Ras Tafarians and the Red Terror

Those who mourn the lost martyrs...

In 1930, Prince Ras Tafari (say it fast, and you unlock the inspiration of a whole new dreadlocked religion), was crowned the king of Ethiopia.  He got a new name, Emperor Haile Selassie, a new gorgeous palace at the Northern section of Addis, and the next year, Ethiopia got a new constitution that granted the Emperor almost total power.  Fortunately, for at least a chunk of time, Selassie was a benevolent, dog-loving leader who made big investments in both country-wide infrastructure and a personal fleet of sports cars.

In 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia, hoping to annex the country to connect its two neighboring colonies, Eritrea and Somalia.  By 1936, Italians has captured Addis, and Selassie left the country to appeal to the League of Nations to help oust Italy.  No such luck.  A groundswell resistance brewed from Ethiopian patriots, and in 1941, with some aid from the British (who now wanted to see Italy weakened as part of WWII), Ethiopians finally defeated Mussolini’s six years of brutal, violent rule in their home. 

The 1940 and 50’s were a time of rebuilding, establishing Ethiopian Airlines (which we love), Addis Ababa University (which is beautiful), a new national currency, and the headquarters of the UN Economic Commission for Africa.  It was this globally connected and educated populous that was not just disappointed by the slow pace of development, but they were appalled at the famine of 1972-1974 that Selassie’s court kept hidden.  In 1974, the Derg, a radical military group emerged as a challenge to Selassie’s rule, and after populous strikes from teachers, taxi workers, and students, the Derg succeeded in ousting Selassie.  In contrast to his usual ride in a fancy car, the Derg escorted him Selassie to prison in the back of a VW Bug.

With new leadership, the populous uprisings passed for a few years, while the Derg’s Colonel Mengistu instituted Marxist rule.  The nationalization of banks and farms under socialist rule was at first a boon for Ethiopian peasants, by 1977, the Derg had launched a campaign of absolute suppression of any critics of the government.  In the Red Terror, which lasted 17 years, more than 100,000 people were killed, twice as many were tortured and imprisoned, and several thousand fled the country.  This number doesn’t account for the million more starved to death in the 1974 and 1984 famines – started by drought, perpetuated by bad government who wanted a weakened population.  

This week we visited the Martyr Museum in the middle of Addis’ Meskel Square that records all this history and honors the resistance fighters who were killed by a corrupt and power-hungry government.   When we walked into an exhibit on Selassie’s first constitution, we had no idea we would walk out past a display of human bones from excavated mass graves.  And we had no idea that the current heavy-handed Prime Minister Zenawi is the same one who helped defeat the Derg in 1991.  

The final row of the museum was covered mug shots of all of the students, intellectuals, workers, and regular people who had perished at the hands of the Derg or who fled the country for asylum.  Sara looked for a long time for the photo of her college mentor, Tadessa Adera.  In Sara's first semester of African Literature her freshman year, Tadessa alluded to his imprisonment by the Derg, and he promised to tell the rest of his story later.  Tadessa later passed and along with him his story -- a story that rings familiar for thousands of proud nationals who resisted.

Addis Ababa University, photo credit: Nancy Oyler, guest photographer.

Today we visited another museum – the Ethnological Museum at the University of Addis Ababa, housed in Selassie’s former palace.

Walking across the campus, you could feel the sense of hopefulness -- this was the place where young Ethiopians from across the country were coming to learn the lessons of the past and to plan for their country's future.

A little bit ADDIS, a little bit a dat.

We arrived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia at the crack of January dawn, bloated after 3 weeks of Greek food, hung-over after drinking a little too much at the Cairo airport with a Californian on his way to Saudi Arabia and a Hungarian on his way to Thailand, and confused as to why we were greeted once we got off the plane with "Merry Christmas!" We specifically escaped to Africa to avoid the American winter and somehow found ourselves in a perpetual state of the holiday: the decorative lead-up in Accra, the children ringing triangles on Santorini on December 24th, the celebration of Greek Orthodox Epiphany in Athens on January 6th, and landing in Addis for Ethiopian Christmas, celebrated on January 7th (naturally).

