Every expedition into the depths of Ethiopia is a luxury. Ordinarily, my days are spent gathering information, writing telegrams, and going to the post office, so the telegrapher on duty can forward my dispatches to the Polish Press Agency offices in London (this turns out to be less costly than sending them directly to Warsaw). The collecting of information is time-consuming, difficult, and dodgy business–a hunting expedition that rarely results in capturing one’s quarry. Only one newspaper is published here: four pages called the Ethiopian Herald. (I witnessed several times in the countryside a bus arriving from Addis Ababa, bringing not only passengers but a single copy of this publication as well. People gathered in the marketplace and the mayor or a local teacher read aloud the articles in Amharic and summarized those in English. Everyone listened raptly and the atmosphere was almost festive: a newspaper had arrived from the capital!)
An emperor rules Ethiopia at this time; there are no political parties, trade unions, or parliamentary opposition. There are Eritrean guerrillas, but far away in the north, in mostly impenetrable mountains. A Somali opposition movement operates out in a region of equally difficult access, the desert of the Ogaden. Yes, I could somehow make my way to both places, but it would take months, and I am Poland’s only correspondent in all of Africa. I cannot just go silent, disappear into the continent’s uninhabited wastelands.
So how am I to gather my material? My colleagues from the wealthy news agencies–Reuters, AP, or AFP–hire translators, but I lack the funds for this. Furthermore, their offices are equipped with a powerful radio: an American Zenith, a Trans-Oceanic, from which one can tune into the entire world. But it costs a fortune, and I can only fantasize about it. So I walk, ask, listen, cajole, scrape, and string together facts, opinions, stories. I don’t complain, because this method enables me to meet many people and find out about things not covered in the press or radio.
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