‘An interesting thought,’ mumbled the lawyer into his beer, ‘but you should take care, the Afar are not civilized people like us Highlanders.’
There was a pause in the conversation as a man appeared asking if we wanted more beer. We did, though not all of us needed it.
‘A beer, a beer, my kingdom for a beer,’ declared the lawyer with a broad grin on his face. I returned to the subject of the Afar, and asked the assembled drinkers whether there was any truth in what I’d read about their penchant for castrating foreigners. The lawyer was draining his beer glass and I saw his red eyes bulge as he heard my question. He almost choked on the last drops of his beer as the others burst into laughter. The journalist reached out to slap him on the back.
The man from the British Council was the first to regain his composure. ‘When were these accounts written?’ he asked. ‘In the 1930s,’ I told him. He nodded. ‘These are just historical stories,’ he declared, ‘it’s not like that any more. Such behaviour is very rare nowadays.’
‘Ethiopia is not a land of savages,’ the lawyer stated, mildly contradicting his earlier remark about the Afar not being civilized.
Our next round of beers arrived. The lawyer pounced on his and gulped half of it down in one. ‘The Afar are a proud and independent people,’ the British Council man continued. ‘Their women are beautiful and bare-breasted, but don’t even think about touching them. I wouldn’t advise that you so insult an Afar, but even if you do, he won’t castrate you …’ This pronouncement was a cue for more laughter and I almost breathed a sigh of relief, but caught myself just in time ‘…he’ll just shoot you instead,’ the British Council man continued.
Although my questions had been a source of some mirth at the pot house (‘It’s called a pot house because it’s where you drink pots of beer,’ the journalist had explained), my new-found friends seemed to have taken a shine to me, and after a couple more pots, they suggested I accompany them to their next destination.
‘It’s an azmari beit,’ the British Council man told me. ‘There you will see some of our culture.’
‘Yes,’ said the lawyer, ‘and considering where you’re going, a dose of iskista is just what you need.’ This latter comment was met with another gale of laughter as we tumbled out of the pot house into the late evening sunshine. My enquiries as to the meaning of the joke were met with a chorus of, ‘You will see,’ and it wasn’t long before I divined the lawyer’s meaning.
An azmari beit is literally a place of azmaris, an azmari being a peculiarly Ethiopian phenomenon, sort of a cross between a stand-up comedian and a sharp-tongued folk singer, usually accompanied by a one-stringed fiddle with a diamond-shaped soundbox covered with goatskin. In centuries past, azmaris were a caste of wandering Amhara minstrels who made up topical songs. Some were assigned to the courts of sovereigns, much like European jesters, but they also performed religious functions, celebrating liturgies and officiating at certain ceremonies.
Their repertoire gradually became more secular, singing love poetry and eventually inventing humorous or satirical verse in which they poked bawdy fun at anyone and everyone, but particularly prominent figures of the times. The azmaris are often described as cultural scapegoats, held in contempt by the heavily Christian society at large, yet at the same time admired for their ability to create music that embodies emotional and physical intoxication. Azmaris helped maintain morale during the Italian occupation in the 1930s, and so potent a force were they that many were executed by the Italians as a result. They were not well thought of during the time of the Derg, either, and many of the Addis alcohol dens like the one we entered were closed down during that time.
My friends led me through a gate in a breeze-block wall, across a muddy forecourt, and into a small, dark room inside a concrete house. A fug hit me as I walked in to see low benches around the walls hung with coloured drapes and wicker baskets. An assortment of men were sitting comfortably behind low round tables laden with beer bottles, ashtrays and glasses. Their eyes were all fixed on a young woman dressed in a long white flowing robe with an embroidered strip down the front. Her singing, to the accompaniment of a man also dressed in white, playing a one-stringed fiddle, brought forth occasional gales of laughter.
We ducked past the azmari to the short bar in one corner of the room, got beers and found seats. The woman performing gave a loud and piercing whistle while breathing in as I passed, which made me jump, much to the amusement of all present.
