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The unabridged transcript of Amha Selassie's recorded interviews, edited for clarity but never for character. Recorded November 2022 – May 2025, Potomac, Maryland.
I was born, depending on who you ask, on different dates. The main thing was that my parents were married for almost twenty years before they had a child. So it was a big surprise that I was born, and everybody was delighted. Everybody pampered me in my childhood, basically.
I was also fortunate enough to come from parents who were, if not well-to-do, but reasonably well-off for the time and for the surroundings. I got everything that any child at that time could get—proper clothing, shoes, food, and whatever it was that was available at that time that money could buy. There was not much even if you had more money, because many things are not the same as they are now. Now everybody has too much abundance of anything and everything, but in those days people didn't have that opportunity. But I got the best, and that was, looking back, a great opportunity for me.
Everybody in the family, everybody basically in the town, took care of me. I could go anywhere, and I could be accepted wherever I went, and I was more than accepted. I was given whatever I needed and some more, and things pressed on me as well, so it could not have been any better than that. People basically respected and deferred and gave us the opportunity to feel secure and to feel good and to feel accepted by everyone. So looking back, it was exceptionally good.
Not many of my peers were as well-to-do, or they didn't have the money, so they didn't have the kind of opportunities I had. For example, if I had a sweater at that time, it was unlikely that other kids would have a sweater like that, and I'd stand out for that. It was not comfortable in a way, because I did not want to stand out or look different, so one of the arguments at home was on what clothes to wear. The most interesting thing was, I refused to wear shoes to a very great extent, because the other kids did not have shoes. And if we were going to play soccer with them, they wouldn't allow you to play with your shoes, because you'd have a big advantage over them. So I didn't want to go through that hassle, so the easiest thing was to avoid wearing shoes, and my parents basically insisted that I do. So I would go out wearing shoes from home, and then I would take them off and come back and put them on again, several times like that.
Even in school, teachers paid attention, they knew my name, they would not punish me as much. The other kids complained about that at times—we do this and get punished and you do not. At that time, I did not fully understand why things were the way they were.
It looks funny now, but there was a need to conform and to be not different from everybody, so you don't want to be looking odd in whatever way it is. We tried to conform to the surroundings.
My father was a big man, both physically and socially and morally speaking. He was highly respected in the community, and he was dedicated to helping other people and to promoting new ideas and new activities in Axum. He started out as a young man, appointed at an early age as a tax collector for the city. He was responsible for collecting taxes from merchants and traders and market activities, and that gave him a position that enabled him to have contacts with a variety of people and with various segments of society. He was working for the governors and administrators. At the same time, he was working with merchants and traders. At the same time, he was working with the church hierarchy. So he developed a lot of friends and associations and supporters over time, and he gained a lot of experience from it.
As a result, he was called upon to do a lot of things. Whenever there was a need for mediation, he was always asked to be part of it. He was leading some of the activities in the church, working with the head of the church and high priests and people involved in church affairs. When I was growing up, he was working closely with the Nubraid, who was the governor of Axum. He had access to the hierarchy, and that gave him a lot of opportunities to help people and do what needed to be done.
Two of the outstanding things he did, for example—one, when the emperor came to Axum many years ago, I was very young at that time, my father stopped his motorcade in the middle of the street while it was driving. The bodyguards hustled him, asking who he was and so on. The emperor stopped the car and said, what is this about? So my father went over and the emperor said, what do you want? He told him that Axum, being one of the oldest cities in the country, had been neglected over time. One of the examples he gave was the fact that there was no hospital in Axum—only a clinic. He was asking the emperor to make it happen. The emperor instantly agreed and said, we will do it. Two years later, the hospital was built. It is still standing. It is the main hospital in Axum now. It had seventy beds, which looked enormous to people at that time.
The other thing he did was, a few years later, he organized a group and they went to Addis to meet the emperor. They asked him to have a high school built in Axum, because Axum was the main source of all education in the country. The church schools and all the literature and liturgy had started there, but Axum had been forgotten—it did not have a modern school. My father was the spokesperson of the group. He told the emperor it had been neglected and they were asking him to redress it. The emperor ordered that a high school be opened, and it was.
