FINAL THOUGHTS ON ETHIOPIA
FINAL THOUGHTS ON ETHIOPIA
12/30/2004 4:47AM
I'm somewhere over the Alps right now, having left Addis Ababa at 7am. The Alps are really fantastic from this height, but I am not in the mood to really enjoy them. My leave-taking was not as tearful as it was with my mother in Khartoum, but I am still disappointed. I wanted to spend more time with my old man, and as expected my gadding about the African continent was at the expense of my time with Dad. I also came to the rather stunning realization that for the foreseeable future I won't be getting any really long vacations, so I'll have to make some pretty tough choices about where I spend that limited vacation time.
But I don't want to sound maudlin. I just wanted to do for Addis what I did for Khartoum, so without further ado, my final thoughts on Ethiopia:
- Amharic is an interesting language. As a semitic language I thought I'd be able to understand it fairly quickly, but there are just too many idiosyncrasies to it that I don't get. For instance they use some explosive consonants. Their t's and g's are explosive, and pop up quite often in regular speech. Imagine the X!hosa people with more options. They also have a tendency to insert short gasps into their speech. The gasps are used to indicate comprehension. Instead of an expulsion of air as in "uh-huh", there's a rapid intake of air: "gasp!" The weird part of it is that it's infectious. Even the stereotypically named Jacques Dubois does it, though his thirty years of marriage to an Ethiopian woman may go some ways towards explaining that. It doesn't, however, explain why the Finns in town all do it too.
- Little kids in Addis Ababa fall into two broad categories: modern or traditional. I've noticed that the traditional kids have some very strange haircuts. I was riding through town when I noticed a kid with half his head shaved. I quickly discarded the possibility that he was in some prog-rock band, but could find no other explanation. It was made more mystifying when I saw another little kid with her head shaved except for a little circle at her forelock, I finally asked around and discovered that it's a traditional practice to ward off the evil eye from little kids. This practice is similar to one that one was prevalent in the Sudan when my father's generation were children. The Ethiopians also add another twist: they tattoo the faces of particularly beautiful young women, also in order to ward off the evil eye. The tattoos incorporate a cross on the forehead and typically also include a chain of small crosses along the woman's jaw line and then down her throat. The overall effect is quite striking, and I wish I had taken a picture of one of these women to illustrate. Interestingly, in the Sudan a counterpart to this practice exists, wherein the woman's lower lip is tattooed. My grandmother's generation is the last generation of Sudanese women to sport that particular look.
- Ethiopians have a strangely intimate relationship with black folks outside of Africa. Within Africa they hold themselves aloof, apart from the rest of the continent because of their ancient civilization and their pretension to being the heirs of the throne of Solomon (yes, as in King Solomon of the baby splitting and the Old Testament). Yet they feel a strong affinity to the rest of the black diaspora. Ads for satellite movie channels show black stars. The country seems to be united behind the English Premier League Club, Arsenal, primarily due to the predominance of black players on their roster. Don't even get me started on the relationship between Ethiopia and Jamaica. The capital is flooded with dreadlocked Rastafarians, and every year a huge reggae festival is held on Bob Marley's birthday.
There's more but for some reason, from the moment I got onto the plane I've been blocked. For now I guess the only thing to mention is the short stop on the tarmac in Alexandria Egypt on the way to London. We landed at Borg AlArab air base, made famous by it's inability to get a single plane in the air during the 1967 Six Day War. Upon touch down I noted the series of hardened camouflaged hangars scattered around near the landing strip. It's always eerie to be near the scene of an infamous historical event.