The progeny of Nurenebi

‘If evil deeds cannot be forgotten, I wish to see them recalled without malice and vengeance.’

The Nurenebi File, written by Ethiopian historical novelist Tesfaye Gebreab and translated from Amharic into English by Eritrean playwright Alemseged Tesfai, is a long, sprawling epic which rides a very, very fine line between an academic work of history, a biography of an actual family, and a literary work of historical fiction. It is a complete work, however. As such, it holds up well when examined from each of these three angles. The Nurenebi File tells the story of four generations, spanning nearly 100 years of East African history from 1886 to 1982, of the family of Nurenebi (from Arabic نور النبوي, ‘Light of the Prophet’) Bekhit, the Muslim headman of the village of Fana in Ethiopia, who fled a famine for the coastal port city of Massawa with his wife, his horse and his two infant sons.

The backdrop for Nurenebi’s flight from his dying home village to the bustling port city, is the conquest and colonisation of the coastal lands along the Red Sea—which had belonged to the Maritime Kingdom, Medri Bahri—by Italy. In Nurenebi’s time, the Italians were largely welcomed by the Tigrinya and Beja people amongst whom they landed, as it was thought that the Italians would bring peace and save them from oppression by the Gulf Arabs and the Ottoman Turks, who raided the lands of Medri Bahri for slaves. Indeed, Italy did put a stop to the practice of enslavement of local tribesmen where their writ ran. But as with all tales of colonisation, the colonial administration was a two-edged sword which cut against the colonised more often than it helped them.

Massawa was, as Gebreab illustrates vividly, a key trading port which opens the Arabic world and Egypt to the Indian Ocean trade. For much of the time of the post-classical world system of trade, the nearby port city of Adulis had served as the logistical and trade hub linking Egypt to India. As Medri Bahri replaced Aksum and the Muslim Beja people began exercising greater autonomy, the regional centre of gravity shifted toward Massawa. And Massawa became both a grand hub of commerce and a tempting target for regional powers, including the Ottomans, the Egyptians and the Ethiopians… with the Portuguese eventually coming in for colonial booty, to be replaced by the Italians by the end of the nineteenth century.

Tesfaye Gebreab is a master at showing the complexity of colonialism, both the good parts and the bad parts, while never being an apologist for the colonial masters. He notes with some justice that many Eritreans who sided with Italy did so because they saw in Italy the hope to escape the warlordism and slave raids that had plagued them for centuries. And although Massawa was already a thriving port, the Italians did bring in some level of industrialisation, technology and modern infrastructure. It came, however, at a cost. To Nurenebi, this cost was personal. His flight from famine had forced him to take up work as a guard at a local hospitality establishment, in which position a drunken Italian shouted an insult at him: ‘pigro’ (‘slacker’). Nurenebi, who had never been on the receiving end of such an insult from anyone (insults being taken incredibly seriously in the Ethiopian culture), responded to this by becoming an anti-colonial freedom fighter—a shifta. He carried on his struggle in the Sahel for the rest of his life, before being killed in a skirmish.

Having turned rebel, Nurenebi’s two young sons were left in the care of Christian missionaries, and were baptised into Christianity, christened with the Italian names Eduardo and Edmondo. These sons served in the Italian administrative apparatus and military, and were exempted from some of the more repressive Italian policies on the local population. Italian law severely limited educational opportunities for African people, banning education after the fourth grade, and even banning certain subjects which were not applicable to military or menial careers. (It was forbidden to mention Italian independence heroes Mazzini or Garibaldi to Eritrean students, for example, in educational contexts—for fear that the ideals of Mazzini and Garibaldi would be seized upon by enterprising Eritrean activists.) Italy used cheap Eritrean labour in its factories and shipping yards to extract wealth from Africa. And it used Eritrean soldiers as the front-line shock troops, the cannon fodder, in its wars against Libya and Ethiopia.

The narrative core of the novel is an espionage case in which the Italian authorities are on the trail of a ‘mole’ in their administration who leaked detailed secrets of Mussolini’s planned invasion of Ethiopia to Emperor Haile Selassie in Ethiopia. The mole, in this case, was Edmondo’s son Gabriel, who was captured and brutally tortured into confession. He in turn had been betrayed by an Italian mole who had infiltrated Ethiopian noble circles. The Italians, who believed that Gabriel was motivated by family feeling against them (as it came out that he was a grandson of Nurenebi Bekhit during his interrogation), attempted to convince Gabriel Edmondo of the error of his ways—but in vain. For his part, Gabriel believed firmly, despite the considerable technological progress that Italy had brought to Eritrea, that only independence could serve the human needs of the Eritrean people. He also disapproved of Italy’s constant warfare in the region, the human cost of which was borne almost wholly by its Eritrean subjects. Gabriel was issued a death sentence, which was commuted at the behest of his friend, the pro-Italian Iyasu. Tesfaye Gebreab offers Iyasu as something of a foil to Gabriel: his father had been wrongly taken as a ‘traitor’ by Ethiopia’s Emperor Menelik after the Battle of Adwa, and punished with juridical amputation along with 460 of his fellows. Although Iyasu’s father bore no great ill-will toward the Ethiopians as a whole (some of whom helped him after the sentence had been carried out), the son bore a deep grudge against Ethiopia on account of this treatment.