One of the reasons for acrimony at that time among family members and other families was the question of access to land. Land was very important. It was commonly owned in many places, so people who lived in a certain area were able to have access because the land belonged to the community. If your grandfather had rights to land, then you had rights to land too. It did not matter where you lived or how long you had been away. You could come back and ask for a piece on the basis that you came from this family or that family. This created an atmosphere where people competed and people were suing each other.
What my father told me later in life was that the reason he kept in good standing with almost everybody was because he made a decision early on that he was not going to ask for land from anybody. He said to himself, if I have to have it, I have to work for it—I can buy my piece of land. But he was not going to go to people asking them to share. He said it creates acrimony, people become angry, people become frustrated, and that creates conflict. So he decided not to do that, and he said it changed everything for him. Now he was not fighting with anyone, and at the same time, everyone came to him to help resolve this problem or that problem. That increased his connections, his respect among people, his neutrality, his fairness. It had a multiplying effect on what he was able to do.
One of the things I saw growing up was that a lot of people came to the house, from early morning until the evening. Many were relatives, others were friends, but many others were hangers-on who wanted my father to help with this or that—to intervene in some issue, to mediate family disputes, marriage issues, land-related issues, political issues, fights among people. People deferred to people like my father at that time. It is not like now. If he said don't do it, people would stop, period. No argument.
I remember one day very clearly—two people were beating each other up, and one of them took a knife out. The bystanders started screaming because one was going to kill the other. My father came out and they said to him, can you tell them? He looked at them, called them by name, and said, stop. Both of them froze. He said, what do you have? One said a stone, because stones were used as weapons. The other said a knife. The third said a pistol, which was unheard of at that time. They brought everything out and put it in front of him. He said, come. I want you to make peace, and you will start now. Whoever made the mistake says I am sorry, and the other accepts it. And they did. He gave them their things and they went home and nothing happened. Nowadays, nobody would listen to you if you intervened. At that time, people never crossed those lines.
The body language was the most important thing. Words people can say or not say, but when they see you, when they come close, when they are standing near you—people have their own body language on who defers to whom, and to what extent. It becomes a very clear thing. It is not a verbal culture the way Amharic culture is, where everything depends on words, on what is said and how. In Tigray, it is more by subtle actions.
One day, a gentleman was coming to the house. As he came to the door, he changed the way he was wearing his gabi—the way you drape it tells a story, it signals deference. My father jumped out of his chair and ran to him, and they started struggling. At the time I did not understand what was happening. No, the one said, no, the other said. Other people intervened. What had happened was, the big man was wearing his gabi in a way that showed respect, lowering himself. And my father was saying, no, you are too big—you cannot do this in my house. I will not allow you to put yourself below me. It was like fighting for the restaurant bill. These small things meant a great deal. Somebody could be offended because something did not happen the right way—you were wearing the gabi on the left and not the right, or whatever. These are the subtleties of the culture.
Every time somebody important came, everybody stood. If they entered ten times, you stood up ten times. Who sat where mattered. If somebody of higher rank arrived, you gave up your seat. People would not tell you why they were doing it, but after a time you realized. When people walked down the street, they would show deference by following you—some for a short distance, some for a long distance, and some all the way to your destination. How far they followed you was the measure. It was a complicated process, but it worked.
One thing that shows who my father was: every year, Axum hosts the Mariam Sion festival, a big holiday where people come from all over the country. Preparations started in August for November. In the old days, there were no restaurants or hotels, so the only way to eat was to go to somebody's house. The townspeople would throw a big feast, and their relatives and friends would come and eat and drink. But also the average people who came from the countryside with no contacts—you had to feed them and give them drinks. It was a big operation. Hundreds of people would come during the two-day period.
