Two Weeks in Southern Ethiopia

I spent two weeks in southern Ethiopia, mostly in the South Omo Valley. I’ve been run off my feet for the past 4 weeks, never spending longer than 2 nights in the one location, so it’s been difficult to find time to write this post. Luckily, I had a long day (yesterday – I tend to write the start of the blog post last) of flying from Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) to Freetown (Sierra Leone) via Lome, Accra and Monrovia, so the time finally presented itself.

Tribes of the South Omo Valley

1. The Dorze Village (near Arba Minch)

The Dorze tribe migrated from the South of Ethiopia further north to the Arba Minch area. Their houses are supposedly shaped like elephants (inspired by elephants back in the day before they were hunted to extinction in Ethiopia). Here are some good examples of Dorze houses:

I personally think that they look much more like woolly mammoths than elephants

Rocking combination of joggers, fleece and cheetah pelt

A depiction of a real Dorze warrior. This is supposed to be a hippopotamus tooth on his head, but personally I think that the artist was having a laugh when he painted it like this

We spent one day and one night at the Dorze village and I had a great time there. Our local guide, Mekkonan, showed us his house and walked us around the village. We learnt about how the subsistence economy in Dorze revolves around a crop called the “false banana”. This crop looks extremely similar to a real banana, however it is a plant (not a tree) and does not produce fruit. The leaves of the false banana can be used to make food, liquor, twine, roofing material and probably many other things that I cannot remember.

Mekonnen explaining the false banana

The evening was capped off by a singing and dancing evening around the fire. This was an interesting evening because in Dorze tradition the men demonstrate their masculinity (ie, eligibility for marriage) by jumping through the campfire. I chose not to jump through the fire because I am happy to keep my non-masculine pre-fire jumping status (and also not to have all of my body hair singed).

Here are some photos:

The high jump variation of the fire jump was introduced at the end of the ceremony. As a former high school athlete who specialised in jumping events I was very impressed by the skills of these men.

The evening involved much singing and dancing. It was really fun until I had an asthma attack.

2. Konso

There were two interesting things happening in Konso: first, the mummification of deceased kings; second, the attitude of the current king to social progress and globalisation.

From what I’ve seen whilst travelling, it seems to me like a large portion, if not all, moderate to heavy physical labour is performed by women (household chores are extremely labour intensive when you need to fetch all of your water from a pump well, carry it, and then pound or grind the life out of anything that you wish to cook). In contrast, men seem to do the majority of the drinking and 99.9% of people who I saw in local bars were men (excluding female tourists).

When a Konso chief dies his body is kept in a mummification hut for 9 years (9 YEARS!) before finally being buried in a forest under a totem pole. During this time, one must not mention or even insinuate that the king has passed (this seems to be a common thing in sub-Saharan African tribes, as I have been told several times by various guides over the past month that the correct way to refer to the king’s passing is to say that he has gone travelling). This tradition is really taken to the extreme in Konso; when a king dies they relatives living in the compound even bring food to the mummification hut so as not to attract rumours of his death (yes, it has occurred to me that the fact the king is living full time, and dining, in a mummification hut is a pretty big clue that he has died!).

Totem poles in the forest. Bad photo but you get the general idea.

A mummification hut is definitely a curious place for a king to hang out for 9 consecutive years if he’s still alive.

The second interesting thing about Konso was the king/chief of the tribe. My group and I visited the royal compound and had the opportunity to ask him some questions. From his answers to these questions it became clear that he was not a fan of globalisation and cultural exchange. To him, external influences, be they the internet, healthcare, education or even mobile phones, posed a great threat to his culture and traditions and he saw it as his role to protect his people from these corrupting influences.

My thoughts on this: in my view culture is not static and immovable. Cultures evolve and adapt, normally for the better. Whilst I respect the rights of people to maintain their traditional customs and identities, in my view this right is limited and sensible changes should occur. I will flesh out my views shortly (in my section on the Hamer tribe), but in short I think, after visiting a collection of remote tribal communities over the past month, that there are some incredibly damaging cultural traditions being practiced in many places and that often the preservation of tradition is used as a front for subjugating sections of the population (typically females). Those who hold firm views to the effect that the culture should be preserved at all costs (ie, that education is a threat to culture) are typically those who benefit from the status quo.

