In Ethiopia with a Mule

by Dervla Murphy

  At 11 we stopped for brunch beneath a grove of tall, wide-spreading trees, and here I saw my first African monkeys – a troop of capuchins racing and swinging through the branches above me. Also – walking with bird-book in hand – I identified today the Lilac-breasted Roller, Bataleur, Namaqua Dove, Purple Grenadier, Red-cheeked Cordon Bleu and Black-billed Wood Hoopoe. These birds were marvellously tame; as Jock and I plodded quietly through thick dust we were often within a yard of them before they moved – and even then many only hopped or flew a few feet further away.

  During the afternoon we passed a herd of over a hundred camels, all purposefully chewing the highest branches of small thorny trees and big thorny shrubs. One was pure white – a rare and beautiful animal. Probably this herd recently brought salt from the Danakil Desert and is now being rested in preparation for the journey home. Camels don’t survive long in the highlands, as the British Army soon discovered when it invaded Ethiopia from the Sudan in January 1941. Out of 15,000 camels fifty reached Addis Ababa in May and an officer reported that ‘a compass was not needed; one could orient the column by the stink of dead camels’. Various reasons have been suggested for the camel’s allergy to the highlands – thin air, precipitous paths, the cold and wet of the rainy season, the lush grass of some areas and the fact that camels have never learned to avoid certain unfamiliar herbs which lethally inflame their stomachs. In the past this allergy has saved the highlands from sharing Egypt’s fate and being repeatedly invaded by neighbouring camel-nomads.

  This has been a day of deep contentment – wandering alone along a makeena-free track, seeing only hoof prints in the dust, with all around the healing quiet of wild places, unbroken save by birdsong. The loveliest time is from 4.30 p.m. on, when the light softens and colours glow. This afternoon, brown, red and yellow cliffs, flecked with white marble, were rising above dark green scrub, and on every side the outlines of high mountains became clearer as the heat-haze thinned.

  At 5.30 we came to the crest of a hill and there, half-a-mile away, was Adua – a white-washed town at the foot of a splendidly distorted mountain-range, with lines of slim green trees between its houses. On the outskirts we were captured by the inevitable English-speaking schoolboys, who led us to this brothel, thinly disguised as a hotel. Bedrooms lead off the central courtyard on two sides, on the third are the cooking-quarters and stables, and on the fourth is an Italian-type bar, from which frightful wireless noises emanate continuously. Groups of girls lounge around the courtyard giggling and smoking – in this country cigarettes are the prostitute’s hallmark – and, though no one is overtly hostile, the faranj is aware of being regarded with contemptuous amusement. There could be no stronger contrast to my reception at Mai Cheneta.

  When we arrived a rather tiresome young teacher was in the courtyard, bargaining with one of the girls – whom he temporarily abandoned to practise his English on me. I asked him to help me buy barley for Jock, but he seemed to think that this would entail too much delay so making an evasive reply he returned to his girl. Luckily the schoolboys proved more cooperative and while I was unloading Jock – watched by grinning servants who made no attempt to assist me – they fetched the grain in my bucket. Their profits must have been considerable, judging by the meagre change they returned out of a five dollar note: yet they demanded a fifty per cent tip each. By now Adua has become semi-Westernised, being on the Asmara–Gondar motor-road.

  While I was unpacking another teacher appeared and, explaining that I wished to make a telephone call, I asked him to direct me to the post office. For some quaint reason Adua’s telephone lives in a chemist’s shop, to which this young man kindly guided me through steep, pitch-dark laneways. Before discovering that I had governmental connections my companion was rabidly revolutionary in his political views and he got an obvious shock on hearing me ask for the Palace at Makalle. While we were waiting for the call to come through he tried awkwardly to retrieve the situation, then finally decided to be frank and begged me not to repeat anything that he had said lest he should lose his job.

  Most English-speakers soon ask me why my government ordered me to come to Ethiopia and how much money was granted for my expenses; and they are bewildered when I say that my government doesn’t even know I’m here and wouldn’t dream of paying my expenses. The average highlander cannot imagine a country in which people are free to go where they choose when they choose, without governmental permission – not can he imagine any ordinary individual being rich enough to travel abroad.

