Ethiopia: Hidden wealth amid poverty
Benefit concerts may raise money for famine relief but they also perpetuate the one-dimensional view of Ethiopia as a destitute land with nothing going for it. With its rich past and culture, impoverished present and precarious future, Ethiopia deserves to be explored on its own terms.
It was set to be our most unusual date ever but the sands of fate had other ideas. We had arranged to arrive in Addis Ababa within a couple of hours of each other after more than two weeks apart during which Katleen was on mission in Sudan. I should have perhaps gleaned that something was not quite right when I couldn’t see Khartoum from my window as we flew over it.
As I kicked my heels in the arrivals hall, I heard a group of people speaking the unmistakable Egyptian dialect. They turned out to be officials at the embassy who had come to greet some people on the flight from Cairo. They were a little surprised that I had come to Ethiopia on holiday and one of them warned me that trouble was brewing a week or so down the line when the government was expected to announce ultimate victory in the elections, an outcome which the opposition and most Ethiopians would consider a travesty. How deadly accurate he would prove to be. He gave me his telephone number at the embassy just in case I needed any help.
For the time being, thoughts of imminent reunion were growing in my mind. Then, suddenly, the Khartoum flight disappeared from the arrivals screen. I went around the chaotic customs area of the new Bole International Airport trying to discover what had gone wrong. Eventually, I found an airport official and I informed him that I’d lost the flight I was waiting for. He told me that a sandstorm over the Sudanese capital meant that no flights could take off or land there. I switched on my mobile phone and found an SMS from Katleen saying that she was grounded until the following morning.
On the way to the hotel, we drove through Addis Ababa’s bleak, rundown streets. I had already got a sense of how poor the city was from the air – it was less luminous than most other urban areas I had flown over. From ground level, and veiled by night, the town looked destitute: a rusting, crumbling expanse of corrugated iron peppered with the odd solid brick or concrete structure.

The friendly cab driver, when he learnt that I had to go back the next day to pick up my wife, asked enviously: “You’re married?”
“Yes. Are you?” I inquired.
“No,” the 24-year-old laughed with a hint of bitterness that was beyond his years. “Not yet. I must prepare myself.”
“Have you got a girlfriend,” I prodded innocently.
“No, I have no money.”
“Do you need lots of money to have a girlfriend?”
“Of course,” he responded simply. “Love and feelings are not important when there is no money.”
Being a strong believer in the power of emotion, I was taken aback by his cynicism. But during our stay we were to see several apparent displays of the power of money. The very next morning, we came across an Ethiopian woman in her 20s with an English man that was old enough to be my father. I knew he was English because he was in the midst of a shouting match with a young Ethiopian man who seemed chagrined by this match. Later in our trip, we encountered two middle-aged American men – obviously friends – with pretty Ethiopian partners about Katleen’s age. All four sat silently staring into space while they awaited their flights, fiddling with their fingers or their cameras.
We chatted a little about the political situation and the taxi driver told me how disillusioned everyone was with Meles Zenawi’s government. “After 14 years, everyone has had enough, we need change,” he stated confidently, ticking off the problems with the current regime: falling living standards, corruption, too much investment in the PM’s part of the country and nowhere else, etc.
That hoped-for change was in the form of the opposition Coalition for Unity and Democracy, which I hoped, for Ethiopia’s sake, would live up to its label. My driver was in no doubt. “They’re educated people – doctors and lawyers and engineers – and they have a programme.”
Feeling exhausted, I entered the hotel lobby with thoughts of sleep, but I was about to be delivered my second disappointment of the night: the booking I had made over the internet was not communicated by the manager – who banned anyone else from using the hotel’s only computer – to the reception and all the rooms were occupied. Luckily, they managed to arrange a cheaper room at a better hotel.
Addis awakenings
My first morning in Addis was spent dashing between airline and airport sorting out the mess in our domestic flights bookings – which Ethiopian Airlines’ Addis area manager, once involved, cleared up efficiently – and picking Katleen up.
Addis Ababa means new flower in Amharic and this is what Menelik II thought of his new capital when he established it in the 19th century. Blossoms in spring are not the first images evoked by the disintegrating wilderness of shabby shacks, rivers-cum-sewers, and the legions of street children and beggars. Despite its fresh-looking people, Addis looks like a city that is perpetually withering and wilting, a town of gloom, not bloom.
The tin and corrugated iron shacks put me in mind of South African townships. The key difference is that they are not kept far away, in a separate dimension, but are right in the heart of the city and permeate everywhere. Addis doesn’t have the dangerous feel of what I hear about, say, Soweto.
The street children and the mutilated beggars are the hardest to deal with. Sometimes I felt seized by the urge to pull my wallet out and hand its entire contents, one note at a time, to the poor wretches. But even if we went round the city distributing every penny we had, it would have no visible difference. The deficit in Ethiopia’s Gross Domestic Poverty balance is too big for small fish like us to plug.
Visitors to such a poor country are bound to come away with some feelings of guilt but we decided our presence here was better than our absence – both for Ethiopia and ourselves. The best we could do, we decided, was to bring fleeting moments of joy and show our friendship and camaraderie to individuals and, in this pummelling mass of humanity, not to lose sight that these are individual humans.
One of our first chances to do so was when a group of boys approached us asking for food. We took them into a nearby supermarket and bought them something wholesome to eat, as well as some biscuits they were staring at. We also took some time to chat and laugh with them.
Once your eyes adjust to their new surroundings, you begin to notice how unthreatening the city is, how friendly and happy many of the people walking down the street seem, and the beauty of the surrounding mountains which hug and curtain Addis. Foreign faces are rare enough to draw a lot of attention, mainly from people smiling at you or saying, “Hello!”
Although it felt strangely inconsequential here, news of the French ‘no’ vote on the EU constitution filtered through and we watched it on the evening news in our room. Addis, of course, aspires to be the Brussels of Africa. It is home to the African Union and the African arm of several UN bodies but the physical shadow they cast on the city is not as large or imposing as in Brussels.
However, to reflect its position as the aspiring capital of Africa, Addis has taken to giving most of its main roads the names of the continent’s 53 countries. This presented us with a three-pronged problem: maps are at best indicative, our guidebook contained the roads’ former names and people tend to give streets popular names. This meant that, in the evening, we spent an hour wandering around looking for a particular restaurant our guidebook had recommended but unable to find it – instead, we came across one seedy bar after another.
Adventist adventures
One of Katleen’s colleagues in Sudan had given her a package to deliver to his sister who lived in Addis. We tried dialling the number he gave for her but it did not work. He’d also given the address for the Ethiopian Adventist Church where, he had said, his sister was known.
After trying different combinations of the phone number, none of which worked, we decided to head to the church. At the front gate, we were greeted by a spotty teenager with a detached glaze in his eyes. He had something of a sedated air about him, perhaps due to the strength of his faith, and spoke in a slow and deliberate monotone.