Tiniest hotel room ever

Although we needed a minute to adjust to a new time zone, currency, language, smell, and altitude (Addis sits at 7700 ft), it felt good to be back on the continent. All we needed was a good night sleep, and we'd be ready to fall in love with the country that had been raved about by so many the world over.

It's been nearly three weeks. We're not smitten. We haven't hired movers to pack up our stuff and ship it over here. We haven't joined hoards of Westerners at adoption agencies. In fact, we've said, "I miss Dakar" more times than we ever thought we would.

But, Ethiopia is important on the African continent economically, politically, and culturally. The IMF forecasts Ethiopia's economic growth rate (8.5%) between 2011-2015 to be the 3rd highest in the world, only behind China and India. Ethiopians proudly boast that their country is the only one on the continent that was never colonized (notwithstanding a brief Italian occupation from 1935-41). 

That uniqueness and a rich history of strong empires, combined with a 17-year repressive communist state, make for an interesting political climate with a mix of local and foreign influences. With the discovery of Lucy, a 3.2 million year old skeleton believed to be the oldest and most complete hominid, Ethiopia claims to be the cradle of humankind (though recently even older skulls have been found in Chad and Kenya...whatever), and with more than 80 different languages spoken, it is one of the most diverse countries on the continent.

And, you can't know Ethiopia without knowing its capital, Addis Ababa. Meaning 'new flower', Addis is the 4th largest city in Africa, and as home to the Organization of African Unity, is seen as the continent's diplomatic hub. Made up of rural farmers coming to the city for a better life, slum dwellers, a moneyed-elite, foreign investors and aid workers, and pan-African cosmopolitans, Addis is a swanky, smelly, spicy, mess of a metropolis.

It's impossible to typify the city in one anecdote or encounter, so we give you a little bit Addis, a little bit a dat.*

Raw meat on almost every menu.

The Food

After a gluttonous feta and moussaka-filled Greek Christmas, Julienne gave up cheese for 2012. For the whole entire year (?!?!?!). (JO note: It's called a New Year's resolution, people!) Fortunately, there is enough deliciousness in Ethiopian food that even Sara could handle a meal without dairy. In fact, every Wednesday and Friday, Ethiopian Orthodox Christians "fast". But let’s not be silly, fasting doesn't mean not eating. It means that you can eat anything you want as long as it doesn't come from an animal (like cheese), unless it's fish...or jello...those are Biblically sanctioned exceptions. It's like being sorta vegan two days per week. We're not complaining, the cheese-less "fasting pizza" is pretty awesome, though we haven't tried the variety with tuna.

Extra berbere, just in case.

On most days though, we’re eating piles and piles of lentils (kikalecha), chickpeas with berbere (shiro), spicy chicken and egg stew (dorowat), and minced spinach (gomen).  And we’re doing it all with our fingers.  Food here is served communal style, with a big metal plate centered on a squat, knee-high table. We could go on and on, but since 90% of the people reading the blog have either been to Meskerem or recently bought the DC area Groupon, you get our drift.

Pickpockets in the Piazza

In 3 months in West Africa, neither of us had ever been (or attempted to be) pick pocketed. We didn't take any specific precautions, like wear a money belt, stylish (reads obvious) as they are. So it was a bit of a surprise to have not one, not two, but three pickpocket attempts in our first 72 hours here. But, since we're now seasoned travelers, all 3 attempts (and the 7 since) were thwarted. Here's how they went down:

1. Dude man standing on a crowded street corner decides to hawk a big loogie. He "doesn't see" Julienne as he spits while turning around. "Surprised" that he "accidentally" spit down her pants, dude man grabs a convenient tissue out of his pocket and starts wiping it off. While he's distracting her by wiping the spit off with one hand, he reaches into her front pocket with the other hand. Wise to this maneuver, Julienne grabs his wrist with every "hustler-hating, get your tour offering, no I don't want to go to a traditional coffee ceremony or buy a bogus DVD" bone in her body and twists like there's no tomorrow. We wished he had successfully picked her pocket, though, only to walk away with the super tampon she had in there.

