In Ethiopia with a Mule

by Dervla Murphy

  By this time Assefa and I had but a single thought and, as we searched for talla, a cheerful man emerged from a mud shack and invited us to help celebrate the christening of his fifth son. In the dark, straw-strewn room about forty men sat on mud benches around the walls, fondling rifles, while a minstrel played in the centre of the floor and a tall, elderly woman sang and danced with strange, fierce gaiety.

  This invitation was providential, as no one could long remain sad at a highland party. After an enormous meal, accompanied by much talla, I found myself holding a half-pint tumbler brimming with araki, which normally is served in tiny vessels. I sipped the burning spirit slowly, but was soon cut off from reality by a sentimental haze through which I regarded myself, my host, his fifth son, all his other sons, my fellow-guests, all highlanders, the world in general – and even the prospect of arriving in Addis – with benevolence.

  At seven o’clock Samuel, the Director of the school, waveringly led Assefa and me towards his home. Evidently I was then at the maudlin stage; on looking up at the brilliance of the storm-cleared sky I wanted to weep because in comparison Irish skies seem to have so few stars.

  Lots of strong black coffee sobered us and when I was again able to focus I saw that my hostess is a most beautiful and charming young woman. Both she and her husband are Addis-born and educated but here they are living – resentfully – at a level little higher than that of the local peasants.

  With sobriety my gloom returned and as I sat dolefully thinking of the motor-road ahead it was ironical to hear Samuel and his wife envying me because within three or four days I will be in Addis.

  27 March. Addis Ababa

  An abrupt ending – but my arrival here without Jock would in any case have been imperfect, and it was almost a relief to have the painful farewell stage cut short.

  This morning I found Satan severely lame in both hind legs. Were I a highlander I would have loaded him up regardless and beaten him on his way. Not being a highlander I gave him to Samuel, as a present of doubtful value, and a little boy shouldered my sack to the bus-stop.

  It was a wonderful morning, in this high, cool world of clarity, spaciousness and quiet; but such a curious numbness had crept over me that I observed it without feeling it. The bus was due at eight o’clock and I was being seen off by three teachers and half-a-dozen other men. To them I was at last doing the normal thing by getting on a makeena, after walking through Manz for some infinitely obscure reason. They had no conception of the significance of the occasion for me and I chatted casually with them while inwardly trying to adjust to the fact that now – already – my trek was ended.

  The minibus arrived on time and Samuel carefully explained that when we reached the main road I must change on to the big Dessie–Addis bus. He added, wistfully, that by midday I would be in the capital of the Empire; and I politely pretended to be pleased at the thought.

  Waiting for the bus to start I took out my notebook and totted up the miles I have walked – according to my pocket pedometer – since landing at Massawah. As I passed the 800 mark, and got to 900, and then 950, I became aware of a childish suspense. At the end I checked and re-checked; but there was no mistake – the final figure was 1,024 miles.

  Epilogue

  ADDIS ABABA MEANS ‘New Flower’, a misnomer that many faranjs find wonderfully funny. However, this malformed infant capital so atrophied my sense of humour that I never saw the joke. My first impression, as the bus topped a ridge some five miles from Addis, was of more tin roofs than usual among more blue-gums than usual, and my permanent impression was of a calamitously unreal city. Other recently-modernised non-European capitals seem unreal too, and are all the more enchanting for that. Yet they are unreal only in relation to the Western visitor, whereas Addis Ababa is unreal in relation to Ethiopia.

  The gulf between capital and countryside appeared repeatedly during my conversations with Addis’ foreign residents. Whether diplomats, businessmen or nurses, the majority expressed identical opinions about Ethiopia and usually the experiences on which their opinions were based differed considerably from those of travellers in the provinces. To most foreigners familiar with the provinces Addis seems like a faked jewel that has been hastily stuck on to the fabric of the Empire and that may fall off any day, since it represents a centralised administration unacceptable to millions of the Emperor’s subjects.