The Konso village was a beautiful place with an unfortunately high prevalence of Kwashiorkor (based on my general observations whilst there and not on any reliable data)

3. The Mursi Tribe

After the Konso tribe we headed into the South Omo Valley. The first tribe that we visited there was the Mursi Tribe, best known for the lip plates worn by the women.

Women leave out their lip plates for the majority of the time, but wear them when the tourists come to visit with their cameras and their money.

Upon arriving at the Mursi village we put away our cameras (something that I believe is always the best way to start when visiting people) and headed to the river near the village to splash ourselves with water (it was hot, sweaty and dirty). Whilst I love photography and cherish the photos that I have taken, I believe that sometimes the camera is literally a barrier between the traveller and the subject of the photo. This moment at the river was one where that barrier was broken down. As this was our first encounter with a truly “exotic” (I really hate this word but can’t think of anything more appropriate/less loaded) tribe we were kind of standing there initially just looking at them. Luckily, they were looking back at us with the same look of polite befuddlement, and the awkwardness was broken down when they started noticing that we too had body modifications. Thus, the exchange became less about us staring at a group of humans as if they were zoo animals and more about two groups of different cultural backgrounds trying to understand each other. The ladies of the Mursi tribe were fascinated by our piercings, and my favourite moment from this riverside encounter was when one of the ladies noticed my belly button piercing (Dad – if you ever read this, sorry that you just found out that I had this done!). I ended up with a group of ladies surrounding me all wanting to touch this piercing, trying to figure out where it entered into and out of my flesh. When I wiggled it around many of them gasped in horror, shocked by this thing that must have looked like mutilation to them.

I took a photo of this lady because I thought that she had a natural beauty about her. I liked the fact that she had chosen not to have a lip plate, as breaking away from societal beauty norms takes some courage, especially in a society where marriage prospects are somewhat dictated by these standards. I also chose her because I think that it’s a mistake to only choose to photograph those who are most “different” from yourself. It encourages a spectacle and discourages engagement.

I’m not much of a cultural relativist (as any reader will easily be able to garnish from this post) as I think that some things are such fundamental parts of human rights and dignity that they transcend cultural borders and should ultimately apply to all people. However, I do believe that certain behaviours and standards are strongly culturally defined. Beauty, particularly female beauty is something that I believe is highly culturally specific and my experience down by the river highlighted this to me. There are certain parts of “African beauty” (apologies for the absolutism) that I admire: the idolisation of a healthy body weight, and the amount of pride that people put into presenting their clothing and hair in the best possible way. These things are positive aspects of a culture that I would like to contrast with my own culture, which is one of starvation, plastic surgery and expensive beauty treatments sold to women who are brainwashed into believing that complying with these standards will bring them greater happiness. Of course, and this should be obvious to anybody who has ever spoken to me about this topic, I am one of the biggest suckers for this beauty myth (my new year’s resolution for 2014 was to learn to love and look after my body rather than constantly finding new things about it to despise) but I guess at least I’m aware of the way that culture brainwashes us all when it comes to things like beauty.

This lady approached me as she’d noticed my conch piercing (Dad – this is the one that you hate in the middle of my ear), which she pointed to before giving me the thumbs up. I then pointed to her nose piercing and gave her the thumbs up. She (obviously) does not have her lip stretched. Her choice to follow the beauty trends of tourists rather than her own tribe intrigues me. I wonder whether this is a purely aesthetic choice, or whether it symbolises a desire to identify more with another group.

Following our trip to the river and my revelation that I am the western equivalent of a big lip-plated Mursi woman, we visited the local village with our cameras. The dynamic completely changed when our cameras were involved. Upon arriving at the village (a 5 minute walk from our campsite) we were told the price for photos (adult 5 birr, child 3 birr, infant 2 birr) and then our guide organised a line up of people who stood there (like a bunch of prostitutes at a brothel) whilst the 5 people in my group plus our guide got all up in their grill trying to take nice portraits (hint: there is no way that you are going to get a nice portrait in this sort of setting) before we divided ourselves up to go and individually seek out people for portraits.