‘This woman is called Zewditou Yohannès,’ the British Council man said in my ear. ‘She is quite famous and has toured in Europe. Her style is specific to Addis. It is known as bolel, which is an Amharic word for car exhaust fumes.’ I could see the parallel between her rapid-fire combustible delivery and the put-put of my Lada taxi.
Azmari performances are often interspersed with iskista, a traditional Ethiopian dance involving shaking shoulders and heaving chests. It was the heaving chests that had provoked such laughter among my friends on leaving the pot house, because at this particular azmari beit, they belonged to several rather well-endowed and very beautiful young women. As Zewditou Yohannès closed her session, a dancer took the floor accompanied by another fiddler and a man on a bongo drum.
Her dancing was decidedly interactive, the woman shaking her stuff directly in front of various members of the audience, who were at liberty to stand up and dance in kind with the performer. Being the only white man in the azmari beit made me an obvious target, and it wasn’t long before I was on my feet facing an impossibly attractive woman doing extraordinary things with her shoulders, shaking and thrusting her head as if her neck were made of jelly on springs, and performing a range of gravity-defying tricks with her ample bosom.
After ten minutes of my trying my best to keep up with the erotic iskista gyrations and gymnastics, I left the floor to a hearty round of applause. The small room had become sauna-like, and I was sweating like a pig.
‘The heat must be good preparation for the Danakil,’ I shouted above the hubbub to the lawyer, whose smiling eyes were shining even redder than before.
‘No, the Danakil will be much hotter than this,’ he shouted back, ‘but iskista is good preparation of a different kind. You must get these feelings out of your system before venturing into the Danakil.’ The lawyer stooped to take a drink from his beer bottle, then he started laughing and slapped me on the back. ‘Enjoy it while you can! It’s like the condemned man eating a hearty breakfast, is it not?’
I told him it was probably a very apt simile.
T W O
Ethiopia may have developed in a parallel universe, but the country has still managed to acquire a penchant for paperwork that would be the envy of the most ardent Western bureaucrat. This meant that in addition to my permits from the central government in Addis Ababa, I also needed to obtain similar documents from the Afar regional government. This was a bore because I had to go out of my way to get them. Asayita, the regional capital, is at the southern end of the Danakil depression, while Dallol is up north, and there is no recognized route along the length of the desert between them.
Although Addis is a capital city, it isn’t sealed off from the rural economy it represents. Donkeys laden with firewood mix with the Ladas and lorries on the streets, while chickens and goats root among the debris along the pavements. But just beyond the city’s outskirts, the countryside begins in earnest, circular mud huts with perfectly conical rush roofs sitting in a sea of neat fields tilled by men walking patiently behind pairs of oxen.
The road between Nazareth and Awash was lined with heaps of charcoal packaged for sale in sacks that had originally contained food aid, and Awash itself was the last town where horses, pulling two-wheeled carts like chariots along the dusty roads, were the main form of transport. After crossing the Awash River that Thesiger had followed, at a bridge guarded by two stone lions and four real soldiers, the appearance of camels and donkey carts marked the beginning of a different environment. As we’d descend
ed from the Highlands, we had been driving up a temperature gradient. The bushy savannah had all but disappeared as we entered the lowland oven. I put my hand out of the window of the truck into an airflow as hot as a hairdryer.
We continued north, along a good tarmac road that led to Djibouti, Ethiopia’s main port after it lost its coastline to Eritrean independence and a senseless two-year war with its former northern region left Ethiopia with no access to Eritrean harbours. A constant flow of articulated lorries trundled goods back and forth to the Red Sea coast. We passed through wildlife reserves where oryx stood motionless beneath the rare trees and a huge vulture surveyed our passing from the roadside. The occasional warthog trotted nonchalantly across the road in front of us.
