I know very little about the transatlantic slave trade beyond its existence, the crimes committed against the slaves and the racism and exploitation that did not end with abolition in 1816. What I know and feel very deeply is the yearning for home felt by Rastas, evoked by listening to the music of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Morgan Heritage, Burning Spear, Culture and Capleton and reading Marcus Garvey’s work. Other than their black nationalism and the influence their religion plays in my personal politics, I respect Rastafari people because they live with conviction, self-assured and unshakeable in their belief that Africa is a spiritual home. In Shashamane, the dream came alive in 1948 when His Imperial Majesty Haile Selaisse donated some of his private land to the descendents of slaves.
I arrive from Addis at night after being in bed with a fever for several days. The first thing I hear when I get out of the minibus is ‘Summertime’ by Vybz Kartel. I follow it to McKenzie Bryan Hotel. It’s like living next to a dancehall nightclub. I feel at home. It doesn’t hurt that hanging out at the bar is the quickest way to start meeting some of the repatriates. The hotel is owned by Sister Wendy, who relocated from Manchester, and an Ethiopian-Jamaican boy whose dad is among the first group of people coming back to this patch of the Motherland.
There are between two and three hundred people like Sister Wendy. Some have been here for four decades, others are new in town or visit for weeks at a go with one foot in the West and another in Africa. It has added some Caribbean touches to the town. The lingua franca in Shashe is patois when I’m at Sister Joan’s and other Rasta-owned restaurants. It’s Amharic elsewhere. Some gates are painted in the red, gold and green of Rasta colours or black, green and yellow after the Jamaican flag. While Shashamane may seem like a meaningless dream for this very misunderstood religion, to me, it is one of the greatest affirmations believers can receive. Why else would anyone leave their life in the West and the Caribbean to build a new life in a barely developed town that tests their faith daily?
The closest ATM is twenty-five kilometres away in Hawassa, there is scant economic activity, power cuts are frequent and there are days when the taps are dry and the jojo containers used to store additional water remain empty. On these days, I use a litre of bottled water to wash myself from head to toe, including brushing my teeth. My days are planned around the brief periods between power cuts. One of my first articulate sentences in Amharic is, ‘mababrat yelemi?’ Is there electricity? Often, the answer is ‘ayi’, no.
Whenever I ask repatriates if moving to the promised land is worth it, the answer is a variation on the fulfilment of no longer living with a spirit that feels restless and homeless no matter how dreamy their former life is to onlookers. Take Julian. He used to live in New York and enjoyed the kind of life that comes with being Peter Tosh’s tour manager, among many other reggae luminaries he has worked with. His life felt superficial and empty until the day he arrived here, where he spends his days working on his farm. Brother Levi is from Trinidad and Tobago. Like everyone who resolves to move here, he started preparing for his African life long before he arrived. Sitting with him in his leather shop, I note how much he references Haile Selaisse in our conversations. When he offers me a drink, and I ask what my options are, he recommends sour sap. ‘It was His Majesty’s favourite fruit,’ he says, before telling me to visit to the hot water springs in Wondo Genet, sixteen kilometres from Shashamane. ‘It was His Majesty’s favourite holiday spot.’
Setting up homes and businesses is not always easy. For a start, some passports have long expired, leaving their holders neither Ethiopian nor Caribbean in the eyes of the law. It still hasn’t stopped people from creating a permanent life and their social hubs. There’s a Manchester House for people who used to live in that UK city and other properties that belong to the twelve Tribes of Israel, Bobo Shante and Nyabinghi sects of Rastafari.
After His Majesty’s birth and coronation day, the third most important date on the social calender is 6 February. Bob Marley’s birthday is big. It starts a week before the date with fliers and posters reminding us to save the date. There will be live music, food and drinks.
A power cut kills the mood on the day of the party. Even so, whatever happens, people are simply enraptured to be in their promised land, living a lifestyle that’s close to nature and the environment and, most importantly, living a dream that many of them nurture from when they are teenagers and spend their life working towards.
