Hidden Triumph in Ethiopia

By Kay Bascom

When Kay Bascom and her doctor husband landed at a hospital in southern Ethiopia, they found themselves face to face with first generation believers in their first love for the Lord Jesus Christ. Witnessing the Marxist Revolution and the subsequent persecution of the Christian church, Kay was burdened to make known the incredible account of "hidden triumphs in Ethiopia" to the outside world. After interviewing over one hundred people, she chose Negussie's true-life story as representative of that era's triumph.

• Language: English
• Publisher: William Carey Library
• Release date: Jun 1, 2001
• ISBN: 9781645085324

Book preview

A ROYAL DESTINY?

In a small village of central Ethiopia in around 1950, a newborn child opened his eyes on the world. His cries rang out in the mud hut of a peasant family who subsisted on what they could grow on their small acreage beside a nearby stream. Life was elemental. As the morning mists arose from the cool valleys, the baby could smell his mother’s coffee roasting over a three-stone fire base on the dirt floor of their circular hut. By day he could hear her grinding grain outside their door. By night, he could hear the peaceful breathing of cattle that his father barricaded within, safe from hyenas.

The couple named their son Negussie (pronounced Ne güs´ se Küm´ bi). The name’s root meant king, and its ending meant my. In Ethiopia, nearly every child’s name has a meaning. Negussie was not an unusual name, for the concept of royalty was ingrained in the country’s culture. It reached back almost three thousand years to the national epic. A royal son had been born to Israel’s King Solomon and Ethiopia’s Queen of Sheba, the epic said. Wasn’t Sheba’s visit to Solomon’s court recorded in the Holy Scriptures themselves, in I Kings, chapter 10?

Negussie’s parents had seen Haile Selassie take Ethiopia back from Italian occupation just a decade before their baby’s birth. The child’s grandparents had seen Haile Selassie’s predecessor, Menelik, unify the nation the generation before. Over the vast tangled mountains and dry savannas, provincial dukes had fought for centuries for control over Ethiopia, some of them from the Amhara tribe of the central highlands, others from various outer regions. In the 1920s, the duke named Ras Tafari — of the Amhara ethnic group — had risen above all the others to claim supremacy. He’d used every opportunity to buttress his political power with historical credentials. He’d reached back to the Queen of Sheba’s child from Solomon to claim her line by appropriating for himself the Jewish title, Lion of Judah. In addition he’d chosen the name Haile Selassie (power from the Trinity) for himself, to emphasize a Christian mandate as well.

Few rural Ethiopians were literate, but they knew their oral histories and ancestry. Around their fires at night, the stories were rehearsed. Each tribal group had its unique heritage, and rarely did tribes encourage intermarriage. Baby Negussie’s mother was of the Amhara tribe, and his father, Ato Kumbi (ie., Mr. Kumbi), was of the Oromo tribe, not an easy alliance. According to the common Oromo custom, Kumbi kept one wife managing a compound at one of his acreages, and another wife elsewhere. His family identified loosely as Ethiopian Orthodox Christians but, along with many, lived in fear of the ancient spirits of animism. It must have deeply grieved and even frightened the family when their child’s development seemed stunted, his back bent and his body compacted. Eventually Negussie was placed at Ato Kumbi’s property near the small town of Wolisso, instead of living with his birth mother. Although there was a mission clinic within minutes of Negussie’s home, the fear of vengeful spirits kept the family from seeking medical help.

Outside their grass-roofed hut, head-high inset plants (false banana) circled the home. Their broad leaves provided an African variety of disposable plates, and foods made from its root kept people alive in hard times. A few corn stalks dotted the small acreage beyond the well-swept circle where the compound’s women did their daily work. Negussie’s older stepmother was not fond of the child with a deformed spine who sat hunched over in the shadows of their round one-room home. Perhaps that was why, when it was not raining, Negussie liked to perch crookedly on a three-legged stool in a spot of sunshine at the gate of the compound fence. Sometimes the nurse from the Obi clinic next door passed by and would see the boy sitting there, smiling brightly.

One day she asked him, Whose child are you?

I’m God’s child, was his unexpected, happy response.

Stopping to visit a bit, the nurse could observe that the tiny boy showed signs of TB of the spine. She told the family that he could be helped if he got to the TB treatment center in the capital, a hundred miles away. When Negussie was about four, his parents finally did let her take him to that hospital. A few months later, the child returned from Addis Ababa with his TB arrested. At least his legs would grow, even if his torso could not develop normally.