You are definitely not going to get a good photo when another person in your group is whistling and clucking at people in the line up so that they will look at his camera. 

It turns out that you don’t really need to seek people out for portraits, rather you end up trying to fight them off as everybody is so desperate to have their portrait taken (or, rather, more accurately, to collect some cash for having their portrait taken). In the Mursi village some strategies employed to encourage us to take portraits were grabbing, slapping, pulling, and, my favourite, poking (my friend Veronica) up the bum with a giant stick. I honestly don’t know many people who would have found this pleasurable, and unfortunately this was just the first of many similar village visits.

I appreciate the honesty in this child’s expression. I suspect that everybody collecting money for photos secretly feels the same way about the whole ritual.

One thing that I noticed in the Mursi village was that every adult male was holding an AK-47 (huge gun). As somebody from a country where nobody (**with the exception of a small minority of people with licences to own guns for agricultural purposes) owns a gun, I found this quite intimidating, especially as there were several moments in the village where a friendly exchange would suddenly turn very unfriendly (for example if somebody decided that you should pay them more than the agreed price, or if they were not satisfied with the quality of the birr that you gave them). I took one photo here of a man holding a gun and the expression on his face is one of absolute cockiness. Standing next to him is a child with a cheeky and innocent looking grin on his face. Here is the photo:

It occurred to me afterwards, especially after learning that an AK-47 is now a standard part of a bride’s dowry (along with 30-odd head of cattle) that the money I had paid to take photos that afternoon was contributing to the armaments of these villages. I learned that the guns are all smuggled in from nearby Sudan, so effectively my tourist dollar had helped to fund the international trade in illicit weapons.

That afternoon, our campsite was filled with people from the local village. Most of these people were simply curious about us (I attracted many strange stares when I sprayed steroid spray up my nostrils, a morning ritual of mine to keep my sinuses open since my surgery last year) or desperate to make some more money off photos. Our guide asked one of the local men to tell people to leave our campsite to give us some peace and space to prepare dinner (we were outnumbered about 5 to 1 by tribal people so their presence really was overwhelming). Unfortunately, the man who he asked to do this decided that this service was worth quite a bit of money, along with several empty plastic mineral water bottles (a tradable and highly polluting commodity in Southern Ethiopia) as well as an opportunity for him to sit there on his own and gawk at us. Whilst I never felt actually threatened by this man, there is something somewhat off putting about having a man armed with an AK-47 sitting next to your camp kitchen demanding money. Initially, our guide told him to leave and said that he was trespassing on our camping territory (something that did not go down well at all since our campsite was actually in his tribal land, so the notion that we could pay money to kick him out of his own land for the night was, understandably, highly offensive to this man). Luckily some other village men intervened and the man lost face and was forced to calm down and then apologise to us and say that he was not a violent man (we all accepted this apology with our best fake smiles and he didn’t trouble us after that).

That night I slept terribly. Our guide had hired a few men to sit outside of our tents as armed guards for the night. They spent the whole night sitting right outside of my tent talking, loudly. In the morning we discovered that the guide had approached them about this in the middle of the night and they said that they were talking about how the money that we were paying to the village (a very substantial amount it turns out) was not being equitably divided amongst the village, and they feared that they would not be suitably remunerated for their efforts as guards that night. I’m unsure how this situation was resolved, but the tension in the air was palpable when we left the village the following morning. It seemed to me like the more that money became a factor the less we were able to form meaningful connections with the people we were visiting.

4. The Karo Tribe

To my best recollection the next tribe that we visited was the Karo tribe. The particular village that we visited was up on a hill overlooking the bend of a river, a beautiful location. Here’s a photo of the location:

This visit was in many ways similar to that at the Mursi village, however at the Karo village we were not even told the first thing about the people we were visiting and it was very clear that the ONLY purpose of this visit was for us to take safari-style photos for a fee. To me, this is not a good way to travel, and my experience at this village was on the whole not a good experience. I had a few nice moments at the village, mostly when I approached people who were not begging for photos but rather going about their regular business and asked them if they would mind having their photos taken. Here are some photos that I took using this strategy:

This is my absolute favourite photo from Ethiopia (out of my photos).

