ADVENTURES IN ABYSSINIA

The Hyenas had vanished back into the darkness some time ago, seeking shelter from the driving rain. I should have gone with them. I had come to Ethiopia in search of adventure, but standing on the rooftop of a hotel in the small hours of a Friday morning, in the midst of a storm of almost biblical proportions, was not something I had bargained on. Neither had I envisaged spending my last hours in the country trying to talk an evangelizing, and very drunk, American down off the aforementioned roof

We were in a town called Harar, situated in the foothills of the Chercher Mountains, some 150 kilometres from the Somalia border. This was a town of conflict and contrast, a microcosm of African life, where Muslims and Christians had brokered an uneasy truce and the streets and alleyways positively screamed with colour and noise. For centuries the town had been a crossroads, an entrepot of commercial trade from Africa, India and the Middle East. It was from here that the Muslim armies of Ahmed Ibn Ibrahim al Ghazi had swept forth in a holy jihad against the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. This was a town with attitude, which still had a xenophobic mistrust of foreigners and the largest chat market in Ethiopia. This was not a town for drunken American evangelists.

I had flown into Addis a few weeks before, my ears still ringing from the inevitable, and it has to be said ill informed, comments of family and friends. Ethiopia still has a serious image problem. Years of news reports on famines and droughts and the seemingly endless conflicts with neighbouring Eritrea have clouded the perception of the outside world. This is a shame, because the reality is very different. Ethiopia is an undiscovered gem. Home to one of the oldest Christian civilizations in the world, it has an archaeological pedigree to match any of the great civilisations of antiquity and a cultural and natural diversity that can compare with anywhere in Africa. True it is one of the poorest places on the planet, but this is a country that has a heritage and a history stretching back millennia. Great empires rose and fell here whilst our ancestors were still running around in animal skins and woad mascara.

Addis Ababa is a relatively new city for a country that can boast such an ancient pedigree. An eclectic mix of the old and the new, where concrete and glass vie for space next to wattle and daub shacks and donkeys and taxis bray and honk in unison along the wide-open boulevards. But for all its potential it is still just a city, so first chance I got I headed north, towards Bahar Dar and Lake Tana. It is from here that the Blue Nile begins its 4,000 mile odyssey through sub-Saharan Africa, to meet up with the White Nile at Khartoum in Sudan before continuing north, to the shores of the Mediterranean.

It is a strangely unassuming beginning for such an epic journey. The river flows gently from the lake, between low lying islands ringed by papyrus and overgrown with jungle, its passing marked only by the odd lone fisherman in his papyrus boat, or a yawning hippo, basking in the early morning sun. It is not until it gets to Tissisat Falls that it begins to take on the mantle of a great river. Here it becomes the ‘smoking waters’ of legend, as it cascades over a sheer chasm and churns its way through a narrow-sided canyon. This was once one of the most spectacular waterfalls in Africa, a thundering torrent that was believed to contain evil jinns: demons waiting to grab the unwary and drag them down to a watery grave. These days, thanks to the building of a hydro-electric dam, the falls are a shadow of their former selves, but still impressive nonetheless and after the rains you can still imagine the odd demon waiting in the shadows for anyone unwise enough to stray too close.

Local transport is probably one of the best ways to truly appreciate travel in a foreign land. How can you not feel an empathy with a country and its people when you spend your days travelling on an old rusting bus next to a man with a loaded Kalashnikov! From Tissisat Falls I headed north, along dusty pitted roads into the religious heartlands, to the city of Aksum, reputed home of the fabled Ark of the Covenant itself. It was a journey that was to take me through a timeless landscape encapsulating something of the true diversity and history of this ancient kingdom. Sharing our road with cattle, chickens and a seemingly endless procession of large black umbrellas, I passed the days looking out across an ever changing tableaux: magnificent Imperial castles and lines of burnt out tanks, mountain plateaus where the breathtaking views where punctuated by uncountable hordes of Gelada baboons and all enveloped by a way of life that had remained unchanged for millennia.

We arrived in Aksum in time for the Easter celebrations, an important time for the Orthodox Christians. Of the numerous religious festivals practiced by the Ethiopians the two most important are Timkat and Easter. The three-day festival of Timkat is certainly the most colourful, Easter though has always required a more committed approach to worship. Fasika is the Orthodox Easter and marks the end of a fast that has lasted some 55 days, during which time no animal product at all can be consumed. Even the more traditional approach to Easter requires the populous to fast from the Thursday before Good Friday until the end of the Easter services at 3 am on Easter Sunday. The end of Easter in Ethiopia is something of a blood fest as the streets quite literally run with blood, not a good time to be an animal, or indeed a vegetarian.

My plan was to spend a few days here, recuperating from the journey and enjoying the spectacle. Aksum was once one of the most important cities in this region, the centre of an empire that rivaled those of Rome, Persia and China. An empire that controlled the Red Sea coast from Sawakin, south to present day Djibouti and even into southwest Arabia. It nurtured a civilization far in advance of its neighbours, building fabulous stone palaces and erecting giant monuments to its deceased rulers. Monuments that still stand to this day: huge carved stelae that are amongst the largest known in the ancient world. The Aksumites were also responsible for introducing Christianity to Ethiopia, small wonder then that there is still an unshakeable belief amongst its people that the Ark of the Covenant is indeed within their midst.