I have to admit that I don’t know much about Seventh Day Adventists but, in my imagination, they were inextricably linked to TV evangelists, cultism and crackpot reinterpretations of scripture. Now I’m home I’ve learnt that the 14-million member church is one of the world’s fastest-growing organisations, mainly thanks to its missionary work in poor countries.
Having lived through the changing of the millennium, we are all aware – especially those of us who lived near the pyramids at the time – of the great disappointment felt by millennialists. It appears that like-minded individuals suffered a similar set back more than a century and a half earlier. A certain William Miller predicted the second coming of Christ would occur on 22 October 1844, which didn’t happen. This led to the Great Disappointment and gave the church its name.
Everyone in the Addis church was helpful and friendly but no one could point us in the right direction towards the woman we sought. We went around asking various people, including those staying at the guesthouse, the rector, and the receptionist who dialled all kinds of people for us in her loud and jolly manner.
Conceding defeat, we looked for an internet café to e-mail Katleen’s colleague and ask him to send us clear co-ordinates and ask his sister to look us up upon our return to Addis.
Streams of conscience in Bahar Dar

Photo: ©Khaled Diab, Katleen Maes
Floating on the surface of the massive Lake Tana, I felt tempted to shower Bob Geldof – who, as he greys, is looking more and more like the high wizard of charity pop pretending to conjure away world poverty with his celebrity wand – with expletives, exposing him to the tirades he regularly directs at the world. Although he portrays himself as some foulmouthed angel, or messiah, as Katleen would put it, and he has done a lot of good in his time, the man does not tread water and his record is decidedly mixed.
Personally, I have major reservations about his backing of the recent G8 plan spearheaded by Gordon Brown – and his sitting on the Commission for Africa – because he is helping sanctify what amounts to business as usual. The news of the so-called new?! debt relief plan broke after my return from Ethiopia and I was a little revolted by the sight of all those fat cat politicians and pop stars from the rich world patting themselves smugly on the back for the great things they were doing for those poor wretches in Africa.
But what have they done? Debt relief for the HIPCs (or highly indebted poor countries, as they’re known) has been on the cards since the Jubilee 2000 campaign (remember that, the one led by Bono), the money they will use to finance the latest round – years too late – will come from existing development budgets. Ingenious that, give money with the right hand, take it back with the left, and make it look like you’re doing someone a favour – loan sharks, take note.
Gordon Brown’s pet project to allow poor countries to borrow on financial markets against future pledges of aid looks no better either and it is mired with potential pitfalls. It amounts to little more than a financial optical illusion that would make future generations – in rich and poor countries – pay for whatever extra money developing countries receive now. Brown fails to mention why his children should pay for his largesse and not him, nor does he mention where their peers in the developing world will get aid from if they, too, need it. And what happens if rich countries don’t honour the aid pledges upon which the borrowing system would be based?
In addition, I have evolved this knee-jerk distrust of pop stars (ageing or otherwise) who line up for charity does. When I see a studio bursting not necessarily with talent but with enough net worth to keep an African country or three afloat for a few years, I wonder to myself why these mega-rich celebrities don’t put their money where their mouths are.
Imagine what a difference to Africa that would make if the music and film community dug deep into their pockets and gave away 1% of their combined individual wealth. Being so rich, they’d barely feel it and it would make a world of difference, particularly if it were pumped into long-term projects rather than relief programmes.
Back to Bob. Geldof has helped perpetuate a myth about Ethiopia that is far from true. In the Band Aid hit he penned (Feed the world), he claims that Ethiopia is a place “where nothing ever grows, no rain nor rivers flow”. And, as a demonstration of the power of pop, a lot of people I know admitted that this is just the image they had of Ethiopia.
Here, there be water
If only they could see this, we thought, as our boat glided through the pristine waters of the lake with no end in sight. There’s plenty of water in Ethiopia (the problem is its distribution). Lake Tana, for instance, could comfortably house a small European country. It is bigger than Luxembourg, we reflected.
The lake was so still that barely a ripple disturbed its surface beyond the short trail of waves kicked up by our boat. All manner of colourful birds which we could not name jostled for our attention. Olympic butterflies raced and overtook our boat kilometres away from the safe sanctuary of dry land. Jumbo pelicans flew low enough overhead on the way to their colonies to make us consider the consequence of one falling on our boat! But we didn’t see any of the hippos the lake is famous for. We passed beautiful and lush secluded islands, and people rowing timeless papyrus boats.
As the cliché started by Herodotus tells us, Egypt is the gift of the Nile. More than three-quarters of the river’s water flows through the Blue Nile, which is fed by Lake Tana. It felt strange to be floating on the source of sustenance for untold generations of my people. Prior to my departure, I had joked with my Uncle Mahmoud on the telephone that I would drop a Lotus flower or something into the lake and he would wait at Cairo’s Qasr el-Nil bridge to retrieve it.
On the edge of a peninsula, we trampled up to an old 17th century church – one of the few open to women on the island. We didn’t bother to go to the other churches and monasteries for this reason. The walls of the church are constructed of mud and straw which left me wondering how it has stood for so many centuries (perhaps they refresh the walls periodically?).
The small church is circular in design and is decorated with richly coloured biblical scenes. Its round design intrigued us and Katleen and I came up with different theories. Hers was the straightforward explanation that the church simply followed traditional building practices. I came up with the more exotic tawaf theory, that the church was round so that everyone could face the holy of holies and circle it kind of like pilgrims do in Mecca. The guide came down on the side of Katleen.
Outside, an intense priest in bright yellow garb gave us piercing glances as he crouched in apparent contemplation. On the way back to the boat, a little girl sold me a rattle-like contraption similar to the ones used in church ceremonies and instead of bells in small rural communities.

Lakeside story
Bahar Dar (which means corner of the lake) lies exactly where its name suggests. It was where we’d arrived that morning after a ridiculously early start (4.30 am). The town is quieter and more pleasant than Addis, and feels better off than the capital.
Our hotel, the Ghion, commands a beautiful and strategic location on Lake Tana, where it is pleasant to sit at any time of day or night. The rooms are clean and functional but – like so many other structures in Ethiopia – have seen better days.
During our stay there, we met a number of interesting characters, including a group of retired people who were doing volunteer work in Ethiopia, and a Swede who had planned to cycle round the world but had abandoned his scheme after being attacked by rock-hurling kids in an Ethiopian village. We also ran into an annoying and boastful American whose alias was Geekeasy. He said he was planning to travel around the world overland. It had already taken him a year to cover two countries. “Interesting project, too bad about the guy,” Katleen said pointedly.
Once we escaped the cloying clutches of the various hotel lookouts who were waiting to cut us off at every pass and sell us an excursion, a walk through the town proved to be a pleasant experience. Bahar Dar struck us as a more prosperous and laid-back town than Addis Ababa.
