Namibia 4 A Continuous Cacophony

  As I enter the gated grounds, the kids stop and sing the African national anthem for us, doing so in 4 languages. These children are happy, and excited. They are all dressed in simple red aprons with a different animal stitched on the front of each in white.

 With fists outstretched reinforcing the beat of the song, it is the innocent eyes that hit us. How could they be happy given the life they live? From an outsider's perspective it would be hard to imagine, yet the energy and excitement is overwhelming. Turning to walk away from the kids we are mobbed, arms out for hugs. Fifty fists are pushed towards us, thumbs outstretched, a continuous cacophony of the kids yelling out "shop". We return the manner of saying goodbye by extending our thumb to meet each of the little thumbs.

"These kids are rich inside," Bob tells me as he sees Sharon crying.

Calvin (to be continued) 

Namibia 3 Kids Are Delighted To See Us

 The kids are happy, and are delighted to see us. Some stand quietly watching us with a shy curiosity, while others run up to us and hug us with strength unexpected for a child. Above all of the rough challenges of life surrounding them, the children are genuinely happy. It is this strength that gives hope. The children are often unaware of AIDS and disease and the cards they have been dealt, but just accept their brief time as an opportunity to live.

 Entering the coreche(?), a place where 80 young children are left each day while their parents are gone, I meet Bob, who founded a theatre group that provides an opportunity for the children to develop a talent. They are preparing for a production, one that will be shown to the president later today. The name is "Plus Minus Memories of the Battery".

Calvin (to be continued) 

Namibia 2 Parents Are Dead From AIDS

Every so often one finds a home marked as a Tuck Shop -- a place where an entrepreneur has bought some bulk product, selling smaller quantities to the people. Five large white sacks of coal, with one poured out over the ground, individual pieces for sale.

Three young kids are throwing rocks and tops wound with string on the ground in front of me, and when a top starts spinning, smiles and excited laughter follow. The settlement is filled with kids, in part due to the large families, but also because many of their parents are now dead from AIDS. No one is allowed to comment on how serious the problem is, but its obvious that a good segment of the region's demographic is child-headed households. With 200-250 funerals a weekend in Soweto, death is an accepted part of life. 

Calvin (to be continued) 

Namibia 1 Vicious Dog Without A Leash

To my right stands three concrete drop toilets, each providing for five families of seven each. Half a dozen kids are sitting on the surrounds of the toilet block, stopping their improvised games while they watch us walk by. Just ahead a solitary tap is crowded with activity, women filling large pots only to hoist and balance them overhead. Out of the 57 taps in the region, 9 are broken. This tap feeds 45 families. Access to water is the life-blood, and these taps serve as the daily epicenter of social activity and personal conflicts.

 An unsettling howl causes us to turn as we see one dog attack another - a fierce lock around the other's neck. One young men is lashing the dog from overhead with a belt while another is throwing waste water at its eyes. The vicious dog is without a leash, wreaking havoc with its rabid determination. Two dozen men and children crowding around, the attacker is subdued and the poor victim limps away with an upset 6-year old owner. Even in these areas there are ground rules -- dogs must be on a leash.

Calvin (to be continued) 

Ethiopia 13 Stanley Stewart

 Amongst the animals skins, the arm bands and the long strings of beads, they had a startling item of clothing: brassieres. They had been to Addis; they had seen the future… And now they were wearing it. In this place, they seemed oddly indecent.

Stanley Stewart  

is the author of three highly acclaimed travel books and several-hundred articles based on journeys across five continents, for which he has won numerous journalism awards. He is a contributing editor of Condé Nast Traveller and his work appears regularly in the Sunday Times. He has also contributed to the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, the Independent and the Times. He writes for the National Geographic Traveler in the US, the Sunday Times in South Africa and the Australian.

Ethiopia 12 It Was Erotic, But Happily Innocent

 On a low ridge, we arrived at the village with flocks of goats returning to their family corrals for the night. There was a dance at sunset. The warriors appeared, their bodies decorated with white markings. They assembled in a half-circle under a rising moon. The women clustered nearby, wearing thick, bundled necklaces and skirts of oiled skins. 

With elaborate hand-clapping rhythms and deep, mesmeric chants, the men took turns leaping into the air. The women, too, began clapping; and one-by-one, they danced forward to select a man of their choice from the line. Amidst rising clouds of dust, the couples thrust their hips at one another in a pantomime of sex. It was erotic, but also happily innocent, full of laughter and teasing.

A trio of new women arrived on the periphery to watch the dance.

Stanley Stewart  (to be continued)

Ethiopia 11 A Karo Village

 The larger the lip plate, the more goats her father could demand from prospective bridegrooms for her hand in marriage. In these societies, marriage is a kind of pension fund: you pay for a big lip plate on your wife when you are young in the hope that you will have plenty of daughters with decent lip plates to sell in your old age.