The sun was setting as we turned off the highway towards Asayita, the battered signpost and dirt track belying its importance as a regional capital. An extended family of baboons cleared the way through a green patch of low trees and thorn bushes fed by a spring, and we motored the final leg of the ten-hour drive across a lifeless salt plain accompanied by the last remnants of huge dust devils. Darkness had fallen by the time we saw the silhouette of the town against the sky.
Ethiopian time still had a trick up its sleeve. Entering Asayita was like driving back into the Middle Ages. Despite being in the middle of an arid wilderness, the town was closed off at night, and the driver had to brake hard to avoid bursting through a motley chain strung low across the track. Beside it was a sentry box with a guard who approached carrying a Kalashnikov slung casually over his shoulder. After checking our credentials, he lowered the chain and we drove into a shadowy world of adobe and stick houses. Street lights sprung up haphazardly along the rough track, but none appeared to have been blessed with electricity. Flickering candles and burning braziers did their best to ward off the darkness, affording brief glimpses of children playing in the dust. Further into town, dated Western pop music was pumping from battery-powered cassette players as breeze-block buildings took over where the huts left off. Our progress along the streets was slowed by a throng of strollers taking the torrid evening air along with a small battalion of goats. Our vehicle was met with curious glances, but whether this was because we were arriving after sunset or simply because it was a truck, I couldn’t tell. Certainly, other motor vehicles were conspicuous by their absence.
I made a mistake at the Lem Hotel, situated, I discovered the following morning, just a stone’s throw from the huge town square, a rough patch of stones and goats that encircled an odd-looking monument about 5 metres high in bright sheet metal with some sort of coat of arms at the top. Faced with the choice of a very basic box room, or one of the beds lined up outside in the courtyard, I plumped for a room. My reckoning was based partly on thoughts of security, but was clinched by the presence of a ceiling fan that, miraculously, was working, despite the apparent lack of electricity elsewhere in the town. For an hour or two, the fan did a passable job of carving the stifling atmosphere into chunks of hot air that buffered my weary torso. But when even the Lem’s electricity gave out sometime during the night, I was left to stew in a motionless sauna, all the courtyard beds having been taken by those more familiar than me with the ways of Asayita.
When I awoke at 5.45 in the morning, the temperature was perfect. It lasted until about 8 o’clock by which time my thermometer was registering 36ºC (97ºF) in the shade and outside it was already too hot for the flies. They had all taken refuge in my room instead. Breakfast consisted of a piece of bread and a refreshing glass of tea, followed by an ice-cold Coca-Cola that gave me the strange sensation of feeling like a human sieve. As I poured the caramel-coloured liquid down my gullet, it almost instantly seeped out through every pore in my body.
In the morning light, Asayita looked less medieval and more like a seedy frontier town. But its streets were busy with men in sarongs going about their business, a bicycle repairman hard at work on a puncture and a couple of shoeshine boys awaiting their first customers of the day. Opposite the Lem Hotel, a donkey cart was making its morning delivery of beer to a building with red walls and yellow shutters, which turned out to be a brothel. Small kiosks were opening to ply their trade of cigarettes and household goods, while larger shops revealed row upon row of brightly coloured sarongs. Curiously, every other establishment appeared to be a hairdressing salon.
I crossed the desolate wastes of the town square to shrieks of ‘Farang, farang’ from innumerable small children who seemed positively ecstatic at the sight of a white man in their midst. I knew the meaning of the word from the pages of Nesbitt, who had been similarly harangued more than 70 years before. But while the children’s delight was endearing, I was mildly perturbed by the implication that little had changed in the Danakil in more than half a century. A few moments later, however, I was berated with the more contemporary exclamation of, ‘You! Money!’
The upside of having to make this side trip to Asayita to trawl round regional government offices was that it also gave me the opportunity to make contact with the Afar Pastoralist Development Association, a non-governmental organization that I’d heard of while still in Britain. Their office, if office it could be called, was in a compound a short walk from the town’s central square on the opposite side from my hotel.