  This little room has freshly whitewashed walls and the cotton sheets are spotless; yet appearances can be deceptive and the bugs are busy as I write. An electricity supply functions from 6 to 10.30 p.m., but there are no switches in the rooms and the bulbs give the dimmest possible light. However, one worthwhile local amenity is the crude and stinking loo next door; throughout the countryside the loo-problem is acute in every settlement – to my mystification, discomfort and embarrassment. (Here sign-language can always be used effectively in emergencies, but its use leads to a certain loss of dignity.) Squatting just anywhere is not customary, yet I never can find an authorised squatting-spot and sometimes wish that I were back in Nepal, where one simply goes outside the door like a dog.

  3 January. Aksum

  There was a Jock crisis when we arrived here at 4 p.m. While unloading I noticed that the base of his tail has been rubbed raw – so I hurried off to seek some sort of veterinary aid. Predictably, none was available; and in a country where pack-animals are worked mercilessly, even when covered with suppurating saddle-sores, no one could be expected to take much notice of my little crisis. Therefore I’m now treating the patient with Yardley’s talcum powder – presented to me in Asmara for my feet – and the pale pink tin, embellished by graceful floral designs, is an object of much admiration in the hotel yard. Despite the incongruity of the treatment it should work within a few days, the sore being so small and new.

  My companion’s physical state was not today’s only mule-trouble. The road from Adua to Aksum teems with traffic (relatively speaking – one vehicle passes about every twenty minutes) and those twelve miles shredded poor Jock’s nerves. While controlling his plunging and rearing I twice thought that my right arm had been dislocated, and tonight my shoulder muscles are throbbing. Yet Jock is not to blame; for some reason Ethiopian lorries are singularly noisy, especially when tackling steep slopes, and Ethiopian buses harbour fiendish radios and blow ear-splitting horns non-stop – so how could any rural mule retain his self-control?

  This morning I rose at 5.30, to see Adua’s two most interesting churches. Ethiopian churches are locked after the daily Mass has been celebrated, and I prefer to avoid searching for a man who will search for a priest who will search for the key – and only find it if he has hopes of being well paid.

  When we left the hotel at 8 a.m. hundreds of children were on their way to school – Adua being a centre for secondary education – and one gang of about twenty boys was soon following us, shouting and laughing and teasing Jock in an attempt to make him bolt. Jock very properly ignored all this, and at first I merely waved at the youngsters and laughed back; but then out of the corner of an eye I saw one boy whipping my straw hat off the top of the load and another putting his hand into the hanging bucket, where I keep my camera, torch and map. I swung round and gave the nearest lad a blow across the shoulders with my dula, whereupon they all fled.

  After some five miles we climbed a steep – but not high – pass and at the top I sat on a flat boulder under a tree to eat brunch while enjoying Adua’s grotesque mountains and thinking about Adua’s significant battle – the first defeat of a European army by African warriors. Then we crossed a wide plain, where barley was ripe – though hardly more than a foot high, and dirty with five-foot thistles. (Most of the thistles I’ve seen so far are much smaller and have blue-green stems and large primrose-yellow flowers.) I had many fellow-walkers today, all of them curious and most of them friendly. About half-way I was
joined by two men, one of whom insisted on leading Jock – until a truck approached and Jock decided otherwise. After that I led Jock.

  Aksum is one of Ethiopia’s main tourist attractions and outside the town I was commandeered by two small boys, who proved to be professional parasites. Both mistook me for a man and offered to get me ‘a good bad woman for tonight’, as they so graphically expressed it. They were taken aback when I put them right, but unlike their Indian counterparts did not then offer to provide me with ‘a good bad man’.

