Hope Restaurant is a powerful example of what happens when Africans looks inwards, instead of outwards to international aid, to begin our healing. It becomes an all-encompassing journey that puts people at the heart of all ideas and decisions.
Out of all the wonderful memories of living in Bujumbura, the most precious one is the echo of drums thumping from somewhere everywhere in the city. As a parting shot on my last day in Burundi, my buddy Valentine has, for US$100, gathered a group of traditional drummers to put on the finest show there is to catch in Burundi. Drumming here isn’t just a song and dance, it’s a source of national pride and a spectacle that combines powerful, synchronised drumming with dancing, heroic poetry and traditional songs, as UNESCO points out.
The spectacle starts months before a performance when the trunks of imivugangoma – which loosely translates into trees that make drums that speak – are carved into drums that rise as high as the waist and weigh up to fifty kilograms. The trees have to be at least one hundred years old. The hollowed trunks are then covered with ox hide that’s been left to soak in water for a day. Wooden pegs stretch the hide over the drum.
Sixteen drummers wrapped in green, white and red cloth file onto the stage, an open field in front of a school, with drums on their heads. They move in sync. An elder dressed in a raffia robe leads the troupe. His regalia symbolises what the king wore on occasions that called for traditional drumming. He’s also wearing a band around his arm, which the king wore on hunting trips, a bone and calabash around his neck, and a raffia bag the king used to carry his dearest personal belongings in while travelling.
The performance transfixes the audience with its energy, agility and perfectly synchronised harmony, even the man covered completely in a cloth, who curls his body into a ball in the half circle, does so with a head that nods along to the rhythm. There’s humour and depth, songs and dances that make us smile and laugh, and songs that make us clasp our hands to our chests, silent and immobile lest we miss a beat that takes between two to six months of practice to perfect. It’s a fitting way to spend my last day in Burundi; the small country with a big heart.
I leave by bus to Kampala, where I spend three days catching up with friends before visiting Arrot and David in Nairobi, then reuniting with author Zukiswa Wanner, who has moved from Joburg to Nairobi. I also meet journalist and literary blogger James Murua. We throw ourselves into the night, fuelled by Tuskers and his VIP access to industry events.
My next stop is Ethiopia.
XXI
WEIRD PRIVILEGE
January 2013
I KNEEL IN FRONT OF THE young man and hold his hands for a few seconds. I need a bit of time to fix myself. I wrap my netella, the linen shawl that covers the heads and shoulders of many Ethiopian women, over my body; careful to not leave any stray strands of my cheap human hair piece on my face.
‘Don’t be scared,’ Neyan says as he puts his hand in the basket that’s next to us to get intestines he wraps on a twig. The twenty-two-year-old has been coming to the outskirts of Harar every night for the past eighteen months to perform the nightly ritual that the Harari believe keeps them safe from the two hundred-plus hyenas in the city and the green hills that surround it. Legend has it that a drought befell Harar in its medieval days, driving the hyenas from the mountain to the city, where they developed a taste for humans.
The town’s people make a special porridge they feed to the king of the hyenas, who in turn orders his subjects to change their menu from flesh to porridge. This starts an understanding between the Harari and scavengers; they will live to see another day for as long as they make sure the hyenas are well-fed.
Like the men and boys whose job it is to keep the animals happy, Neyan has inherited his role from his father. The only thing that has changed between medieval times and today is that instead of porridge, the animals now get whatever scraps of meat and bones their feeders can get from butchers. Neyan puts the end of the twig that doesn’t have meat in my mouth. My nostrils flare from the pungent smell.
‘Aiii Tika, Butta, Mehai, Jimba and Jimta, nahi nayi,’ he yells, calling his pack of hyenas using the names he gives them. Two of them stand behind me, their gasps warm my skin. They take their place at the end of the twig. I stay like this until all five have had their turn; feeding them from my mouth to theirs.