  Among the city’s handicaps are an immaturity for which no one can be blamed, as it was founded only eighty years ago, and a proliferation of architectural excesses for which many people can and should be blamed. Recently a colossal hospital was built in memory of the Duke of Harrar, before any nurses had been trained to staff it, and on going to a vast, avant-garde bank to change travellers’ cheques one finds the splendour of the building equalled only by the multitude of clerks with whom one has to deal with while transacting a simple bit of business. All over the city other extravagant, meaningless new buildings rise at random from amidst a huddle of mud shacks, to offend both the eye and the reason of the beholder. Many of the VIPs who visit Ethiopia get no further than Addis and evidently these architectural frolics are partly inspired by a desire to create an impression of imminent prosperity. Much suffering might have been averted by the spending of this money in drought areas.

  Another aspect of the inspiration to ‘develop’ Addis is even more dangerous – the city’s use as a screen behind which the Ethiopians themselves hide from the facts of their national life. In the 1960s the simplest way to gratify the old Amharic blind pride is by building a spectacular capital: to lessen trachoma or forestall famine in remote areas would be unobtrusive achievements, giving no impression of Instant Progress. All highlanders are proud of Addis – the many who have never been there as well as the few who can compare it with other capitals. For everyone it is a triumphant symbol of what Ethiopia can do when she tries.

  The formidable communication problem presented by the highland terrain is sometimes given as an excuse for this governmental flight from reality. Yet, unlike many other undeveloped countries, Northern Ethiopia is fortunate in having a uniquely healthy climate and a generally self-sufficient population. In The Christian Romance of Alexander the Great* we read that one day Alexander and his soldiers came to the City of Saints ‘where the water is sweeter than the grapes of which wine is made and the stones are of sard, chalcedony, jacinth and sapphire, where there is neither freezing cold nor parching heat, neither summer nor winter, neither oppression nor tears. Instead of snow, manna falleth from heaven. All their wells and rock cisterns are filled with honey, and every beast among them is filled with milk.’ Granted this is a Romance, not an agricultural survey, but it does convey truly the feeling of the highlands, where an energetic and responsible government could bring prosperity to most regions.

  My six weeks’ stay in Addis Ababa was an instructive ordeal, though I might have learned a lot more had I not been trapped in the faranj ghetto. As time passed the frustration of living among a people, yet not with them, made me more and more restive. On a few occasions I slunk away from my opulent base to drink in a tej-beit down an alleyway, but though I was always treated politely my presence caused embarrassment and a furtive amusement. Addis is not yet on the intercontinental hitch-hiking route and the locals expect faranjs to keep to themselves. Then, shortly before flying home I broke loose and went into the mountains for a day to say farewell to the real Ethiopia.

  It was a cloudy morning when I set out, heading straight for a mountain to the south-east. The mood of the moment made me feel that any mountain would do – except Entoto, which has recently been afflicted by a motor-road. This was the Sunday after the Orthodox Easter and as I crossed the city every alleyway was bubbling with wedding excitement; when Lent ends one has the impression that half the younger generation are about to be married. Here, as in India, weddings are cripplingly expensive. White banqueting tents stood in scores of tiny compounds, everyone was out in their Easter best, minstrels were rehearsing in tej-be
its, women were scurrying to and fro with injara-baskets on their heads and basins of wat in their hands and men were carrying zinc buckets, earthen jars and wooden casks brimming with talla or tej.

  Most of my route lay between tin-roofed shacks and the rough laneways were ankle-deep in thick, black, stinking liquid. So few foreigners ever leave the main streets that hordes of children followed me, screaming ‘Faranj! Faranj!’ Then suddenly I would find myself crossing a broad tarred road, lined with tall new buildings, gaudy petrol stations and glossy advertisement hoardings; these roads were hazardous because of the mechanised wedding processions of the richer citizens, who were driving like things demented (or prematurely drunk) in cars garlanded with flowers and overloaded with wildly-singing guests. Yet immediately beyond Addis the only signs of a city’s nearness are footbridges across rivers that elsewhere would have to be forded and a line of electricity pylons.

