Children of the Revolution

I admit that I don’t know nearly as much as I should about Africa, and that I feel shamed by that. Recently, I read Children of the Revolution by Dinaw Mengestu which has piqued my interest in the area.

It is a story of Sepha Stephanos, a man living between two worlds: the Ethiopia that he fled and the American capital he calls home. He runs a store and spends time with two other friends who are also immigrants from Africa. What has become his normal routine for the past 17 years changes when a white woman, Judith, and her daughter move into the neighborhood.

Sepha’s memories of his father, murdered in front of him during the revolution, are omnipresent. The memories of his dead father are far more binding than any contact he has with his mother and brother, alive and back in Ethiopia. Sepha observes the hope that immigration brings versus the reality of immigrant life against the backdrop of urban blight and gentrification. There is a loneliness as someone who is not connected with their home and not connected to their present, and it’s a sentiment that Judith and Sepha both share. But for Sepha anyhow, there is no going home even if he’s not willing to admit it to himself just yet. One gets the feeling that this novel could be very close to a memoir, in its character development and sense of place. It’s such a fragile insight into the human condition and the fleetingness of happiness, as well as the ways that children can penetrate our souls in a way that many adults can’t.

Since I read the book, Ethiopia has been strangely popping up all over, including this article.

It seems like the classic conundrum: “These events are unfolding as billions of dollars in foreign aid pour into the country. Foreign aid is important. It helps needy people, it creates allies for our causes and markets for our products, and redeems some of the damage inflicted on the third world during the cold war. But aid agencies need to ensure that their programs don’t exacerbate the political problems that are keeping people poor in the first place” (Referring to political turmoil in the 2005 elections, the silencing of opposition, and the May 23rd parliamentary elections that will probably be decided in advance).

If there’s one thing I wish development workers and governments would understand, it’s that just throwing money around doesn’t solve anything even if everyone has a price. From my experiences, one of the biggest problems with money is that it is often mismanaged and not handled transparently. So imagine what happens when you have a country like Ethiopia with 90 different ethnic groups and power grabbing in an election year?

And this should go without saying that any hope for a society’s future needs to be based on human rights. Human rights establish safety and alleviate fears. They drive a society forward because they allow people to organize and speak their minds. Traditional powers have a long history of ignoring human rights for a political bottom line, and this is yet another example in the sad history of short-sighted opportunism.