Coming after the comments on the matter from my friends in the pot house in Addis Ababa, Valerie’s definitive dismissal brought me further mental relief. But even she left me with an element of doubt when she added a little later, ‘It’s the Oromo who castrate their enemies, not the Afar.’ I sensed, perhaps, an element of displacement here, of one group blaming another. Nobody had actually denied that this sort of behaviour took place, albeit perhaps less frequently than in times past.
We were continuing on the Djibouti road. After slowly gaining altitude, passing burnt-out shells of tanks now stationed forever at points that were strategic during the civil war that led to the end of the Derg regime, we were now descending steeply through the Doobi Pass. The route was in a perpetual motion of trucks grinding their gears as they struggled up the hairpin bends laden with goods from Djibouti. Earlier, we had passed through a couple of settlements, long lines of brightly painted wooden shacks, whose raison d’être was to service the passing truck drivers with food and drink. Sweat had drenched the shirt on my back. The heat was still and palpable.
The dramatic drop of the Doobi Pass gave hazy views of flat salt pans shimmering in the afternoon heat at the foot of towering volcanic peaks. Valerie pointed out the rift valley pinnacles and reeled off their Afar names: Pregnant Mountain, Children’s Mountain. The pass itself featured in one of the stories told to youngsters by their mothers. ‘They say that Auntie Doobi eats small children,’ Valerie told me with a provocative smile.
My mention of the castration ‘myth’, as Valerie called it, was obviously still bothering her, and she proceeded to give me some more details on the tolerance of Afar culture. Even when disputes arose among themselves, violence was the very last resort, she told me. ‘They’re not like the Somalis, who seem to solve everything with a gun,’ she said. ‘The Afar have clan judgements, not retribution. They have a very well developed system for dealing with disputes. Everyone sits down before the elders and has their say. Evidence is given by witnesses, and there’s even an official recorder who repeats what has been said and the elders say, “We have heard with our own ears,” and then it’s officially on the record. The process can continue for days.’ Penalties usually came in the form of livestock being handed over by the guilty party, who also has to make a public apology for their misdemeanour. The only exception to this rule occurred in the case of murder, when retribution certainly was on the cards.
We had passed the turn-off to Djibouti and were continuing northward along the road that led to Assab, formerly one of Ethiopia’s major ports but now cut off in Eritrea and no longer used for Ethiopian trade thanks to the war between the two countries that had ended only a few months before. Without the lifeblood of trade, the route had withered in the desert heat. There were gaping potholes, stretches where the tarmac had simply been worn bare and not replaced, along with sorry shells of former settlements that had died along with the road.
The closure of the border with Eritrea had been a disaster for the Afar both economically and socially. Afars live in neighbouring parts of Eritrea and Djibouti, and Assab was an Afar port. Ethiopian Afars had sold livestock to Assab traders for export to the Arabian peninsula, but now everything had to be sold through Djibouti. But in 1998, the same year that the war with Eritrea started, Saudi Arabia imposed an import ban on livestock coming from Horn of Africa countries due to a suspected outbreak of Rift Valley Fever somewhere in the Horn. Sales to Djibouti exporters dried up and now Afars who wanted to sell their animals had to rely on Djibouti’s domestic needs. Many Ethiopian Afars also had relatives in neighbouring Eritrea whom they had not seen for three years.
We turned off the dilapidated Assab road and our vehicle lurched its way across country. After an hour of listing and swerving to avoid thorn trees and small sand dunes, we came to a halt. ‘From here, we walk,’ Valerie announced. And walk we did, across a desolate landscape, flat and tedious, hemmed in by great walls of rock thrust up along fault lines in the distance. All around us, towering columns of dust quivered upon the skyline, hovering momentarily like umbilical cords to the heavens before twisting away to set off for a race across the desert plain.
The community, when we came to it, was a group of half a dozen low, oval-shaped huts in a rock-strewn patch of desert. The huts consisted of a patchwork of palm mats covering stick frames. The rocks were everywhere, hot and black and hard to walk on. It wasn’t the sort of spot that I’d have chosen to set up camp.
