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The Ethiopians Call Them Black

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The Ethiopians Call Them Black BETWEEN ETHIOPIA AND JERUSALEM Appendices: A Selection of My Reports in Yediot Aharonot Appendix 2: The Ethiopians Call Them Black By Adeno Dan Adebe, November 2020 Appendix 2: The Ethiopians Call Them Black1 The cemetery in Netanya is overcrowded. Hundreds of members of Beta Israel accompany one of the elders of the Ethiopian community, who has died at an advanced age, on his final journey. His sons weep bitterly and his friends from the villages in Ethiopia have come from afar to say goodbye. In the plaza, among the many children of the deceased, Wanda stands out. His big eyes glisten from his tears. “Father, why have you left me?” he sobs. Members of the community stand in line to console the bereaved family. “He wasn’t really his son, he was like his son,” whispers one of the guests. “I know the family from Ethiopia, from the area of xxx. They had fields, cows, horses, and this young man was their barya. I remember that the deceased loved his barya. I don’t know whether he loved him like a son, but he loved him,” he adds, walking over cautiously to offer his condolences. HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT HE WAS A BARYA? The man laughs under his breath; after all, this is still a funeral. “What, don’t you know what barawech looked like in Ethiopia?” He turns to the reporter Danny Adeno Abebe, who is also of Ethiopian origin. “Didn’t your family have a barya in Ethiopia? So why are you asking such irritating questions?” he rebukes him, then asks, “Whose son are you?” At this point, Abebe cuts off the conversation. “What do I know about what he knows about my family? Is it possible my family had a barawech back in Ethiopia? Maybe I should go to my family first, to check whether we ever kept a barya at home.” Abebe did not go to ask his family. The topic is a taboo in every Ethiopian home, and it is certainly not to be discussed with outsiders. No public discussion of the status of barya is allowed. Several months passed, and we both racked our brains about how to broach the subject with members of the community and get them to discuss it. It would be the height of discourtesy, practically an insult, to ask someone to his face, “Are you a barya?” Because what it means is: “Are you a slave?” Or the son of slaves. In Ethiopia, Beta Israel were called Falasha—foreigners—among many other, more offensive epithets, such as “the hyena people.” But despite the insults and the feeling of alienation, even the Jews of Ethiopia, like other groups in the country, owned their own slaves. People with an inferior status. The Jews might not have been allowed to own land, and they were often treated with hostility by their Christian neighbors, but their barawech, their slaves, had nothing. No property, no family, not even a memory about their ancestral roots, one of the most prized assets of Beta Israel. “We’ve come to write a report about the barya in the Ethiopian community,” we say cautiously to Wanda, who is still crying. “An important subject,” he whispers. “But who would want to talk about it? Do you even know how many barawech there are in Israel? There are tons of them. I know many of them and they’re going through a difficult period. By the way, who told you I’m a barya? What, do you know the family of the deceased?” he asks suspiciously and then quickly clarifies: “He was my father. I was his son.” Only after a long pause does he share his story: “They say that I was a barya in Ethiopia. Over there, there were differ- ences between the barya and other people. They treated us with disdain, and we treated them with respect, truly with respect.” At a certain point, Wanda begins to feel uncomfortable. “There are lots of Ethiopians here who can hear our conversation. I don’t want them to hear, maybe we leave and sit over there, on that rock? I don’t even feel comfortable talking about this in Israel.” The memories cause Wanda grief. “Sometimes I know deep down that the man who died was not truly my father,” he continues, his face contorted in agony. “But I’ve been with him since I was around eight years old. I was a shep- herd, cleaned the sheep pen, brought cows for milking, took the children to sleep, woke them up, washed my mas- ters’ feet. In short, I did everything in the house of rich people. “They were OK to me. I loved them. I didn’t know anyone else. All I know about myself is that I was born in the region of Wolkite, far from the village where I grew up. I didn’t have a mother or a father. Both of them, I assume, died 1 Co-written with Natasha Mozgovaya, “7 Days,” 1 January 2002. 1 when I was a child. Maybe they were also barya. In Ethiopia, everyone knew that I was a barya. It was accepted there. We used to meet children in the fields who were other people’s barya and we used to play like normal. Till today, I still don’t like people calling me ‘barya.’ It’s offensive.” Wanda is slim, short, and wears a large knitted kippah. His round face bears the scars of his childhood, creating a kind of drawing. His skin is pitch black, “blacker than a Sudanese,” as one of the mourners at the funeral says. His wide palms, long fingers, kinky hair, and teeth as white as snow attest to his barya status. HAS THIS EVER BOTHERED YOU IN ISRAEL? “In the army, actually, I was an outstanding soldier in the Paratroopers Brigade, Battalion 890. After my military service, I was invited to work in a VIP protection unit. They asked me to do their admissions tests. After a long try-out, they sent me a letter, saying I wasn’t suitable. But what bothers me more is that I’m thirty-two and still unmarried. For Ethiopians, it’s unusual to be unmarried by my age, but no woman in the community wants to marry a barya.” WHY? “Because for Ethiopians, being a barya is like a stain for the rest of your life. You can’t escape it. When you want to get married, they count seven generations back. The elders are like the establishment, they know everything about you. You can’t get around them. I would only want to marry an Ethiopian woman. It’s important to me, I’ve dated a few Ethiopian girls. This is how it goes every time: at a certain stage, it starts to get serious, then you go to your girlfriend’s parents, and they start asking about my family, and as soon as they discover I’m a barya, it’s over. They won’t look at you anymore. They’ll say, “Thank you, but no thank you,” without even explaining why not. ARE YOU SURE THAT’S THE REASON? “Yes. That’s the accepted way in the community, not to tell you to your face. Everything is roundabout. I dated three girls I wanted to marry, each one separately, of course. But it was the same story with all three. So what will I do? Stay single for the rest of my life? I’ve got to get married. I want children of my own. I want something to continue from me. I don’t have a family line of my own.” BUT IN ISRAEL, THERE’S NO SLAVERY. “True, today there are no barya. We’re all the barya of the system in Israel. I have worked for many years for a large security company, I have a good job there. But the people who were my masters in Ethiopia do the grunt work, they’re cleaners. In Israel, nobody has a class. I am a barya who succeeded in Israel. I have always felt that I had to prove to everyone that I was the best. Even at my religious boarding school, Neve Amiel, I was a good student. I’m not some kind of delinquent or criminal. So why can’t I marry a girl who is not a barya? “Five years ago, I met a girl from Bat Yam. We went out for three and a half years, I felt at home with her family, I even told them that I was the son of the family who raised me. They were very happy, because it’s a well-known, respected family. When I decided to make it official, I sent the ‘father’ who raised me to her parents’ home. Before he went, he asked me whether he should tell them the truth. Since it’s a community where everyone knows every- one, I told him yes. “He went all the way to Bat Yam and told them the whole story: that I was a barya, that I’d come to him as a kid. That very moment, the girl cut me off, and every time I call her, she refuses to hear my voice. All this, because I’m a barya. I don’t understand why even in Israel, they keep up this racism against the other. They even give us trouble at funerals. The kesim are the biggest troublemakers.” Wanda’s story has taken a happy if accidental turn. It happened, ironically enough, thanks to Operation Defensive Shield [the IDF operation in 2002 to crush the wave of Palestinian terrorism known as the Second Intifada].
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