What I remember is that all the big personalities who came to town came to our house for lunch or dinner. Growing up, I had no idea who was who. You knew somebody was important because people deferred to them and followed them. But later on, when I realized who they were and how connected they were, I saw they came from all different backgrounds, from the highest to the lowest. Nobody else would dare invite some big personality to their house because it would feel presumptuous. But that did not happen with my father. He would invite everybody, all types of people, and they would come. Even some of the bishops came, and bishops never went to other people's homes—you took things to them. But there were some who came to ours.
He talked about his childhood, though not in a big way. He went to Gondar as a young person, which was a big city then. One surprising thing I learned was about my great-grandfather. People told me he was a rich man in those days, and I asked what that meant. They said he was allowed to make taj in his house. Apparently, people were not allowed to do that. If you start making taj, people will come to your house to drink, and you will be gathering people around you, and you will be getting the idea that you are somebody—and you will be challenging the highest people in the area. So they did not allow it. Making your own taj was a much bigger privilege than what it meant economically. It had a very big political meaning.
The other thing I learned was that my great-grandfather was a contemporary of Emperor Yohannes, and they knew each other. One day the emperor came to visit him and entered the house on his horse. The horse destroyed the bamboo floors—in those days, if you were a person of means, they laid bamboo on the floors. My great-grandfather was so offended that the next time, he lowered the height of the door so nobody could ride in again. He could not say no to the emperor directly, but he could lower the door.
My father was also imprisoned by the Italians. When they invaded around 1935, he went to fight. Everybody went to the countryside, but they were not well organized where he was, so there was nothing they were really doing. Meanwhile, my mother was at home. The Italians started harassing her—where is your husband, and so on. They came to the house and searched the premises. When they looked up at the ceiling, they saw a painting of the Ethiopian flag in the decorations. They were furious. My mother did not even know it was there—it was part of the decoration. Because of that, they started harassing her. They said there were arms in the house, that she would be thrown in jail.
She said she was very scared. They came as a group with an interpreter, a young man from Eritrea who understood some Italian. And in the process of harassing her, this young man said to her, in Tigrinya, quietly: whatever they ask you, say no. They will tell you they know this or that—they don't know. Be calm, be strong, do not panic. Do you have arms? No. Do you know where your husband is? No. He helped her out.
After that, they started pressuring my father to come back, promising he would not be punished. But when he returned, they arrested him. They told him what he needed to confess and decided to give him forty lashes. A guard warned him privately to be prepared. Then the head of the church in Axum, who was related to my mother, went to the Italians and said, this is my son, you gave him a promise, he came, how can you do this? My father did not know about this intervention until later. The day he was supposed to be whipped, they came and told him he could go home. It was a very big surprise. He was even afraid it was a trick—that they might do something worse. But later he understood that the priest had interceded on his behalf.
My grandmother was still alive when I was growing up. She would tell us stories, and she was getting old, so she was not as active, but because she was in the house, I saw her every day. One of the things I remember very clearly is that her uncle went to Addis. Her brother went looking for him and stayed there. Another brother followed and stayed. Her sister decided to go look for all of them and she stayed. For my grandmother, Addis was a place that took everybody and never returned them. That defined her views.
When I told her I was going to Addis, she was very angry and frustrated. She was blaming my father—how stupid he is to let you go and get lost like this. I did not fully understand it at the time. It was only when I went to Addis that I could appreciate what she had been talking about all those years. When I came back after a year, she was very relieved, because she had not expected to see me again.
She used to tell us that when she was a little girl, there was a game the children played. The game said: may your children go to Shewa and Gondar, and your grandchildren disperse everywhere. She used to say, I have come to see that my children went to Shewa and Gondar, but I am not sure what is meant by "your grandchildren disperse everywhere." She wondered about that. Now, I think, she would know exactly what it means.
My father brought most of his family members around him. He was the central figure, and everybody came and many of them grew up with him. He was supporting, leading, helping, and advocating for people. His brothers and sisters, his younger uncles—they all saw him as their father and treated him that way, even those who were the same age.