These ladies looked shocked when I walked up to them but somewhat relieved when it was just for a photo and not to have my own hair styled.

The three girls in the group opted to have our faces painted. I am extremely unphotogenic and thought that my paint made me look like I had acne so stupidly refused to have my own photo taken. Here’s my friend Veronica having her face painted.

An anecdote that feeds into something that I am going to say about responsible tourism: the bra incident. When we arrived at the village we noticed that one of the young ladies was wearing a bra and walking around like the coolest girl at school. Clearly, a tourist had donated her bra to this young girl. One of this girl’s friends approached me and started pulling on my bra and saying “you give this to me” in broken English. I said “no” and then she started shoving her boobs in my face to show me how droopy she thought they were and how much she needed my bra (which was way too large for her, at least I like to think it was!). Again I said no, but she wouldn’t leave me alone and ended up following me back to the 4x4 as I was leaving the village, along the way constantly grabbing at my bra and trying to literally pull it off me, despite the fact that I was being very firm with her. To whoever first introduced bras to this village: thanks a bunch!

In the South Omo Valley, women only breast feed with the one breast. This way, the breast gets stretched and it is easy for infants to grab and stretch around to wherever they are standing if they fancy a suckle.

5. The Hamer People

A large portion of our time in the South Omo Valley was spent visiting the Hamer people at Key Afar market, Dimeka market, and two villages for a bull jumping preparation party and for an actual bull jumping ceremony.

Hamer women

This anxious looking young boy is about to undergo his bull jumping

This is the actual bull jumping

The Hamer people are known for their bull jumping ceremonies. These ceremonies occur when an adolescent boy is entering into adulthood. The ceremony is preceded by weeks of preparation and ceremony. The bull jumping ceremony itself starts (typically) in a dry riverbed where the female relatives of the bull jumper offer themselves up to be whipped. It is believed in their tradition that being whipped at this ceremony is a sign of great love and devotion to their male relatives. Following the whipping (which continues on for several hours) the ceremony is concluded by its namesake, a bull jumping. Eight bulls/cows are violently lined up in a row (more about this later) and the bull jumper gets naked and then has to run and then jump along the row of bulls and repeat this four times to prove his manliness. After this ceremony he is declared ready for marriage and is allowed to look for a bride.

We visited a local market where we were shown around by a 17-year old boy from the community who told us how this typically occurs. He told us that the young men, following the ceremony, will go to the market (produce market, not people market) where they will survey the eligible young women and pick one who takes their fancy. Then they will ask around to discover her name and the address of her parents, who the boy will then approach asking for the lady’s hand in marriage. Whether or not the girl is keen on this proposal is inconsequential, however our guide, a high school student, told us that this tradition is losing favour amongst educated people of his generation (for his part, he had a girlfriend and was keen to have a love marriage with her rather than this more traditional arranged marriage). I personally think that it’s great that arranged marriages are starting to die out. These sorts of things belong in the history books, not in the lives of modern people.

On our final day in the Hamer area we went to see a bull jumping ceremony. This was an optional activity, but something that seems to be on the South Omo Valley bucket list, so I went along to see what it was like. Before we arranged to see this ceremony we were told that we could opt out of the whipping, but when we got there we walked right in on it and before we knew it we’d seen a bunch of women being whipped. Whilst these were consenting adult females, I do not believe that they freely gave consent for this grievous bodily harm to be committed against them. We were told that women who abstained from this custom would be ostracised for this decision. As such, Hamer women have severely scarred backs.

I have thought long and hard about whether I want to share photos such as this one. I don’t want the suffering of some people to be used for other people’s viewing pleasure, nor for voyeurism. Eventually, I decided that I would put a very small collection on my blog (where there is sufficient space to explain their context) and not on facebook. My decision was driven by selfish reasons: it was emotional seeing this occur and sharing what I’ve seen kind of helps me to process it.

