Ethiopia. In bits

Arriving

Yesterday the Ethiopian Prime Minister rocked up to our hotel along with 2,000 Ethiopian farmers wearing identical chalk white caps and t-shirts. It was National Farmers’ Day and the farmers, rows upon rows of white caps and t-shirts, watched young traditional dancers shimmy and step in the traditional style. They all wore white and the girls had Queen of Sheba hairdos. The next morning we saw the Ethiopian Prime Minister on TV talking to the nation about the troops they’ve sent to Somalia and the bombing of the major airports. The sharp american accent of the BBC World newsreader comes in over the top telling us it could unbalance the fragile stability of the region. The newsreader uses the word, Islamists.


The Joker, Bahir Dar

The B____ bar is red and tiny and packed on both sides with people sitting on low wooden chairs and stools. There’s a bar at the back (also full of people) and to the right of it a door out to the bluelit alleyway behind. A man with a mini drumkit sits in the space between the door and the bar. Dressed in traditional white garb with a wooden instrument held low on his waist, the top end pressing into his shoulder, a man strolls back and forth in the tiny amount of floorspace afforded him. His instrument is guitar-like, but with a diamond-shaped body and one thick blue string that he manipulates with his fingers and palm, drawing a curved wooden bow across the bottom. The place is packed with young Ethiopians and I can see their shoulders wiggling to the beat. The man with diamond guitar strolls back and forth, his eyes sparkly and mischievous. He has the look of a joker and sings little ditties making fun of people in the room. A big man behind the bar leans over a young man’s shoulders and drunkenly sings a ditty of his own. Four lines.
“You say, ‘How are you?’ in English.” The joker repeats the phrase with a flourish of his bow.
“I say, ‘How are you?’ in Amharic.” Again, and some more bow.
“How can we understand each other?” Repeated and a flourish.
“But in bed, there is no problem!”
The bar goes mad with everyone clapping and laughing. The drums kick in and everyone is smiling at us.


The Boatman, Lake Tana

The hotel manager is strange and sleazy with a cleanly shaven head, he invites us for a coffee, and then for wine after ripping us off on the boat trip to the monasteries. The Ghion Hotel looks right out over Lake Tana and there are pelicans on a pile of rock nearby and hornbills making noise in the high branches of the trees. A nervous monkey collects bits of food left over from the Farmers’ Day celebrations.
We spend Christmas day, lazy start, trying to avoid the manager who seems to appear instantly at our sides, as if he has sniffed the air and smelled us coming. We avoided him and his flashy mobile phone, jumping off the large, clean tourist minibus at the last minute when we realised that we didn’t want to spend the day with other tourists. We caught the nice boatman (who also seems to get screwed by the sleazy manager) and did a deal with him to take us to the mouth of the blue nile river. He’d taken us out to the island monasteries the day before and made animated jokes to the Ethiopian couple from Addis Ababa we shared the trip with. Later the couple told us what he’d be saying, imitating different nationalities and their tipping habits – Japanese, American, French, English.
“You say your price in birr and the Japanese are tentative.” The boatman bows his head and makes a mmmm noise, imitating his Japanese customer. “You ask him then, What about 50 dollars? And the Japanese looks up smiles say yes yes yes and gets the money out straight away.”
“Americans? No problem – they leave big, enormous tips. And Germans, too. the French are difficult and the English,” he says, knowing we are English and the trip is not over yet, “are fair. If they get good service, they will tip you nicely.”

The boatman is embarrassed that his jokes have been translated to us by the man from Addis Ababa with the gold tooth and gel in his thinning hair. His girlfriend/wife/woman is younger and beautiful and quietly smiles. But we all egg him on and ask, What about Ethiopians? How do they tip?


The girlfriend is scared of the boat tipping and smiles nervously every time someone climbs in or out of the boat. While we wait at the bottom of the island at the top of which the monastery sits in a green cloud of foliage, she teaches me one to ten in Amharic and writes the script next to my own phonetic spellings. She seems pleased to help me and I think, with her beauty and quietness, she would make a good teacher. We are not allowed on the island because, as women, we would be a huge distraction to the monks who have there without such distractions on their turf since the middling ages. No Entrance For Lady. The men brought us back a photograph of this sign and of the ancient books of Mattius, Marcus, Luka, and Johannes, and of frescoes and of a monk holding a Lalibela Cross.