Away from my interest in Rastafarianism, Shashamane gives me the opportunity to observe everyday life as lived by Ethiopians. At the moment, this life includes finding myself in the strange position of being friends with Tsega. The eighteen-year-old is from Addis, and here to live with her teen boyfriend. Her mother thinks she is getting an education while Tsega is really occupied with playing the real-life version of house. They are not the only ones. There’s Chachi and Peter, Berek and Genet and a couple who work at McKenzie Bryan. Watching these teens spend days looking into each other’s eyes tests my ability to bite my tongue. I fail with Tsega and implore her to go on birth control before an accidental baby happens. The more serious couples in the mix start building their lives together, starting with a spaza shop. Tsega and Yared go from renting a back room and living off the money she makes selling shiro wat to opening their first business. To keep it afloat among the six others within a kilometre radius, they sleep in their shop. The teen couple who work at the hotel moves out of their room to the new spaza as well. It’s the first business many people start with.
My first stop after Shashamane is Arba Minch, named after the forty springs in southern Ethiopia’s biggest town. About six hours from Shashamane by minibus, Arba Minch is a typical big town that’s not a capital city – a bit broken by time but still awe inspiring for the endless green hills and valleys it’s set around. Life on the streets looks like a mass evacuation. I’m in Arba Minch to find transport to Konso, from where my trip to Lower Omo Valley starts. Omo Valley is the picture of tribal Africa, with naked bodies painted in white chalk and scarified, bottom lips that are slit and discs put in, earlobes that are elongated, and hair is shaved into patterns or twisted into thin strings that get their colour from red clay and their shine from some of the butter churned for eating.
In Konso, I discover that travelling in this part of the country requires a lot of waiting. Transport is scarce and passengers scarcer. Journeying in southern Ethiopia feels like a road trip to the ends of the world. The road our minibus uses to leave Konso joins a long one that spans kilometres through the savannah landscape. It has been raining, and vegetation and acacia trees are bright green. Occasionally, we drive past trucks, forklifts and other tools of construction that are turning the road into tar. For the most part, it’s just the expansive savannah and the small villages that dot it, as well as the villagers and livestock.
Life in Omo Valley revolves around market days. I plan my visit around them, starting in Turmi on Monday, but not before the waiting game turns into an event. Jinka is the main town and the only place where getting transport is guaranteed. It’s also at the end of the route that covers most of the villages. Hoping to find a lift to Turmi, I end my trip in Key Afer. Their market day is on Thursday. On this Sunday afternoon, the town and its streets are empty, and the only time I see a person walking around is when they go into a café for buna or beer. I don’t find transport to Turmi until mid-morning on Monday, and even then, I force my way into Yohannes’s car. Whenever a car parks at the restaurant next to my hotel, I walk over to ask for a lift. Yohannes and his friend Tesfaye are the only people on their way to Turmi. I leave them to their buna and breakfast of injera with scrambled eggs, and follow them to their car when they leave. There, I open the door and take my seat with the suggestion that they loosen up because only one of two things will happen: They are retracing their steps to Jinka, or moving forward to Turmi with me. Our trip is icy at first. Yohannes’s cheeks are swollen from all the sulking he is doing. Nonetheless, they are calm by the time w
e get to Turmi, going as far as helping me find a hotel and introducing me to their friend, a tour guide called Emmanuel, who runs Explore Omo Valley tour company.
The market is dissipating when we arrive in the late afternoon. Some of the traders have packed their goods. Many of them live in the villages outside Turmi. Some of them have more than thirty kilometres of walking ahead of them. In the evening when Emmanuel is certain that his village family has had ample time to walk back home and settle into their evening, we follow them on his moped. They are already sleeping when we get there. Instead of meeting them I smell their cows and goats in the cleanest air I have ever breathed. We hang out under the darkest of skies, with the brightest stars, and listen to the shrill of insects. In the morning, we join the family for coffee, which they make by boiling the husks instead of using coffee beans. My gift is a token goat. Receiving it teaches me that the Amharic word for goat is fiyel.