2. Some high on glue street kid walked straight up to Sara, put his hand in the front pocket of her jeans (twice), and on the second try she smacked his forearm so hard that the donkey across the road started jogging away.

3. Oh yeah, you're going to try to unzip my backpack. Sure, that might work if you didn't smell like you fell head first into a keg of moonshine and said, 'hey my seesta', as you grabbed the pack. Idiot.

Better students -- at school in the Merkato.

Amharic Lessons

We had such an easy time with French, why not tackle Amharic?  After Greek, we figured we could up our game with the fourth alphabet system we’ve encountered on this trip.  First word: coffee.  Second word:  beer.  Third word: another please.  We found a local tutor on the Addis ex-pat Craigslist, plopped down in a café with him, and then proceeded to pepper him with “how do you say…” questions.  Three weeks later, with only a few more words in our vocab, we are still absolutely unable to read a thing.  Similar to French, most is gendered, and while we don’t always remember to “-nesh” our “salaams” to women, we’re getting quite a few smiles at the effort. 

Timkat and the Orthodox Warblers

After much searching for a guesthouse that had hot water, was no more than twice our original budget, didn't have a box of condoms in the ash tray, and had "internet access" (we use the quotations very liberally), we found a new place tucked behind the Bole Mendel Alem Orthodox Cathedral.  To our good fortune, or so we thought, this meant that we would be close by to participate in Timkat, the Ethiopian Epiphany. Considering we had just celebrated Epiphany in Greece two weeks earlier we thought we would have a leg up on the celebration. Not so.

In Ethiopia, Epiphany is not only the celebration of Jesus' baptism, it's also inextricably entwined with national pride at being the host of Moses' tablets, encased in the Arc of the Covenant.  Each local church has a replica of the Arc, and on Timkat, the parishioners dress in their most baptismal white clothes, and solemnly carry the Arc to the town center, escorted by full on throngs of singing children and supplicating grandmas. The whole city shuts down, everyone is dressed beautifully and covered with an umbrella parasol for the mid-day walk, and the Arc is carried along a moving walkway of red carpet, carried on the shoulders of teenage boys. It's awesome.

Here's the catch: we thought we were had faced the worst 4 am call to prayer in Muslim West Africa, but nothing could prepare us for the agony of Ethiopian Orthodox Amharic hymns blaring from the neighboring church loud speakers from 3 am - 8 am each night for the past five nights. Straight. Five straight hours. Five. Straight. Hours. And like the Australians who play continuous notes on the didgeridoo by inhaling and exhaling simultaneously, so do the warbling Orthodox priests. You'd think they'd at least need a bathroom break.

Ethiopian Calendar

"Welcome to Ethiopia. Welcome to 13 months of sunshine." Excuse me, 13 months of sunshine? Keep talking.

Ethiopians, we quickly discovered, operate on two calendar systems. First, the Ethiopian calendar, invented by god knows who (actually Wikipedia probably knows, but it was shut down in protest the day of research), runs on a 12 hour clock each day and 13 months per year. Therefore, January 1, 2012 by the Roman calendar is actually the 1st day of the 5th month in the year 2004 per the Ethiopian calendar. "So you are 7 years younger when you visit Ethiopia, hahahahahahah."

Not quite following yet? Here's the explanation we got:

Time: Because Ethiopia is "close to the equator or something like that", the 12 hour clock starts at sunrise and then again at sunset, it and reflects the amount of daylight and darkness. For instance, 7am by non-Ethiopian time is 1 o'clock in Ethiopia, or 1 hour after the sunrise. 7pm is also 1 o'clock because it is 1 hour after the sun sets. Ethiopians don't use am or pm to separate the 1s o'clock, but substitute them with "in the day" or "in the night." Okay, fine. Seems logical-ish enough.