The key was the question of land. Because he had removed himself from the land disputes, he was not fighting with everybody left and right. And later in life, people would come to him and say, you have a right to this piece of land—we will give you your share. He kept saying no. But he said they kept coming back. Some of them said, it is not for you, it is for your children—make sure they have some roots, some connections. And he would say, thank you.
My parents' marriage was arranged. If you divide the world of Axum into two sides—the political side and the church side—my mother had a lot of pedigree in the church leadership. The Nubraid is the highest title you can get in Axum, equivalent in protocol to a Ras. My mother's grandfather was a Nubraid. His wife was the daughter of a Nubraid, and so on. They were all in that group. Her family controlled the heads of the Axum church.
The marriage arrangements fell to the parents and other people. Someone would suggest it—uncles, aunts, neighbors would give ideas, and people would follow through. They would make their judgments: are we of the same or similar pedigree? That was basically the question. People could be offended if you asked for their daughter and you were not the right kind of person.
My mother was a very nice lady—a housewife who did not go out of the house. Everybody came to her, but she rarely went anywhere. The house was a family center. Everybody was there. People came all day long. There was laughter and arguments and entertainment and eating and drinking. Hosting all sorts of people—everybody had to get something. If it was a small child, they gave him a small loaf of bread or some treat. For important guests, the finest they had.
She came to the States twice. The first time, I took her to the grocery store. She was very impressed. She could not believe the abundance—five different kinds of tomatoes, and you could pick and choose. She immediately understood the abundance and what it meant. She said, these people must be extraordinarily rich.
The second observation I remember was during the Reagan administration, around 1985. We were watching the morning shows, and two people were on different programs. She asked me who they were. I said, this is the defense minister—Weinberger—and this is the foreign minister—Schultz. She looked at them and said, no wonder this country is great, because it is led by mature people. She was coming from Addis, where thirty young military men were making all the decisions. She grasped the whole thing immediately.
The other time she was here was 1992, when Clinton was running for office against Bush. The first time she looked at Clinton, she said, he looks too plain, too light—how is he going to be president? But about a month later, she said to me, I have changed my mind. He is going to be the next president. She bet me he would be the next president. And he was.
The first time she visited, in 1985, when I went to work she was alone in the apartment. She was watching the soap operas during the day. One evening, a young woman came to visit and they started talking about the shows. They were having a serious discussion about the characters—this one is not dependable, that one did such and such. My mother watches them and knows exactly what is going on. She followed the stories perfectly, even though she did not understand a word of English. The characters, who was dependable, who was the cheat—she had it all figured out. You do not need the language.
The family traces itself, in very general terms, to the time of the Queen of Sheba and the Menelik legend. The way they tell it is that seven tribes came from Israel when Menelik returned to Axum after visiting his father, King Solomon. Those seven families, when they came to Axum, were able to maintain their lineage. They have names—the so-and-so family is here, the so-and-so family is there. To this day, there are people who trace their lineage from one or the other of these families. Is it true? That is another question. But people believe it and people act as if it is true. These are the families that go back basically two thousand years. Because of that, they feel entitled. Nobody is above them—it does not matter whether you are a king or a Ras or whatever. The word they use is fugo, which roughly means the source, or the original.
I did not understand any of this until later in life. The first time I knew about it, a member of one of the big families was telling me stories and said, did you know that your father and your people think that they are the only ones, that they do not consider everybody equal to them? I said, how come? He explained it to me. My father never told me anything about it. Nobody talked about it, nobody bragged about it. It was just normal for them among themselves.
A week before Easter, there is a holiday called Hosanna, which in Axum is a big event—people come from out of town, and there is a procession that starts at somebody's house and goes to church. Mules and horses are decorated, and this ceremonial activity starts at the house of one of the fugo elders. The seven families rotate. If you come from the main lineage, the procession starts from your house. The next year it is from the next family, and the third, and the fourth, and so on. It comes back around after seven years.
