Hamlet in Ethiopia

In Addis Ababa a 16th-century revenge drama is the hot ticket

You can’t get away from Hamlet. Not in the West End nor on Broadway, where Daniel Day-Lewis and Ranulph Fiennes are starring in the role. Nor yet at the cinema: Kenneth Branagh’s film is currently at the casting stage, with the baked meats from Mel Gibson’s version not yet cold (it will be the sixtieth screen version). And if not Hamlet proper, then it’s Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, revived at the National Theatre, or Hamlet II: Prince of Jutland at the Edinburgh Festival.

And you can’t escape the play in Addis Ababa either. Here the sixteenth-century revenge drama is a hot ticket. At the opening a few weeks ago of an Amharic version at the Ethiopian National Theatre it was evident that the moral world of pre-modern Elsinore, with its Machiavellian politics and vortices of revenge, is not so far removed from the current political situation in Ethiopia. The last time the play was performed here, in a translation by Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin, was in 1967. The current production is the first in the country for three decades – the first professional production of any play, in fact, since the death of the last emperor, Haile Selassie, in 1975.

I was in Addis Ababa to cover the trial of the Derg, the erstwhile military rulers of Ethiopia, responsible for the Red Terror of the 1970s, during which thousands of Ethiopians, including the Emperor, became victims of state violence, killed or tortured to death, accused of being feudal remnants or counter-revolutionaries. Under the leadership of Mengistu Haile Mariam, the Derg (the term means ‘committee’) presided over two decades of civil war and natural and unnatural disaster, including the famine of 1984, which made Ethiopia an international byword for affliction. The rule of the Derg, bloody even by the sanguinary standards of Ethiopian history, lasted from the deposition of Haile Selassie in 1974 until 1991, when a rebel army from the northern province of Tigray captured Addis Ababa and took control of the state. Finally, this year, the new government put the surviving members of the Derg on trial.

Each day in Addis Ababa I went to the courtroom on the northern heights of the city to see the Derg in the dock. Not all of them, though: half were dead, purged by their own colleagues during the Derg time; four others had sought sanctuary in the Italian embassy when the Derg was defeated and were still immured there (one subsequently committed suicide). Mengistu himself, when he saw the writing on the wall, fled, with American help, to asylum in Zimbabwe. So the trial in Addis Ababa was not so much Hamlet-without-the-Prince as Hamlet-without-the-King, with Mengistu as the absent Claudius.

Nevertheless, forty-four of the leading members of the former regime were there in the dock, facing charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. Western human rights activists applauded the fact that the new government was doing things by the book rather than simply putting its opponents to the sword. Ethiopians, particularly those opposed to the new regime, were more cynical: this was the justice of victors, they said, revenge by another name. The trials were televised; few bothered to watch.

But many in the city seemed keen to catch a performance of Hamlet. The queue outside the theatre – a building of Pharaonic proportions built in the Emperor’s time – was half a mile long; squads of white-helmeted riot police failed to prevent large-scale queue-jumping; each night the auditorium was full to capacity well before the performance began. I went with Teshome Gabre Mariam, who had been Haile Selassie’s Attorney-General in the mid-1960s and subsequently spent eight years in prison under the Derg. We had found ourselves sitting next to each other in the courtroom where the Derg were on trial. Ato Teshome’s career spans half a century of wrenching changes in the Ethiopian body politic. He started when he was still in his twenties. I asked him if he had been the youngest Attorney-General in Ethiopian history.

‘I was the only Ethiopian Attorney-General in Ethiopian history,’ he replied. ‘Remember, we were a feudal society. The ruler was the last court of appeal. We didn’t have human rights in those days; we had the divine right of kings.’

In the courtroom we heard how the Emperor had been suffocated in his bedchamber and buried in an outhouse; how sixty of his ministers had been gunned down at the Central Prison; how exhumations in army camps had revealed mass graves of students abducted and tortured to death on suspicion of subversion. And now at the National Theatre we watched the goings-on in an imaginary court, in the royal court of Denmark: a regicide, revenge killings, the corruption of the state, grave-diggers, a coup d’état – the Shakespearian catalogue of unnatural acts and casual slaughters.

The parallel between mediaeval Denmark and present-day Ethiopia was not lost on the audience. They gasped at the ghost; they whooped at Hamlet’s oblique resistance to court culture; they applauded every act of revenge, every rapier thrust. For Ethiopians today, I realised as I discussed the play with Ato Teshome, a key question remained at the end of the play: whether Fortinbras could institute an improvement in the body politic, and save the state, or whether he would preside over its dissolution. For the figure of Fortinbras – the conquering Norwegian prince who emerges as heir to the throne of Denmark – you can read Meles Zenawi, the current Prime Minister of Ethiopia, a rebel from Tigray in the north whose forces toppled the corrupt government of the Derg.

Outside the theatre, the streets of Addis Ababa were full of indigent veterans of Ethiopia’s civil conflict, war-wounded mendicants that even the repressive apparatus of the Derg had not been able to clear from the streets. Since the fall of the Derg their numbers have been swollen further by famine and displacement, and demobilization and unemployment. On the city heights young Tigrayan sentries of the new regime, with untamed hair and AK-47 rifles on their shoulders, patrolled, not the battlements of Elsinore, but the gates to the former emperor’s half-ruined palace.

Someone outside the palace had a radio, tuned to the BBC Africa service. Across the airwaves, on the other side of the continent, I heard another young soldier, serving with the West African peacekeeping force in Liberia, being interviewed by a BBC World Service reporter. The two of them were walking late at night on Buchanan Highway near Monrovia, the site of many horrors in the Liberian civil war, worse horrors than in half-a-dozen sixteenth-century revenge dramas. What the soldier said in the interview could have been a line from a play; it could have been from Hamlet, a riposte to Horatio’s doubts about the ghost of Hamlet’s father. The play of plays has echoes everywhere, for everyone, in every age.

‘While on sentry duty between 2 and 5 AM,’ the soldier told the reporter, ‘you hear witches talking and walking by. You can check them out all you want, but you can never touch them. Yes, they are spirits, but believe me, they exist. And they are destructive . . .’ ★