What these women were enduring looked incredibly painful. Some of them seriously needed medical attention and all that they had available to them was first aid from each other.

There is no good way to caption a photo showing somebody being whipped. All I want to mention here is that she’s so used to being whipped that she’s standing up straight and not flinching, even as the whip is only a fraction of a second away from breaking her skin.

We then (after a few hours of waiting around whilst the whipping kind of continued in dribs and drabs) watched the actual bull jumping. The most difficult part of the bull jumping seemed to be getting the cattle lined up. This was not helped by the fact that they selected a bunch of calving females to be included in the line-up and then forcefully separated them from their young. Basically, the cattle were each handled by a group of men, some pulling on the tails and others pulling on the horns and mouths of the cattle until they were all lined up. At one point one of them broke loose and came running at the edge of the circle of spectators, right where my friends and I were standing. We were all OK, but it made us realise that the whole thing was actually quite dangerous.

Now for some opinions (of which I have many). I do not think that tourists should be allowed to watch the bull jumping ceremony, especially the whipping sessions. As a tourist I would prefer to observe customs from the standpoint of observing and appreciating ancient and rich cultures, however it is impossible to watch something like this without feeling, at the very least, judgmental. I imagine most people would feel horrified. I wonder how much of the ceremony, especially the whipping, which seemed to be reignited each time a new group of tourists showed up, is preserved for the purpose of attracting tourism (and the tourist dollar). If so, tourism is complicit in horrible violence committed against female bodies. Moreover, there were so many tourists at this ceremony and the vast majority of them acted in a disrespectful and intrusive way. I use the word “disrespectful” with a certain amount of tension: I certainly do not respect cultural traditions that use female bodies as a marking ground for the continuation of their subjugation to their male peers. However, there is a difference between respecting and agreeing with the culture and acting respectfully, and I think that acting respectfully requires tourists to step back and allow the ceremonies to continue without their presence being an intrusion. Most of the tourists at this ceremony were doing exactly the opposite. I will let my photos tell the story of what happened on this occasion at the bull jumping ceremony:

This boy’s facial expression speaks a thousand words

Just to zoom in a bit on part of that photo

A man walking through the middle of the whipping ceremony in order to get close up photos. I would not have felt particularly sympathetic had he been hurt by an errant whip.

6. The Dassenech Tribe

This was the last distinct “tribe” that we visited in the South Omo Valley, and I think that I speak for my entire group when I say that we were completely and utterly burnt out by tribal visits at this point. This visit started with us having to pass through an immigration checkpoint, which was awkward for me as my passport was residing at the Beninese consulate in Addis Ababa (see previous blog entry) so I had to hide out in the car. We then crossed a river in some dugout canoes to the opposite bank where we were greeted by a bunch of truant children begging to be paid for portraits. Upon arrival at the village we were reminded of the current rate for photos and again given a line up for pre-purchased humans for our photography pleasures. I’d really had enough of this, so I latched onto a local youth with good English skills and asked him to walk me around the village so that we could escape from the hoards of desperate people. I got a couple of nice photos at this village, but my heart really was not in it at this point.

Great face, great necklace.

I felt like people were competing with each other to have the most outrageous outfits (as these would most likely attract pay for photos)

Goat and girl

I came across two ladies building a house.

As we were leaving the village we were followed by a group of young girls who were desperate to have their photographs taken. They kept running a few meters ahead of us then stopping to pose in extremely awkward poses saying “photo money photo money”. The most uncomfortable thing about this situation was that the girls were posing in a sexualised manner (despite the fact that they would all have been between about 8-10 years old). I don’t know why they would do this unless they were either victims of sexual abuse, or alternatively had found that these poses were popular with tourist photographers. I can’t think of any nice reasons to explain their posing.

This particular village was one that practiced female genital mutilation (FGM) (otherwise known as female circumcision, a term that I find far too sterile to describe the custom or excision (in West Africa only)). It will probably come as no surprise that I find this practice absolutely abhorrent. When studying the topic in my masters degree I was taught that “female circumcision” is now the more politically correct term to describe the practice, as the term “female genital mutilation” implies mutilation of the woman. Whilst I understand that nobody likes to be deemed mutilated, there is really no other way to accurately describe what is going on here and I think that there is no point in pretending otherwise.

