Feed the World: Birhan Woldu and Live Aid. Oliver Harvey
in hand-quarried stone hidmo farmsteads of astonishingly skilled masonry. All were scattered above the banks of a river called Mai-Shashasta, meaning ‘water splash’, which is little more than a trickle for much of the year.
Birhan remembers the seasonal rains coming and turning it into a swirling, muddy torrent as flash floods swept the rich soil from the mountains. In the early morning and late afternoon she would accompany her sisters, Lemlem and Azmera, and the village children as they trekked laughing and singing down to the river bank in knots of threes and fours. With their clay pots, jerry cans and plastic bottles they would haul back all the water needed for their families’ daily cooking and cleaning. Dangling from their necks by a thin cord given to them at baptism were lucky charms and talismans to ward off evil spirits, horrific diseases and times of hunger. ‘There was so much laughter,’ Birhan remembers. ‘Life was so carefree at times. When the harvests were good, Lahama was like a paradise.’
Yet, when the rains fail in the Highlands, a common occurrence, there is drought, and if they keep failing, famine. In this precarious land the families are purposefully large, as security against the ravages of starvation and disease.
The mountains are often shrouded with mist as the sun rises. Temperatures sometimes drop well below freezing and the howling winds make it seem even colder. Birhan remembers the whole family huddling together at night to keep warm while they slept on ox skins under blankets. Then the midday sun could be broiling and unforgiving.
The rains were good when Birhan was a baby. Irrigated fields become lush green against the surrounding burnt hills. Woldu grew carrots, sorghum, spinach, barley, wheat and the native tef grain, the main ingredient of Ethiopia’s staple dish injera bread. Another delicacy Birhan remembers the villagers loved was the prickly pear cactus fruit that grew throughout the village. Honey is also a delicacy – when the big meher rains come in mid-June, the flowers on the mountain pastures bloom in a burst of life, allowing bees to produce a distinct, sweet fluid famous throughout the country. Woldu says his hives produced some of the best honey in the village. Often served with crisp white bread as a church festival meal, it is also used to make tej, a honey wine that is the national drink of Ethiopia.
After the valley has blossomed, it is alive with bird life. Brilliant white cattle egrets bob up and down on the swirling air currents like giant butterflies above the river meadows. Carmine bee-eaters, with their brilliant green–blue head plumage and pinkish brown wings, feast on parasites while perched on the back of the cattle.
‘Lahama was our Garden of Eden,’ Birhan says, her face lighting up at the memory. ‘The fields would turn bright green after the big rains. There was a little patch of grass sheltered by acacia trees where the children of the village came together to play. We called it Maida-Tseba. It was just a small patch of meadow and a few scattered bushes but it was magical to us. It was our secret world. Although it was a beautiful valley, life was very hard for my father who would work all the daylight hours in the fields. There were no schools or doctors in Lahama then. There was no electricity, TVs or radios. We had no idea what was going on in the outside world. I’m not sure we really cared.’
Woldu would rise with the sun and work the fields with his oxen, whose sweeping horns were identical to those seen painted on the walls of the tombs of Egypt’s pharaohs. Like all rural Ethiopian men, he carried a hardwood staff called a dula. It is part weapon, walking stick and cattle prod. Most often it is used as a balance aid, laid across the shoulders with the owner’s hands curled up to clasp the wood on either side. When the light begins to go in the late afternoon, the shadows cast by men carrying them in this way make them look as if they are being crucified. Some days Woldu would load his donkeys with firewood and honey to sell at the nearest market at Kwiha. The dustbowl town, a five-hour trek across ravines and upland pastures, is a natural gathering point for the cluster of mountain villages around Lahama. It lies on the main arterial trunk road connecting Addis Ababa, with the Tigrayan capital, Mekele, and, eventually, with neighbouring Eritrea and the Red Sea.
Alemetsehay, her hair painstakingly braided in traditional cornrows, would help out with the back-breaking harvesting and planting in the fields. Amid the swirling woodsmoke inside the sekela, Alemetsehay, a pewter Christian Cross dangling from her neck, would also spend much of her time preparing family meals. A daily chore was baking the spongy, pancake-like injera on a large, black, clay plate called a mogogo over a cow dung-fuelled fire. With Birhan, Lemlem and Azmera playing at her feet, she would grind grain, roast coffee beans and brew tella beer. The barefoot village children, their heads shaved bar a single long tuft (to enable God to pluck them to heaven should they fall sick), tended the goat and cattle herds, protecting them from attacks by hyenas. Later, when she was old enough, Birhan would become a goatherd, spending long days alone with her flock on the mountainside. But at that time, Lemlem and Azmera would drag along baby Birhan to Woldu’s well-tended fields where they were charged with protecting the root crops from scavenging porcupines. ‘If you want to kill them you have to hit their feet first with sticks or stones,’ Woldu explains. ‘Their feet are their weak points.’
Ethiopia is a land where elders and grey hairs are respected and obeyed. Birhan refers to her father as ‘Ato Woldu’ – ‘Mr Woldu’ – as a mark of respect. She listens intently as he describes his family’s early years, a glass of tella beer in his hand. ‘I love him so much. I owe every thing to him,’ she says.
Devoutly Christian, Woldu tells how famine, pestilence and even plagues of locusts have dogged his six decades. The family patriarch was born in a sekela hut a six-hour walk over the mountains from Lahama in the village of Adi Hidug. The year, he thinks, was 1948. By the age of five he was orphaned – his father, Gebregergis, had perished from some undefined ‘fever’ (a description applied to most diseases in the mountains) and his mother, Aleme, died in childbirth, a still tragically common cause of death in this isolated region today. She was, Woldu says, ‘light skinned’ and so beautiful that ‘people from other villages would call in just to gaze at her’. Woldu has a sharp memory and feels obvious pride in describing his family history in the Ethiopian oral tradition.
‘We were a poor farming family. Life was very hard. Famine was not so bad then but we had plagues of locusts that made the sky go black. If the land grew infertile or there was famine we simply moved to another place where there was rain and good soil. There was plenty of space for us all then. There was no outside aid in those times. If you went hungry you died. We weren’t educated people. School was nothing but a dream to me. I can’t read or write. If you bought me a big clock and put it on the wall there I would have no idea what the time was. I just look at the sun and where it is in the sky. I only remember the time of year by the church feast days.’
Woldu was left in the care of his sisters. The family had 10 cows and many goats and Woldu was in charge of the livestock herds. He says his sisters treated him badly.
‘My sisters’ boys wouldn’t go into the fields so I did all the work. I was always hungry. I would only be given a handful of roasted barley a day to eat. I was so unhappy I cried in the fields; then I cried silent tears when I slept in our sekela.’
At the age of 12 he ran away from home to work as a cattle herder for a rich family. In return the family gave him a patch of land to farm for himself. Any profits he made, he could keep. He had no home of his own and would sleep under the stars next to the cattle.
‘I grew wheat. If I had a good crop I would lend 100kg (220lb) of the crop to those in need. When they could give it back they would give me 150kg (330lb). It was a sort of loan with interest. In the good times I would make a little money and I could buy clothes. If there were locusts I made nothing. I lived like this for many, many years during the Haile Selassie regime.’
Haile Selassie, Ethiopia’s Negus Negast or ‘King of Kings’, was said to have a divine right to rule. The Ethiopian Constitution insisted he was the 237th monarch in an unbroken line from the biblical King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Other official titles bestowed on him were ‘Elect of God’ and ‘Conquering Lion of Judah’. A tiny, seemingly mild-mannered man, Haile Selassie had ruled the nation since 1916, first as a regent, then from 1930 as Emperor. His lavish