Category Archives: history

Ethiopia Reprise: Axum Obelisks

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On March 6, I flew from Addis Ababa to Axum and landed safely at the Axum airport.

A guide from the Africa Hotel was there to pick me up at the airport. After I checked in, he assured me I could wait until 1:30pm to check in at the Ethiopian Airlines office five minutes from the hotel, then go to see the obelisks, the museum, and other sites of Axum. So, I took his advice, reading email and blogging briefly at the local Internet cafe, then eating lunch with an Italian woman, born in Libya, who was designing exhibits for the new Axum museum, not yet completed. Checking in at Ethiopian Airlines for the flight to Gonder the next day, March 7, was no problem. Then, the guide brought me to the obelisks. By the way, I really would recommend seeing Axum without a guide if you can. He didn’t really help out much.

The obelisk the Italians finally returned to the Ethiopians a couple of years ago rests on its side in a few parts awaiting its re-erection probably in time for the Ethiopian millenium celebrations during our September 2007.

My guide, wearing his Che Guevera T-shirt, showed me an excavation site. One of the largest obelisks has tumbled to the ground. Nearby is an eight-pointed stone compass.

Subterranean chambers apparently held a tomb of an Axumite leader. Only rarely were the backs of the Axum obelisks carved.

The new Axum Museum, already mostly constructed, will soon be located just behind the obelisk field and archaeologists plan to excavate the old town of Axum once residents are relocated.

Axum is dominated by Ethiopian Orthodox Christian churches, including a church that reputedly has the Arc of the Covenant. The town has refused construction of a mosque for its Islamic residents.

The next blog entry focuses on the Axum Museum and the Trilingual Tablet at Axum, both of which I also saw on March 6.

Ethiopia Reprise: Tiya Stela Site

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On March 1, we also drove down to Tiya to see the stelae there.

According to UNESCO: “Of the roughly 160 archaeological sites discovered so far in the Soddo region, south of Addis Ababa, Tiya is one of the most important. The site contains 36 monuments, including 32 carved stelae covered with symbols, for the most part difficult to decipher, which are the remains of an ancient Ethiopian culture, whose age has not yet been precisely determined.”

Recent excavations revealed that the stones mark mass graves of both males and females (displaying breasts) who died between the ages of 18 and 30 and were laid to rest in a foetal position. One symbol appears to indicate a sword, the number of swords perhaps representing the number of people killed by the person buried below. Another symbol looks like typical African neck pillows. The symbol that looks like a Greek epsilon has as yet no known meaning.

On the way back, we saw a beautiful mountain, slowed down in a typical small town, and got stopped by a herd of cows, a premonition of events to come.

Back in Addis, the driver helped me change dollars to birrs at the bank and purchase some kersone in preparation for my camping trip the following day March 2. I took pictures of a couple of mosques in Addis.

Memory Lane: Arrests at Yale University Conference

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After barely graduating in 1985 with a degree in Writing and Computer Science from MIT due to my activism there, I hightailed it back to the San Francisco Bay Area where I was hired at Sun Microsystems as a technical writer. The guy who hired me was an anarchist and one of the reasons I got hired was because of my nonviolent anarchist philosophy and activism.

I led a dual life as a well-compensated corporate worker and as an activist for a variety of causes. After the release of a computer called the SPARCstation 1, for which I had worked outrageous hours producing a new set of manuals that made it possible for non-technical users to use the machine, management rewarded me by proposing a paid leave of absence so I could relax and recuperate. When they mentioned the possibility to me, I was overjoyed and requested a year’s sabbatical to travel around the world. When I told my manager this, she gulped and said she’d check to see if it was possible. After checking with her boss, she came back and told me that if I insisted — which I had by telling them I was planning to leave the company if they didn’t grant me the time away — then they would give me a few months paid leave and would try to rehire me upon my return if a position was available.

So, off I went. My first stop on the trip was in October 1989 at Yale University for the Third Gay and Lesbian Studies Conference, organized primarily by a Yale history professor and department head known as John Boswell, author of Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality and of Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe.

The conference was rather unique in that quite a few activists — queer activists — attended, including myself. It was the heyday of Queer Nation and its in-your-face direct action tactics for queer activism.

At at the conference, I met the likes of John Boswell, Vito Russo, Larry Kramer, Jonathan Katz (well, I already knew him from activist circles in San Francisco), and a host of others.

The conference was well-run and had the excitement of a groundbreaking moment in history. The sessions were well-attended and provoked fascinating dialogues that lasted long into the night.

At one plenary session, someone ran into the room and yelled that the Yale police were arresting one of the conference attendees. Naturally, this shocked the crowd. The surprising reaction of the crowd was to relocate en masse to the scene of the arrest. Apparently, the Yale police were upset with an activist from a group called Arms Akimbo who was posting somewhat provocative flyers around the university campus.

They were quite surprised when a crowd of dozens of conference attendees arrived at the scene. Once it became clear what had happened, the crowd surrounded the police vehicle and requested the release of the activist in police custody. The police refused, and in the ensuing melee, a half-dozen more activists were arrested for lying down in front of the police car to block its progress. I was one of those arrested. We were taken in a police wagon to the jail in New Haven and I remember being excited and not at all scared. (Even previously on my first of many arrests for civil disobedience, the rush of it all kept me from being truly frightened.) We talked amongst ourselves, reassured each other, and developed a sense of solidarity that we would not budge until all of us were released. Not anticipating an arrest, most of us had identification on us, so it was not a question of whether we would be identified.

Meanwhile, John Boswell had contacted the president of Yale University and was negotiating for our release. Apparently the president of Yale got on the horn with the chief of New Haven police. I can only speculate that he applied pressure to avoid the embarrassment of the conference arrests becoming widely publicized by urging the chief to release us rapidly. Somehow, we were processed within hours and released with orders to appear in court on a later date. If my memory is correct, they released us without us signing any promise to appear, although I may have that part wrong. The reason I think that is that I was scheduled to continue on my trip around the world. So I wrote a letter to the judge, which I left with one of my fellow arrestees. In the letter, I explained that my pressing responsibilities for this trip prevented me from making a court appearance what I consider to be a spurious arrest that compromised the free-speech rights of the conference participant. I went merrily on my way with my travels and, to this day, I’m not sure how my case was resolved in the court. My memory is that the others had their cases dropped with no further penalty. But who knows, I may still have an outstanding warrant for my arrest in New Haven.