I was all right, in those first few days after the fall. It had been a drawn-out dying, the end of empire, starting in February 1974, just a few days after I began my work, and culminating in that loud and angry September. Haile Selassie himself did not die until 1975, when it is commonly assumed that Mengistu murdered him with his own hand. If that had been done in those September days, I think I would have fled. I could probably have done it: a short trip to the airport and an exchange of goods for services. I had friends, of course, who protected me and might have helped me: old drinking buddies from the university who now found themselves appointed to the Cadre for People’s Artistic Expression by a Derg scrambling to locate and project a coherent identity from an opportunistic eruption. I even knew a few career soldiers who were belated members of the revolutionary vanguard. I was a painter, after all, and I mixed with all sorts. No one could seriously have imagined me as political, though of course I had political value as an object to be smashed.