Visiting Harar is the highlight of my travels in Ethiopia. After spending four months here, being in Harar feels like waking up from a series of nightmares that involve food that tastes the same no matter who cooks it and hospitality that’s downright hostile. People in Harar mind their business and leave me alone. Kids don’t run after me yelling the Amharic word for foreigner, ferengi, and most importantly, people respect my boundaries. Here, I’m an adult with autonomy and an individual with her own preferences, a concept that’s foreign to Ethiopians.
Harar is the fourth holiest city in the Muslim world after Mecca, Jerusalem and Medina. Islam shuns vice. Harar has a brewery and a lager named after it and the right time to drink is when you feel like it, even at 8am. In the morning when the town wakes up, women line the streets with sacks of qat that people buy in large bundles before starting their days with buna, as coffee is called, machiatto or beer. The main gate at the Juma mosque isn’t crowded with people selling Qurans or prayer mats. They’re here to sell or chew their favourite drug.
Walking around the old walled city that makes Harar a world heritage site, I’m astounded by the pastel blue, lime and salmon pink houses with white flowers and geometric patterns, and by how pervasive qat is. Even when I don’t see the plant in people’s hands, I see faces that have formed balls on one side of the mouth with jaws moving slowing like grazing animals – the telltale sign of someone who has been chewing for hours. People who don’t have teeth grind leaves into fine powder to get their highs.
Every day after lunch, men empty out into the streets, closing shops and businesses to spend their afternoons chewing through plastic bags’ worth of qat, including Girma, the affable manager and handyman at Teodros Hotel where I’m staying on the outskirts of the ancient town. I sit in the courtyard with him and Addis, my new friend, chewing until my temples become tense. Another man comes over to buy bottles of beer on his way home. He has two bags of qat, and jokes that he hopes everyone behaves because he’s off to chew with his friends. He is the police commander, and although the police station is open, everyone has effectively stopped working for the afternoon.
Madness, a language I’m most fluent in, is also one that Harar speaks well. Take Addis. He shows up at my door after our chewing session. He pins me against the wall when I let him in and starts kissing me. He thinks I’m playing hard to get when I try to push him away.
‘Addis please stop,’ I beg him between dodging his wet lips. He comes in for another kiss.
‘Addis. Listen to me – I’m not playing hard to get. You have to stop.’ He doesn’t.
I pull him to my bed and pin him down with my ass on his small beer belly. I plant kisses around his face and neck, anything but his lips, and slowly unbutton his shirt. ‘Is this what you want?’ I whisper. He grabs my ass. ‘Slow down,’ I purr and run my finger down his body. ‘Oh Addis,’ I say breathlessly, ‘O mo masepeng.’ This silly boy is knee-deep in shit, as I warn him in Setswana, and getting a hard on over it. I kiss his chest and run my tongue around his nipple. I open my mouth until I can’t stretch it any more and bite his breast so hard, it moves with me when he tries to push me off. I only let go when my temples get tired.
‘What the fuck? Are you trying to kill me?’ he whimpers, ‘You’re crazy.’
His eyes shine with tears.
‘Not crazy Addis, mother-fucking-crazy,’ I tell him.
One of the effects of being a woman in South Africa, where rape and gender-based violence are a pastime, is that I’ve had this conversation with myself for years. Just as we tell ourselves to not fight thieves, I always tell myself that I will not try to fight any man who tries to rape me.
I will teach him a lesson he’ll never, ever forget. When I see Addis the next day at the office where he runs his small transport business, he unbuttons his shirt to show me a ring of dark red teeth marks. ‘You should thank me for not biting into your dick,’ I say, laughing while he stands a safe distance away from me.
The crazy follows me to the minibus I take from Harar to Addis Ababa. Our driver speeds through roadblocks no matter how much we beg him to stop playing with our lives. He has unpaid fines and the traffic officers have set up roadblocks along the way to try and catch him. He drives through them at high speed, causing people on the road to run for cover. I ask him to stop so I can get out, but he refuses. The cops are onto him and call colleagues to tell them to create a roadblock that closes all the lanes; they use two trucks.