While we waited for the men to visit the monastery, we shared bananas and the boatman told us the story of an Italian woman who refused to accept that she wasn’t allowed up with the men, marched straight up to the gate beyond which the path led up the hill to the monastery. Our boatman sat on the dock drawing a sign for a monk who had emerged from the bushes. He traced the sun-faded symbols with his pen. The Italian woman was stopped at the gate by some Ethiopians – maybe the monks themselves – and a fracas ensued, she wouldn’t give up, she shouted and tussled. Eventually a fellow Italian was able to calm her down. And she not pass through the gate. The boatman continues to trace the Amharic script as he tells the story, shaking his head, laughing. She was a crazy woman. The monk stood by, nodding. It seemed we women posed no distraction whatsoever to this monk. And I felt the slightest trace of resentment, the barest inkling of indignation at having been excluded from the monastery for simply not being a man. A memory of feminism/equality, that dirty word, where does that fit into tradition and religion?

st gabriel, monastery, ethiopia

3 CORPSE PROVERBS

No. 2
Adhabu ya kaburi aijua maiti.
The torment of the grave is known by the corpse.

No. 4
Aibu ya maiti aijua mwosha.
The corpse washer knows the defects of the deceased.
cf. No man is a hero to his wife.

No. 174
Mwosha hadhuru maiti.
The washer of corpses does no harm to the dead.

Selections from FriendFinder
The Citizen, Tanzania
16th December 2006







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Pope Valley, 11th August

My young nephew says, “You’ll never guess what’s in the freezer!” and everyone laughs. We had just been discussing the birth of eight Irish Wolfhound puppies, my mum and dad proud and exhausted parents, up at three in the morning to the whimper and scuffle of little paws as they make sure that the canine mother does not inadvertently squish a puppy beneath her enormous frame. I wonder about that and, if I had eight puppies hanging off my teats, whether I wouldn’t inadvertently roll over on top of one or two.

“What’s in the freezer?” I don’t want to ask the question or hear the answer but my nephew is so excited about it, he’s bouncing on his skinny knees next to me on the couch, grinning. I have helped weigh the puppies and am aware that we only weighed seven little bundles of joy. So I think I know what is in the freezer.

I have come home for two weeks to Pope Valley California from Tanzania for a holiday, but specifically to be part of the rare event that all my family members are in the same place at once. It took me three days to get here and I am unsure if people should be allowed to travel so far in such a short space of time, without transport, without any process to account for time and space changing so drastically. Not to mention my bowels’ adverse reaction to additives, preservatives and e numbers.

I knew it would be a sort of circus. My mum fore-warned me that, ‘things will just be crazy’ and ‘ you’ll just have to bear with us’. Family circus aside, the shock and awe of America never softens no matter how many times you return. Culture shock manifests itself in many different ways, conscious and sub-conscious, external (large shopping malls and thousands of TV channels) and internal (longing to talk to someone who understands the meaning of hali halisi or why I went to Africa in the first place).

So, somewhere in the freezer, wrapped up and sitting snug in a ziplock bag, is the small frozen body of the eighth puppy. My parents are amused by the look of disgust on my face and the shock in my voice, “Are you serious?” My nephew, bouncing and grinning, nods his head frantically. “So, if I dig around in the back of the freezer looking for frozen peas, I might actually come across a frozen puppy?” My mum says, “No, no. He’s right at the front, just under the ice cube tray.” She finds this hilarious. I find it disturbing. I wonder if my parents are considering cryogenics.

There are many times on trips back to England or America from Tanzania, when I find myself asking, perhaps unfairly, “What would Tanzanians think?” At my parents house it is no different. I find myself wondering what Tanzanians would think of our massive American fridge, well stocked with all sorts of foods, drinks and condiments. But it is not a fair comparison. Some people have a picture in their heads that Africans live in ascetic simplicity in mud huts, that they are somehow nobler because of their lack of fridges and drinks and condiments. But Tanzanians are just like the rest of us – they like TV, big cars, money. What is noble about the Tanzanians I know, is that they do not give up their sense of humour about the absurdity of life, even when everything is shit and the Big Potatoes remain Big Potatoes despite rampant corruption and impotent politics.

And yet, as I watch my nephew go to open the freezer, I do feel fairly justified in asking myself, What would Tanzanians think about keeping a frozen puppy in the freezer?