 A couple of days later, we were in the lands of the Karo staying at a lodge at Murle on the east bank of the river. In the afternoon, we walked up to Kolcho, a Karo village. Termite towers rose from the savannah. We skirted a lake where tropical bou-bou birds were singing duets. In the woods nearby, families of colobus monkeys were quarrelling.

Stanley Stewart  (to be continued)

Ethiopia 10 anti-slaving device

 The plates are worn, rather like a veil in Islamic societies, in the presence of men. At home and in the company of other women, they tend to take the plates out and let the stretched lower lip dangle down below the chin in picturesque fashion. Older women eventually abandon their plates, while fashion-conscious young wives don’t like to be seen without them.

One theory is that the plate was an anti-slaving device: a way of making your tribe unappealing to Arab slave traders from the coast; another is that it is a protection against evil spirits, which are said to enter the body through the mouth. But the girl herself, working on her own lip in the dusk, said that it was chiefly a question of goats.

Stanley Stewart  (to be continued)

Ethiopia 9 Hideousness Of The Plate

 It seemed the moment to broach this delicate issue. But I was keen not to cause offence. I didn’t want to let on that it was the sheer hideousness of the plate that fascinated me. At first I thought I might try, “Hey, love your lip plate. Do the fellows in your tribe find that as much of a turn-on as I do?” In the end I settled for the neutral brevity of “why?”

Women do not insert the lip plate until they are preparing for marriage in their early twenties. An incision is made in the lower lip, which is stretched over a period of months to accommodate a plate made of baked clay or wood. The two front lower teeth usually need to be extracted to make fitting easier.

Stanley Stewart  (to be continued)

Ethiopia 6 - Naked Tribesman With A Spear

 On the third day, somewhere beyond Dimma, we began to drop out of the highlands. The fields and the villages fell away. The hills unravelled. The views lengthened. Breaking free of its confinement, the landscape was spilling out on all sides towards distant escarpments. We were falling into an empty world of savannah and acacia. Long waves of grass commandeered the horizons.

After the crowded uplands, the emptiness of this new country was almost unnerving. The land shimmered in lowland heat. A sentinel figure appeared, on a rock above the road, silhouetted against a pewter sky – a tall, naked tribesman with a spear: the archetypal image of Africa, like a guardian on the frontier of a new world.

Stanley Stewart  (to be continued)

Ethiopia 8 - Nothing Compares To the Lip Plate

They giggled behind their hands at our pale skin, our watery eyes, our bizarre clothing. In this barefoot, bare-assed and bare-breasted company, I felt I had arrived a trifle overdressed.

We pitched our camp in the grounds of the mission church, watched by hordes of spectators. Later, when I went for a stroll through the village, I came upon a woman sitting on a log outside her house. She was stretching her lower lip with a mixture of charcoal and butter. In all the sad history of crippling female adornment, from bound feet to suffocating corsets, nothing quite compares to the lip plate worn by the Surma and the Morsi women of the Omo Basin.

Stanley Stewart  (to be continued)

Ethiopia 7 - The Lands Of The Surma

 We were entering the lands of the Surma, one of the largest tribes west of the Omo. After that first figure, others appeared: boys herding goats; men melting away into the grass; a young woman naked in a river.

In the late afternoon, we arrived at Tulget, a Surma settlement straddling a long ridge. Few things were as novel as white folk in a car, so naturally the whole village immediately dropped what they were doing to get a good look at us. Men with spectacular, elongated earlobes and women with huge lip plates crowded round to gaze at us as if we were circus freaks. I knew they were dying to poke us. Stanley Stewart  (to be continued)

Ethiopia 5 - Taxis Were Donkey Chariots

 Traditional architecture is circular here – and in the flyblown towns, full of tea and tyre shops, square huts with corrugated roofs were a sign of decadent modernity.

We spent a night at Jimma, where taxis were donkey chariots driven by eight-year-olds; then moving on to Kaffe, where we slept among the topiary hedges of a government coffee plantation. As we pushed west and south, the road became rougher; the vegetation wilder; the faces blacker; the clothes more bedraggled; and the smiles wider.

Stanley Stewart  (to be continued)

Ethiopia 4 - Central Highlands

With a small but motley crew, I headed south from Addis Ababa. The central highlands of Ethiopia are a dense, agrarian landscape, quite unlike the Omo basin. The people are serious and hardworking; the women keep their tops on; and the middle classes are distinguished by umbrellas.

Between tangled walls of maize and false bananas, the road was swollen with pedestrian traffic. Young men strolled arm-in-arm, while women staggered in their wake beneath vast sacks. Girls in white shawls made their way home from school. 

A few horsemen passed: glamorous figures with long whips and wide-brimmed straw hats. A priest appeared beneath a splendid parasol. Nestled among the crops were round thatched tukuls. 

Stanley Stewart  (to be continued)