Ethiopia: Troubled Lion

Along Addis Ababa’s “Mattress Street,” brothels used to be marked with red crosses until the International Red Cross complained that too many Ethiopians were wandering into first-aid stations looking for a treat instead of a treatment.

By government edict, red lights replaced the crosses. In the past two years, the electricity bill for Addis’ red-light districts has risen as the number of cribs increased from 5,000 to 8,000. The boom is a significant symptom of change. Its cause: the influx of foreigners into the city for an endless series of conferences, all part of a determined attempt by His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, Conquering Lion of Judah, Elect of God, King of Kings, and Emperor of Ethiopia, to put his land in the vanguard of African nationalism.

For centuries, Ethiopia’s proud Amharas—who claim descent from a night’s roistering between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba—shunned black Africans as barya (slaves). But when the emerging black African states began getting voice in world affairs, the Emperor started to fire off letters to nationalist politicians all over the continent, condemning imperialism and hailing the once despised barya as “our beloved black brothers.” This week at Addis Ababa’s new $3,000,000 Africa Hall, he plays host to the U.N.’s traveling special committee on colonialism. The Emperor hopes that such hospitality will further his campaign for African leadership. Says one Cabinet minister: “We’ve been free the longest. It’s our heritage and duty to lead our recently enlightened brethren into the modern age.” Poverty & Corruption. But, as TIME Correspondent Lee Griggs reports, Ethiopia is not a likely candidate to lead any country into the modern age. Despite Haile Selassie’s tentative efforts at reform, Ethiopia is still one of the most backward nations in Africa. Parliament rubber-stamps the Emperor’s absolute rule. The press is rigidly controlled, and informers and secret police agents are everywhere.

Hangings are held in public, and public flogging was recently authorized in lieu of jail sentences, both to cut down the jail population and to keep dissenters in line.

Government corruption is so widespread that one-third of the taxes levied never reach the national treasury. So large is the bureaucracy that two-thirds of the annual budget goes for government salaries. Annual per capita income for the country’s 20 million people is only $30 ($5 if Addis Ababa is excluded), and 98% of the population are illiterate. Some 80% of the population have parasitic diseases ranging from hookworm to elephantiasis; venereal disease infects at least half the adult population, and infant mortality is nearly 40%. Malaria kills 30,000 people annually, and 40% of the country’s cattle are tubercular.

Most of Addis Ababa’s 450,000 people live in primitive mud huts with no sanitation. Said one visiting Senegalese: “If this is the heritage of freedom, I say ‘Bring back the colonialists.’ ”

At Gunpoint. Realizing the impression that Ethiopia makes on visiting Africans, Haile Selassie has embarked on an industrial development program, is shrewdly using foreign investment from both East and West to build dams, refineries, port facilities, factories. But the Emperor has ignored advice on civil service and parliamentary reforms that might curtail his absolute power, has made only token attempts to redistribute his own vast land holdings among the poverty-stricken peasants. As a result, Ethiopia’s intellectuals, who sparked the unsuccessful revolt against the Emperor’s regime 17 months ago, are again growing restive—despite the government’s attempts to buy them off with civil service appointments or simply offering them, in lieu of a job, up to $180 a month to keep quiet. Though plots against the government proliferate, they are mostly talk, for no one can agree what to do and when to do it.

Much popular affection remains for the Emperor, who at 69 still seems as vigorous as the man who 26 years ago protested before the world against the conquest of his country by the Italians. But with his wife and four of his six children dead, he is an increasingly isolated figure. Heir apparent Asfa Wossen, 45, is more liberal than his father, but mild and retiring. On his succession, he will probably become a figurehead for the reform-minded officers and intellectuals whose revolution he fronted—”at the point of a gun,” as he put it—in 1960. But if the succession is too long delayed, the gun aimed at the old order may well go off.