Travels With My Hat: A Lifetime on the Road. Christine Osborne
cause of Haile Selassie’s death, on 27 August 1975 was given as a cardiac arrest but at that time the whereabouts of his grave remained unknown. Later reports indicated he was likely to have been murdered, and in 1992 witnesses came forward to say his body was buried under a lavatory in the Imperial Palace.4
My employer, the Lancaster Gate Nursing Agency, was sympathetic to my request for ten days leave, although accustomed to nurses taking a week off to holiday in Spain, or the Greek islands, they were astonished to learn I was going all the way out to Ethiopia. Just for ten days. A snooty person, Mrs Graham cared not a toss who looked after her, provided her egg was boiled for precisely three-and-a-half minutes. Not a second more. So after writing out instructions for the relief sister, I hung up my uniform behind the bathroom door.
On my first British press trip, I found myself in the company of journalists from distinguished papers such as the Guardian and the Times. Jonathan Dimbleby, who had covered the Wollo famine of the early seventies for the BBC, was on board with a television crew. In fact, converging on the Ethiopian capital were more than seventy journalists from all over the world.
With time before the Revolution Day parade on 13 September, we were split into sightseeing groups. Mine was to visit Dire Dawa, an important market centre and a stop on the Djibouti-Addis Ababa rail route to the Red Sea. In 1930, a young Evelyn Waugh, sent out to report on the coronation of Haile Selassie, found the entire train had been rented out to the Duke of Gloucester in whose party was Wilfred Thesiger, the first British child born in Ethiopia in 1912, when his father was in charge of the British Legation.
According to Thesiger, the coronation embraced all the pomp and ceremony the emperor could muster. However something happened to the fireworks display, when to everyone’s surprise, they all went off at once.5
The first serious threat to Haile Selassie’s government had arisen not from domestic issues such as the critical need for land reform, but from Mussolini’s designs on the Horn of Africa. Abyssinia, as it was then known, was one of the few African countries to escape colonisation and in October 1935, declaring intervention on ‘humanitarian’ grounds, the fascist dictator had launched a full-scale invasion against the Armed Forces of Ethiopia of whom many were only equipped with muzzle-loaders and spears. In a war remembered for the use of mustard gas, Haile Selassie—225th emperor in a line dating back 3,000 years—Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Lord of Lords, and God incarnate of Rastafarians—was forced to flee, and in May 1936, Italian troops entering Addis Ababa proclaimed Ethiopia, a part of Africa Orientale Italiana.
The male journalists, railway buffs like many Englishmen, watched the night train from Addis Ababa pull into Dire Dawa before retiring to our hotel pool. It was sublime weather for swimming, but I set off to explore with Dorothy, a tall, black reporter from Uganda, in a horse-trap taxi. Spared aerial attack during the conflict, Dire Dawa had become something of an up-country resort for divisions stationed in the capital and as our garis clip-clopped along its tree-lined streets, we noticed an Italian influence in several candy-coloured houses and cafés advertising caffé latte.
But here similarity stopped. We’d struck market day and Dire Dawa was thronged with peoples: Oromo and Ahmara farmers from the central highlands, Tigrinya from the Tigray region, Saho from the Red Sea coast and Somali pastoralists all buying, selling and exchanging news in a babble of different languages. There were also Afar tribesmen from the Danakil Desert, a harsh region of intense heat and sulphorous springs abutting on north-east Ethiopia.
Scrutinising one man, I decided his wiry hair was similar to my own and I wondered whether it had ever been washed. His traditional garb, a khaki skirt and shirt affair, was complimented by a jile, a vicious looking double-edged dagger, and he wore a bone bracelet on his wrist. Wilfred Thesiger has left a vivid impression of the Afar encountered when he lead an expedition across the depression in 1933.6 Our driver, speaking un po’di Italiano and waving his whip to emphasise the point, indicated that most were camel-owning nomads, coming to sell slabs of salt and to purchase fuel.