The biggest con of my life on the road starts as innocently as any random conversation between strangers admiring a piece at the museum. The pieces in question are the two gold sculptures at the entrance of the Ethnological Museum, the former palace of Haile Selaisse. The boy follows me inside to ask for a favour. His name is Mehari. He is a first-year student at the University of Addis Ababa, the woman he is with is his aunt Leila and her visit is the first one by family: Would I mind photographing this special occasion? I do and we spend the afternoon together. Leila wants to know how much their pictures cost.
‘I don’t charge people for pictures,’ I say.
‘That’s kind of you. If only there were something we could do to repay your generosity,’ she says, ‘Perhaps you can stay with us when you visit Lalibela.’
It just so happens that Lalibela is my next destination. I’m going to Ethiopia’s Holy Land for Easter. I decline the invitation to stay with Leila but promise to visit her and meet the rest of Mehari’s family. I rue the day I meet them, because knowing this family turns into the biggest inconvenience of my life in Ethiopia.
The bus trip from Addis to Lalibela starts around 4am at the bus station in Merkato. Ethiopians move in a swarm. The station is heaving with people and hissing buses. After months of prayer and fasting, the Holy Week is about to start. I settle into my seat for the long journey ahead. It takes more than twelve hours to travel north to Lalibela. As we get closer, the landscape and people turn into the Ethiopia from traditional music videos that the national broadcaster plays all day every day; the Ethiopia of traffic jams that are caused by camels and fat cows with long horns, of men dressed in blue or green shorts and matching shirts that look like a safari uniform, and sticks they carry on their shoulders. We arrive in Lalibela in the early evening. My first stop after check-in and a shower is to the churches that have turned this town into Holy Land. Legend holds that one night in the twelfth century, the angels came down from heaven to chisel red volcanic mountains into twelve churches, carving Lalibela into a world heritage site. The windows, pillars and doors are built from the same rock. Walls have faded paintings of saints and angels with round faces and almond-shaped eyes; floors are covered with worn red and faded Persian carpets where bishops and deacons stand. Behind the thick curtain in all of them lies a replica of the Ark of the Covenant, where only church elders are allowed to go. The most known of these rocks is the St Georges, or Bete Giyorgis as Ethiopians call it. It’s shaped like the cross and named after the country’s favourite saint. He also has a beer named after him. In the two weeks when the fasting season draws to an end, prayer becomes even more important. On days that commemorate Jesus’ final journey to the cross, church becomes a second home.
The Friday of my arrival marks the end of the first of two weeks of Easter celebrations. All the churches are in the same complex. Celebrations are held at different ones, and typically at the ones that are close to the entrance. There is a service, but people are also here to spend time with God without being in a group. Tucked into some enclaves of the buildings they pray or read scriptures in solitude. Everyone is dressed accordingly in shawls and robes and the monks’ heads are in wraps. Some people wear rings made from palm leaves, while some others are adorned with palm crowns made by tying a leaf around the head and fashioning it into a cross that sits on the forehead. Feet are bare and heads bent in prayer. There’s chanting, clinking bells and murmurs. The smell of incense permeates the air.