Eastern Ethiopia is in the highlands. Instead of stopping, the driver goes through the pavement on the edge of a hill. We scream, and the woman next to me starts crying. This is the kind of move where a mistake always ends fatally, with the car rolling down to sure death. I always have a knife in my bag so I don’t have to worry about peeling my fruit. I put it on his neck, ‘I said, let me out now, or I will kill you’. He drives to the police station and tries talking his way out of paying for the fines. I still get off the taxi and wait for a safer one to Addis.
I’m shaken but I’m not shocked. My life in Ethiopia has been a series of bizarre moments that have made me love and loathe the country in equal measure.
My obsession with Ethiopia runs deeper than any country’s hold on me. It has nothing to do with being the only African country that was never colonised, or the awe I feel whenever I think of the Battle of Adwa, fought in 1896, when the Ethiopian army won over the Italian one. Although Rastafarianism is an influential aspect of my identity, my fascination has little to do with the fact that in this land lies the Rastafari manifestation of repatriating back home to Africa, two hundred and fifty-one kilometres away from Addis Ababa in Shashamane, or that, according to the religion, Haile Selaisse I is the manifestation of the return of Christ. I don’t question or deny his lordship because, according to Rastafarianism, God is black and African – I am God.
I seek out Ethiopia around Johannesburg, Pretoria and East Africa, and find it in downtown DC and Harlem. I eat Ethiopian food more than other cuisine, I know where in Johannesburg and Pretoria to find Ethiopian honey wine, tej. My fascination goes far beyond obvious differences like using the Coptic calendar, which has thirteen months and according to which Christmas falls of 7 January and New Year of 11 September. The Ethiopian clock also ticks to its own standard. They start counting time at 6am, which is midnight to the rest of the world; so 8am here is 2am elsewhere.
This sense of Ethiopia being a world of its own is something I perceive long before my visit. Experience doesn’t prove me wrong.
It starts on arrival at Bole International Airport. Visas are issued on arrival but the US$20 fee must be paid for with American currency. The ATMs in the customs area don’t work and the seat of the African Union doesn’t trade African currencies. I can exchange dollars, pounds, dinas and euros; not the stack of Kenyan shillings I have. It takes a long time and a massive tantrum for the uniforms to understand my dilemma and let me out so I can look for an ATM in the city.
An air hostess comes over to ask why I’m sad, and shows me another ATM at the airport that works. She is the only person who hasn’t been cold and dismissive in the first hour in a country I used to refer to as ‘Her Majesty’ in my first travel journal.
My bitter first impression infuses itself into many moments as my three-month stay turns to six after my passport is stolen. In the end, when I get onto a flight to Johannesburg, I realise that Ethiopia is my weird privilege, for strange and sometimes harrowing as being in the country is, it’s wonderful to experience its landscape, heritage and the unrivalled pride Ethiopians have in their land and their ways; even if it almost drives me insane. What matters, I suppose, is that Ethiopia evokes strong emotions. It makes it an unforgettable destination; I love it as much as I hate it.
My visit comes five months after the death of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and the country is not over his passing. Along with paper triangles modelled after the national flag that hang on lamp posts to celebrate Jesus’ baptism, called Timkat and held on 19 January, comes posters with Meles’s photograph. The driver makes the sign of the cross over his face and chest whenever we drive past Meles’s face. The storm of my arrival has made way for rays of sunshine I feel from how authentic Addis is. Everything is written in Amharic and the blue and white Lada cars add a vintage element to the modern city where skycrapers are going up faster than in any country I’ve been to. I’m in a shared cab to Piazza neighbourhood, and the last person who will be dropped off. In some areas old zinc houses are neighbours with newly built mansions, and the road we use on our way into one neighbourhood is closed for construction on our way out. There are more coffee shops and massage parlours than I can keep count of.
My spirit is soaring by the time the driver drops me off at hotel Taitu. It’s run down with toilets that put me off shared bathrooms for life, but it is the oldest hotel in the city, in the oldest neighbourhood of the capital.
Even in their current grubby state, the hotel and its neighbourhood are charming. Taitu was built in 1898 by emperor Melenik II’s wife, Taitu Betul. It has a mix of backpackers, overland travellers and cosmopolitan Addis Ababeans who grab a bite or sundowners on a patio that overlooks tour company offices. Boys who take their chances as touts huddle at the main entrance next to an old man who sells loose cigarettes and sweets under a worn-out blue umbrella.