The Kefira market, spread out on bags beneath the trees, stocked everything the tribesmen needed for survival in the arid wilderness outside Dire Dawa: spearheads, knives, tea, sugar, salt, cloth, corn, ropes and camel-halters. Beautiful, but melancholic, Somali women selling baskets of chillies, moved among the traders with the painful, flat-footed gait characteristic of the circumcised female. Swathed in red, white and yellow cotton robes, they pressed around Dorothy, who was wearing a tight T-shirt with Bob Dylan on the front, flared jeans and platform sole sandals. Black, she was obviously one of them, but why did she look so different? No one could explain. Even our press group knew nothing about Dorothy, though rumours said she was the personal emissary of His Excellency, President for Life, Idi Amin Dada, the ‘Butcher of Africa’.
Ethiopia’s national dish—wat and injera—on our dinner menu explained the chillies. Along with other spices, red chillies are a potent ingredient in this palate-scorching casserole made using goat or lamb. Injera, a spongy, grey pancake affair, is used to grasp morsels of the meat and to mop up its unctuous juices—slurp, slurp.
Dabbing at tears with a table napkin, Dorothy exclaimed: ‘This is even hotter than our own curries.’ And soon the entire press group was weeping.
‘We also like raw meat in this division of Ethiopia,’ said a waiter in a crushed white dinner jacket, smiling broadly as he sliced a steak off a side of beef suspended on a coat-rack behind the buffet table.
I tried it with some berbere sauce, another hot local delicacy, but although I love a well-made steak tartare, I found the taste too primitive, even for my by now well-seasoned palate.
‘If one must eat meat raw,’ said Laurens van der Post, who had tried berbere during a visit to Ethiopia, ‘it is surely best done in this way, for the sauce gives the impression of being hot enough to cook the meat right on your tongue.’7
On our second day, we were to visit Harar, a devoutly Muslim town forbidden to infidels until 1887 when Menelik II incorporated it into ‘Greater Ethiopia’.
Travelling by minibus, we left the plains behind for rolling hill country sown under coffee, teff (the cereal used to make injera) and qat, a leaf having mild narcotic properties which is widely chewed throughout the Horn of Africa and in the Yemen. Climbing higher, we passed roadside markets selling cheese, eggs, and cow-dung fuel and in contrast to the half-naked tribesmen of Dire Dawa, people here were wrapped in blankets and wore woollen jumpers against the chill. In one place where we stopped, everyone was busily knitting garments, even teenage boys. Eventually we reached Harar, a town perched on the eastern rim of the Great Rift Valley escarpment and surrounded by a medieval wall holding it together like a surgical corset.
AFAR TRIBESMAN LOADING PACK CAMELS IN DIRE DAWA MARKET, 1975
Many myths relate to the founding of Harar, but it is usually associated with Sheikh Abadir, a holy man from Southern Arabia who settled there in the tenth century. The town subsequently became the spiritual centre for Ethiopia’s Muslims, developing its own language—a mix of Cushite and Semitic—even minting its own coinage. The great wall was built in the sixteenth century by the Emir Ibn Mujahid al-Nur to protect the town from Christian raids. More than 4 metres (13 feet) high, its five gates were bolted at night, locking in the Hararis, and equally keeping out wild animals.
‘Jugol, the old walled town, is the sacred heart of Harar,’ announced Mr Abdulwasi, our local Harari guide, in the Oxford accent affected by many foreigners when speaking English.
We trailed along behind his dapper figure wearing a green woollen hat and a three button, centre vent tweed suit. Harar is 1,885 metres (6,184 feet) above sea level, and several women who hurried past wore leather leggings against the cold. The cobbled lanes lined with squat stone and clay houses and the shops filled with silversmiths, weavers and leather-makers, bestowed a living museum feel, rather like the medieval town of Fez in Morocco. Everywhere were glimpses of local life, of coffee-sellers, sugarcane grinders and women selling bundles of qat, freshly plucked on