The town’s market is large and well-stocked and well worth exploring. All the multicoloured wares are laid out on canvass or plastic sheets. However, there is one major distraction that makes browsing difficult: the crowds – and I don’t mean shoppers. From the moment we got within a 500m radius of the market, we became the souq‘s main attraction, drawing curious crowds, particularly of children and young people.
At one point, it felt like we were some sort of enchanted pied pipers – minus the music – leading the village’s children deeper and deeper into the market. Our entourage – which went through three major changing of the guard – ranged from the silently curious to the brashly pushy minority.
One youngster at a time would try to nominate himself as our guide and negotiator with the vendors. Although we were interested in some of the goods on display, we wound up buying nothing because of the pressure, confusion and havoc. We decided to come back the next day, but didn’t manage to make it.

Identity parades
In the market, some of the pushier people whose pitches we ignored would react in a way we thought was unfair and designed to intimidate us into doing what they wanted. They would point to their skin and ours and say: “We’re black. You’re white. But we’re all the same colour on the inside.” Absolutely, we would agree, that’s why we don’t deserve any more attention than a passing Ethiopian.
Our identity was a constant source of curiosity and amusement. In the eyes of many people, we seemed like a strange mix – pale woman with blue-eyes with darker man – and that might explain why we were regularly mistaken for Israelis. For some Ethiopians, however, we looked as white as each other, and we were from those pale lands somewhere to the north. I found that to be something of an interesting twist.
The Ancient Greeks knew Ethiopia (which means the land of people with burnt faces) as some vague notion of the land that lay south of the first cataract in Egypt. I found it curious that not a single person during our stay in the country guessed for themselves that I was Egyptian, Arab or even African – I got plenty of Spanish, Italian and Israeli (and even African American). In fact, many people found it quite novel that I, too, was an African like them.
Smoke on the water
The next morning, we decided to make our own way to the Tis Abay (smoking water) falls using public transport. We’d had enough of the nanny attitude of our hotel and wanted to explore more independently.
Just before we managed to slip away, one of the hotel’s trip organisers intercepted us and offered us a place on their trip at two-thirds of the previous day’s price. Despite the discount, our aversion to organised tours meant that we were still keen on our normal modus operandi. We were only willing to entertain the notion of joining the trip organised by the hotel, if we missed the once-daily bus that went to the falls.
Fortunately, we found the bus station and our bus – packed as it was – just before it left. We sat on the raised platform beside the gear stick for the entire duration of the journey. The landscape was spectacular, if a little parched at the end of the long dry season: rolling hills, trees I associated with wildlife documentaries shot in the savannah, pitch black cows with wizened throats grazing on drying fields. I tried to imagine how the area would look after the deluge of the rainy season, with all the bone-dry streams and riverbeds gushing with water.

On the bus, we got to know two Dutch travellers, Martien, and his mother, Kori. That placed us in the bizarre situation of chatting with two strangers in Dutch on a provincial Ethiopian bus. In fact, my Dutch was to get quite a lot of exercise during our holiday.
We also got to know Michael, an Ethiopian who’d befriended Martien and Kori and offered to reserve them (and, eventually, us) a place on the bus for the only return journey. Michael gave the impression of being a brightly intelligent lad and he carried himself with certain intellectual airs – he was like a scruffy street thinker of common-sense philosophies.
His story – at least, the version of it he told me – was touching and frustrating, and spoke volumes of Ethiopia’s uncomfortable relationship with Eritrea. He claimed that his deceased father was an Eritrean by birth but had lived in Bahar Dar for three decades. His late mother was an Ethiopian. During the war, his father was deported to his so-called homeland which he barely knew, and both his parents died without seeing each other some years later. Now, he eked out a living as an unrecognised person. Although he was an Ethiopian to all intents and purposes, he had no official papers because his paternal line was Eritrean.
He claims that he could’ve received identity papers had he signed a certain document swearing allegiance, but he found it insulting that his patriotism should be so called into question and so he didn’t turn up. “I am proud of my Ethiopian identity,” he said with quiet vehemence.
Early into our walk up towards the falls we came across a large funeral. The mourners were all dressed in dazzling white with the colourful hems of their scarves turned inwards as a sign of grief and respect.
Water under the eggshell bridge
We eventually arrived at the Portuguese bridge which locals believed was built with lime, eggshells and milk. It looked like plain old-fashioned stone to me! The red-tinged water flow deep below the bridge looked weaker than one would expect but it was still a sight to behold.

The waterfall itself was spectacular but a tad disappointing. With a name like smoking water, one expected a gushing, whirling mass of water giving off a spray hundreds of metres high. But the reality was a little more modest, what with it being the dry season and the hydroelectric dam holding back the flow. In addition, as Katleen noted, photographic trickery in the cinema had raised our expectations of what waterfalls should be like.
Our self-appointed guide suggested that the dam was 40 years old but I found this hard to believe considering that I had long read that Ethiopia had no dams until recently when it built a couple of small ones – developments which are watched carefully downstream in Egypt.
Thomas, a friendly hustler on the street who had tried to interest us in everything from a trip to the falls to bicycles or a tour of the market, gave the more reasonable figure of three years. He also told us proudly that the plant now allowed Ethiopia to export electricity to Sudan.
Although the waterfall might no live entirely up to its name, it was a spectacular sight. On one bank of the main pool where the water collected was a patch of grass of a lush and dark green that stood in contrast to the drier surroundings. A herd of clever – if miniature-looking – cows grazed casually and unhurriedly on this fertile ground, as the tempestuous water rushed and gushed past.
Cows in Europe are docile bulks of breathing beef that chew cud all day. However, their bovine cousins in Ethiopia are more active and often run between one patch of sparse grazing land and the next.
Michael spent the return journey in silent contemplation – well, actually, in a chat-induced stupor. His eyes were bloodshot and a little manic-looking. When we probed him on why he chewed the bitter leaves, he said that it was good for sharpening the senses, and he only consumed it once a week. When we suggested that it was a fairly potent narcotic, his rebuttal was fierce: “Chat is not a drug. It’s just a leaf,” he insisted.
Defensive at the perceived affront to his national pride, he suggested that chat was less harmful than alcohol, tobacco and marijuana, which were all drugs, while the benign leaf was not. After a period of silence, he asked a question about Egyptian identity: “Is it true that Egyptians don’t see themselves as Africans? I hope this is not true.” I had to admit that it was partially true – in fact, truer than I admitted.
Fall from grace
Back at the hotel, we had barely been in our room for five minutes to rest and freshen up when we heard a knock on our door. One of the hotel staff had come, yet again, to try to sell us an excursion to the waterfall.
When Katleen explained to him that we’d just been he seemed shocked by her response and didn’t seem entirely convinced. Later in the afternoon, we decided to rent bikes and cycle down to Haille Selassie’s abandoned palace. But that simple task turned out to be more easily said than done.
