Feed the World: Birhan Woldu and Live Aid. Oliver Harvey
a face among the celebrity-studded crowd. It was Jeremy Clarkson, the comparatively less glamorous presenter of BBC motor show Top Gear. The programme is shown abroad on BBC World and is a favourite with Ethiopians. A large glass of rosé in hand, Clarkson was happy to pose for pictures. Later, Birhan, Bisrat and Rahel were back on the little 2 metre- (6.56 feet) wide gantry to watch The Who and a re-formed Pink Floyd play for the first time in over 20 years under the slogan: ‘No More Excuses’.
Bear-like concert promoter Harvey Goldsmith, a giant wall clock dangling around his neck, barked orders out at the pop stars, who shuffled around backstage as if they were errant schoolchildren. Then, Sir Paul McCartney was back on stage to lead a mass singalong to The Beatles’ hit ‘Hey Jude’ with the artists who had performed and the rapturous crowd.
Birhan stood swaying along to the music, smiling softly to herself as she watched transfixed. It had been a special day, one so different from her normal life.
Then it was over – Live 8 had pulled off what Live Aid had achieved 20 years before. Cynicism had been banished at least for one day, it seemed.
Leaving on foot through throngs of euphoric pop fans to head back to their Mayfair hotel, the three Ethiopians nattered away about what they had seen and heard. Some people in the crowd recognized Birhan. Politely smiling, most nodded ‘hello’ at her and kept walking. Others shook her hand with excitement.
The next morning over breakfast, Birhan was more talkative than usual. She had been unable to sleep in the strange, crisp white hotel sheets and had lain awake thinking of home. Of her beloved mountains of Tigray where that morning her father Woldu would wake with the rising sun to harness his lyre-horned plough oxen.
She loved the excitement of London, riding on the tube and seeing the people from all over the world – and the burgers, of course. She knew there were money and jobs here and good hospitals and great universities. But she wanted to go back home. Live 8 had helped Birhan understand her life, she explained to me. She now realized how the spirit of Live Aid had galvanized Western goodwill all those years ago and exactly what her part in it had meant. She finally understood why the farenji TV crews and reporters had wanted to talk to her.
Birhan had always found it difficult to speak about the famine days of the 1980s. She had been very young, it was true, but perhaps she had also blocked out the true horror of what had happened out of necessity. Her mother, Alemetsehay, and five-year-old sister, Azmera, had perished in the Great Hunger after all. Now Birhan began to talk as she hadn’t been able to before. She told of how she’d wept as her father spoke of what she called the ‘hunger time’; how the men with guns had come for their family and pushed them like cattle onto an old Russian plane, stealing them away to a resettlement camp in the Ethiopian Lowlands, around 1,300km (800 miles) away from their home. She spoke of how her father had told them that they would walk home, even though they were penniless and starving. That he would carry Birhan and her little sister on his shoulders all the way back to their ancestral mountains. To Tigray. To home.
She began to tell her family’s story, of her father’s struggle, of the epic journey to life.
GARDEN OF EDEN
THE MOUNTAINOUS NORTH of Ethiopia is a beautiful land long populated with farmers, priests and warriors. A rugged vastness, which had its first Christian king in the fourth century, the God-fearing people here believe the Lowlands are bedevilled by disease, strange people and savage beasts. Dotted with rock-hewn churches and lonely cliff-top monasteries, the mountain ramparts have repelled invaders for millennia.
It is here that Birhan Woldu came into this world mewling and kicking on a dried ox skin splayed across the sandy floor of a mud-walled hut known in the Tigrinya language as a sekela. It was an easy and relatively painless birth. Thankfully there were no complications for her mother, Alemetsehay, who soon cradled the wailing baby while a neighbour helped cut the umbilical cord with a sharp blade. If there had been a problem, mother and daughter would have been in the hands of the Almighty. The isolated hamlet of Lahama, with no electricity or running water, is on the high plateau of Tigray Province in Ethiopia’s remote north. A trained doctor or midwife with even rudimentary knowledge of modern medicine were at best five hours away on foot across the desolate Highlands.
Birhan’s father, Woldu Menamano, was out working his little terraced fields with his two sturdy plough oxen. As the red sun began to dip below the mountain crags, he made his way back through the lush fields of wheat, sorghum and barley, which swayed in the mountain breeze. Soon Woldu could see the rising plumes of white smoke billowing from Lahama’s cluster of dung- and wicker-walled, thatched sekelas.
Before Woldu went inside, a white-robed priest blessed the baby, sprinkling holy water on Birhan and around the sekela, its beams and thatched straw roof turned charcoal-black with woodsmoke. Woldu paused for a moment to allow his eyes to adjust from the fading sunlight to darkness. Bending down, he slowly made the sign of the Christian Cross over the baby’s forehead and whispered his own blessing. Tradition dictated he would not be able to hold his new daughter until she had been baptized, 80 days after her birth.
Woldu is a tiny man, barely 1.5 metres (5 feet) high, with a heavily lined, leathery face, a testament to a lifetime spent guiding the olive-wood plough and tending his cattle under the blazing African sun. Sipping bune, the rich Ethiopian coffee, or a home-brewed maize tella beer, he is a natural storyteller with a lyrical turn of phrase that often remains undiluted, even when translated from his native Tigrinya language. Birhan and the rest of Woldu’s extended family all listen reverently when he speaks. Today, wearing a treasured, but threadbare pale cream suit, a traditional white gabi shawl draped over his shoulders, protection against the chill of the mountain night air, Woldu’s dark eyes widen at the memory of Birhan’s birth. He already had two girls, Lemlem, aged four, and Azmera, just two.
‘I was so happy to set eyes on my beautiful little Birhan for the first time. My own childhood had been full of death, despair and suffering. I wanted my little girl to have a different life. I had passed the darkness of my early life and everything was now bright. So we called our new daughter Birhan, which means “light” in our language. Tigrayan farmers prefer boys; they are strong and can plough but I love my girls. I felt God had looked on me with fortune. I now had my own farm and a third daughter. The harvests had been good; I had honey and yoghurt for my beautiful wife and children.’
The little girl took her father’s first name ‘Woldu’ as her surname, following Ethiopian custom. There was no birth certificate, no registration. Nor could anyone in the extended family read and write to record the event. Like many in Ethiopia’s rural heartlands, Birhan does not know her birth date nor the exact year in which she was born. Woldu himself estimates that he is approximately 63. He laughs at what he sees as the Western fixation with age, saying: ‘I know when the sun rises and falls. Is that not enough? We were more worried about getting through each harvest with enough food for our children than worrying how old we were. God decides how long you have in this world.’
The best guess for Birhan’s birth year, her family say, is 1981 in the Western calendar. In January of that year former Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan became US President, just as the Cold War with the Soviet Union became more icy. In Britain, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was presiding over the yuppie age of materialism.
At some 2,300 metres (7,546 feet) above sea level, high in Tigray’s burnt-brown mountains, the often harsh life in isolated Lahama had remained largely unchanged for its subsistence farmers since the time of Christ. On a rocky and sun-baked incline above a meandering river valley, 20 or so extended families lived in sekela huts. Their