Travels With My Hat: A Lifetime on the Road. Christine Osborne
citronella fragrance reminding me of home.
Unlike today’s tourists, armed with an abundance of maps, apps and advice from Trip Advisor on where to eat, sleep and locate a cyber café, in 1975 there were no such things. The solution was to find a companion who could speak some English and near the Ghion Hotel, I met Gebre, an eighteen-year-old Christian student. A tall, sad-faced youth, he said he was studying law until the Dergue had closed the university and dispatched its 50,000 students into the countryside to educate the illiterate peasantry.
‘We needed change, but no one expected a Phoenix-like Ethiopia to arise without more bloodshed. It’s like awakening to a river in the morning that will change its course many times by the afternoon,’ said Gebre, fingering a silver cross below a rather pronounced Adam’s apple.
Our first stop was the Holy Trinity Cathedral where Sylvia Pankhurst, daughter of the famous suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, a friend and adviser to Haile Selassie, was buried in 1961. Just as Mrs Graham had said. From here we took a taxi to visit St George’s Cathedral built in 1896 to commemorate Ethiopia’s celebrated victory over Italian troops at the Battle of Adwa. The Dergue had disestablished the Ethiopian Orthodox religion, and state security forces had slaughtered hundreds of Christians on its steps, but today it was open. To impress the visiting journalists I decided.
‘Our leading artist, Afewerk Tekle, designed the stained glass windows,’ said Gebre kneeling for a moment of prayer. ‘Art in Ethiopia is strongly influenced by faith. You will see this in the mercato, but keep your bag closed. It is full of thieves. They’re not bad, just hungry.’
I’ve seen scores of markets in Africa: the ‘King Jimmy’ market in Freetown while on a commission to photograph Siaka Stevens, then president of Sierra Leone, Kumasi market in the Ashanti region of Ghana, the Sandaga market in Dakar, Senegal (which is certainly full of thieves), Dar-es-Salaam, Lusaka, Harare (during good times in Zimbabwe) and Omdurman filled with bean gourds, ivory and cheetah skin handbags, but the enormous mercato in Addis Ababa was the biggest of all. Literally hundreds of stalls and small shops announced by their smells: spices, incense, skins, wood smoke and the rancid odour of the butter market, where Gurague women, wrapped in white robes, squeezed phallic symbols out of greasy, yellow mounds. Asked the significance of this erotic butter sculpture, they said they didn’t know, but offered to anoint my head with it for a few birr (the unit of currency in Ethiopia).
‘It’s good for the brains,’ they explained, but I declined, disappointing Gebre who said he buttered his own head every morning.
The afternoon slipped by as I sifted through ethnic crafts: baskets for carrying injera, charcoal and qat, shields, textiles, musical instruments, carvings and carpets. Some traders specialised in equine equipment— saddles, bridles and plumes—a horse being the only means of transport in the rugged highlands.
Elsewhere, merchants seated on three-legged stools were selling icons and religious scrolls. The theme of many paintings—an Ethiopian version of The Last Supper—depicted Haile Selassie as Jesus Christ, surrounded by the twelve disciples wearing vivid orange and green robes. Other shops sold religious artefacts cast from the Maria Theresa dollar minted in late eighteenth century Austria and used as unofficial currency in the Horn of Africa where silversmiths found its silver content perfect for making jewellery. In one shop we visited, an elderly jeweller with a prominent nose brought out a cardboard box containing hundreds of silver crosses.
‘They are cast by the cire perdu lost wax method,’ he told me. ‘No two are the same.’ He held up a delicate filigree Gojjam cross, but I was more struck by his nose. Was he a member of the ancient Beta Israelite community of Ethiopia?
‘Yes,’ he said, as if reading my mind. ‘My name is Rada, and our family comes from Gondar. We are many generations of silversmiths, but times are bad.’ He took a quick look at Gebre.
‘I’m Christian,’ said Gebre. ‘You can see my cross.’
‘Our people are being murdered by the Dergue,’ continued Rada. ‘The Beta Jews have lived in Ethiopia since the time of the Book, but they are killing us.’ He put a finger to his lips. ‘There are only three of us left in the mercato.’
Conversation ceased as I sifted through round Solomonic crosses, hinged Lalibela crosses, small hand crosses, the huge processional crosses carried by Orthodox priests at tingkat, the Ethiopian epiphany, and finely wrought pectoral crosses such as Gebre wore. Another box held silver jewellery including lion and leopard claws incorporated into pendants, brooches, and other accoutrements to dress. Like the Bedouin in the Middle East, an Ethiopian woman’s jewellery, is her personal walking wealth.
Born in October, I suffer the irritating Libran trait of indecision. It may be over something simple, such as whether to paint my nails scarlet or pink, or a complex issue that actually causes personal anguish. Confronted by all Rada’s jewellery, after much deliberation I finally bought a silver choker, strung with miniature phalluses whose significance would become apparent a few days later.
Only the political correspondents were invited to the evening banquet in the old Imperial Palace. Back at the hotel, I added my name to the list of journalists interested to visit the famine belt, and next morning, escorted by Ato Shimalis—Ethiopia’s Minister for Relief—we took off for Gode in a chartered DC-3.
Gode lies in the Ogaden, a vast swathe of south-east Ethiopia bordered by Kenya and Djibouti, and sharing a historically disputed frontier with Somalia. A semi-desert region, it supports only scraggy shrubs and trees, but the Webi Shebelle River crosses it before flowing into the Indian Ocean, between Mogadishu and Mombasa, more than 1,000 kilometres (621 miles) from its source in the Ethiopian highlands.
FAMINE VICTIMS IN THE OGADEN, SEPTEMBER 1975
‘We’ve had no response to our appeal for medical teams,’ Shimalis told us in the Gode refugee camp where one skinny doctor, two tired nurses and three overworked dressers, were attempting to care for 12,000 starving famine victims.
‘She will die,’ murmured the doctor of a wasted mite whose arms were no thicker than my fingers. ‘There have to be mass graves before anyone wants to help, and once you find fresh graves, we have lost our battle against the drought.’ He sighed deeply.
Times are never normal, or good in this godforsaken corner of Africa, where Somali nomads roam in a perpetual search for sustenance, for themselves and their herds.
‘They are a primitive people who eat food on the hoof, using a special curved knife to slice steaks off the living animal, then packing the wound with mud,’ said Shimalis.
Hammered by the sun and buffeted by sand-laden winds, the Ogaden had not received a drop of rain in five years. Wherever I looked, bleached bones punctured the landscape. Even the hardy camel herds were dying.
Walking away from my colleagues, I came upon a group moaning softly around a dried-up water hole. One was a mother with twins whose hump had shrunk to a flab of skin. She salivated, rolling her tongue, as they butted her udder in frustration. While I watched, she sank to her knees and rested her chin on the sand. A buzzard took off from a twisted acacia, then another, and looking up, I saw other scavengers circling in the washed-out sky. I had encountered many unpleasant situations on my travels, but conditions in Gode made me weep.
And this was not the first famine in Ethiopia. When the government concealed the Wollo disaster, an estimated 100,000 people perished and it was only when Dimbleby and his team were able to make The Unknown Famine in 1973, that the extent of the calamity was revealed. Ian Studdard, the film’s director, told us of a sumptuous banquet served by the governor of Wollo, a province in north-east Ethiopia, as people outside the gate were dropping from starvation.
The situation we found in Gode was equally catastrophic. Withered by hunger and racked by disease, the proud nomads had staggered into the relief camp from all over the Ogaden: thousands of refugees, needing thousands of tonnes of high-protein food to survive.
‘There’s