In the end, the privileges were mainly ceremonial. When modernization came, it got diluted—other players came onto the scene, people who had money, modern education, other resources. But the idea remained. People had it in their minds and nobody was going to take it away. You would be told by your aunts, do you know who you are? When you are a kid, you do not know and you do not care. But it stays with you.
The first school I attended was a church school. That is where I learned the alphabet—to read and write, in Ge'ez and Amharic. It was a small school. The teacher was an elderly man who did not take many students. The discipline was very strict, but I do not remember being punished, mainly because of whose son I was. Then I went to the government school. The government school was different. You could learn math and English and Amharic. They had paid, regular teachers, different classes for different ages, from grade one through grade eight.
When I was growing up, there were three kinds of kids. There were children of the locals, from the old city and our neighborhood. There were children of the new bureaucrats—government officers, teachers, policemen. And there were Muslims. I had equal access to all of them. Looking back, they did not know each other very well or mix or play together, but I used to go everywhere. To this day, I have Muslim friends. I talked to one the other day after sixty-some years.
Before soccer took over, there were a lot of traditional games. My generation was in the transition period. When I was little, we played games that had been played traditionally for a very long time. None of them are played now—when I go back and ask people, they do not even know what they are. Around Christmas, we had sticks that we used for singing and dancing during the holidays. Preparing the stick was a long process. You had to get the right one, then cut a revolving ring around the shaft and put it in fire. The exposed part turned black, and when you peeled the rest, it stayed white—so you had a black and white stick, which was the thing.
Then there was a game where we got big nuts from palm trees, carved them so you could tie strings around them and throw them to spin on the ground. If you made holes in them, they whistled. The sound of the whistle, the way you cut it—that was a very important part. Kids would stand in a circle and everybody would play theirs, and whoever's spun the longest was the winner.
One person who had a big influence on my learning was the governor of Axum, who later became the Bishop of Tigray. When I was six or seven years old, he used to see me in church and took interest in me. One day he told me that if I came to church on Sundays, I would have breakfast with him. This was intimidating and exciting at the same time—intimidating because I did not know what to say to him, and exciting because it meant I would ride in a car with him in the morning. That was something not available to any child.
During breakfast, I would sit at the table with him—something out of the ordinary, because he was a governor, highly respected, and only a few adults were allowed to sit at the same table. He was different from other adults—he talked to me like a friend and encouraged me to participate. At that time, children were not allowed to answer back even when they were spoken to. When he traveled to Asmara or Addis Ababa, he brought books for me.
I was six or seven years old the first time I went to Asmara. There was a big incident on the way. The bus we were on went over the edge of a cliff. Two-thirds of the bus was hanging, about to tumble down. But for some miraculous reason, it had stopped over a bridge, and the pavement of the bridge caught the back tire. The bus was just hanging there. The story was that my father was getting ready to throw me out the window—just take your chance before you tumble down. It was instinct.
What I remember most is what happened next. The next car that came was carrying the Archbishop of Tigray, who had been the governor of Axum when I was growing up—a big personality with his own car and driver. When he arrived and saw me, he wept. Because it was a miracle that we survived. He kept saying it was the angels of this cave that saved everybody. Then he gave my father and me a ride to Asmara in his car. The car was a Dodge—everybody said Dodge. It was a big thing. Nobody knew exactly what it was, but everybody knew it was a big car.
My mother was horrified when I first left home. I was fourteen years old, and we had to go to Mekelle for high school. She was praying all year long that I would fail my exams and stay another year. In my class, only six out of thirty or thirty-five passed. She was banking on that.
When you took the exam, they gave you a number, and you were known by that number. The results were printed in the newspapers. Mine was there, and she was disappointed—because she had wanted me to stay at least another year. My father was very happy that I made it.
The first time I went to Addis was after I completed the eleventh grade. A great-uncle of ours—a general, who had come to Axum during the Mariam Sion festival and connected with my father—had said that I should come to Addis and finish school there. So I went, not knowing what to do or where to go. Only hopes that something would happen. But when I arrived, the general was in the United States.