Goats wandered in and out between the huts sniffling at God knows what because there wasn’t any vegetation for 200 metres in every direction. A camel sat unperturbed beside a rock enclosure covered in thorn branches that contained three baby goats bleating for all they were worth. A couple of small children sat among the rocks, not playing as I might have expected, but just sitting. Occasionally, the small girl, perhaps five years of age, would push away a goat that fancied a nibble at one of the rush mats that covered her hut.
From inside the hut, a woman’s voice called a greeting above a constant grinding sound. She was squatting just inside the entrance pounding grain between two pieces of rock while simultaneously breast-feeding a tiny baby that clung precariously to her chest inside a brightly coloured dress. Behind her, the dirt floor of the hut was strewn with lengths of rope, encrusted wicker baskets and a rolled rush mat. Hanging from the stick frame were a couple of well-used wooden spoons and other cooking utensils. These nomads certainly seemed to have few personal possessions.
The woman wore a flower-patterned headscarf tied over a black veil and showed us some of her white teeth when she smiled. She didn’t once cease her rhythmic grinding as she chatted away. Afars greet each other with a ritual of enquiries into the health of livestock followed by an exchange of news. As Valerie told me, news can consist of almost anything seen or heard since the parties last met. ‘This woman,’ said Valerie, indicating one of the health trainees, ‘is telling her that she saw what looked like a stray camel by the road when we drove up. She’s telling her the clan it belongs to, which she knew from its markings. It may not seem important, but the news will be passed on until it reaches the ears of someone from that clan. Information like this keeps these communities going. It’s an extremely efficient intelligence-gathering system.’
I was grateful for the rest and partial shade of the hut as the news bulletins were exchanged. By the time they had been exhausted, the woman in the hut had finished grinding her grain and had proceeded to make a dough of the flour in a battered metal bowl. She handed her baby to the five-year-old girl and walked a short distance to a square hole in the ground lined with flat slabs of rock. At the bottom of the hole, perhaps 40 centimetres deep, were the smouldering ashes of a fire. She turned them over with a stick and fashioned four flat pancakes out of her dough, slapping each on to a side of the hole. Then she carefully covered the ground oven with more flat rocks and a piece of damp cloth.
While waiting for the bread to bake, the woman set about roasting and grinding coffee beans back at the entrance to the hut. By this time, we had been joined by three other women and the menfolk, and we all squatted round the hut on rush mats to be hypnotized by the delectable smell of the coffee beans roasting on a small metal pan. All the men carried stout sticks and wore Western-style T-shirts and sarongs that hung below the knee. To my relief, none of them wore a knife at his belt and only one carried an ancient Kalashnikov.
Once ground, the coffee was carefully put into a black pot, which was filled with water and sugar, and placed on the fire. Tiny cups were produced on a battered tray. After the head of the family blessed the coffee in a short ceremony as the sun sank towards the horizon, it was poured to accompany the flat bread still hot from the oven.
That evening, I was given the best mat to sleep on and one of the men produced a roll of material for a pillow. He also insisted on wrapping it with his headscarf as a pillowslip. The mat was laid in a patch largely cleared of stones and the other men settled down on their mats nearby to pr
ay. Getting comfy for me meant moving a few more rocks from beneath my mat.
A cool, blustery wind blew up as the children played with sticks and an old tin can and the stars began to twinkle in the night sky. A three-quarter moon bathed the rocky scene in a wholesome brightness. The goats still pottered about sniffing at this and that, their pelts glistening in the moonlight. Before I settled down to sleep, I was offered a bowl of their warm milk to drink. As I drifted off into slumberland, I heard, far off, the howl of a jackal, but any thoughts of danger now that I was finally amongst the Afar could not have been further from my mind.
The next morning, the harsh reality of a nomad’s life hit me square between the eyes. The women set off early to collect water and Valerie suggested we go with them. We took with us the goats, and four donkeys that I hadn’t seen the previous day, because they all had to be watered. It was a three-hour walk.
‘They’re always walking, these Afar,’ Valerie chirped as we picked our way over the stones away from the camp. ‘I love walking. I could walk all day.’ I didn’t say that taking a 20-kilometre trek as soon as you get up in the morning wasn’t exactly my idea of fun. It was 7 o’clock and I was sweating already.