The interplay between Gabriel and Iyasu, as well as between Gabriel and his interrogators, displays two of Gebreab’s central themes. As an Ethiopian historian, Gebreab is attuned keenly to the deep historical wrongs that were dealt to the brotherly people of Eritrea as a result of colonialism—up to and including those inflicted by Ethiopia’s emperors, Menelik and Haile Selassie, as well as by Lt Col Mengistu. But he is also adamant on the need for forgiveness—and he places the articulation of this need upon the tongue, mostly, of Gabriel Edmondo. Indeed, Gebreab’s clarion call is for a radical forgiveness, a Christian forgiveness specifically of the unforgiveable. His approach is therefore a knowing and willing mirror-image of that taken by China’s Lu Xun, who dwelt precisely upon the unforgiveable and expounded upon it at length in his work.

Eritrea was ruled, after all, first by the Italians—who brought industrialisation but reduced the Eritreans to a state of manufactured ignorance for the purposes of using them as cheap labour and cannon fodder. The Italians also ruthlessly kidnapped, tortured and assassinated, outside any legal system, any Eritreans who began talking too loudly about political ideas or demonstrating any sort of intellectual or organising prowess. Then came the British, in the wake of Italy’s defeat in the Second World War. The British liberalised Eritrea’s education and press climate, lifting the restrictions on Eritrean education… but they entirely dismantled everything Italy had built, literally pulling down factories and tearing up railways, and selling the materials off abroad. The British plundered Eritrea to the tune of 62 billion pounds sterling, and reduced Eritrea to a state of permanent near-famine or actual famine. Italy filled bellies but would not abide a full mind; Britain was happy to fill minds but at the cost of everything in the belly.

After union with Ethiopia, Eritreans continued to suffer, as Haile Selassie leased Eritrean lands to foreign governments in order to finance educational and charitable institutions which aggrandised the Shoa nobility and the Ethiopian monarchy. The Emperor also brought back Italy’s policy of sniffing out, incarcerating or assassinating anyone suspected of disloyalty—a policy which the nobility exploited to an almost cartoonishly corrupt degree for personal benefit. When the Derg took power under Mengistu, the terror took on a practically nihilistic character, as the Derg slaughtered anyone and everyone who was thought to be a ‘backwards’ influence—Muslim or Christian. Ethiopians suffered a great deal worse under the Derg than the Eritreans; but it was against the spectre of Eritrean independence that the Derg justified the commission of their worst brutalities.

Tesfaye Gebreab relates all these things as part of the historical backdrop within which his characters live and move, not to apportion blame or to pursue a partisan political agenda, but instead as a meditation precisely on the need for forgiveness and reconciliation. One sees through the person of Gabriel Edmondo that forgiveness comes to be something of a literal survival tactic, and the knowledge that desperation and political advantage can drive a person to commit terrible crimes ultimately leads Gabriel to symbolically forgive the mole who had turned him over for torture to the Italians (himself imprisoned by the Derg) by refusing to pass on his name even to his own children. The book ends, however, on the sorrowful note that Gabriel’s son, Mekonen, was killed fighting in the EPLF – leaving to become a guerrilla even after his mother pleaded with him not to go; his fate deliberately mirroring and echoing the struggle of his great-grandfather Nurenebi.

Again, even though the characters in it are real and thus borders on biographical, The Nurenebi File works remarkably well also as a historical novel. It foregrounds the drama of Nurenebi’s family firmly against the legacies of colonialism in East Africa, and the context lends the family drama a great deal of its power. The characters of Nurenebi Bekhit, of Gabriel Edmondo, and of Mekonen Gabriel, are all portrayed with remarkable skill—and all the more poignantly for swimming against the historical-political currents in which they find themselves carried up. However, Tesfaye Gebreab isn’t entirely willing to let his novel rest there. There is a certain extent to which his treatment of Ethiopian and Eritrean history is informed by a scholarly eye. One sees this in the consistent references to and citations of other non-fiction histories and books by authors both Habesha and Western. The acute shifts in tone and subject—zooming in to the personal level and then zooming out again to the level of palace intrigues and subcontinental campaigns—might come off as jarring to readers who are expecting a work of literature that fits neatly into one ‘box’ (biography, novel or history), but it surprised me how well everything pieced together.

That isn’t to say the book is perfect. Some choices in characterisation are slightly confusing even in context; as well, some actions appear unaccounted for or unexplained. Also, the book presumes a familiarity with local conditions, cultural practices and art forms, which makes particularly the early chapters a daunting learning curve for anyone daring to begin this book in its English translation. Still, The Nurenebi File is a deeply interesting read with valuable things to say: I’m still pondering some of its implications.