May Day 1968 E.C

May 1968

The groundwork for the May Day celebration had been in full swing for over a month, though in truth it looked less like preparation for a workers’ festival and more like a competition between a government trying to prove control and a ragtag band of activists eager to prove otherwise.

The activists—if one stretched the word—claimed to represent the proletariat. But to be honest, there was no real proletariat in Jijiga. The only souls resembling a “working class” were daily laborers like the legendary wheelbarrow pusher, Wegebe, whose calloused hands and bent spine were their lone credentials of Marxian authenticity. That May Day, with all its fanfare and irony, should have been christened “Somali Pastoralists’ Day.” And for good reason: while Somalis from every corner poured into the field to wave flags and chant slogans, not a single Amhara soul with a Gashe, Ababa, or Ato before his name dared step onto the dust.

Gashe Tilahun, Ababa Alemu, and other dignitaries of the town instead spent the day in the warm, honey-lit rooms of Shewangizaw’s tejbet or the sparsely stocked grocery bars where politics never ventured. Even the famous Italian, De-Fabri, was unusually busy—fuming cigarette smoke on his verandah, eyes narrowed like a man who had once watched Mussolini rise and fall and knew how such mobs tend to end.

Meanwhile, government cadres from the “Provisional Peoples’ Organizing Affairs Office”—a title long enough to choke a horse—were in full swing, mobilizing residents by habitat and gender, attempting to stitch order out of dust and suspicion. Solomon and I had been tasked with the revolutionary art of scribbling slogans and tossing homemade fliers onto high-tension wires. Solomon, conveniently, was our mole inside the Kebele, privy to government movements and cadre moods. He had the added advantage of knowing the sergeant who ran the Kebele—a veteran more concerned with his concubine, a shopkeeper named Eteye Zewditu, than with May Day politics.

The sergeant’s office, in fact, was not in the Kebele at all but in Zewditu’s warm bosom. Urgent papers in need of his signature had to be carried next door, where he was found sipping his morning Ye Kosso Arake. This negligence gave Solomon free rein to sniff through notes and graze on every word in files that concerned the youth movement of Debub-2. With no photocopier in sight, Solomon’s prodigious memory became our duplicating machine.

That evening, Solomon and I met for our clandestine operation. Our battleground: the tombs of Saint Michel’s graveyard. Before beginning, I begged him: “Leave the marble grave in the compound untouched.” But something inexplicable fumed inside him that night. Like a man possessed, he leapt the first stone wall, retreated three paces, then shot like a bullet over the inner fence of Balamberas Mecha’s tomb. In moments, the white sepulcher was slashed with grotesque streaks of red.

“Why the dead, Solomon? They’ve done nothing,” I whispered, half-afraid of raising spirits or alerting the nearby deacons preparing for morning liturgy.

“Shut up and do your job,” he snapped, his tone as cold as the marble he desecrated.

I bit my tongue. His elder brother sat on the committee that held my application for youth league membership. Without it, I risked being marginalized, even branded an “idealist” because of my ties to the evangelicals—dubbed then as imperialist agents of Idealism. My place in the movement dangled in Solomon’s hand like a lamb before the butcher’s knife.

Still, I couldn’t resist inwardly mocking him. He had bested me in foot races and even beaten me in a fight or two, but I had always believed my brain was sharper. Spoiling graves was the proof of his thick skull—his latest dimwitted “masterstroke.” Yet here I was, skulking with him among tombs, chalk in hand, to prove to his committee that I too was no fragile idealist but a revolutionary of grave courage—quite literally.

His rationale was as absurd as it was theatrical: “I want to scare mourners coming to bury soldiers. A new force is born on the graves of the dead!” he declared, pointing dramatically to the tombs.

I could not make sense of him. On whose dead body was this new order being born? Balamberas was little more than dust and bone by now, awaiting resurrection at the end of ages. Still, I held my tongue, lest my blood be spilled there that night—not by ghosts, but by Solomon’s fists.

We crept between tombs, scrawling “EPRP will prevail” in both Amharic and English. Solomon insisted that I handle Amharic, leaving English to him. I recognized the power play: I was better at English, thanks to my evangelical friends, and this was his way of reminding me who held the boss’s chair that night.

The irony? No foreigner ever came near the graveyard, save the Americans who had packed up and left a year earlier. Our English slogans floated in the dark for no one at all.

At dawn, I passed the church to admire—or endure—the fruits of our labor. What I saw made me bite my lip to stifle laughter. Solomon’s spelling was a massacre. The twin “P” of EPRP had utterly defeated him. On some tombs he scrawled: “EPPR won Price.” On others: “IHAPPAR will pre-vile,” an unholy marriage of Amharic and English. But the crown jewel stood on the northern gate—the dignitaries’ entrance, the gate of the Sembete and the male folk. There, in proud red, Solomon had written:

“EPRPRP will pre-fail.”

A slogan that promised, with unintentional honesty, the failure of our revolution.