‘Why don’t they set up camp a bit closer to the water?’ I asked.
‘Because the grazing’s better here.’
As they walked, all the women were busy weaving mats from a wrap of rushes tied to the small of their backs. They never seemed to stop doing something. ‘We did a survey and found that 80 per cent of the daily tasks are done by women,’ Valerie told me. ‘It’s the women who do all the work in this society. The men do nothing by comparison. They just sit around and demand coffee.’ I was beginning to think that perhaps the men had it right. An hour into our walk, as the sun had crept progressively higher in the sky and the temperature had risen accordingly, I decided that the reason the men lounged around all day was quite simple. They probably couldn’t hack it as a woman.
The heat was becoming unbearable. We had crossed a cracked clay plain and were once more clambering over bloody rocks. Just picking my way through them took all my concentration and, weary as I was, the chances of slipping and turning an ankle were increasing all the time. But Valerie and the women just marched straight through the boulder field as if the rocks weren’t there, and they were all wearing flip-flops. They also never stopped weaving, even once.
‘The Afar are in love with goats and rocks,’ Valerie announced as if she could read my mind. ‘Goats are part of the family, and rocks they use to build compounds, as grinding stones, as pillows. They love rocks too much.’ She could say that again.
Somehow, I managed to stay with them all the way to the water-hole, but it wasn’t the sort of waterhole I’d been expecting. While trudging across the desert wastes, I’d conjured up images of a palm-fringed oasis of sparkling clean water with a sandy shore. I imagined shedding my sweat-sodden shirt, splashing the cool liquid on my chest and then just lying in the fresh waters for a lengthy period. More fool me.
I started to become suspicious when the last stretch was uphill. The hillside was, of course, covered in large rocks. ‘I thought this was supposed to be a waterhole?’ I asked Valerie, probably more aggressively than was entirely necessary.
‘You’ll see,’ she said as she skipped between the boulders.
Short tufts of bright green grass sprouted every now and again between the rocks and the goats had spotted them immediately. Up above, I could make out what looked like cairns, large piles of stones marching along the top of the ridge. We stopped at the second one. ‘Here we are,’ announced Valerie, ‘the waterhole.’
I didn’t feel disappointed immediately. On the one hand, this was at least the end of the walk and, on the other hand, frustration was being temporarily averted by my mild curiosity as to where the water was. I moved round the side of the cairn, which I could now see was sealed between the stones with mud. A large oil drum appeared. It was full of water. Now I did feel let down. This was cheating. I was about to say so, but one of the women had finally stopped weaving her mat for long enough to kneel down beside the cairn and start pulling out some of the stones at its base. As I opened my mouth to voice my irritation, she leant back on her haunches to avoid wisps of steam that emerged from the hole. I shut my mouth, deciding instead to bend down for a closer look. The ground was hot beneath the hand I stretched out to balance myself. Not just sun-baked stone hot. This was too hot to touch hot, and the heat was coming from beneath the ground. The woman was pushing an old tin can on a rope into the hole she’d excavated. It fell a short distance inside the cairn and then I heard a splash.
I looked at Valerie. ‘Steam harvesting,’ she said, ‘clever, huh?’
The women had poured water from the oil drum into a shallow metal tray and the goats had suddenly lost interest in the green tufts of grass and were lapping it up. Meanwhile, one woman was refilling the drum from the can that she was using to draw hot water from the cairn. It was steaming, too hot to drink. The oil drum was an intermediate cooling device.
The tufts of green grass indicated where hot steam could be found after a little digging, Valerie explained. A larger hole was dug immediately to one side of the mini-geyser and lined with thick mud. When the mud had dried, it sealed the hole so that it would act like a basin, and the cairn was built over it. Inside the cairn, the steam condensed on the inside of the rocks and dripped down into the basin. The process continued, and a water supply was maintained, as long as the steam kept seeping out of the stony ridge. In this tectonically active area of the Rift Valley, it would probably last forever, I thought. Valerie said that it was usually the cairn that failed before the steam. A well-built cairn lasted for about ten years.