The Wahehe, the local tribe, are reknowned for their ferocity (they successfully battled the Germans’ canons and guns back in the day, before being slaughtered), their tendency to commit suicide (Chief Mkwawa killed himself before the Germans could get to him) and the rumour that they eat dogs.

Some people say that the Hehe word for beans “dogi” was misunderstood by colonials. Others, say it is just a myth. I once came across a band of street kids trying to kill a scabby dog. Almost all the dogs here are mangy and quite often dangerous, rarely cute and cuddly, probably because people do not treat them as pets. Most dogs are locked up in small wooden ‘bandas’ during the day and let out at night when they become ferocious guards. The kids had tied ropes to the dog’s legs and were banging it against the pavement. I wondered how kids can be so cruel to animals. I wanted them to stop. But when I asked them what they were doing, the kids looked up at me and said, We are hungry.

I think about the frozen puppy in the freezer at my parents’ house. I think about the litter of puppies that were born near the rubbish hole in our garden here, under the papaya tree. One died of something mysterious and awful and I remember coming upon him in early morning, his body hard and taught, eyes open, vacant. I was heartbroken. And besides, what do you do with a dead dog?

Our Tanzanian freezer is tiny and anyway it never crossed my mind to put him in the freezer, even if there was a ziplock baggie big enough. Luckily for us, we have a night guard who helps us with the things that we didn’t grow up with – dead dogs, big rats, massive cockroaches, robbers. Valentino, an old and cheeky Hehe man, laughs bronchially every time we shout for him to throw out the body of a poisoned rat or tackle the black wasps that sting your eyes and temporarily paralyse you. He chuckles when he sees me, near to tears, as I show him the puppy corpse. He loves the fact that we need him. He says we are like his grandchildren.

My eight year old nephew is back to bouncing on the couch next to me, cackling. He wants me to look in the freezer, he wants me to look at the frozen puppy. He has all the enthusiasm for gore that his age demands. My brother is reading a book but I can see him smiling out of the corner of my eye. Everyone is vaguely amused by my repulsion and I know Valentino would be laughing, too, though perhaps for different reasons.

I disappoint my nephew and start pulling ingredients out of the cupboards for lunch. I would rather spend my time in California enjoying the family circus and appreciating the easy comfort, the kitchen appliances and the beauty of the oak speckled valley where my parents live.

Several months later, I am back in Tanzania, and it occurs to me to ask my parents why they were keeping the eighth puppy in the freezer. I am used to their eccentricities now, though it still disturbs me to think that I have been replaced by four Irish Wolfhounds, or that the cost of feeding such mammoth dogs is inappropriate if you plug it into my worldview. It seems somehow wrong to me when there is so much need elsewhere.

I have never directly said this to my parents for fear of upsetting them but also because it sounds unbelievably self-righteous. They have built their lives around their dogs and they love them without apology or embarrassment. So I am learning to do the same, to accept my parents for who they are and realise that long before dog shows and irish wolfhound paraphernalia, my parents devoted their entire lives to the two little blobs that became myself and my brother. They made us and then helped make us who we are and for that I am only just starting to be grateful.

My dad tells me the reason the eighth puppy was in the freezer. The ground was too hard to dig a grave deep enough to stop the coyotes from exhuming and munching on the body. Fair enough, I think.

“It should not be physically possible to get from the banks of the Pepani river to Wyoming in less than two days, because mentally and emotionally it is impossible. The shock is too much, the contrast too raw. We should sail or swim or walk from Africa, letting bits of her drop out of us, and gradually, in this way assimilate the excesses and liberties of the States in tiny incremental sips, maybe touring through South America and Mexico before trying to stomach the land of the Free and the Brave.”
– Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat

clare in front of our house

Beer Bottle Legs

I have been away for no longer than a week, in the lowlands stretching towards the Mozambicque border, in Songea a southern regional town with red dirt and hot sun. I was attending a conference for the organisation I work for and we were put up in a crumbling government hotel attached to the football stadium, which also doubled as the Coka Cola depot. We woke every morning to the rhythmic crashing of crates of empty bottles thrown from truck to depot, from depot to truck.

The MajiMaji Complex smelled alternatively of urine and beer. My colleague warned me of cockroaches ‘the size of cats’ and I did see some the size of a small mobile phones scurry from the light as I walked into my room. The mosquito net seemed intact and yet still in the middle of the night, half awake, I sensed the little mozzies buzzing and in feverish half-sleep scratching bites. I woke up to red and raised bumps on suprising parts of my body. When I tried to inspect every corner of the net for stray mosquitoes I found a tag in the corner revealing it came from UNICEF.

