‘It’s impossible to prevent it. That’s how it is: armies always do well in famines.’
The pilot grunted, and the two men sank back into the close embrace of another sticky silence. They both, separately, contemplated the enormity of the task facing Ethiopia, a task personified in the figures barely visible in the desert landscape beneath them.
Adrian asked: ‘What’s the idea behind the resettlements?’ When Tim looked surprised, he added: ‘I’m a little new to this; never been in Ethiopia before.’
‘What do you do?’
‘Public relations. Africa Assist is a client of ours.’
The pilot nodded, staring at him, a little mystified, before saying: ‘The government moves people from areas where there’s little food to areas where it’s more plentiful. Claims their motives are humanitarian, but what they’re really doing is isolating the rebels by taking away their bases. They also want cheap labour for their agricultural enterprises in the south of the country.’
Without turning his head, Adrian said, ‘You can do that kind of thing when you’re a dictator.’ He’d never understood why dictators received such a bad press. If people were determined to prove they couldn’t run their own lives, then someone needed to do it for them; it was as simple as that. An individual was better at solving problems than any government. ‘At least it’s their own government they have to contend with.’
‘Meaning?’
‘At least it’s not a colonial power, the Italians, the British or the French that they’re dealing with now.’ This is exhausting, he thought. I’m too tired. And he decided there and then to be less forthcoming, and hope to discourage the pilot from further conversation.
‘The Ethiopians have never been colonized – or so they claim.’
‘What about the Italians?’
‘Like to pretend they were never here. Selective amnesia, I’d call it. But they’ve been colonized now – since 1985.’
Adrian frowned, not understanding.
‘By you lot – by the aid agencies. Since Live Aid, you’ve become the country’s new masters.’
Adrian wondered if he was being criticized, but rather than attempt to come to any conclusion, he said, with the slightest of smiles, ‘If you ask me, the only answer for Ethiopia – and every other country in Africa – is to be recolonized.’
The pilot blew through his lips, almost as if he’d been punched in the solar plexus. He looked momentarily puzzled, perhaps unsure as to whether his companion meant what he was saying. ‘You being serious?’
‘It’s the only solution I know that would sort out this mess.’
‘Doubt it would go down well in Cape Town – to pick one city at random.’
‘Even the South Africans are incapable of getting their affairs in order. As for the rest of the continent, it’s a disaster. Take Somalia as a case in point. Or Sudan, Kenya, the Congo, Namibia, Rwanda, Uganda, Liberia, Zimbabwe – you name it. Africa has everything, except the people to rule it. At least when the British were here, the place was run efficiently.’
Tim stared out of the cockpit. Whether he was examining the distant horizon or the outrageousness of Adrian’s last statement, it was hard to tell. Perhaps he was reluctant to argue with a client. Then, as if deciding an oblique rejoinder might be the best approach, he said with a grin: ‘You Brits can never face up to the fact that the only successful colony you ever established was Australia. And that was by mistake.’
Adrian ignored the provocation. He stared at the large, solid man in the pilot’s seat, with his long, thick blond hair swept back from his forehead and his eyes deep set like the embrasures of a coastal fortification (probably used to scanning some outback scene, far inland from any sea), and was suddenly uncomfortably aware of how he himself must come across to this self-sufficient Antipodean. Tim was likely seeing the face of someone for whom life has been a little too easy, a face that was a little too plump and soft, a little too round and unlined. He’d think it was the face of someone who wouldn’t survive long in the wild.
The pilot was pointing down to where the flat plains of eastern Ethiopia are funnelled into a deep gorge by the mountains that surround Addis Ababa. The towering, three-and-a-half-thousand feet red cliffs resembled fortress walls protecting the city against the onslaught of the desert. Elegant spurs and solitary summits, bluish in the afternoon sun, paraded their majesty and fertility over the flat sterility of the Danakil Desert far below. ‘That’s the Great Rift Valley and the Awash River down there. Reckon that’s where humans first appeared in the world, the cradle of civilization. Twelve years or so ago – in 1974 I think it was – anthropologists discovered Lucy there, a fossilized skeleton that was about three or four million years old.’
Adrian was more interested in the fact that a pilot – an Australian pilot, what’s more – should know so much about a country that wasn’t his own.
‘That’s where it all started,’ Tim said, almost to himself, shaking his head with wonder. ‘That’s where we all started.’
Ten minutes later they were talking to traffic control at the international airport, on the outskirts of Addis Ababa. Almost immediately they were given the all clear to land. They flew low over a World War Two Russian transport plane rusting at the end of the runway. After they touched down, they taxied to the terminal building.
At two in the morning, Adrian woke up in his Addis Ababa hotel room, and was unable to get back to sleep. Perhaps it was sleeping in a strange bed, or that he was upset by all that he’d seen at Korem, or that he was too wound up, but he lay for a long time with thoughts teeming through his brain: the refugee camp, work, Judith and Emma, the famine, Anne Chaffey… Round and round they went, in no particular order and with little sense of logic, a whirlpool he was unable to escape from. And then, in the middle of all this, quite out of the blue, without any conscious effort on his part, the nurse’s statement hit him. And at exactly the same time, so did the solution. He turned on the light, reached for the notepad and pen he always kept at his bedside for moments like this, and began scribbling, He was terrified to lose any of his inspiration. After that, he began to think, to take the idea that had come to him in a subconscious flash a few minutes earlier, and worked on it, applied logic to it, picked and nagged at it until it revealed so much more, details that opened up a whole world of possibilities.
He was so excited that he wanted to phone someone and share his discovery, but he knew Judith would be fast asleep. Anyway, she was likely to have been slumberously dismissive, as she was with any of her husband’s ideas that were to do with work. Nor could he wake Emma – like most 14-year-olds, she slept like a log. Everyone else in the UK, including his business partner, would also be asleep. Even for this revelation, he couldn’t presume to wake someone up in the small hours. Eventually, he turned out the light, and tried to get some sleep, but not before having decided to postpone his flight back to London, and to call Tim first thing and get him to fly back to Korem. He had to talk to Anne Chaffey immediately.
Soon after ten the next day, he was back in the Cessna, flying north. Anne Chaffey was taken aback to see him again so soon, but when they sat down in her tiny office at the back of the clinic, she soon became engrossed in what he had to say. Adrian kept calm, and explained – or sold – his idea as simply as possible. As well as attempting to foresee any worries she might have, he also emphasized the fact that it had been her words that had inspired him in the first place.
Her only real worry – apart from the logistics of the project – turned out to be with its ethical aspects. But, to Adrian’s surprise, she proceeded to argue against each of these as soon as she raised them. He simply had to sit there, nod his head vigorously and