Nomadic pastoralists like the Afar tend to inhabit the fringes of modern societies, and governments in most parts of the world have a propensity to view these kinds of people as a bit of a nuisance. Often overlooking the fact that their nomadic lifestyle is one adopted out of necessity, mobility being the ideal response to an environment that offers few and rather unpredictable resources, much of the ‘help’ offered to nomads comes in the form of encouraging them to settle. From a benevolent viewpoint, getting nomads to put down roots and stay put means it is much easier to provide them with education, health and other services. Conversely, critics argue that settlement makes control and taxation of these people more straightforward.
Once in a while, however, somebody tries to meet the nomads’ needs on their own terms, and the Afar Pastoralist Development Association was one such body. Valerie Browning, who ran the organization with her husband, explained to me that they had started with primary health care, not by building a clinic but by training health workers who could go out into the desert and visit families where they camped.
‘Putting up a clinic is bloody useless for people constantly on the move,’ Valerie told me in her straightforward manner. She was a no-nonsense woman, well over 4 feet tall, with the constitution and energy of someone much larger. ‘The Afars’ whole life is centred around their livestock and the animals have to be kept moving to find grazing, so health-care workers have to move with them.’
Valerie was not what I’d expected. She was an Australian who had happened upon the Afar nearly ten years before, married one, and taken up residence. Her association had also established an education programme, teaching Afar people to read and write. ‘The rural Afar are 98 per cent illiterate in this country,’ Valerie announced. ‘Mind you, their language was only first written down in the 1970s.’ Consequently, numerous aspects of grammar were yet to be agreed upon, quite apart from the fact that there were very few books in Afar. Like many other nomadic peoples, they have a strong tradition of storytelling and the Afar Pastoralist Development Association had begun to send out fieldworkers to collect stories and oral histories and write them down.
Latterly, Valerie’s team had also been involved in women’s issues and veterinary training. ‘Next we want to go into marketing. The Afar are useless businessmen because they have no experience of a cash economy. They’re always being ripped off. When they come into town to sell a sheep or goat in exchange for grain, the merchants sit around all day and refuse to talk to them. The Afar gets nervous because he has to get grain so his wife can make bread. By the evening, he’s at his wits’ end. And that’s when the merchant pounces. The Afar never gets a fair price for his animals.’
The merchants were all Highlanders, Valerie told me,
and Asayita was essentially a Highlanders’ town. This surprised me. I’d thought that I’d arrived in the Danakil, but obviously I hadn’t really quite yet.
‘Look around you,’ she exclaimed, ‘the majority of shops and businesses you see here are owned by Highlanders. And it’s not just animals they’re here for. The Danakil is full of salt and other minerals – they’re all after a piece of the action. They want to suck the Afar dry.’ She made the Afar sound like a people under threat, but with Valerie the one-woman whirlwind on their side, I felt as if they had a chance.
A couple of days later, my regional government permit in hand, I was sitting in a Land Cruiser, on my way to an Afar community somewhere a bit further north of Asayita. Valerie was taking two women who had recently completed a health-care course back to their families, and had asked if I’d wanted to come along. ‘It’ll give you a chance to see what the Afar are really like,’ she had told me.
The offer had come not long after I’d tentatively broached the subject of castration with her. Valerie’s response was fairly unequivocal.
‘Total nonsense,’ she scoffed. ‘I’d like to get my hands on that Mr Thesiger; most of what he wrote was bullshit.’ Afar men often carried the long curved jile knife, she said, but it was for ceremonial purposes only. ‘It’s part of the coming of age thing. At the age of ten, a boy gets a stick. At 18, he gets a knife. When he’s 21, a fully grown man, he can have a gun.’
‘But this whole castration business is all Highland propaganda,’ Valerie continued. She had dark hair and a pointy little chin and eyes made to read your inner thoughts with. They were burning with indignation as she said this. ‘Highlanders hate the Afar, because they’re scared of them. But castration, huh, the Afar were never like that. They have a tradition of hospitality to foreigners, not hostility.’
Going to Extremes Page 15