Finally, the general's brother-in-law took me to General Wingate School. When we went in, he told the headmaster that I was a very good student and he would like me to go to school there. The headmaster looked at me and asked, what grade? I said, twelfth. He said, twelfth grade? No way. We have never done that, and I do not think we can accept this.
There was a back-and-forth, and then the brother-in-law said, oh, but the ambassador told me he could go here, and I thought he had talked to you about it. The headmaster's attitude transformed completely. Oh, yeah, yeah—is that him? He said, he can start as a day student on Monday.
That Monday morning I went. During the break, the headmaster and his deputy called me over and said, you have been assigned to the green room—that will be your bed. Just like that, I was admitted as a boarder. The problem was I had no clothes with me. I had not expected any of this. I stayed in the school in my clothes for a week. The weather was very cold. But I was in.
What had happened, I learned later, was that the brother-in-law had talked to the British ambassador, who had asked the school to accept me. I still remember the transformation in the headmaster's attitude—from seriously saying no way to suddenly welcoming me. That is how the world works.
One of the most important things that happened at Wingate was that the deputy director came to me after two or three days and asked, do you want to learn English literature? Not knowing what he was talking about, I said yes. He took me to a class and told the teacher I was to be in it. The teacher was an Englishman, and he was teaching Macbeth. He was teaching it as if he were acting it, with the English accent and everything. I had no idea what I was into.
By the end of the year, I knew what literature was, what plays were, how to read books. The main texts were Macbeth, Animal Farm, and Cry, the Beloved Country. If you take Animal Farm, we had no idea about the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution. We had no idea who Stalin was or what communism meant. It was taught in a kind of blindness.
The same thing had happened earlier, in the tenth grade at Mekelle, where we had an American Peace Corps teacher. She wanted us to read Moby Dick. But we did not understand it. We had no idea about sailing, no idea about ships, no idea what whales were, no sense of the sea. If you do not know a whale, you do not know what they are talking about. But you go along—you pick up a few things here, a few there.
My father saw the coming changes clearly. I remember when he went to Addis to petition for the high school. Before going to the emperor, they went to the minister of education first. The minister said, that is not how it works—you have to wait your turn. My father said to him: sir, we have waited until our children like you got the education and became ministers. How long more do we have to wait? The minister was offended and dismissed them.
My father came back furious. He said, how dare he? We are elders of the community, coming from Axum, the source of everything. If he is going to dismiss us, I can imagine how he dismisses everybody else. He said, it seems this is the end of these people, because God will not tolerate this kind of abuse and lack of respect. Everybody said, no, they are well entrenched, they are powerful, it will not happen. And he said: do not say that. When things happen, they happen very quickly.
Then he told a story. When the Italians were occupying the country, people were resigning themselves to the idea that the Italians would stay for a long time. One day, a convoy of automobiles came into town—not trucks, not military vehicles, but automobiles. That meant important people. And there were Ethiopians in the cars with the Italians, which was unheard of. The cars went into the government compound. The Italian administrator came out and saluted them—and he saluted the black men too. Then the same group came out, went to the flagpole, lowered one flag and raised another. Nobody understood what was happening. Finally, the Italian officers came out and told them the British had taken over. My father said: with my own eyes, I saw one of the most powerful governments fall in ten minutes. That is how long it takes when it comes. So he said, if Italy could fall in ten minutes, it would not take these people two minutes.
When the change came, it was not surprising—it was expected. What was surprising was that it ended up in the hands of young military people whom nobody knew. That was the biggest problem. It was said there were about 120 of them. But nobody knew who was who, and in the early days they were not naming names. That created enormous uncertainty—who are they, what motivates them, what drives them, what will they do next? Nobody knew.
One of the most interesting stories I have is that I knew the man who chaired the committee for economic affairs. One day we were talking, and this was the time they were trying to introduce land reform. He was saying they wanted to introduce the most radical reform they could implement. I said to him, why are you insisting on the most radical thing? Why can't you introduce something the country can handle?