T H R E E
Two of the warriors with the Afro hair leant against their Kalashnikovs and didn’t say anything or look as if they wanted to say anything. Valerie’s husband, Ishmael, sat cross-legged on a rush mat and watched the third warrior, whose name was Hayu Yassin, clean his knife in the trickle of water. I stood in the shade of a thorn tree, grateful for the light breeze. Hayu Yassin was a willowy figure with long fingers to match. He ran them up and down the flat of the blade until the last drop of sticky blood had been washed away.
The long jile knife had made short work of the kid. A quick swipe across the neck, and the job was done. But Hayu Yassin’s weapon was far too big an instrument to skin the small goat with. He slipped it back into the sheath it his belt and wanted to borrow my Swiss Army knife instead. I handed it to him. He lopped off the feet and cast them aside, then made an incision from the neck, down the belly, to the tail.
‘How long will it take to cook in the hot spring?’ I asked. Ishmael uncrossed his legs and reclined on the mat, propping his head on his hand. ‘Not long,’ he said, ‘20 minutes, perhaps 30.’ He had an aura of calm about him, and would probably have approached a wait of two days with the same relaxed manner. He’d just lie there, quiet and patient, like a leopard conserving energy in the desert heat. His peaceful demeanour was in total contrast to the tightly bundled energy of his wife, and the antithesis of what I’d been expecting of an Afar male.
The three warriors looked more like it. Each wore a jile and carried a Kalashnikov that never left his side. At night, the warrior wrapped up the length of white material that he wore over his shoulders like a shawl and used it as a pillow on his gun. But Hayu Yassin had proved to be an hospitable fellow and had agreed almost straight away to initiate me in some of the ways of an Afar warrior. His infectious smile suggested that he might quite enjoy it. His two associates had been less forthcoming. They had been moody ever since Ishmael and I had arrived, and despite all the assurances from Valerie and my friends from the pot house in Addis, I had been nervous about spending the night with them out in the wilds.
But my apprehension had almost completely evaporated after our initial conversation. Ishmael told me that their Afro hairstyles, reminiscent of the Jackson Five circa 1971 and then some,
indicated that these guys herded cows. Consequently, I started out by enquiring after the health of their cattle. They were all doing nicely enough, it seemed. The grazing in this area was good. There was water here too. Hayu Yassin asked how my cows were, but I had to say that I didn’t have any. That stopped the conversation in its tracks. The Afar cowboys were confused. They shot puzzled glances at my shorts and hat, and gave each other sidelong looks. One of them began to toy nervously with his gun.
I took off my hat and ran my fingers through my hair, just to give myself something to do. ‘It’s very hot here,’ I said, playing for time. ‘If I had hair like yours, I wouldn’t need my hat. It must be a very effective sunshade.’ As Ishmael translated this inane comment, the looks on all their faces changed.
‘Yours is too short,’ one of them said immediately, reaching over and tugging a lock of my hair just above my left ear. ‘It’s a funny texture too.’ He returned his hand to his own head and gently tugged the ends of his fuzz with an expert twist of the wrist. The cowboy squatting next to him patted his Afro in a delicate way that I hadn’t seen since my childhood. There was a dinner lady at my primary school who used constantly to do the same with her perm.
‘You’d have to grow it for weeks,’ Hayu Yassin told me.
‘I guess I wouldn’t make it as an Afar warrior then.’
Hayu Yassin cocked his head, looking at me. ‘We could give you extensions,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘like the camelboys wear it.’
The others nodded their agreement. ‘Then you’d have to grease it.’
‘Grease it?’
‘Yes, camelboys rub animal fat into their hair.’
And so it went on. I couldn’t believe it. Here I was, finally face-to-face with some Afar warriors, supposedly amongst the most fearsome characters on the planet. These were the guys I’d lost sleep worrying about since before I’d even arrived in Ethiopia, the people who were meant to castrate you first and ask questions later. And all they were interested in was hairdressing. No wonder Valerie’s survey of household tasks had found that they’re all done by women. If these cowboys were anything to go by, the men are all too busy at the beauty salon. Hayu Yassin and his mates had spent two hours doing each other’s hair that morning.
Going to Extremes Page 16