Saturday is the main market day. I start my day here, moving around thick crowds of sellers, shoppers and – at the livestock market – goats, cows and sheep feeding on dry grass. Those that have been sold are being dragged home on leashes or beaten with sticks so they don’t stray. Around the town – which still has mud houses with grass roofs and yards that are fenced with sticks – women sit next to round fire pits topped with wide black pans into which they pour a mixture of fermented teff flour and water to cook injera. I go to Leila’s house to meet her son and husband as promised and then walk up the road to see her sister, Mehari’s mother Miriam and her family. I meet her husband and two daughters, Fassil, Martha and Gete. Martha, the eldest, has a boyfriend, Teshome, who works as a tour guide. He joins my domestic life when Miriam tells him to show me around Lalibela, the hilly town on the edge of bare mountains and green hills. The only person missing from the happy mix, his mother says, is Mehari. Miriam wants me to move in but I pass: I have been to their toilet and still have a week in town. I promise to move in two days before leaving Lalibela. In the meantime, I spend a lot of time with the family after Miriam and Leila insist that I should come home for meals daily. I do, and learn to keep a straight face when all I want to do is yell ‘stop it already.’ Ethiopian mothers are pushy.
Mehari’s mom and aunt are not different. They also enjoy introducing me to the Habesha way of eating some things, for instance, putting sugar on avocado, offering me a piece of raw chicken liver and serving me litres of tej and a bitter black drink called tella. Three days before I leave, I move in with Mehari’s family as promised and feel as loved as I always do whenever people let me into their homes, often sharing their already small space. Mehari’s house only has one bedroom. I share the lounge with his sisters, taking over one of their sleeping sponges while they share another. Miriam insists that I have to ‘look Habesha’ for the main church service. This means getting a local hairstyle and wearing a traditional dress called kemi, which she lends me. She pouts and sulks when I tell her my beauty ideal doesn’t include silky hair, so off to the salon we go, where bouncy human hair is added to my cornrows. I feel like I’m cheating on my Pan-African gods. I also feel ugly whenever there is a lot of distance between how I look naturally and how I dress and style myself. However, the compliments I collect around Lalibela with my Habesha hairstyle, with everyone calling me konjo – Amharic for beautiful – are worth the slight guilt of wearing silky hair.
My happiness is short lived. I wake up with a swollen face that keeps getting bigger by the minute. My features melt into one grotesque mess. I have an allergic reaction and the only thing new on me is the human hair. The gods are clearly teaching me a lesson on why I must never distance myself from how I look naturally, I think as tears stream down my face: Vanity is the deadliest sin in my life.
I hide my face behind my netela at the church service. It’s already in session when we arrive. People sit on benches in the courtyard, next to the main entrance. Unlike on my other visits when some people look ashy or dress in dirty shawls and wraps, everyone is clean and the women are in various traditional dresses. A handful of people stand away from the crowd to worship in solitude. If there are people beyond us, in the other buildings, the crowd at the entrance is too large for me to find out. I join people who are standing behind the circle of priests who have formed a human wall around a group of their colleagues in the circle, who are walking from one end of this section of the yard to the other in step with the beat of three drummers walking behind them. The human wall sways to the beat while chanting and clapping hands. Afterwards, deacons who were st
anding under cloth umbrellas with gold tassels form a procession, their hands carrying brass, gold and silver crosses with intricate designs on their left shoulders. They smile at me when our eyes meet.
Gete takes me to the clinic after the service and the doctor gives me blue pills that knock me out for hours. I’m sleeping on what has become my sponge in the lounge when the voices of Martha and her man wake me up. I’m too groggy to even open my eyes fully, much less talk or move my body. My camera bag doubles as my purse because it’s always on me. Except now. It’s on the table and Martha and her man are digging through it. They separate my money into two bundles. One goes back to my bag and the other into his pockets.
Miriam is aghast when I tell her and begs me to not tell her husband while she deals with her kids. She calls a meeting and, of course, the couple denies swindling me. What happens next shocks me. Miriam turns on me, and says I’m lying. Her children are neither thieves nor liars. I don’t know about you, but where I come from, when you invite someone home, you don’t steal from them, and if your children happen to be little pieces of shit, you call them out. I’m somewhat disappointed but not shocked – I’ve come to expect that something weird will happen just when I think I’m having the most wonderful moment of my life in Ethiopia. Miriam protests when I move back to the hotel, complaining that people will gossip about why I move out of her house.
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