At the same time though, I do believe that change in reducing the prevalence of this practice must come from local advocates rather than international condemnation. One of the most inspirational women I have ever read about is a Kenyan woman named Agnes Pareyio who advocates against FGM at the village level. She travels between villages in rural Kenya with a model of female genitals that has been custom made to have removable parts so that she can show girls what will happen when/if this is done to them. She educates young girls about the complications (and there are many) of this procedure and then teaches them how to detect the warning signs that this is about to be forced upon them. Most importantly, she has established a retreat to which girls can flee if they choose not to have this done to them. At each village, she teaches girls how to reach her retreat and then, if they go there, she provides them with accommodation and education, ultimately saving them from lives of suffering and subjugation and giving them some agency over their own bodies and futures. This is my ideal model of advocacy for this issue, but I accept that it has limitations (most pertinently that it will only work in societies where the procedure is performed on older girls and cannot be used to save infants in regions where this is performed at a younger age). Promisingly, as education levels increase there is a correlate decrease in FGM and the data clearly shows that more highly educated mothers are significantly less likely to have this excision performed on their daughters compared to their less educated counterparts. Again, I think that education is so critical for development and progress.

Some observations

Ethiopia is a truly beautiful country and fantastic destination for tourists who are keen to learn more about unique customs and traditions. It is a shame, however, to see the impact that tourism is having on local communities. At the most basic level, tourism has been harming local communities. Guns purchased using money from tourist visits are being used to defend cattle, humans are being commoditized, and the landscapes are being polluted by tourist waste such as plastic bottles.

Moreover, some people have actually died due to tourism. It is now typical to drive along a road in the tourist areas and see children running out from their houses to dance on the road in front of cars, or simply straight out beg for money. As you drive past the children they will chase your car. Several children have been killed doing this, and the practice started because some tourists started handing out money/water bottles/sweets to children who would approach their cars. I’m not saying that it’s easy to ignore people begging (compassion inevitably sets in when you make eye contact with somebody asking you for something and it’s hard not to wonder whether it’s OK to give to just that one person, but nonetheless the best way to leave a good impact is to support local charities and on an individual level leave people with the gift of your friendliness).

What saddened me about Southern Ethiopia was that tourism had forged such a path that it had became impossible to interact with local people on any meaningful level as everything had become transactional: ie, you take a photo, you pay money. This is such an immovable barrier, driven by desperation on the part of the local people, and curiousity and wunderlust on the part of the tourists. My friend, Rita, suggested a solution that would overcome this barrier (but I suspect would drive away tourists): ban photos. Assign one professional photographer per group so that everybody can access memories of the trip but remove the impetus for cash per photo to be the primary interaction between tourists and local people.

My local guide, Gele, had painted this photo (he is the guy in the image). We are re-enacting the picture, which is representing a Hamer person meeting a foreigner and immediately asking for money.

All of that said, I really loved Ethiopia. For the most part, the Ethiopian people who I actually got to know personally were friendly and kind. I feel this kind of tension: privileged and grateful that I have had the opportunity to witness the lives of people who live so differently to me, but also guilty that this exchange was only possible because of the vast divide between their wealth and my wealth leading them to accept my presence only for financial gain. I suspect that there is much more that unites us than divides us, indeed many of the people I had a chance to chat to are people who I would be friends with if I met them in Sydney, however the nature of classic “just visiting” tourism made it really difficult for me to see these purported similarities.

I had the opportunity to travel with some lovely people in Southern Ethiopia: Lene and Veronica, two delightful Norwegian girls who are also on long backpacking trips, Douglas, an art museum curator from Nebraska, and Paer, a retired financier and quasi-professional photographer. I am glad to have met these people, and believe that I have made some life long friends in Lene and Veronica (I will have to visit them in Norway some time J).

I’m unsure when my internet connection will be strong enough for me to post this latest update, but right now (as I edit the post) I am sitting in a beach side bungalow in Sierra Leone at the beautiful John Obey Beach.