Billboard for the new light rail.

Months: "Your Western calendar is very strange because some months have 30 days, some have 31, and your February has 28 or 29 depending on the year." We conceded the point.

"In Ethiopia it is very easy. Here we have 12 months of 30 days. And the 13th month has 5 days, unless it's leap year, in which case it has 6 days." OB-VI-OUS-LY. "The 13th month is a holiday. It starts on Sept 7th and ends Sept 11th...I'm sorry for your loss." Also, to keep accounting even, nobody pays rent for the 5/6 day month.

Ethiopia maintains a different calendar because, "you know we are the only country in Africa that wasn't colonized." The second calendar Ethiopians use is the Roman calendar so that they can meet for coffee with EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD.

Riding the public mini-bus all around town

So here we are, almost three weeks into our time in Ethiopia, and as we write this snippy blog, we’re realizing that Addis is starting to grow on us. We got on the right public bus this morning, to arrive at a café we really like for Julienne to order a Pepsi in Amharic and for Sara to down a steaming latte.  We crossed the street to meet an NGO that is doing incredible agro-business development in rural Ethiopia, and this afternoon we’ll pile into a local bar to watch the African Cup of Nations football tournament.   We have a better appreciation of the history and culture of this complicated and proud people, and if they had a team in the tournament, we might actually root for them. 

*Big props to Lara B for the punny title. She gets us.

This is Africa

Throughout the trip, when glitches have emerged -- the bus lights go out in the middle of a dirt road, or water stops flowing through the tap, or we step over goat horns in the middle of city sidewalks – invariably someone will say to us “this is Africa!”  It’s one part sheepish apology, one part admonishment that things aren’t different just because we’re here, and one part comic relief.  We’ve heard a “this is Africa” refrain in each country we’ve been in, and the abbreviation “TIA” was popular enough to appear in the movie Blood Diamond.   It’s a phrase that tries to explain that the present, invariably challenging, situation typifies the African experience.  But on a massive continent -- with 54 nations (and one disputed territory), more than 900 million people, hundreds of ethnicities, and thousands of languages –how can one phrase explain it all?

On this trip, we have only seen 7 countries, crossed 4 borders overland, toured 20 major cities (of 20,000 or more inhabitants), slept in 60 different accommodations (with nightly rates between $15 to $65), ridden on 8 major bus lines, learned the words for “hello” and “thank you” in 12 languages, and purchased 5 different cell phone SIM cards. We cannot pretend to know more than a tip of the large African iceberg. However, each time we hear “this is Africa”, we are more convinced that the African continent is far, far more than what meets the eye at that particular moment.


Skyscrapers across Addis. Please note an awesome sunset.

To state the obvious, Africa is a complicated series of contrasts.  It is a modern Organization of African Unity skyscraper constructed at the edge of an over-crowded Addis slum.  It is home to children with stomachs bloated from a lack of protein, next to others well fed and cleanly dressed on their way to school. Women here give birth to healthy, beautiful boys (congrats, Sophie and Abdou!), and they also die unexpectedly in childbirth. This is Africa.

On Thursday, we were sitting 4 people across in the back seat of a brand-new SUV after a program site visit.  Piled in the car with us were the driver, the suit-clad Country Program Director, an expert in public health partnering with Tulane University, a program staff in Ray Ban glasses who shared a travelogue of his last trip to New York, and a representative from a partner organization completing a capacity assessment.  Squeezed in the trunk were three younger, part-time program staff. We were all going to the family home of woman killed the day before in a bus accident to offer our condolences to her brother, another program staff. The woman had arrived home to Addis from Dubai two weeks before to prepare for her upcoming wedding. She was visiting family for the holidays. Forty-two people were killed alongside of her when the driver sent an air-conditioned coach careening down an Ethiopian highway gorge.

