Amanuel Sahle

In a clear night one can see forever. I don’t know who said it but I like the maxim, whatever it means. And in a serene mind one can think forever. There are people who love to think, and they travel far and wide, backward and forward, in the immensity of the cosmos, just for fun.

A person is a person only when he is in this world i.e. as long as he takes this world as a reference point. If you put a person in an alien planet and leave him there, he will forget that he is a person after some time, and will lose his bearing, and his senses will wither away and he will start to live in his memory only, and finally he will simply fade away. This is what may be called ‘annihilation of the self’.

Sometimes I like to simply wander in the wilderness of thoughts and dreams. I do it at night. I give my mind free reign to venture out into the outer space-time-continuum,, and my thoughts become just like the wild horses of the West, who gallop with unbridled freedom and rush forward to an outcrop or a hill out there and snort and neigh rearing on their hind legs as if they have conquered the land around them.

But from time to time the mind balks and refuses to continue on the wild journey. This far and no further. There is lunacy around the corner. Reason just collapses out of sheer exhaustion, and logic loses its force. Unbridled thoughts can lead you straight to the land of madness, and no one wants to lose one’s inner self just for fun. Many people prefer to stop there, than lose their minds.

Our parents used to tell us to stop thinking when we simply stared into the window and mused or contemplated. Ata weddi bzuh aytihseb keytisilel (too much thinking and you will kiss your wits goodbye).

I was always intrigued by these words when I was young: Baria yihsebo! I think it means that one should enjoy life to the full while it lasts, and as for deep thinking which is associated with worry and unsettled questions, there are dehumanized people out there upon whose shoulders should rest the burdens of the intricacies and absurdities of life.

Just the other day I thought that before being Eritrean or habesha or African, I am first a human being. Let me tell you something.

Take any Eritrean for that matter and ask him to rattle off his genealogy.

Gebremariam begot Habtemariam, Habtemariam begot Kidanemariam, Kidanemariam begot Habtemariam…Okay that’s three generations long. Just continue fast re-winding and the fourth forefather may come up with a name that is a bit ‘unEritrean’. Continue! Are you afraid to proceed!?

The fifth and sixth, and you start to cross the border. Seventh and Eighth, and you find yourself very far removed from the place you always thought was your native land. Alas! But for a few, we are all more or less immigrants in our own native lands. How do you like that?

The more backward you go along the genealogical path, the more you become related to other people than to your own compatriots. And in the end, you meet Mr. Adam and Mrs. Hewan. By the way what was Adam’s nationality or religion?

What Socrates said about 3000 years ago remains true even today. I am neither a Greek nor Athenian; I am a citizen of this world…. We are all citizens of this world. If you one day get a chance to travel to the moon, just sit on rocky outcrop and contemplate the planet earth… Can you see any political boundaries on the surface of the earth or can you discern with a help of a telescope special people with three legs or with wings on planet earth? Nay! They are all alike except that some are whiter or taller. If you could craft a gadget which measures human intelligence, you would again find very little difference among them. They are all equal, both in intelligence and in stupidity.

Einstein once said: There are two things which are infinite in the universe. One is the universe itself and the other is human stupidity. And he added: And I am not sure of the first, but I am sure of the second. He said this to warn us that because of man’s stupidity, the human race may one day disappear from the face of the earth. These are some of the ingredients necessary for sending the world down to its ultimate ruin and desolation: intolerance, greed, fundamentalism, unbridled nationalism, racism and of course pollution!!

And now let’s go forward. Maybe just a thousand years from now. If all goes well and people retrieve their senses and start to live in peace and harmony, they will stay in this planet. If not, nature is not a respecter of persons, and just as the dinosaurs and the dodos have become extinct which may be soon followed by the tigers and the rhinos, the time may not be far away when humans, by violating the rules of nature, shall disqualify themselves as citizens of this world.

But we have a choice. A path that leads to extinction and another that awards men with survival.

However, the prognosis doesn’t look well. Too much animosity. Too much intolerance. Too much superstition. Too much fundamentalism. Everyone wants to go to heaven and leave a foretaste of hell here in this world. Nobody thinks of creating paradise here on this goddamned world! What is your purpose of going to heaven? To create hell there also? If you so much love paradise, why don’t you try to build it here instead of giving us hard time preaching that it is better there than here?

And then you have the nationalist who thinks that everything that belongs to his country has a touch of gold. The Eritrean thinks he is special, men kem eritrawi! The American thinks he has a solution for everything. If it doesn’t work with words and common sense, just try with a bomb and see if it works. It works! The enemy has surrendered and so now is the time to shove democracy down his throat. A gun-toting vigilantes can hardly teach other people to change.

The result is obvious: dictators here, dictators there, dictators everywhere. You fix one dictator and another one sprouts in its stead. Does this dictator satisfy the needs of my country which is in need of rare earth, titanium or anything that appeases the mineral hunger of my multinational companies? No! So would you please tell him to leave town before noon. That’s what they said in cowboy films.

How about if the dictator is a capitalist’s darling.

Double standard is so common in this world that it has become a norm. It is like, my country right or wrong. The cataclysm is just around the corner.