On returning to Iringa, I feel like I am coming home. The mountains, scattered with boulders like God’s marbles, rise up behind the town.

As I walk into the office, Fatuma greets me with her massive smile and black beehive hair and I am happy to be back. Our office is based at the Municipal youth centre, which is little more than a massive hall and some rooms. There are some cool things, like a library with youth magazines and sexual health information and some funky half-finished wall murals depicting the issues that confront young people in Tanzania. But there is a long way to go before you might call it a youth centre as we know it.

Fatuma says, Karibu! And, Mbona umenenepa? Immediately I am irritated. I had forgotten that any time you go away and return, there are two things that will inevitably come up.

One, What have you brought me? Each region has its own speciality. If you go to Mbeya, you will be expected to return with lovely purple beans. If you go to Songea, they say, Bring us some sweet potatoes! If you go to Ilula, it is tomatoes, Tukuyu, green bananas, Dar-es-Salaam, anything.

Two, But why have you gotten so fat? What have you been eating there? You have been eating life, eh? Sweet life over there, eh? I try to explain to my Tanzania colleagues and, in fact, anyone who greets me with the rhetorical fat question, that In Our Culture, it is not a Good Thing to be fat. The question used to make me wonder whether I had in fact put on a few pounds or if I was wearing particularly unflattering outfit or if I’d eaten too many greasy omelettes on the road.

Fortunately, I enjoy food and drink just enough to want to stick with it, no matter how many people talk about my massive hips and bottom. No matter how big my hips and bottom truly are. Within reason. I am not into obesity.

After a few years of this, I have undertaken informal but continuous research every time I return from a trip. Often it has more to do with what clothes I am wearing (I’ve learned skirts are better than trousers) and just as often it seems completely random. Someone might exclaim, with characteristic mock surprise, how much weight I have put on and later the same day, someone else wonders at my slim figure. Someone else might say, Oh you were really fat back then, you are thin now.

If you actually listen to these remarks, you start to look at yourself through a wonky mirror, like trying to imagine how other people truly perceive you. It is impossible to judge. I turn around and around in front of the long mirror in our livingroom, like a dog getting ready to sleep. I look at my bum. Wiggle it. Is it really bigger? I try to gauge the snugness of my clothes. It’s true I would like to be slim and svelte and fit inside someone’s pocket. Everyone wants something impossible. But for the most part, for 99% of my waking life, I do not give it another thought. Until the next time I return from a trip and Faraja asks, “But why…”.

I force a little laughter, the culture of thin is not that easily cast off. I realise that there is no answer to this question. It is asked simply to remark that you have been away, living it up somewhere else and now you’re back. It is asked in the same way we might say, You look great or, You’re really tanned to someone returning from holiday. It is a way to answer the question of seeing someone again.

So I answer the question – though Faraja wasn’t looking for an answer in particular – with a list of foods that I have consumed in the past forty-eight hours. They all laugh and look me up and down, pinch my underarm just where the flab is. But you have a nice shape, a figure of 8. Not like those English figures. You have an African figure.

Great. English figure is what many of us have been striving to find underneath our flesh and bones (some less maniacally than others), the perfect slimline shape. African figure looks much better on Africans, I think.

As I walk out of the office, I shout over my shoulder, Tomorrow Jamani! And they shout back, Kesho! I can feel them watching me and I hear Faraja say, Cheki miguu, chupa za bia hizo! I know she is teasing me on purpose. She has told me before I have beer bottle legs. As opposed to what? I asked. Oh, we have legs like… soda bottles, maybe. It was if she had never thought about it. How do my legs look like beer bottles? She made a motion with her hand to show an upside-down beer bottle. I think of the thick brown Kilimanjaro bottles. Ah, the bulge of the calf.

Yesterday I was walking down the street, past the madness of the daladala stand – banana-sellers, colourful flipflops jumbled on tarpaulin, the pigadebe shouting at passengers, selling seats on the minibuses for small change, their eyes bloodshot, their breath boozy. Two young women walked past me and one said to the other, Wow, did you see those hips? I smile to myself and turn around long enough to catch their eyes and laugh, long enough for them to realise I understand.