How difficult and protracted is a revolution! How much blood it costs, when the contradictions within society and between its component forces have not been resolved! And when the ‘cadres’ who ought to be leading the revolution fall every day (or night) beneath the blows of faceless enemies!

Two weeks ago, less than twenty-four hours after we arrived in Addis Ababa, we felt the reality and enormity of this price in a direct and painful way. We had asked to see Haile Yesus, the representative of the Ethiopian revolution who scarcely two months earlier had visited Italy in a first direct encounter with our society. ‘Haile Yesus who?’, we were asked. ‘Haile Yesus Walde Senbet.’ It was a Wednesday afternoon. Yes, they said, they would look for him.

Someone else found him. The next day, on Thursday afternoon, Haile Yesus Walde Senbet was shot down on the main road separating the Hilton Hotel from the Foreign Ministry. This should have been one of the quietest areas of Addis Ababa, that ‘new flower’ founded by Emperor Menelik : 8,000 feet above sea level, a cluster of hills covered with conifers and slim eucalyptus trees, mud-huts and walled houses, modern apartment buildings and near-skyscrapers—each with lift, roof-top bar and restaurant. All once part of the personal fortune of Haile Selassie, the emperor overthrown in 1974.

So, all we saw of Walde Senbet was a newspaper photo under the heading, ‘Burial of our fallen comrades’—the others being a sergeant and a corporal who had been killed in error by a defence-squad of the kebele (the basic organizations in Ethiopian towns today). Many more die, or risk dying, condemned by a phone-call or letter giving notice of ‘execution’. Three days after Walde Senbet’s death, we were reading his obituary in the papers—it was an exemplary story, of a man whose political maturation kept pace with the ‘acceleration of history’ taking place in Ethiopia—when suddenly we heard a single pistol-shot in the street. From the window we could see, less than a hundred yards away, people running and gathering about a shape on the ground; there was someone fleeing, pursued by someone else pointing a pistol. Later, we went to talk with four leaders of the all-Ethiopian trade unions—organizations that rose from the ashes of the old federation, which had been a key instrument of the imperialist system. One of these leaders had spent four months in hospital after being wounded by the volley of shots that killed the former trade-union president; another told us that barely three days earlier, on Sunday, they had shot at him while he was on his way home. He was Gedlu Tekle, ‘first vice-president’ of the unions, and now the figure with the highest responsibility. There was no president because the successor to the one killed a few months previously had himself been assassinated.