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Peter Gill, in his book, Ethiopia and foreigners: Ethiopia from Live Aid (Oxford University Press, 2010), describes the professor Mesfin Wolde-Mariam as “a formidable fighter in all the causes he has embraced.” Excerpts:
At the beginning of his career it was hunger. Then there were human rights. In later life she became an open opposition to the government.
He started out as a professor of geography and became the head of department at Addis Ababa University. He wrote influential books. He was the founding member of the Ethiopian Rights Council. In 2007 he got out of 20 months in jail for his role in the political opposition. When some Ethiopian opposition leaders went into exile and began calling for the violent overthrow of the government, Professor Mesfin stuck to the political campaign at home and faced the consequences.
“The simple answer is, I had nowhere to go,” he said and chuckled. We met in his flat, where Kent smoked cigarettes for two hours. A few weeks earlier, he had been hit hard by the butt of a soldier’s rifle while protesting the treatment received by another opposition leader. He was then approaching his 79th birthday.
A famine fifty years ago, almost unnoticed in the outside world, he started it for Prof. Mesfin. In 1958 she had just married and joined the university faculty. He told me how The use to to visit the House of a classmate whose rich mother he was also an exceptional philanthropist. ‘She she was very kind, a lady who Yes she he saw someone sick in the streets who would stop the driver in his Mercedes and carry that patient and treat him.‘
The woman’s name was Ghenet Wolde-Gabriel. From the Roman Catholic nuns she had heard of a terrible famine that was developing in Tigray and was sending food and clothing through them north. Ghenet asked the nuns to bring the starving orphans to his home in Addis Ababa where in his own backyard, he built an accommodation and a school building and then another.
Mesfin went to see the editor of the Ethiopian Herald, then as now a government spokesman, and urged him to cover this story of great suffering. Not a word appeared. He decided to see for himself what was happening.
Took the bus to Tigray, through those sharp curves to Korem, beyond them to the capital, Makelle, and beyond to the cities where hunger was greatest. ‘What I saw was horrible, I couldn’t bear it. The money I had taken was exhausted when I returned. My wife had to drive me home from the bus. She was hungry and shivering. She had barely eaten for the past three weeks.
Prof. Mesfin has since developed a deep antipathy for the bureaucracy, but this time he began to annoy the “ high official dignitaries ” in the empire in the government to support your fundraising plan. Emperor Haile Selassie was on an official visit to Moscow at that time, and the Home Secretary suggested that a donation committee be established under the crown prince and that they should approach, as Mesfin said, ‘the Duke of So-and-so, and His Highness So-and-So, and I said it would take me a year to get to see these people and by then the problem would be solved.‘
The young professor wrote a letter to the emperor and attached some slides he had taken of suffering. ‘A few days later I received a letter from the minister of the pen [on the personal orders of the emperor] telling me he was going to Tigray to distribute the grain that His Imperial Majesty had graciously donated–about 20,000 quintals [2,000 tons].
Only about 500 tons of the emperor-authorized grain reached Tigray, but Mesfin spent another grueling month in the region face to face with hunger. By then, some American food was starting to arrive., but it was too late for many. A hundred thousand may have died in northern ethiopia in 1958. “For me the experience was a nightmare,” Mesfin said. ‘A young woman with a baby whom had befriended was in terrible agony, along with her baby. She came in my dreams all the time. She was chasing me, and that’s what ultimately led me to write about the famine. ”
Prof. Mesfin published his Rural Vulnerability to famine in Ethiopia almost thirty years later, in 1986, immediately after the worst tragedy that northern Ethiopia has suffered in modern times. In that interval there were other famines, a of them more severe than that of 1958. It was this event that undermined and ultimately sealed the fate of Haile Selassie’s empire.
Mesfin was appointed to chair the commission of inquiry into that 1973 famine, and this was an opportunity to search the archives at both the national and district levels.. The very first famine records he found in the Ministry of the Interior they were those of 1958. From then on, Ethiopia and the outside world had intermittently begun to recognize the outrageous human cost of starvation and had begun to address it imperfectly.
Image: Siye Abraha, Mesfin Wolde-Mariam and Negasso Gidada
