Feed the World: Birhan Woldu and Live Aid. Oliver Harvey
present-day Prime Minister Meles Zenawi became its Chairman in 1985.) Bitter fighting between the TPLF and the government went on for years. Birhan’s face contorts at the mention of the Derg. The men with guns even came to the remote, wind-blown valleys around Lahama. ‘We tried to avoid the soldiers,’ Woldu recalls. ‘If the Derg soldiers wanted food we had to hand it over. It was a terrifying time.’
The rains had returned to the Highlands after the famine of 1973 and the harvests were plentiful in Lahama. Woldu and Alemetsehay decided to start a family and in about 1977 Lemlem, meaning ‘green’ or ‘fertile’, was born. Scratching his grizzled beard, Woldu says: ‘Alemetsehay prepared me a lunch of injera, then less than an hour later Lemlem was born. She was a lovely child, very sweet natured.’ Another girl, Azmera, followed in 1979 and two years later Alemetsehay was expecting again. This time with Birhan.
‘Lemlem and Azmera were very similar children,’ Woldu murmurs. ‘Both were quiet, placid and very contented. Birhan was different from her older sisters. She was the most quick witted. Unlike her sisters, Birhan never stopped talking.’
However, when she was just one year old, Birhan was struck down by a mystery fever. Woldu and Alemetsehay prayed to the Lord. When their daughter grew weak, her eyes swollen, the local traditional healers knew exactly what had to be done. Woldu took a razor blade and carefully made several vertical incisions on the arches of Birhan’s eyebrows. The ‘bad’ crimson blood flowed freely. Then using the blade again, he made another cut on her forehead, first a horizontal followed by a longer vertical incision that bisected the first. Slowly he intoned: ‘In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’. The bad blood flowed again. Like many in Ethiopia, Birhan has the mark of Christ, a crucifix-shaped scar now on her forehead.
Christianity is fundamental to Birhan’s Highland people. The Ethiopian Orthodox religion arrived in these wild uplands some three centuries after Christ’s death when Rome was still officially pagan and much of northern Europe was still centuries away from converting. There are 30 Old Testament references to Ethiopia or ‘Cush’ as it was known to the Hebrews. Moses himself married an Ethiopian woman. In Genesis it is written that the Ghion River, believed to be the Blue Nile, which has its source in Lake Tana in the Highlands, ‘compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia’. The land is dotted with monasteries and holy relics. Should they stray from the path of righteousness, the God of the peasant farmers of Lahama is the vengeful and unforgiving Old Testament divinity of Abraham and Moses.
‘The Church has always been central to our lives,’ Birhan explains. ‘We follow the calendar by feast days. Every day of the month is dedicated to a particular saint. My father remembers our family history by the feast days.’
The Orthodox Church services are in Ge’ez, an ancient Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic, which is sub-Saharan Africa’s only ancient written language. It is the Latin of Africa, a liturgical language no longer spoken yet closely related to Ethiopia’s national language Amharic, as well as Tigrinya. The Ethiopian Church claims a fragment of the True Cross is buried under the Gishen Mariam monastery in the Wollo region. In the holy city of Lalibela a solid gold cross is said to have miraculously appeared as a mason chiselled the walls of one of the city’s famous rock-hewn churches. Legend has it that the holes in the stone surrounding Lalibela’s Bet Giyorgis Church are the hoof prints left by St George mounted on a horse. Birhan has never been to Lalibela but it is her long-held dream to make a pilgrimage there.
In Aksum, north of Mekele, Ethiopia’s greatest treasure, the biblical Ark of the Covenant, the wooden chest containing the stone tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed, is said to lie in the treasury of the Church of Our Lady of Zion. However, only a single monk is allowed to see it. Replicas of the Ark, known as tabots, are kept in Lahama’s Kidane Mehret Church and in every church across Ethiopia.
Like most Ethiopians, Birhan is convinced the Ark lies in her homeland. Woldu shares her faith. ‘God has the power to make the sun rise every morning. Why shouldn’t the Ark be in Aksum?’ Many historians remain unconvinced, however.
Christianity arrived in Ethiopia in the fourth century spread by a Syrian monk called Frumentius. It is a story well known to Ethiopian schoolchildren. Captured as a boy when his ship docked on the Red Sea coast in what is now Eritrea, Frumentius was taken to the ancient city state of Aksum as a slave. The city in Tigray’s Highlands was one of the powers of the ancient world. At its height it ruled a kingdom from the Nile in Sudan, across the Red Sea to Yemen. The third-century writer Manni described Aksum as one of the four great kingdoms in the world along with Rome, China and Persia. Frumentius rose to a position of power and eventually converted Aksum’s King Ezana to Christianity, after which he became Ethiopia’s first bishop. Today, Ethiopians know Frumentius as Abba Selama, Kesaté Birhan in Amharic – which translates as ‘Father of Peace, Revealer of Light’.
Although Tigray is predominately Christian, Islam arrived in Ethiopia during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad. Some of his most respected disciples found refuge in Aksum, leading Muhammad to command his followers to ‘leave the Abyssinians in peace’. Later the conquering armies of Islam swept through North Africa leaving Ethiopia cut off from the holy city of Jerusalem and the rest of Christendom. The word of the Prophet also spread down Africa’s east coast on the dhows (one- or two-masted, lateen-rigged ships) of Arab traders. To the west and south, the country was surrounded by deserts and fierce Lowland tribes. A marooned outpost of Christianity, it led to the belief that it was the kingdom of the mythical medieval priest–king Prester John, a realm whose wealth and vast armies would one day come to the aid of its Christian brothers in the north. Birhan explains that Ethiopian Christians and Muslims today live happily side by side. They respect each other’s faiths. Thus, Birhan’s early life in Lahama revolved around the Church and her parents’ little farm, a pre-industrial society that has changed little since the time of Christ.
‘I gradually built up my herds,’ her father says. ‘Having cattle means prestige and wealth – the same as having many children. From cows you get milk and butter and then money. Then life is good. God had looked kindly on me. My family were all healthy; my herds strong.’ At this point, Woldu pauses, remaining quiet for what seemed an age. The only sound was the twitter of weaver birds in a nearby acacia tree. His face suddenly contorts; his brown eyes far away as if seeing another landscape. ‘Then our world turned black,’ he murmurs. ‘As pitch black as the darkest night.’
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