What he told me was instructive. He said: listen. We did not come here because we wanted to come here. We did not have an agenda. Now that we are here, we have to do something. He said: as far as I am concerned, I want to introduce as radical a reform as possible. Because I do not belong here. I do not expect to stay here. So I am going to go out. Therefore, what I can do is introduce the most radical reform, so that the next group, when they come—and it is inevitable that they will try to reverse some things—they will reverse it halfway. And then we will have done something. If I do it halfway now, they will wipe it out completely.
From my vantage point, the defining moment was the killing of the sixty people. Up until that day, there was no buildup. The Derg was still trying to find its way, and people were willing to give them leeway.
Let me start on the Saturday. Saturday, at about six-thirty in the evening. We used to live in a compound with two other families. One of them was a major in the army. As I was entering the compound, we met at the gate. He was fully dressed in his military outfit. That was unusual—a Saturday evening. I jokingly said, oh, now they are putting you as a guard somewhere? He laughed. Then he said, are you staying home? I said yes. He said, stay home this evening. Do not go out.
Half an hour, forty-five minutes later, he called, and I picked up. He said, tell my wife that I have arrived safely. That was strange too. Around eight-thirty, the telephone rang again. A friend called and asked, is there gunfire in your area? Our house was across the street from the palace—the office of the Derg, where the people were detained. He said there was a lot of gunfire. I said no, I do not hear anything here. Then the telephone stopped working.
The next morning, early, one of the neighbor's daughters—she was about three or four years old—came running to our room. She was saying, my father is crying, my father is crying. I said, what happened? She said, Ras Mengesha is dead. There was no way a child that age could know that name on her own. I knew something had happened. We turned on the radio. The story was being announced. That is how we learned.
There were sixty people altogether. I knew about forty of them, at some level or another—people I could salute on the street if I saw them. What would be the equivalent here? There is no equivalent. Whatever sixty people you collect, it is not going to have the same impact. It was a very, very shocking thing.
At the end of July 1975, I got this call. The lady on the other end said, are you so-and-so? I said yes. She said, hi, how are you, this is so-and-so calling from the Dutch Embassy—congratulations, your scholarship has been approved. At that particular point, I had practically forgotten about it. I was not sure whether it was a prank call or a real call. Everybody was scared.
Now the problem was: how do you go out if the government does not allow you to go out? This is where luck came through, because the Minister of Interior was a friend of mine. I went to him and told him the opportunity had come. He said, are you sure? I said yes. He said, do not tell anybody—leave, and leave very quickly. I am happy for you.
When I was getting on the plane, I was worried until it left Ethiopia. I did not trust the whole thing, because there were stories of people being pulled off planes after boarding.
The plane from Addis landed in Asmara—it takes about an hour—and they were collecting passengers going to Khartoum and Cairo. I was sitting there and people were coming in and out. Somebody called my name. I heard it and did not stand up. For a minute I thought, this is it. But then there was no movement, nobody was trying to find me. They closed the door and we started taxiing. I did not believe it until we landed in Khartoum.
This was my first time outside Ethiopia. At the school, there were students from sixty-six countries. That was the other great value. You learned about the world for the first time. Students from Indonesia, the Philippines, Israel, Palestine, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan—they argued furiously against each other, because one would tell their version of the story and the other would contest it. These personal encounters were more educational than any class.
By the first year, people I knew were getting shot on the streets in Addis. One of the good things I knew was that I got a letter from my father. They did not write in a direct way—indirectly, they would tell you what they were trying to say. The letter said: it is a good thing that your time is coming up and you are finishing school soon. But remember, this is a chance you cannot get again, so make sure you get more education and do not rush to come back home.
That is the wax and gold. If that letter had been intercepted, it would read: we told him to study more. Nobody could say anything against that. But it was clear to me what it meant, and it gave me relief.
I went everywhere. In England: London, Leeds, Manchester, Glasgow, York, Blackpool, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Cambridge, Oxford. In Germany: Munich, Frankfurt, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Mainz. In Italy we started in Milan and went to Turin, Genoa, Pisa, Florence, Rome, Naples, Venice. Then Austria, Switzerland—Geneva, Zurich.