  This pleasant, placidly hilly country had easy, smooth slopes, newly-green meadows, neat little pinewoods and wide plantations of blue-gum saplings whose young leaves trembled like shot silk, in the gentlest of breezes. The few hamlets were Amharic, except for one little Galla settlement, and the countryside was neither intensively cultivated nor densely populated. At one time I walked for an hour without seeing anybody.

  The mountain I climbed is over 10,000 feet but the view from the summit was obscured by haze; yet here I felt again that familiar, overwhelmed sensation experienced so often before in this vast, withdrawn highland world. Below me lay ‘The New Flower’ – its petals tin roofs, its stalks baby skyscrapers, its leaves eucalyptus groves – and now it seemed more than ever a pathetic, futile bid to escape from these rough solitudes that will long remain the reality at the heart of the Empire.

  Descending by a different route I came to level pasturelands, dense with mushrooms, which cost thirty shillings for an imported tin in the Addis supermarket. Not since childhood have I seen so many blobs of white satin half-concealed by thick, cropped grass. My bush shirt had four capacious pockets and I spent the next hour filling them all, ritually quartering those pastures in a state of peaceful obsession.

  Now the early afternoon sky had clouded over. The lines of the surrounding mountains were blurred, the air was moistly warm and it might have been the sort of August day on which one wanders through Irish fields absorbed in this same cosy adventure. Then thudding hoofs broke the stillness and some forty young horses came galloping towards me from behind a eucalyptus grove. Three lads followed, riding bareback on mules and exuding curiosity about my eccentric behaviour. None of them spoke English, but it was easy to explain that mushrooms are a faranj delicacy. They stared at me, appalled – then hastily dismounted, the better to dissuade me from eating the lethal growth. It seems strange that a people with such limited food resources should never have discovered that certain fungi are edible – though no stranger than the Aran Islanders’ ignorance of the edibility of watercress. However, by eating half-a-dozen mushrooms on the spot I convinced the boys that faranjs are immune to the poison.

  Soon after this I became involved with a wedding party. While resting on a boulder, at the edge of another pasture, I heard distant singing and saw about twenty men and women marching, running and jumping across a wide expanse of brilliant grass. (This is only an approximate description of their peculiar method of progress: it seemed that they couldn’t wait for the dancing to begin at the bride’s home.) The men were wearing snow-white shammas over grubby European pants and the women were dazzling in white, full-skirted dresses with exquisitely-woven, richly-coloured borders. Two maidens, balancing injara-baskets on their heads, led the group, and on the lid of each basket a tall bouquet of shrub and herb fronds swayed gracefully as the girls came prancing through the grass. The older women followed, singing, skipping and laughing with un-matronly abandon, and the men leaped vigorously up and down every step of the way, brandishing their dulas over their heads and loudly chanting. (The women’s songs were more varied and at intervals they paused to ululate beautifully.) This little procession – so simple and gay against a background of smooth hills, wooded valleys and calm meadows – was among the most charming sights I have ever seen.

  As the group passed by me everyone smiled shyly at the surprising spectator. They were going in my direction, so I followed them down a muddy path between tall blue-gums and soon I could hear the fast beat of festive drums and the loud chanting of many men.

  Fifteen minutes later we came to a grassy slope below a compound containing a big white tent. The stockade and entrance archway were decorated with clumsily-arranged blue-gum branches and, as we approached, four maidens and a group of older women came to meet us and together the women danced, their wide skirts whirling brilliantly as the drums throbbed more and more frenziedly. Then suddenly I was seized by a pair of laughing girls and a small grinning boy, who conducted me into the compound through throngs of welcoming fellow-guests. This wasn’t an invitation, but a most endearing assumption that naturally the passing stranger would like to join the party.