We saw Mohamed standing by a row of bicycles. I asked him if we could rent a couple and he said okay, before proceeding to launch into a new pitch – he obviously had bigger fish to fry. He wanted to sell us places on a minibus the hotel had organised for other guests to take them to Gondar. We explained that we were flying to the former Ethiopian capital. Nevertheless, he inexplicably persisted. When he found this wasn’t working, he tried to sell us a hotel in Gondar and a trip to the Simien mountains, at which point I lost my patience.
We complained about the hotels pressure-selling tactics and I told him: “All we came to you for were some bikes, please give them to us and we’ll be on our way.” When he explained that the hotel didn’t own any and he had sent out for some, I told him we didn’t want them anymore and we headed out to find our own bikes.
After a short delay, we found our ride and pedalled up to the palace. The ride was refreshing, particularly once we got on to the secluded, tree-lined country lanes which were almost completely deserted. They had obviously been surfaced originally for the former negus’s pleasure. Just before you reach the palace, there is a building that is painted in the red-yellow-green of the Ethiopian flag. Unfortunately, the palace is not open to the public but there are other sights in the vicinity.
Despite the rocky ride and the steep and unpaved final approach, the view of the lake and the surrounding valley from our vantage point was worth every breath the uphill ride had snatched from our lungs, particularly in the last light of day. We managed to get back to town just as it was getting dark.
We decided to go to dinner again at the Inkotatash. However, Katleen got distracted by a sweet little tissue seller and we took a wrong turn on one of the back streets. Luckily, the little lemon seller whom we’d given some change earlier decided to return our good turn. She dashed up to us and grabbed my hand before I noticed her presence. We mentioned the name of the restaurant and she nodded knowingly with a big smile on her face. We asked the people at the restaurant to give her a soft drink and she sat happily sipping away at her Miranda while we went into another room to have dinner.
Runaway success

We had decided to return to the restaurant partly because the food was so good and the service so friendly. The main reason, however, was because we wanted to find out why Assafa had not come to see us at the hotel as promised. It seemed he had but we’d just missed him.
Assafa, 18, is an energetic and enthusiastic young man whose entire existence was taken up by running. He is an aspiring middle distance runner who wants to emulate the success of his idol, the Ethiopian long-distance champion Haille Salisse. He also raced around the restaurant in his eagerness to do his job. His words sometimes tripped over one another in their keenness to leave his mouth and it wasn’t always clear whether the sharp gasp he sometimes inhaled was the regular Ethiopian gesture of interest in what you were saying or sheer breathlessness.
He rises early in the morning to squeeze in a serious session of running before he rushes to school or work. He also regularly runs in local and regional championships at which he was won a number of gold medals. And, like many Ethiopians, he has to run hard on the spot just to keep still in the struggle of daily existence.
Assafa’s driving ambition – which is of the benign sort, i.e. he is not willing to step on anyone on his way up – is perhaps fuelled by the fact that he is an orphan. When his parents died a couple of years ago, the kind restaurant owners agreed to take him in and help fund his schooling, housing and training. In return, he worked in the restaurant.
The evening before our interest had prompted him to suggest that he come round our hotel to show us his medals and certificates. Since we had missed him in the afternoon, we suggested that he come round that evening. He got permission from the proprietor of the restaurant to knock off early and sprinted off into the darkness to fetch his prized possessions.
At the hotel, Assafa hesitatingly accepted our offer of a drink on the lakeside terrace. But, once settled, he got into the excited swing of telling us about his passion for his sport and the medals and certificates he had won. He even brought along his school report to show that he was doing well there, too. We made appreciative noises and told him that we looked forward to seeing him at the Olympics in a few years. He promised to come back in the morning to say goodbye and we hugged in the Ethiopian way – by knocking right shoulder against right, and left against left.
Early the next morning, I already found Assafa sitting patiently waiting on the terrace when I stepped out to collect a bottle of pure Nile source water from the lake to take to my mother, as Martien had suggested. I was surprised to find that the young lad had brought us a present of a traditional Ethiopian basket, which was both touching and embarrassing.
Back in the room, we searched through our bags to see if we had anything appropriate to give him. Katleen volunteered her sunglasses which fitted him well and actually suited him. However, in his naiveté of modern wares, he thought they were vision glasses and he could use them to see the blackboard better in class. We had to explain to him that these were to protect his eyes from the sun and he could wear them while he was out on his training runs.
G spells visionary capital
Gondar became the capital of Ethiopia in 1635, retaining its position for 250 years. It became the permanent capital after the royal court had wondered from one location to the next for a couple of centuries. King Faisal chose the location, according to tradition, because one of his ancestors had reputedly had a vision which was interpreted to mean that the name of the capital should begin with a G.
After breakfast at brunchtime on the rooftop terrace of our hotel, called the Circle, where we sipped on our macchiatos and watched the hawks and eagles circling high overhead, we decided our first stop should be the Royal Enclosure. When we got there, we found it was shut for lunch.
We decided to fill the siesta hours by hiking to a nearby village where a vibrant community of Felasha Jews once lived before most of them were airlifted to Israel in the 1970s. Just as Ethiopia’s isolation led to its own peculiar brand of Christianity, it also evolved its own particular form of Judaism – one that does not draw on the Talmud which was written in the Diaspora – that caused the Felasha difficulties in Israel because they were not regarded by their more Orthodox co-religionists as ‘real’ Jews.
Although Ethiopia is predominantly Christian and Muslim, it is proud of its Jewish heritage. Much is made here of the Queen of Sheba’s legendary visit to King Solomon’s court. Ethiopians strongly believe that the ancient queen came from Ethiopia, and not the wealthy southern Arabian kingdom of Sabaa (Sheba), the ruins of which lie – archaeologists believe – in modern-day Yemen.
Despite Solomon’s ungentlemanly behaviour in luring the queen into his bed for a bout of extra-marital sex after he’d had his fill with one of her maidens (and I thought Biblical stories were supposed to provide us with moral guidance), Ethiopians are proud of the fact that this union reputedly resulted in a son, Ibn el-Malik (Son of the King), or Menelik as he is known in Ethiopia.
To round things off, Solomon’s bastard son apparently took back to Ethiopia the prized Ark of the Covenant (which is not a boat at all but a vessel containing the stone tablets on which are written the Ten Commandments Moses received from God on Mount Sinai) as some kind of inheritance or child support.
This happened after Menelik’s brief sojourn in Jerusalem, during which he decided that he preferred living with his mummy rather than his daddy. The Ark is reputedly docked in a hidden chamber somewhere in the St Mary of Tsion Church in Axum. But since only one man alive is allowed to see it, there has been no independent verification of its existence.