One of the most interesting lessons I learned was this: in Holland, someone I knew was receiving financial assistance, basically on welfare. In June he received two checks. He came to me and said, I think they made a mistake. A Dutch friend explained: this man is getting welfare because society could not provide him a job. It is not his fault. Because society has failed him, we have to support him. Now it is summertime, and everybody in his neighborhood wants to go on vacation. We do not want these people left behind. So we give them money so they can also go on vacation. That was mind-blowing.
At the seminar, one of the professors asked me what I planned to do. I said, if I can, I would like to go to school here, but I have no money for tuition or to support myself. He said, would you like to go to the University of Kansas? Within a week, an application form came, I filled it out, sent it, and got a letter of admission. Completely unreal—getting admitted to a graduate school in a week.
A few days later, I was told there was a job at Georgetown—writing a Tigrinya-English dictionary for the School of Linguistics. That gave me my first sense of stability. I applied to five graduate schools: Georgetown, Columbia, Cornell, Northwestern, and UCLA. I was admitted to all of them, but once Georgetown accepted me, I decided to stay. I was tired of moving.
In Boston, I had a telephone number for someone who had gone to school with me. We went to dinner. I said to him, I have two cousins who live in Boston. I do not know where they are. He said, oh, that address is the street next to us.
When we went out to the street and were walking, there was a young man walking across the street. I went to him and said, hi, how are you? Then suddenly I remembered his face. I said to him, wait a minute. Are you Solomon? That freaked him out. He said, who are you? What do you want to know? Then we went to the apartment and knocked at the door. Who comes out—Getachew. I found both of them within the first two hours after I arrived. What luck. Completely unbelievable.
My immediate boss was a very nice, elderly gentleman named Jim Howe. He took me in and said something I will never forget: remember, you are a student first. This job is not important—the important thing is your school. Then he made a proposal that changed everything. He said, think about turning the work you do here into papers for class. So I did my homework while I was getting paid, and the homework was of a higher standard than I could have produced without the opportunity.
Through that job, I met extraordinary people. Father Hesburgh. Robert McNamara. Elliot Richardson. Senator Kennedy. David Rockefeller. Henry Kissinger. Helmut Schmidt. Edward Heath. I remember all of them—not because I sought them out, but because they were there, and when you are in the room, you are part of the conversation.
The thing I learned is that the higher people are in the ladder, the more humble they are. Because they are sure of themselves, they do not pretend, they do not want to extract attention or honor. They have it all and they know it and they do not care about that. After that experience, there was no person I could meet who would intimidate me. If those people had not thrown me out of the room, nobody else would.
My father passed away in 1983. I was in Washington at the time. I was not able to go back for the funeral. It was during the Derg, and I did not have the papers either—it was almost impossible. I was at the Overseas Development Council at the time, and one day at lunch I was walking on Massachusetts Avenue and my boss saw me and thought I was feeling down. He came to me and said, if you want to go home and you do not have the money, we will buy you the ticket. That was very, very touching.
When I was in Holland, my father wanted me to stay abroad until things settled down, but he could not say that in a letter—they were afraid of the mail being tracked. So what he wrote was: getting an education is not easy, and since getting another chance is not very good, I would advise you to finish all the studies you have to make. That was his way of saying, do not come home. We communicated in code like that.
If my father were here today, I would say thank you for everything—for the opportunity, for everything they gave me. I was a pampered kid. They gave me everything they had and everything they could. My parents did not have a child for almost twenty years after they got married, so when I came, it was a completely different story for them.
My father was very understanding and tolerant and at the same time farsighted. Given his background, I would have expected him to be conservative. But he was very open, encouraging, and supporting in what we wanted to do. That came from something innate. There was no education behind it. He understood a lot of things. He had a good sense of judging people and situations, and he was articulate—he knew how to put things into words. I do not remember him getting angry with me. He would say stop it, or be careful, but nothing more than that.