Being in a new destination makes the old and broken seem exciting. Around Piazza, it’s the boys who sit on low stools with foamy buckets of water to wash shoes, and the hawkers who walk along Churchill Avenue to sell dirt-cheap punnets of strawberries; they make up for the begging children who cling to my arm until I give them birrs and the piles of human crap I keep sidestepping.
Other than its museums and the connection they give me to Ethiopia’s rich heritage, I love Addis for its ornate cathedrals, and the sense of wonder I get at how Ethiopians worship with ritual and pride. Ethiopians are Orthodox Christians. As with everything that defines life here, the religion’s authenticity is untouched by time. Scriptures are written in the ancient Ge’ez script. At the Holy Trinity Cathedral, where Haile Selassie and Empress Menen Asfaw’s remains are in granite tombs next to the altar, men and women use separate entrances. Everyone leaves their shoes at the door and only the priests are allowed to go beyond the altar, just as it has always been.
I love Ethiopia because it is true to itself. At its best, it makes my trip to Holy Trinity Cathedral start with confusion when I ask for help getting there using its English name, and only find it when someone realises that I’m looking for Kidst Selassie, as locals call it. At its worst, this authenticity takes the pleasure of eating Ethiopian food out of me. I discover that it tastes the same whether I eat at a restaurant in Harar, Awassa or Lalibela or as a lunch or dinner guest, when I’m forced to eat chunks of raw beef, called tera sega. It’s the pièce de résistance of any meal. Ethiopians love it. I eat my meat so well done, chefs leave their kitchens to beg me not to let a good cut go to waste. It offends people who offer me tera sega when I tell them that raw meat makes me gag, and because Ethiopian mothers rarely accept no for an answer, I have to eat it whenever it’s offered. There is also a point during any meal when someone feeds me with their right hand. This tradition is called gursha, and is considered an ultimate act of affection. I now use it during my own meal times.
Another upside of my bewilderment that food tastes the same no matter who cooks it is that eating is not only about feeding the body. It has traditions and rituals that everyone observes without fail, whether it’s at home or at a restaurant. Wednesdays and Fridays are fasting days. On these days, even restaurants only serve vegan meals.
‘I’m not an Orthodox Christian,’ I
complain to a friend one afternoon, tired of eating shiro wot, a powdered chickpea stew.
‘We are on a fast,’ she says, before telling me that there are seven fasting periods per year. Some periods last a day, like the night before Epiphany, and others, like Lent, go on for fifty-six days.
At first, it seems to me like being overly prescriptive, but I soon realise that it’s a sign of reverence. In any case, it’s not like the fasting period takes the joy out of eating. As a traditional standard, lentil and meat stews are cooked with a blend of herbs that include basil and rosemary, and spices like chillies, cumin and cardamom called berbere. When I’m in Addis, I go on a joyride around the Arat Kilo neighbourhood in the afternoon, when the smell of the berbere hangs in the air. It makes every breath delicious.
More than anything, I love Ethiopia for the simple coffee cafés called buna bet, where women sit on their stools to brew coffee traditionally by roasting the beans in a pan before crushing them and boiling them in a clay jar. There’s an alley in downtown Addis that smells like roasting coffee beans from the buna bets that line it. All of them are small with floors that are covered with grass, bamboo chairs and zinc walls that are decorated with posters of women brewing buna against backdrops of popular tourist destinations like the seventeenth-century fortresses in Gonder, the Blue Nile waterfalls in Bahir Dar and the fourteenth-century obelix in Axum; where Ethiopians say the Ark of the Covenant, which has the remains of the slabs on which Moses wrote the Ten Commandements, is found after king Solomon gives it to the Queen of Sheba, Makeda, who is the mother of his son, Menelik I. The story of this liaison between the King of the Israelites and the Ethiopian queen finds its way into many conversations. Buna is only brewed by women and, in keeping with tradition, they wrap a shawl over their heads. Even in people’s homes, Buna is brewed traditionally.
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