The stuff of legend and conjecture, sought by everyone from the Knights Templar to Indiana Jones, the Ark, the repository of the original tablets of stone brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses, is believed to have been brought to Ethiopia by the emperor Menelik I. Whatever your own personal thoughts on it authenticity, or indeed existence, there are few here who will publicly deny its presence. The Ark is central to the entire Orthodox faith, with every church, no matter how large or small housing a replica, known as the Tabot, within its sanctuary. The chapel that allegedly contains the Ark is a small unassuming concrete building with a decaying green domed roof, guarded by a lone figure with a gun. Within its inner sanctum dwells another lone figure, the Keeper of the Ark, whose life is dedicated to the protection of this most revered of biblical artifacts; a life that requires a total commitment that includes virtual imprisonment within the compound.

Never having considered myself a religious person, I was somewhat surprised to find I was becoming ever more wrapped up in these Easter proceedings. I even managed to drag myself up into the pre dawn light the following morning to witness a remarkable procession through the winding streets. Hundreds of white robed figures, their faces giving off an almost ethereal glow in the candlelight, walked through the town. At their centre a group of monks carrying a box, the size of a small tea chest, within which lay the symbol of their faith. A part of me truly wanted to believe that this small unremarkable box, just a few feet away from me, contained the most revered of all religious items, the words of God himself.

The ceremonies carried on throughout the following days, the town reverberating with the sound of singing and, as midnight approached and Easter Sunday drew nearer, drums began to sound throughout the town, accompanied by a hypnotic chanting that seemed to permeate every nook and cranny. I visited one of the smaller churches, drawn by the incessant sound of the drums. It was filled to overflowing, every piece of floor space taken up by prostrate figures, the younger ones seemingly oblivious to the goings on around them, content to spend the few remaining hours of fast dreaming of the forthcoming feasts.

The following morning I left the happy carnivores of Aksum to their banquets and flew down to Harar, a walled city of some 75,000 lying to the east of the staunchly Christian highlands. Harar was once a staunch Muslim bastion and, up until the latter part of the 19th century, completely closed to Christians. Also the birthplace of one Ras Tafari Makonnen, better known to most as the emperor Haile Selassie, this was a city like no other I had come across in Ethiopia. It was more vibrant than the towns of the Central Highlands and felt more Arab than African. There was also an underlying feeling of tension wherever I went: Christians were tolerated here, but only just.

For all its initial aggression though I liked Harar. From my hotel room I watched the chat sellers doing a brisk trade in their seemingly inexhaustible supply of the region’s main cash crop. Chat is a mildly intoxicating and perfectly legal stimulant that has been cultivated in Ethiopia for centuries and from my elevated vantage point it also appeared to be the prime preserve of the adult male population of Harar. Walking through the streets later that day I came across countless men resting up in the late afternoon sun, their eyes glazed and their teeth green from chewing bags of the stupefying leaves.

Harar’s network of narrow lanes crisscross the city, passing markets overflowing with spices and vegetables and streets filled to overflowing with barber’s shops, tailors and the ubiquitous beggars. I wandered past tiny mosques and Catholic schools, visited the house of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, who spent 16 years of his life here and, in a back street of almost overwhelming obscurity, came upon the house were Haile Selassie grew up. It has now been taken over by a local family and although it is home to a local holy man and healer, who claims he can cure anything from sexually transmitted diseases to cancer, there were few people there when I arrived. Little wonder given the appalling stench and feeling of decay that assails the senses as you enter the yard. It was more open sewer than health centre and I beat a hasty retreat back out into the warren of alleyways, looking for more pleasant sights and smells.

One of Harar’s more famous spectacles is the nightly hyena feeding that takes place outside the city walls. Very much a tourist attraction these days, it does have its origins in a ceremony that stretches back hundreds of years and, in spite of its potential for crass commercialism, it does actually present something of a unique experience. Calling them in from the surrounding darkness the “Hyena man” feeds these wild dogs from a basket of offal, sometimes placing the tempting morsels between his teeth and allowing the more adventurous of the pack to snatch it, quite literally, from his waiting jaws. I counted upwards of 20 of them emerge from the trees and walk cautiously towards us, a somewhat disconcerting sight given that they could have torn us to pieces very easily had they been inclined. They seemed content to go with the easy option though, just as well given that our “armed” escort seemed to be holding his gun the wrong way round! I was mesmerized and it was only the onset of the rain and the end of the food supply that forced me to tear myself away.

The following morning I was heading back to Addis and from there back home, so I had planned on having a quiet dinner, a couple of drinks and an early night. Unfortunately sometime around midnight I had been rudely awoken by the hotel manager, asking if I could possibly help him retrieve an American from the roof. It appeared that he had made his way up there with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a bible and was even now quoting scriptures to anyone who would listen. Now given that this was a town primarily populated by Muslims, many of whom by now were probably suffering the downside of a chat hangover, I felt it probably in all our interests to get him safely inside as soon as possible.

Which is why I am spending my last night in Ethiopia standing on a roof above the streets of Harar, in a torrential deluge, facing a man with an empty bourbon bottle a head torch and the book of Psalms. It’s never like this on the Holiday Programme!


© Trevor Gibbs 2009