Exodus to Zion
The Felasha village is more than a solid hour’s walk along a stunning – if dusty – country road in the hills. Unaccustomed to the increasingly high altitude, we had more trouble than we expected breathing during our hike.
The sheer number of army trucks that passed us on this otherwise rustic road drove home to us that we were nearing the Eritrean border. Whether or not this movement was routine or represented some sort part of a greater mobilisation effort, we couldn’t tell.
Half way to the village, we met a young boy who greeted us in very good English and chatted with us about himself. We took a photo of him which he wanted us to send to him, so we walked back to his family’s shack to get his address. They had some sort of cafeteria, so we ordered a couple of soft drinks and sat trying to chat to his older relatives whose English was not as good as this six-year-old’s. All his mother could do was smile at us politely.
We passed women bearing water, people of both sexes walking their loaded donkeys, and three young lads racing along each with a heavy load of wood on his back. The race was to keep their minds of the weight they were moving under and the distance they still had to cover. Every few hundreds metres, they put down their load briefly to take a breather.
The only sign that the Felasha village is any different to other tiny Ethiopian villages is the welcome sign with a prominently displayed light-blue Star of David on it. A welcoming party of young children and teenagers was waiting for us at the outskirts of the village. It appeared we were the only foreigners who had been there in a while and, consequently, we attracted a lot of attention.
Marta, a souvenir and trinket seller, described herself as a guide and offered to show us around the village. As she was so polite and shy, we didn’t have the heart to tell her to go away. In fact, we didn’t have the heart to tell any of the kids that followed us around for the whole time we were in the village to go away.
Marta told us that she was half Jewish but, because it was her father who was a Jew, she did not have the right to move to Israel. When we asked, another girl claimed that about half the population of the village was in a similar situation to Marta’s.
When we mentioned that we’d like to see the village’s former synagogue, our detail of dwarf guards led us to its gatekeeper. Just as the village looked like a typical Ethiopian settlement, the synagogue looked like a typical rural building. The only thing that distinguished the circular hut from all the others was that it was a little larger and, inside, there was still a Star of David in the centre of the ceiling.
We also visited the former synagogue library in the next hut down from the temple. Again, the hut looked no different but Marta showed us the box where the scriptures were once kept. Apparently, the entire contents of the synagogue were also airlifted to Israel.
We bought souvenirs from our two main guides and, before we departed the village, Marta – in her timid way – invited us to her home with a smile. Inside, the mud brick hut was surprisingly spacious, cool and clean.
The main guestroom at the front of the hut was long and narrow with fading posters of film and pop stars on the walls. This is where Marta’s mother served the beer she brewed to help them get by. Marta’s father was dead and they made ends meet by tending their small plot of land behind the hut, guiding tourists, and selling their homemade brew.
Marta showed off proudly her collection of photos and postcards sent to her by other travellers who had passed through the village. “Look, Mister, Miss, my friends from Germany. It is very cold there,” she said, holding up a photo of a couple standing on a snowy street. I took a photo of her and Katleen together which we would send to her so that she could add it to her collection.
Unconquered peaks
The nearest we got to Ethiopia’s magnificent Simien mountains was a DVD video of a four-day hike through there. The film was owned by Susan, one of the volunteers we’d met in Bahar Dar. We ran into her again by chance that evening at the travel office where we had earlier inquired about daytrips to the mountains. We returned to see if they’d managed to find anyone else to join us and share the costs of the trip, which were too high for the two of us alone. Unfortunately, they had not.
Susan, austere and outlandish in her dungarees, had befriended the people running the shop. As a consolation prize, Susan showed us the DVD to give us a taste of the Simiens and she told us that it was the kind of place that you could only truly appreciate after several days of hiking through the beautiful terrain.
We sat around with her, the manager and a young woman who works in the shop sipping cinnamon tea, discussing Ethiopia, Africa, and Susan’s experiences in various African lands where she had worked. She asked us for advice on places to visit in Egypt and Turkey.
When I mentioned that there was a synagogue in Coptic Cairo, she asked me if she could visit it or any other, and about Egypt’s Jewish heritage and how much of it was still there. Being Jewish, she was interested in the subject, she explained. I mentioned the large synagogue on Adly Street and the small pockets of Jews still in the country.
She expressed what a shame it was for Egypt and for Egyptian Jews that there were so few left in the country. I agreed, mentioning that the major turning point was not the creation of Israel, but a bombing campaign against US and British targets in Cairo which was blamed on Egyptian extremists, until an investigation uncovered that it was Israeli agents who were behind the attacks (controversially, Israel honoured them with medals for their deeds earlier this year) in order to discredit the Nasser regime.
After the discovery of the plot, Egyptian Jews no longer felt safe in Egypt and many emigrated to Israel or other parts of the world. Inevitably, we had an amicable discussion on Middle Eastern politics and the need for a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“We’re all related culturally and ethnically,” Susan maintained. “I can immediately see your Semitic or Middle Eastern features. You wouldn’t look out of place in Israel.”
“I know,” I told her, “I’m constantly being mistaken here for a Jew.”
We recounted our trip to the Felasha village and talked a little about the position of Judaism and Jews in Ethiopia, and the integration experience of the Felasha in Israel.
Over dinner, we talked Kori into coming with us to the Simien mountains, but Martien was a little sick and not feeling up to it. However, by the time we got back to the travel agency, it was shut, and no one picked up at the mobile number Susan gave us.
Crooning nightmares
Our first night in the Circle Hotel felt like we’d been plunged into one of the upper circles of hell. When we entered our room after dinner, there was a faint stink coming from the bathroom, so we shut the door.
We decided to push the two single beds together, but found so much rubbish and some cockroaches under one that we hastily moved it back. Perhaps appropriately, being in the original Rasta land, we followed Bob Marley’s lyrical suggestion and spent the night together on a single bed.
Marley’s would-be 60th birthday party was held in Addis a few weeks before our arrival and his wife wants to rebury him in his “spiritual resting place”. But his spirit didn’t make sleeping on the narrow bed any easier. Another crooner, Ethiopia’s favourite, Teddy Afro, constantly interrupted my unsettled slumber. A nearby bar, or some late-night joint, was blaring out his latest album.
Teddy is pretty good and we bought his CD before we left. However, at 3am, when you don’t even have the luxury (or room) to toss and turn, his tunes are not so welcome, particularly if the album is replayed endlessly over and over again.
It soon turned into something akin to psychological torture, particularly the track on which he sings a pained refrain in a distorted voice. It wasn’t just the noise that kept me awake, but also the knowing expectation of what was to come, of the exact form and texture of the late-night noise pollution. The odd surprise – such as a woman letting rip a loud and sluttish laugh or a donkey braying in disapproval – would penetrate my stupor and make me more wakeful.