  Inside the crowded tent it was stiflingly hot and the atmosphere reeked of sweating bodies, highly-spiced stews and crushed eucalyptus leaves. Leafy branches were strewn on the ground, beneath rows of unsteady benches and long trestle-tables spread with worn shammas. Each guest was given a chipped enamel mug for his talla and a chipped enamel plate for his wat, the injara being laid on the table – an enormous folded round for each guest, since it is etiquette to serve more than could possibly be eaten. Obviously this was a poor family. No tej or raw beef were served and the wat was not elaborate. As the tent only held about a hundred and fifty people, the guests were being fed in two shifts.

  There were no English-speakers present and not one of the men smoked; only the enamelware and the women’s calf-length skirts (the local mini) marked a city’s nearness. Here I realised that for me the worst irritant of Addis was the inability of so many foreigners to regard the Ethiopians as fellow-humans; it is indeed shocking to think that hundreds of complacent Westerners are sitting in the capital drawing fat salaries for ‘helping’ a people with whom they have so little sympathy that effective help is impossible. (A considerable number of Ethiopians also sit in the capital drawing fat salaries to no good purpose: but that’s beside the present point.) Admittedly the foreigners have not created this situation alone. The Amharas are difficult to deal with, both officially and socially; they will accept help only on their own terms and they are blandly certain that every other race is inferior. But an important distinction must be made here. While Amharas tend to look on non-Amharas as their preordained servants, whatever the nominal status of a particular non-Amhara, faranjs tend to look on the highlanders as creatures of another species and even when they profess a liking for an individual one can usually detect overtones of condescension. Yet the geographically circumscribed highlanders have an historical excuse for their attitude, whereas we present ourselves to them as the apostles of tolerant enlightenment.

  During the feast we managed to exchange a certain amount of information. I learned that this was the bride’s home and that the groom was expected to arrive at any moment from his own village, ten hours’ ride to the west. There was to be no church ceremony, with a solemnisation of the marriage vows by taking the Eucharist; instead the couple would simply swear in the name of the Emperor ‘She is my wife’ and ‘He is my husband’.

  After such civil ceremonies divorce is a simple procedure so, among the peasants, Church ceremonies are favoured only by the clergy themselves, who are forbidden to remarry even if widowed, and by a minority of exceptionally devout families. The third form of marriage, more usual among soldiers and traders than in settled communities, requires no formal vows; the man merely provides his wife with a home, clothes and pocket-money.

  Towards the end of the feast, as people were wiping greasy fingers on leaves off the floor, four friends of the bride began to dance in a corner of the tent to the beat of a drum played by a fair-skinned
youth. This boy stood slim and taut in white jodhpurs and tunic, looking rather like a sensuous angel and vibrating with a fierce joy as he drummed faster and faster. Soon everyone was clapping in time to the music and frequently the women ululated; but all my attention was on the girls, whose every muscle was brought into supple, vigorous action – sometimes subtly, as they followed each other in a circular, pacing movement, shuddering with energy and ecstasy – then violently, as they advanced towards an imaginary male partner with undisguised sexuality, or dropped to their haunches and remained so for a few moments, convulsively working their shoulder-muscles. The dancers were glistening with sweat when their performance was interrupted by four little boys, who had been watching the bridegroom’s route from a hilltop and who rushed breathlessly into the tent to announce his approach.

  Hurrying out to join the welcoming party, we saw a procession of five coming slowly through the blue-gums. Only the twenty-year-old bridegroom was riding, on a mule caparisoned with that shabby magnificence so characteristic of all highland festivals; the weary animal, draped in frayed cloth-of-gold, wore high plumes of crimson ostrich feathers between his ears and silver bells were sweetly jangling on bridle and saddle. As highland stirrups are designed to accommodate only the big toe the groom paused here to put on his smart new wedding shoes, which had been slung around the best man’s neck.

  The bride’s friends advanced to greet the party and danced slowly backwards towards the compound, facing the groom and confining themselves to the chaste, stylised movements customary at this stage. On every side men were chanting gravely and groups of women were ululating in turn. Then, as the groom dismounted, all the women united to produce a beautifully trembling wave of sound that seemed to come from some invisible, far-away choir.