  This hotel is shoddier than last night’s Ritz, but the staff are much more agreeable. Here I must get my kit sorted out; tomorrow I’ll look for cardboard boxes in which everything can be neatly packed. To load a mule securely the ropes have to be tightened to an extent that has left me with a mangled mess of ink on clothes, toothpaste on books, insecticide in dried fruit, pills mixed with broken glass, torch batteries crushed beyond redemption and films torn to shreds. Not to mention the fact that everything is permeated through and through with white dust, sacking being the least dust-resistant of materials.

  4 January

  Yardley’s talcum is working well, but I’ve decided to stay here an extra day to give the sore time to heal completely.

  I spent an exhausting morning at Police Headquarters, having been ‘picked up’ after breakfast by a suspicious constable. It was bedlam in the CO’s little office, where eight officers were simultaneously shouting – in Tigrinya – about the impossibility of anyone walking through the Semien Mountains, least of all a solitary woman. After two hours I lost my temper at the stupidity of assuming a journey to be ‘impossible’ merely because one wouldn’t care to do it oneself. I hated bothering Leilt Aida again, but at last was forced to call Makalle and ask her to soothe the maddened crowd – which she did, with difficulty.

  Aksum’s tourist trade is in its infancy, yet already the place reeks of commercialism. Everywhere one is furtively followed by little boys and shabby youths, each claiming out of the corner of his mouth to be ‘best guide, cheapest guide for Aksum’. Ras Mangasha recently ordered the suppression of this sort of thing – which makes it easier to shake off these touts, who greatly fear the police.

  This evening I had a talk with Birhana Meskel, the official tourist guide – an elderly, knowledgeable man who deplored Aksum’s changing atmosphere. He assured me that ten years ago every woman here wore ankle-length skirts, but now many harlots have moved in from Adua and Asmara, wearing calf-length skirts, and generally the ancient city is fast losing its atmosphere of devotion and learning. I listened sympathetically to all this, though I couldn’t help thinking that Aksum’s devotion and learning must have become mummified quite some time ago: otherwise they would hardly have crumbled to dust at the first touch of tourism.

  Now I must talcum Jock for the night. Since early this morning he has been enjoying the hospitality of a kind Peace Corps couple, who teach at the secondary school and live in a house surrounded by a large grassy garden.

  5 January

  Aksum is the first town on my route without a mosque; the resident Muslims wanted to build one, but the Old Testament-minded local priests said ‘We’re not allowed to have a church in Mecca, so you’re not having a mosque here’.

  The population of Aksum is about 20,000 (500 of whom are clergy), though the town is so compact that this figure seems hard to credit. All these highland towns are extraordinarily ugly, but Aksum does have a certain sad, hidden splendour, discernible when one is alone among the ruins of an empire that once was ranked with Babylon, Rome and Egypt. Yet the melancholy is great wherever a proud past is not allowed to rest in peace, but is disturbed and degraded by trippers and touts.

  No women are permitted to enter even the grounds of the monastic Church of St Mary of Zion – Ethiopia’s most hallowed church – but this morning I went to the Church of St Taklahaymanot, where many of the paintings have recently been renovated. Ethiopian church art is interesting, yet to me these naive, stylised paintings are not true art, if by art one means the disciplined product of a creative imagination. The delicacy of Moghul miniatures or the richness of Hindu carvings touch me, whereas these paintings, though inspired by our common Christianity, merely interest me. It has been suggested that here, as in Tibet, the development of pictorial art was inhibited by the rigid conservatism of clerical practitioners – but the best of the Ethiopian murals that I have seen so far cannot compare with a mediocre Tibetan thanka.

  By now the talcum has been completely victorious and Jock is full of grass and the joys of life, so tomorrow we head for the Semiens. Ever since I arrived in Aksum they have been beckoning – a vast barrier of blue chunks stretching across the southern horizon.

  * Dr Levine clearly defines the position of shifta in highland society. He writes, ‘The one area in which communal sentiments have seemed fairly strong among the Amharas has been in connection with the pursuit of outlaws. It is customary – in some Amhara districts, at least – for the local inhabitants to band together in informal posses when threatened by the presence of one or more shifta, or “outlaw”. Yet even here, in his attitude towards the shifta, the Amhara reveals an ambivalence regarding the maintenance of civil order and security.