At some point, I fell asleep and then woke on Friday morning to a Quranic recital over a mosque’s loudspeaker. Katleen had slept marginally better than me and, on the hotel’s rooftop terrace, over another egg-based breakfast and macchiatos, we made a bleary-eyed resolution to take action – either to move or get a better room. The hotel gave us a much better room where we could sleep the following night comfortably – and without Teddy’s company – on a double bed.
Solid passage of time

Gondar’s Royal Enclosure is a magnificent collection of palaces which was begun by King Fasil when he established his capital here. After the rough night in our crumbling hotel, we were immediately struck by the contrast. Four centuries on and the palaces still looked elegant and solid. Four years on and our hotel was a near ruin!
The Royal palaces are excellent examples of 17th-century Ethiopian architecture at its best. We could also see the Portuguese – and even Spanish – air the complex had about it, and one could imagine some wealthy Iberian seafarer living there. Most doorways sported a Moorish arch in the Cordoba style, if far more modest than those at the Mesquida.
A couple of kilometres from the Royal Enclosure lies the Royal Pool. Just outside, was a sports field with a small grandstand on one side and terraced steps with seating on the other. Instead of spectators, a team of bovine lawnmowers were systematically mowing the grass between the long stone benches.
The pool was being restored through a joint Norwegian-Ethiopian effort. Inside, there were no big Vikings to be seen, only teams of manual workers, mainly women, carrying building materials backwards and forwards.
While we were there, they stopped for lunch. They clustered in little groups, some under trees, others by the pool wall and ate from their traditional leather lunch boxes. One group invited us to join them and we declined politely, amusing them by saying ‘thank you’ in Ethiopian.
Guardian angels
Later in the afternoon, we visited the Debre Berham Selassie Church. Katleen thought that the picturesque church was the most pleasant we’d seen so far in Ethiopia. When we looked up at the ceiling, we saw the friendly faces of Ethiopian angels watching over us. The strips of colourful angels’ faces are one of the most enduring icons associated with Ethiopia in the outside world.
After the church, as the sun was taking its final bow for the day, we decided to take a detour on our way home and walk down to a lake in a nearby valley which we’d seen from a different vantage point the day before on the road to the Felasha village.
Before reaching the dirt road leading to the lake, we came across a little girl struggling to carry a jerry-can of water that looked heavier than her. Much to the joy, entertainment and consternation of the giggling local children, and some bemused adult passers-by, I carried it to her house for her. Straining somewhat myself, I was confounded as to how anyone could ask a young girl like her to bear such a heavy weight.
On the secluded road down to the lake, almost every child performed the by-now familiar routine of saying, “Hello!” Then, after a short pause, adding, “Give me pen/one birre/money/etc.”
By some trick of the light, the lake was further away than it appeared. It looked like a silver tray in the midst of the green and brown hills that surrounded it. It being the dry season, we could see the water was markedly lower than normal.
By the time we’d got back on track, we felt the hunger pangs setting in. On holiday, one tends to lose track of the days, but we could clearly see it was Friday night on the Circle’s rooftop restaurant because it was heaving with local diners, including a couple of Ethiopian women speaking in English. We referred to this variety of expatriate Ethiopians who had settled in the USA and who obviously felt and acted somewhat foreign as ‘Americans’.
Icons of magnificence and misery
Nowhere in Ethiopia is the contrast between ancient splendour and modern misfortune more pronounced than in Lalibela. The forsaken town, which used to be known as Roha, sits high, at 2,630m, in the beautifully rough and rugged northern mountains. It has 15,000 or so inhabitants and one dusty and windswept paved road. It is very poor and surrounded by a loose-fitting belt of even poorer hungryside.
Despite the poverty, Lalibela’s ancient architecture and natural beauty are breathtaking – both figuratively and literally, as one struggles with the rarefied mountain air. The town – which was the capital of the Zagwe Dynasty from the 10th to the 13th century – is also home to 11 of the most magnificent examples of rock-hewn churches in the country.
Carved out of solid rock, these imposing and elegant structures speak of wealth and towering achievement that stretches back across time. King Lalibela – whose name apparently means ‘The bees recognise his sovereignty’ – ruled over one of the richest and most isolated kingdoms of ancient Christendom. However, the ruins are the only remaining signs of this one-time glory in this otherwise dust-blown and dried up backwater.
The drive in from the airport is mainly through dry, semi-arid hill country that is both spectacular and sparse. The rains here have been erratic in recent years, arriving late or not lasting long enough.
On the way to market
We arrived during the weekly migration from the countryside to Lalibela for Saturday morning market. We drove past a steady stream of farmers and donkeys laden with produce, goats and sheep heading into town. Herdsmen, with their arms hanging loosely off a walking-stick balanced on their shoulders, walked behind their animals.
A reckless jeep driver up ahead who was weaving carelessly through the people and livestock knocked over a donkey. Luckily, the arsehole only grazed the ass, and the animal got up a little dazed and continued resolutely on its way.
This part of the country was one of the areas hardest hit by the famine in the 1980s, and it is still a drought area today, with some people in the surrounding countryside requiring food aid to get through three-quarters of the year. In Ethiopia as a whole, an estimated 4 million people regularly require food aid.
One of the first sights that greeted us when we arrived in the town was a group of poor farmers in dusty rags carrying heavy 50kg sacks of WFP wheat on their bent shoulders. The incline of the main road was so steep that the laden men looked in danger of toppling over as they trotted down the hill.
Lalibela was probably the poorest place we visited while in Ethiopia. People looked considerably poorer there than in other places we saw. There was a higher density of beggars, street children and sick people. Many of the children we came across had eye infections, and many of them looked up at us hopefully with one good eye and one eye rendered blind by trachoma.
Although we did not see anyone who looked seriously malnourished or starving, the knowledge that somewhere in the surrounding hills there was likely to be people dying of hunger and too weak to make the journey to a feeding centre did not sit comfortably with us, particularly at dinnertime. When Katleen speculated about how bad the situation probably was in the surrounding countryside, I even found myself reacting defensively: “We can’t be sure there are any starving people near here.”
Hunger for alternatives
But starving people there undoubtedly were and this pitiful state of affairs became an inevitable evening conversation point during our stay in this forsaken place. This part of the highlands is a case-in-point of how shortsighted quick fixes don’t work. Rather than help get Ethiopia on its feet, the international attention it received in 1984 and 1985 built up a culture of dependency.
The effort may have fed some of the starving but it did nothing to boost Ethiopia’s long-term economic prospects. In fact, one explanation for why Ethiopia is so badly off is the fact that, although it receives large amounts of emergency assistance, it receives the lowest amount of development aid in the world.
“Emergency aid is like having an [accident and emergency] A&E department without the rest of the hospital; development aid is having the hospital without the A&E capacity – you need both to treat Ethiopia,” Save the Children’s Peter Hawkins put it colourfully in a recent interview.
To take his analogy further, Ethiopia is like a country in intensive care hooked up to a life-support system. The doctors only provide the dying patient with enough food and medicine to keep them barely alive, but do nothing to make them well or to help them to recover.