Coca-Cola, Ethiopian Airlines, Timkat whites.

On the way home from the wake, when we merged into a honking swarm of blue and white taxi traffic, mixed with an urban goatherd, one of our fellow passengers looked up from his cell phone and said, “well, this is Africa.”  We wondered which part he meant.  A reference to 9 adults crammed into a 5 seat-belt car? The tragic funeral for a young woman who seemingly had her whole life in front of her? The concrete shell of a new skyscraper with a billboard advertising Johnny Walker? The need for 7 busy professionals to take time out of their day to pay customary respect to a junior colleague?



Last night, we ate dinner at a small hip restaurant near our guest house.  The place was packed.  The crowd was as fly as Brooklyn on a Friday night and Dakar on the celebration of Tabaski.  There were clusters of people sitting around 20 low, squat hardwood tables, each with a big metal plate covered with mounds of berbere-infused stews.  The very real famine of Somalia, just a few hundred kilometers away, seemed a remote notion in this restaurant where there was a constant stream of piping hot food coming from the kitchen. There was a table of handsome men in pinstripe hats, G-Star shirts and designer jeans.  There was a woman roasting coffee for a macchiato that would give any upscale coffee joint a lesson in java. There were women in gem-tone heels, painted nails and freshly permed curls.  As the food came, each one of us grabbed a piece of flat fermented injera, scooped up raw meat cut from the beef flank hanging at the front of the restaurant, and proceeded to eat it all with our hands.  This is Africa.

Several weeks ago, we read an article by Kenyan writer BinyavangaWainaina, called “How (Not) To Write About Africa.”  Calling on just about every stereotype of Africa, he rightfully and satirically criticized Western writers for using these hackneyed images so freely in their writing.  “Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls…Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked…Remember, any work you submit in which people look filthy and miserable will be referred to as the ‘real Africa’…Never, ever say anything negative about an elephant or a gorilla…And sunsets, the African sunset is a must.”



For us, Africa actually has been about sunsets and elephants and music.  And we’ve written about them. We have seen starving Africans.  And we have written about them, too. For us, Africa has been about eating goat from a dinged communal metal bowl on the dunes of the Sahara, as well as eating decadent black truffle oil pasta in white table cloth restaurants in a sleepy town near the Ivory Coast border. All things that we shouldn’t write about, either.



But to say (and write) "this is Africa" implies that one experience is more quintessentially African than another.  To Wainaina’s point, Africa is a patchwork of climates and cultures, in places overlapping and interwoven to create a common experience, and in others separated by large gaps without any shared thread.

Almost all people we’ve met, regardless of religion or nationality or age, want the opportunity for self-determination, protection for their families, and a little bit of joy at the end of a day, usually in the form of their favorite soccer team.  Whether cheering for the Ghanaian Black Stars or ribbing their brother for still cheering for Arsenal over Manchester United, the unification of a whole continent through mutual love of ‘football’ is a palpable sentiment. 



And, as easily as a love of soccer can bring people together, the difference of opinion around core values just as easily can separate them--  and the divergence itself thumbs its nose at the very notion that any one “this” is Africa.  For example, while many African columnists we’ve read have praised their governments for maintaining their “African values” and not succumbing to Western pressure to grant homosexuals the same human rights as heterosexuals, few (if any) have acknowledged that their South African brethren recognized same-sex marriages well before any Western governments. This is Africa.

Our wealth and American status has allowed us to participate in many things in West Africa and Ethiopia that are beyond the reach of millions of people on the continent.  The overwhelming majority of people we’ve met left school after primary education, lack potable drinking water, and are incredibly vulnerable to widespread famine and disease.  That poverty and lack of economic opportunity is very real, and by no means should one gloss over the global inequity at play here. To invoke “Africa” only when something has gone wrong not only misses the amazing parts of what is core to Africa, but it also misses the ordinary comings and goings that is part and parcel of each life on this planet.  It misses what connects all of us at our core. All of this is Africa.