  ‘The term shifta had, in former times, primarily a political connotation. It referred to someone who rebelled against his feudal superior and was applied only to persons of relatively high status. More recently the term has been vulgarised and broadened to include any sort of outlaw in the rural areas. In any case the shifta is a man apart, who makes his home in uninhabited mountainous country or lowlands and lives by stealing cattle and robbing travellers. Some Amhara become shifta because of a passion for this way of life; this is particularly true of soldiers who, after a long campaign, prefer the continuation of a predatory and free existence to a return to the hard work of the fields. Others do so involuntarily, in order to escape punishment after committing some violence in the course of a personal dispute.

  ‘The attitudes of civilian Amhara towards the shifta combine fear and dislike with a strong tendency towards idealisation. The shifta is feared because he is a killer; if a person happens to witness him performing some act of theft or murder, he will usually keep quiet about it for fear of reprisal. He is disliked because he lives parasitically off the productive activities of others. But the shifta is widely admired, on the other hand, because he possesses a number of qualities that are dear to the Amhara. He is reputed to be an expert singer … He is credited with unusually handsome features because … he has plenty to eat and no arduous work. … Above all he is guabaz – the great Amhara virtue that embodies bravery, fierceness, hardihood and general male competence. …

  ‘The Amhara’s admiration for the shifta is reminiscent of American attitude towards the outlaw in “western” films … [but] is not balanced by a corresponding idealisation of the sheriff-figure as the representative of civil order … There is no feeling … that the shifta must be captured simply because he is an outlaw. Instead … [he] is acknowledged as a legitimate social type and is tolerated at a distance so long as his killing does not become wanton or excessive. This approach … bespeaks a relatively weak commitment to the value of civil order.’ Wax and Gold by Donald N. Levine, The University of Chicago Press (Copyright 1965 The University of Chicago).

  It is interesting that in Eritrea the word shifta has now regained a political connotation. Of course the men concerned repudiate the term and call themselves the Eritrean Liberation Army; but the government speaks of shifta, hoping that the ‘fear and dislike’ provoked by the traditional outlaws will also be aroused by the new political bandits – though the peasants are more likely to ‘idealise’ them as shifta than as foreign-supported political agitators.

  * A highlander’s fast means nothing to eat or drink until midday – though he may have been working hard from sunrise – and even after midday milk, eggs, meat, animal-fat and fowl are forbidden, so he must survive on pulses and cereals. Children begin their
first fast at about the age of seven, by abstaining before noon during the sixteen days of Felsata. After this the regular Wednesday and Friday fasts should be kept, though often this rule is not enforced until a child is ten or eleven; but from the age of fifteen the gruelling eight-week Lenten fast must be endured.

  3

  Gunmen for the Guest

  6 January. Aedat

  TODAY IS CHRISTMAS EVE and when we left Aksum at 8 a.m. the holiday traffic was at its peak. For miles around I could see groups walking or riding across the wide plain towards their home-villages, and within half-an-hour we had been absorbed by a cheerful party which was also going south. Its members were a local District Governor on a mule, attended by two gunmen, a young priest – also riding – attended by one gunman, the Governor’s twelve-year-old son – walking sturdily – and a ragged Muslim trader driving eight donkeys loaded with salt-blocks. And soon we were joined by Abebe, a breathless eighteen-year-old student who told me that he had been running for miles to catch up with a party which included ‘gun-people’. There is a certain Chaucerian quality about this sort of travel, and in their way such casually companionable wanderings can be as enjoyable as solitary trekking.

  A few miles south of Aksum we climbed a long, rocky ridge, dotted with round, green bushes, and on the crest I was glad that I had walked ahead and could enjoy this moment alone. Below me – like a vast bowl brimming with beauty – lay a broad, sunny valley, lined with golden grasses, and from its floor rose a low hill, crowned by a tree-surrounded church, and faintly, across the silence, came the solemn chanting of many priests – a sound so sweet in its remoteness that it seemed to belong to the soul of the mountains rather than to the rituals of man.