The Garbage King is the gang name given to Mamo, a poor orphan
teenage boy forced to live in the streets of Addis Ababa for survival,
following the death of the sole breadwinner, the mother, and after an
ordeal in the countryside as an enslaved cattle boy. His is one half of
the story. The other half is about Dani (Daniel), the spoiled fat son of
a rich, popular but very strict man. Dani is not popular at school, not
being athletic, not exceeding in science subjects, much to his dad’s
displeasure. When he fails most of his exams one more time, his dad
decides to send him to a remote countryside place, to a harsh
disciplinarian that should put him straight. But rather than spend a day
with the dreaded Feissal, Dani decides to run away from home.
The
two boys are brought together when they end up sleeping in a cemetery
by sheer chance. Dependency and friendship develops and the two are
shortly taken in by a nonviolent street gang as members. Dani undergoes
the sort of change that the dad wanted in the first place as he learns
to survive in the gang, losing his spare fat, becoming lean and
watchful. Accounts of the methods of survival in the streets were given,
begging, sleeping wrapped up in blankets in the open, foraging through
garbage particularly those of restaurants for thrown-away food, doing
the toilet in the open waste grounds, showering in nearby rivers. The
gang members were happy to share out Dani’s rich clothes at first. But
because he really was not poor and homeless like them and he could not
do the begging like them (as he could be recognized and then reported to
his dad) he was often looked down upon, with the exception of Mamo that
usually stood for him. Until he begins writing stories down and Mamo
succeeds in selling them for the group. But this very act that sealed
his acceptance in the gang was to sow the seeds for his later discovery
by the dad who had called up all the people he thought Dani could run to
without hearing anything about him. One of Dani’s stories got sold
unknowingly to a teacher in Dani’s school, to Dani’s own teacher in
fact, who quickly recognized his handwriting then went to see the dad.
Things end happily for everyone, with Dani going back with his father
once he was assured he would not be sent to Feissal, and Mamo also
going to live with his newly married sister, starting night school to
learn to read. The story appears written with kids in mind, with
conscious attempts made to avoid explicit language regarding sex, like
using “doing it.”
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