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)