One evening, with Katleen, Martien (who is an environmental lawyer) and Rori, we discussed this lack of consistency and vision, wondering what a difference something as simple as a decent irrigation system would make to the country’s ability to feed itself.
International apathy and short-sightedness are only one part of Ethiopia’s wows, the other is entirely of its own making. The simplistic picture of the Band/LiveAid campaign portraying Ethiopia as a country facing a natural disaster was misleading, much of that catastrophe was man-made.
At one point, the Addis government was spending an estimated $2 million a day on its conflict with Eritrea, while its people wallowed in poverty. That makes more than $700 million a year in a country with a GDP of around $6 billion. If Ethiopia were a multinational, its combined income would place it at 223rd place on the Forbes 500, alongside Barnes and Noble.
Grading aid
LiveAid’s record is decidedly patchy, as aid expert David Rieff expertly showed in an in-depth analysis that is set to appear in the July 2005 edition of Prospect Magazine.
“The famine was the product of three elements, only one of which could be described as natural – a two-year drought across the Sahel sub-region,” he wrote “The other two factors were entirely man-made.”
These were the internal displacement caused by the Addis government’s war against Eritrean guerrillas and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, and the agricultural collectivisation policy pursued by the Dergue junta. “This collectivisation was every bit the equal in its radicalism of the policies Stalin pursued in Ukraine in the 1930s, where, as in Ethiopia, the result was inevitable: famine.”
Rieff condemned Live Aid for turning a blind eye, and providing the necessary humanitarian mask, for the forced resettlement of 600,000 people from the north to the southwest of the country that may have killed up to 100,000, nearly as many as were saved by LiveAid. The potent mix of unkind nature, ruthless government and international apathy continues to plague Ethiopia, and the situation, in many ways, is no better today than it was in the 1980s, with millions still facing possible starvation.
Beside long-term foreign investment in the country’s production capacity, Ethiopia needs leaders who care so as to break three-quarters of a century of oppressive dictatorships that began with Haile Selassie in 1930.
Rock solid architecture



The churches were a steep walk down from our hotel. As we were buying our tickets at the entrance, the guide who had tried to lure us on the airport bus reappeared out of the blue to attempt to sell us his services again.
We had been interested in getting a guide, but his hard-sell approach put us off and we told him we were going to walk around by ourselves that afternoon and would be looking for a guide the following day. Undeterred, he caught up with us half an hour later and tried again. In fact, he approached no fewer than five times in two days. In the end, we decided our money was better spent on two young boys who befriended us and showed us around.
The first day we wandered in wonder around the eastern cluster of churches and, on the second day, we explored the western cluster. The Lalibela churches are tucked into the rock below ground level. To get to the entrance of each, you have to walk down a long causeway, but many churches are connected to one another via tunnels, some of which are only accessible to priests. We routinely visited each group of churches twice: first, to view them as a whole from the outside while they were closed, and, later, when the priests were there to let us in.
The churches ranged from tiny chapels to large churches, such as the highly venerated Bet Maryam. We wondered how such impressive monuments had been carved out of the solid mountains. On the inside, the buildings – which are decorated with fine icons painted on to the naked rock – were cool and the light was hazy.
The reddish hue of the rocks put me in mind of Petra but Katleen thought the ancient Arabian city was built on a more imposing scale. Still, Lalibela, we agreed, deserved some international attention, rather than the oblivion it exists in. One of our guidebook went one further and argued that it should be recognised as a world wonder. Although we felt privileged to be among only a handful of foreigners around, we knew it would be good for the local economy and Ethiopian pride if more of the world ‘discovered’ this place.
Churches and dragons
The most awe-inspiring church in the eastern cluster – actually in the whole complex – is that of St George. As we descended from a nearby hill, we caught the first glimpse of Bet Giorgis which is excavated deep into the ground in the form of a cross, or a symmetrical cruciform tower, as our guidebook puts it. Around the sides of the cross is a sheer 15m drop and a causeway which leads down to the entrance. The stands near the edge of a precipice which looks out over the area’s stunning landscape. The view is so good that we returned there a number of times to sit and admire.
If you thought that the St George was the patron saint of England and were wondering what he was doing in Ethiopia, let me reassure you that the legendary man was about as English as Jesus Christ.
The hallowed saint, whose name means land-worker in Greek, was probably born in Cappadocia, Anatolia, which lies in modern-day Turkey but was part of the Eastern Roman Empire at the time. The dragon he supposedly slayed had been terrorising locals in Silena, Libya, and eating up their damsels at the rate of two a day. Being an early Christian martyr, he was finally tortured and beheaded by the Romans and buried in his mother’s homeland of Palestine.
Given how many miracles are attributed to this busy saint, finding his way to wet and windy England doesn’t seem beyond him. But his full schedule meant the journey took over a millennium, since he was only adopted as patron saint during the reign of Edward III.
He seems to have found the time to make his way to Ethiopia much earlier. Apparently, a wrathful St George appeared to King Lalibela in a vision chastising the Ethiopian negus for not having dedicated a church in his honour. The pious and trembling monarch immediately promised to build his most magnificent church and dedicate it to the saint whose behaviour in this episode was far from saintly.
Café culture
In the mud-brick village sandwiched between the eastern and western clusters, with its circular huts on a sloping incline, there lies a solitary souvenir shop. On the second day in Lalibela, we decided to deliver on our promise and go back and buy something from the friendly proprietors. Since the shop was a little out of the way, we guessed they needed the business more than the establishments in the town centre.
One sign of how poor the area was is the refrain we often heard in souvenir shops that X item – a bible or an item of traditional jewellery – was an antique sold by “farmers in the countryside” during lean times. We made a point of not buying any such items – we did not feel like preying on the misfortune of people in the hugryside.
The young boy in the shop, Abeba (meaning flower, like the name of the capital), invited us to join his family for a traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony. Their house was the adjoining hut behind the shop, separated on the outside by a screen. Inside the small space, we met four generations of the family: his grandfather, mother, brother and sister, and nephew and niece.
His sister, who also worked in the shop, prepared the coffee. First, she washed the fresh beans and roasted them until the overpowering aroma filled the entire room. Meanwhile, her mother burnt incense and, disconcertingly, proceeded to reveal a shrivelled breast which she used to silence a screaming grandson.
The girl ground the coffee with a mortar and pestle while warming water on the charcoal she had got going earlier. When it came to a boil, she poured it over the coffee powder she had placed in a traditional coffee pot. She poured the coffee out into little cups and we drank. Although Katleen and I only had one cup each, we left, out of politeness, only after the entire ceremony was complete – i.e. when the coffee was up.
