The Jerusalem Post - The Jerusalem Post Magazine
The ignored struggle for freedom
Holding the Ethiopian old guard accountable for alleged war crimes
‘It is so f###ing ironic,” Buddy Schwartz says to his partner, as they celebrate the People’s Choice Producer of the Year Award for Surf Squad, their third blockbuster TV series. “We got all this money. Cars. Drugs. Parties. Women. And I can’t enjoy it. It’s like God’s sticking it to me.”
At this moment, Buddy watches a thirty second TV ad for famine relief – and decides to make a documentary to raise funds to feed starving children trapped in a civil war in one of the most populous and poorest countries in Africa.
Money, Blood and Conscience follows Buddy as he is drawn into Ethiopia’s struggle for freedom and falls in love with Hanna Ashete, an aide to Meles Zenawi, the leader of a rebellion against the country’s dictatorial regime. It is the first novel by David Steinman, a self-styled revolutionary, who played a role in the ouster of Haitian strongman “Papa Doc” Duvalier, the planning of an election and the disobedience campaign in Ethiopia in 2004-2005. Drawing on real life events, Steinman seeks to use the “long ignored” tragedy in Ethiopia to build support for a far more robust global response to the fragile process of democratization among poor and oppressed people.
Money, Blood and Conscience is not a satisfying work of fiction. Plot developments are not credible. Buddy and Hanna are not fully realized characters. Steinman’s prose is as cliché-ridden as the prose in a Gothic novel or (one imagines) the dialogue in Surf Squad.
Hanna’s beauty “tugged” at Buddy, the narrator tells us, more than once. “He kissed her. To his relief, she met his lips with enthusiasm. Her arms gripped his back. He forgot who he was. Time and space slowed down. He felt plunged underwater, then he emerged into a new, brighter world.” A few pages later, Buddy rereads one of Hanna’s letters: “seeing her feminine handwriting that hinted at an artistic side, reminded him he would soon see the object of his desire.”
Readers may also have a hard time deciding whether to take Buddy’s conversations about “the Haile Selassie thing,” with “The Gandel,” his surf pal and therapist, seriously or parodically. “The brain models itself on dreams,” The Gandel explains: “When you see a divider of some kind – a fence, a border, or in your case a curtain – it often represents the divide between the conscious and the unconscious.” When Buddy recalls that when all seemed lost the Ethiopian emperor went to church to pray, only to acknowledge he does not know whether this is relevant to his problems, The Gandel says, “I gotta go. I got a patient waiting.” “He’s not a bad guy.” “Who’s not a bad guy?” “Meles.” “Meles is a Surf Nazi, dude.” Buddy’s “expression grew thoughtful. As if he’d heard something interesting.”
This novel, in my judgment, is not an effective platform to advance Steinman’s political agenda. Apparently, Steinman intends to use Buddy’s naïveté and willful ignorance about the corruption, contempt for elections, and violence perpetrated by Meles on his own people, justified by economic growth in Ethiopia, environmental reforms and a war on terrorism, as a metaphor for the abject failure of leaders in the US and Europe to hold him accountable.
Buddy, however, is so clueless – he sees smoldering huts of an Oromo village, where women have been raped and boys hanged by government soldiers; knows that Hanna’s brother has been arrested and tortured and Hanna has turned against the regime, but decides to ignore “the confusing, conflicting evidence, take Meles’ word for what had happened” and continue to give money raised by Help Ethiopia telethons to him – that readers may miss Steinman’s larger point. All the more so because Money, Blood and Conscience barely mentions that former President Barack Obama, former British Prime Minister David Cameron and former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon lavished praise on Meles and ignored the pleas of the people he was oppressing.
Significantly, in a brief afterward, Steinman leaves the novel behind and tells us what he thinks. Following Meles’ death and a brief period of reform under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, he writes, Ethiopia is again in peril, with almost three million people killed since 2017 in orgies of ethnic cleansing.
Steinman demands that the country’s old guard be held accountable at the International Criminal Court for genocide, politicide (mass murder based on political affiliation), and ravaging of the Amhara, Oromo and other tribes.
Accountability should also apply to Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus, Director of the World Health Organization and the former foreign minister of Ethiopia. Ghebreyesus, Steinman writes, could not have been unaware of his government’s atrocities; he has “blood on his hands.”
Most of all, Steinman urges people throughout the world to support organizations that promote democracy and help turn “never again” from a phrase to a plan of action.