The Chains of Heaven
PHILIP MARSDEN
AN ETHIOPIAN ROMANCE
For my parents,with love and gratitude
Table of Contents
The Glorious Victories of Amda Seyon
The Story of Tekla Haymanot’s Leg
The Ethiopian Book of the Dead
Emperor Menelik Learns to Drive
Aksumawi was the son of Ethiopis and the great-grandson of Noah. He established the kingdom of Aksum which is itself the ancestor of modern Ethiopia. Unfortunately a snake took power in Aksum and ruled for four hundred years. The snake was 170 cubits in length, had teeth a whole cubit long, and the people of Aksum had constantly to supply it with milk and virgins. One day a stranger came and slaughtered the snake. The stranger was called Angabo and he in turn became ruler of Aksum.
Angabo married the Queen of Sheba, and after he died she left the city of Aksum with 797 camels to visit Solomon in Jerusalem. There, with Solomonic guile, he seduced her. Back in Aksum she gave birth to a boy named Menelik, and when he came of age he journeyed to Jerusalem to see his father. When he left Jerusalem he had the Ark of the Covenant. With the Ark the blessing of the Lord was transferred from Jerusalem to Aksum, from the people of Israel to the people of Ethiopia. Menelik was the first of Ethiopia’s line of Solomonic rulers.
The land around Aksum was very fertile and it came to be known among the world’s peoples as a place of wondrous plenty. Every rock on its open plains was a loaf of bread. Once for eight days showers of gold and pearls and silver fell on its hills and filled the rivers with riches. Palaces and temples swelled the bounds of the city. The graves of its kings were marked by standing stones and with each passing king the stones grew higher until they scraped the underside of the sky.
In 1974, Ethiopia was still ruled by the 225th member of the Solomonic line. Emperor Haile Selassie was then an old man. On the morning of 12 September, Ethiopian New Year, some junior officers of the Derg came to his palace, read out a deposition order and took him away in the back of a Volkswagen.
Derg means ‘committee’ in Amharic. It was established as a small concession to the armed forces and ended up taking over the whole country. With the emperor gone, the Derg ruled from his palace. In the cellar below the throne room, they imprisoned about 150 men. They were members of the emperor’s family, his generals, his government ministers and senior clerics. They were kept there for eight years. When the Derg met in the throne room, the prisoners below could look up from their dungeon and through gaps in the floorboards see the feet of the new rulers pacing back and forth.
When I was twenty-one, I went to Ethiopia for the first time. I had never been outside Europe, had never in fact been any further south or east than the top of Italy. Ethiopia amazed me. It shocked me, revolted me, awed and terrified me. It reawakened in me the childlike sense that the world was a vast, diverse and wonderful place—a sense that has remained ever since.
It was the early 1980s, and it was the rainy season. Billows of cloud half-covered the Entoto hills. From the airport the road entered Revolution Square beneath a triumphal