Quick Review: Tim Bascom

Running To The Fire:
An American Missionary Comes of Age in Revolutionary Ethiopia
by Tim Bascom
University of Iowa Press/Sightline Books, 232 pp. paperback, 2015

I expected this book to be a Christian tract about communists torturing Christians in revolutionary Ethiopia, and I’m pleased to report that this is much less that kind of propaganda tract and much more a fairly engaging growing-up story. The author is sixteen years old when his veteran missionary parents take him with them to Addis Ababa in early 1977 en route to a posting in rural southern Ethiopia where his physician father will combine spiritual evangelism with needed medical care.

Writing as an adult, it turns out that Bascom has spent quite a lot of time pondering not only the influential six months he spent in Ethiopia but the meaning and ramifications of revolution, Marxism, and indeed missionary Christianity itself. As a teenager he's pretty much hanging out with other MKs (“missionary kids”), going to school, growing up from shooting at birds with a slingshot to holding hands with a girl, and trying to make sense of what he's seeing around him, which includes random dead bodies deposited by the Red Terror, the frequent background noise of automatic gunfire, frightening kebele checkpoints, and an alien world and culture he's eager to experience. He comes across quite likeable, and raises plenty of existential points about the missionary tradition he grew up in, leaving the book free of missionary certainty and consequently highly readable. I think his attempt to understand — and deliver a verdict on — Marxism, especially Marxism’s view of religion, is well intentioned but unfortunately shallow and off-target, but that's pretty understandable given the contempt shown to Marxist theory in the modern United States.

For the purposes of my study, I found some of Bascom’s anecdotes fascinating:

 “When we passed a burnt-out hulk of a car,  [my friend Dan] said, ‘That's from before Christmas break. Some guerrilla dudes raided an army post and got a bunch of weapons, but they got trapped here.’ ‘It was totally gross,’ Dave added from my other side. ‘You could see bodies for a week.’ ‘Check out the bullet holes,’ Dan said. Then he frowned in a cockeyed way....Dan looked to the driver of the bus, a twenty-five-year-old Ethiopian who seemed a favorite with all the teens. ‘Hey, Yared...what do you think about the burned out car? Were those guys from the EDU?’ The driver, a slender guy with rippling forearms and a receding hairline, shook his head. ‘EPRP,’ he shouted.... I asked, ‘So what's the EPRP?’ ‘The Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party,’ Dave explained. ‘They're the student radicals who started the whole thing. They say they want democracy, but they're more communist than Mengistu.’” (pp. 54–55)

He paints a pretty vivid picture of what it was like to experience Ethiopia as an expat kid, but the problem of course is that as a protected young foreigner, his exposure to the realities being lived by Ethiopians, at least as long as he remained in Addis Ababa, is largely watched through a fence or a window. 1977 was a crucial year, but to young Bascom the details are all so much nighttime gunfire. I wished for more of these kind of anecdotes and visual descriptions.

He eventually spends some of his time with his parents in their remote rural mission station, where it's clear that his family's protestantism is as out of kilter with the time and place as their foreignness. They have plenty of connections with a repressed evangelical community (Ethiopian Christianity being largely of an Orthodox variety), and the threat of legal repression seems ever present. Eventually, growing anti-Americanism and government resentment at missionary privilege and property forces Bascom’s family, and the rest of the missionary community, to evacuate Ethiopia in the latter part of 1977, and Bascom is left haunted by a few months of transformative experiences.

I didn't think this book was a crucial read for my research, but it was a fast read and I enjoyed it much more than I expected. Bascom is thoughtful, and his narrative largely avoids self-righteousness or, worse, American colonial/missionary resentment, and his self-questioning of his own coming of age means that this is accessible to readers who don't share his family's vintage 1977 missionary zeal.