPLF’s fighters with overwhelming Soviet-supplied airpower, commentators regarded its leaders’ hope for victory as a rare ‘’madness’’. They silenced the arrogant Amhara dictum that ‘’All people come from God, but the Ethiopians more than most’’.
Rawlings, Mengistu, Indira Ghandi and the EPLF were each fighting to lift burdens from skies above their different histories; bringing new light and air to a patch of life. They were almost certainly aroused by liberation fighters before them. The BBC on 5th April, 2014 telecast a documentary on Captain Mbye Ndiagne of Senegal who risked his life in saving six hundred persons from the 1994 Rwanda genocide. CNN rolls out its heroes. Daily Trust throws up an “African of the Year’’.  Africa’s media starve Africans of floodlights on their heroes. Africa’s youth must see heroes. Africa’s media must end their drought.