The cause of his blunder, I later realized, was the curse of phonetics. Amharic has no “V” sound. Solomon, ever the practical fellow, replaced it with “F.” So “prevail” became “prefail.” A masterpiece of failure announcing itself to the whole town.

I told no one. Not his brother—whose English was as catastrophic as Solomon’s. Not Gurez, the other committee man, whose tongue collapsed under foreign consonants. Dimbit, the only true intellect among us, was too shy to risk humiliation. So I kept Solomon’s errors tucked away, a secret weapon, ammunition for some future quarrel.

But the day of reckoning never came. His “prefail” has lived unchallenged, etched not only on the cemetery wall but in my memory—an epitaph for our absurd youthful zeal, written in letters crooked as our cause.

The Day of the Procession

Discharging our graveyard responsibilities had taken an hour or so, and by the end our clothes were drenched in red paint, more like wounded warriors than revolutionaries. That was a real problem for Solomon. He had to appear at the Kebele office the next morning, and showing up in his beloved jacket—now tattooed with incriminating crimson—would have been like marching straight into the lions’ den. So, with watery eyes, he surrendered it to me. I accepted it with all the solemnity of a knight receiving armor. That jacket became my badge of gallantry until the war broke out, a relic I wore with pride and irony.

Meanwhile, the task of slinging our red-stained fliers onto utility poles fell to the Qera boys. Slingshot virtuosos, they carried out their assignment with honor, while other youngsters scattered leaflets like confetti at a king’s wedding. By dawn, Jijiga awoke to find itself flooded in a manner that would put to shame even the grand Scarborough fairs of the West.

For the town and its soldiers, it was an entirely new spectacle. The first casualties were not revolutionaries at all but two shopkeepers—Yusuf Selan and Kelifa—the unlucky paint retailers. Their crime? Failing to report such suspicious bulk purchases to the police.

The government itself stood stunned. Nothing in the living memory of Jijiga’s garrison resembled this flood of paper and paint. Soldiers waited patiently for the procession to pass, their discipline betraying either wisdom or bewilderment. By then, however, it was far too late to call the whole thing off. From every surrounding village, peasants poured in with placards, their chants carrying through the dry air:

“Maanta, Maanta Waa Maalin-Weyne Maanta;
Maanta, Maanta, Maanta Waa madaxeyn Bannaane Maanta!”

The anthem—originally for Somali independence—had been opportunistically repurposed to suit May Day’s objectives.

We, meanwhile, were told to go alone, unaccompanied, trickling into Mesqel Square like droplets of water converging into a pool. That square—where the Damera bonfire blazed each September—was now transformed into a revolutionary stage. Dignitaries arrived with fanfare, flags snapping in the wind, and assumed their decorated thrones.

I joined Yohannes, Mesfin, Solomon, and others by the outer wall of the municipality, beside a tearoom patched together from corrugated iron. The celebration was in full swing when suddenly—bang! bang!—the crack of gunfire shattered the air.

What followed cannot be fully described. Human waves surged, broke, reformed—bodies pressed together, then tossed apart. For nearly three minutes we were carried like driftwood in a flood, until the tide dispersed as abruptly as it had risen. Some leapt gullies, others scrambled fences; children were trampled, soldiers’ lines scattered.

Through the chaos, I spotted Kassaye. He was a wiry boy with a Taliban-style beard, a zealous Marxist whose very gait suggested some strange mixture of camel and rocket. With beard angled forward like the nose of a missile, he bounded southward in mad flight. From a distance, he looked less like a man than a galloping horse. His destination was clear—the Chat Tera.

I chased him and saw him veer suddenly into a Somali compound. A woman, baby strapped to her back, was washing clothes. She froze at the sight of us, muttering “Allah Hoge!” before retreating in shock. We darted past her into the nearest house, breathless fugitives.

When she recovered, she offered us seats on an earthen bed. With our broken Somali, we stammered that we were fleeing Askerti-Dewledi—government soldiers. She eyed us skeptically. To her, we were just two matto Amharas, absurdly hiding from their own supposed protectors. And she was right. Who would have imagined Amhara boys seeking refuge in the bosom of Somalis, their “arch enemies”?

From that day, Kassaye and I forged a bond. In later Marxist study sessions, he would grin and declare: “Let each stand guard to the interests of the proletariat!” Then wink at me. We would collapse with laughter, remembering how he had indeed “stood guard”—by bolting like lightning toward the chat sellers of Jijiga. His words carried more truth than doctrine.

By evening, news reached us that no shots had been fired at all. The dreaded “gunfire” was nothing more than a stick dragged across the corrugated iron roof of the tearoom. Yet it had sounded like a .50-caliber machine gun, enough to send both civilians and soldiers alike into a stampede. To this day, I cannot fathom why the trained troops broke their lines and joined the panic.

Thus ended the last proletarian attempt at student insurgency in Jijiga—a farcical imitation of the Paris Commune, staged with fliers, paint, and fear, in a dusty frontier town where even ghosts must have chuckled.