Because the mission offered elementary schooling right next to Negussie’s home, he was able to begin an education, an opportunity that the majority of Ethiopian children did not enjoy. Under the green, yellow, and red striped Ethiopian flag that waved in the schoolyard, classes were held in a simple tin-roofed building constructed from eucalyptus poles. Inside, the classrooms were simple: rough desks and benches, pencils and tablets, and a blackboard and chalk for the teacher. Among other eager students, Negussie learned to read, write, and do arithmetic. His horizons widened.

Negussie had grown up as nearly a town kid, for Wolisso was only five kilometers from his home. He was regularly drawn by the scent of red peppers and onions to the open markets where a myriad of products were set out for display on the ground: piles of eggs and potatoes, stacks of tea cups and rat-traps, assorted soap bars and tin basins, halters and horseshoes. All this in the midst of a colorful jumble of people making their way between bleating sheep, clucking chickens, and hordes of flies buzzing around the butchers’ stalls. He dodged lorries on the tarmac road through Wolisso, stood enthralled before the shelves of shops that lined the road, heard radio music pouring out of the noisy bars, and admired the muscles of men who lifted heavy sacks of grain onto the backs of donkeys. From restaurants, he could smell the enticing aroma of hot peppery sauces eaten with flatbread, Ethiopia’s best-known national dish, injera b’ wut. He stared at faces looking out the windows of overloaded buses, strangers on their way to the wider world. He wondered about that world, even though he could boast having been to the capital once himself, for his TB treatment.

In school, the boy began to learn about clocks, measurements, and directions. On the colorful map of Ethiopia painted on the school’s outside wall, he could now locate Wolisso in the center of his country. His town was just southwest of the capital on the Jimma Road, one of Ethiopia’s five or so main roads that undulated over the mountains from the hub, like the limp legs of a drowned spider. He could see the string of lakes made by the Great Rift which cut southward from Israel through Ethiopia and on to Mozambique. But for him, leaving this little town and its marketplace seemed an unlikely possibility. He didn’t even know yet what difference it made whether one was classed from the north or the south — that is, whether from Orthodox Christian Amhara territory, or from the southern tribes which were more likely to be animistic or Muslim. He didn’t know that the region of Eritrea in the north was not happy to be part of the larger nation.

Among his neighborhood classmates who were mostly Oromo, Negussie stood out, not so much because of his bent spine, but due to his untroubled spirit and sunny temperament. Very early he had been tried by illness and rejection, and yet had come forth shining like gold. Negussie had an uncanny wisdom about him. I’m God’s child, he would say with happy certainty.

COLOR-BLIND BONDING

When Negussie was eleven or twelve, a foreign family moved into the mission property next door. The lad watched the foreigners pile out of a vehicle and start settling their belongings into one of the mission’s square, whitewashed, mud-and-wattle houses. It had a tin roof and a side chimney, just like the one next door where the clinic nurse and schoolteacher lived. Negussie’s stepbrother and stepsister from the other wife had gone away for schooling, making him the solitary child in the home. Shyly, the hunched boy with the wide smile got acquainted with the three children — a girl about ten, a boy around six, and a toddler son. The Colemans turned out to be from faroff Canada and had lived in Addis previously. Their children began to bond with the winsome Negussie, especially the older boy, John.

National children loved to touch John’s blond head and giggle as they felt the light, flimsy hair of Yohannis, as they called him. He didn’t mind, for he was an outgoing boy with a naive and accepting nature. He had a way of turning his head around slowly as if searching for clues. The tendency was later traced to the congenital absence of a stapes bone in his right ear, which made him struggle to know from which direction sounds were coming.

Bea and Murray Coleman gathered neighborhood children for a couple weeks of daily Bible curriculum during the rainy season school recess. Negussie was already tender to God, and he was among those who indicated a commitment of their lives to the Lord Jesus Christ during that time.

Bea sought to shepherd him spiritually, in practical ways. For instance, she realized from the amount of time he spent at their home, that he must be doing very little to help at home. On chatting about it one day, he admitted he didn’t help much. Since he wanted to see his parents come alive to a personal relationship with God, Bea encouraged him to demonstrate the change Christ was making in his life by helping with practical chores, carrying water or wood or helping with cattle herding whenever he could, to show them his love and respect.

The Coleman kids didn’t have a lot of toys, but they shared their big red wagon and tree swing with the neighborhood children. They played store in the spreading branches of a sycamore outside the nurse’s house, selling wares from their perches — seeds or rocks or leaves, or whatever they could think of to trade. Sounding much like the plethora of birds twittering around them, the children chattered together in a mixture of three languages: Oromo, Amharic, and