From the heart of empire to the margins of history
Axum is Ethiopia’s oldest existing city. It was the capital during arguably the country’s heyday in the first millennium AD. No one knows exactly when the city was established but recent evidence suggests the 1st century BC. However, considering that so little excavation has been carried out in Ethiopia, this date is likely to be revised further.
The Axumite kingdom not only ruled over its African heartland but its circle of influence stretched into Arabia. It was recognised as one of the most advanced and influential empires of its age. In fact, it was the junior rival of the Byzantines and Persians.
It was one of the first countries in the world to adopt Christianity, after two shipwrecked Syrian monks in the third century popularised the faith there. One of them sailed for Alexandria and laid down the close historic links between the Egyptian Coptic Church and Ethiopian Orthodox Church – which is often erroneously referred to as the Ethiopian Coptic Church.
Axum also played a crucial role in the formative years of Islam. The Islamic prophet Muhammad was born in the Year of the Elephant, which was so-called because the Abyssinians mounted a major, but unsuccessful, military offensive against Mecca. He also sent his early followers there to take refuge from the persecution they were facing from Muhammad’s own Querish clan, which ruled over the trading city.
“If you were to go to the Habbash (Abyssinia),” Muhammad told them, “it would be better for you until such time as God shall relieve you from you distress, for the king (negus) there will not tolerate injustice and it is a friendly country.”
Muhammad returned the favour to the negus by giving Abyssinia a special place in Islam and calling on subsequent generations of Muslims to leave it alone. But the rising star of Islam also seemed to have sealed the fate of Axum which appears never to have recovered from the loss of its Red Sea trading routes to the Arabs.
After Lalibela, Axum struck us as an affluent and relaxed city. Although it is a largely hassle-free town, low season meant that we were prime targets for hustlers and bored young children. Paradoxically, it would also prove to be the town where I’d have my biggest confrontation – which almost turned ugly – with a hustler who called himself Tom.
Despite its long and distinguished history, Axum does not stretch very far. On our first stroll through the town to get the lay of the land, we soon reached the outskirts of the town, which were more village-like, or ‘biblical’ as a group of South Africans in our hotel described it.
The weather in Axum was the hottest and steamiest we’d encountered so far on our trip, and the sun was pretty intense, forcing us to stop for regular ‘Ambo stops’ – as Katleen called them – to enjoy the supposedly natural bubbles of Ethiopia’s best mineral water which is served in helpful half-litre bottles.
Pillars of the community
Axum’s stellae are possibly its best-known artefacts, particularly since Italy agreed to return one of these famous obelisks which had stood in Rome since the days of Mussolini.
Most of the city’s obelisks stand in the Stellae Field. From its name, we’d expected some Stonehenge-like plot of green land dotted with a small forest of abandoned obelisks – and that was kind of what we kept an eye out for as we reached the outskirts of the city.
After backtracking into town, the stellae turned out to be located in what was less a field and more a yard just off one of Axum’s main squares which had been established by a former mayor as a tourist attraction. In place of the tens of stone monuments we were expecting, there stood only half a dozen obelisks, albeit of impressive beauty and grace. The first pieces of the returned obelisk lay strewn around the site chained to the ground.
Although not as ancient as Egyptian obelisks, the stellae date back to pre-Christian Ethiopia, and are believed to have represented the power of the king and his lineage. The face of each obelisk – the highest of which stands at some 30m – looks like a house, with several storeys of windows and a door at ground level.
Near the Stellae Field is the so-called Queen of Sheba’s pool which actually has no historical link with the legendary queen, since it was built in Christian times. It does, however, have an important practical link for the townsfolk, many of whom seem to depend on its questionable water to fill their buckets and jerry-cans.
Cactus hill
About half an hour away on foot is the sixth-century King Kalib’s (whose name means Dog) Palace. The walk is along a secluded footpath that weaves its way through agricultural fields. The path is lined with strange and stunning desert foliage and large cactus-like trees, which I think are called euphorbia, with large prickly leaves at the base and a long bluish-green stem with bright yellow flowers. Birds of matching colour flitted around these outlandish trees.
Once we arrived at the palace, we received the unpleasant shock that we needed tickets that could only be got from the tourism office in town. That meant we had to return the next day to see the actual insides of the palace of which only a couple of subterranean burial chambers survive.
A signpost from Kalib’s Palace points towards the Pantaleon church which stands on top of a very high hill. We headed in its general direction and took the serendipitous turn off the road to another church with no name on top of a nearby hill which we, at first, mistook for the Pantaleon.
As we got nearer to the top, we were greeted by an agreeable clanking and chiming sound that put me in mind of Buddhist monasteries. On the roof were two metal wheels which rattled in the gentle breeze.
The view of the surrounding valleys and mountains was uninterrupted for miles and miles. One of those mountains, we were told by locals, separates Ethiopia from Eritrea. We could also see a picturesque little house lodged precariously on top of a rocky precipice that was the actual Pantaleon.
The next day, on a hike we started from the other side of town, we visited the Pantaleon church itself, as well as Kalib’s ruins. The actual climb is somewhat easier than it looks from a distance because the solid mass of rock on which the tiny church stands has steps cut into it. However, having been spoilt the previous day’s vista, the view from here seemed disappointing.
The ambience was not helped by the church’s cloying and ingratiating watchman and the fact that Katleen was not allowed to make the final ascent to the church with me – but the guy wanted her to buy a ticket nonetheless.
Keepers of the hidden ark
Following our long morning hike, our second afternoon in the city was spent touring the Axum Archaeological Museum and the St Mary of Tsion Church, the home of the legendary Ark of the Covenant.
Owing to the lack of visitors in town, the museum’s curator had not realised that it was opening time until we arrived and he opened up the building especially for us. If the word ‘museum’ evokes images in your mind of the Egyptian and British Museums or the Louvre, then you are likely to be sorely disappointed by Axum’s answer to them.
The museum is made up of two small chambers crammed full of pottery which is of undoubted major archaeological interest but gets a bit tedious after a while. That said, there is some superb artwork on the pottery and the overview of Axumite history on the walls makes for an interesting read. The most interesting artefacts were some tablets written in the ancient Sabean script of Southern Arabia upon which Amharic is based.
A deacon at the St Mary of Tsion church gave us a guided tour of the compound. The original structure no longer stands, although the foundations of one of its original temples are left untouched as a mark of respect.
The deacon started off by showing us the crowns of some of Axum’s former rulers. Then we entered the hideous modern monstrosity built by Haile Selasie. The only thing that recommends this church is its size. Inside is an ancient goatskin Bible with exquisite illustrations, left inexplicably out in the middle of the main hall.
Only I was allowed into the large main monastery which was built by King Fasil of Gondar. Inside, the holy of holies is protected by a large door decorated by two of the apostles. Behind the door, in an area closed off to visitors, lies a replica of the ark.
The actual ark supposedly rests in an outhouse where, the deacon explained, one monk lives permanently, his raison d’etre being to guard the sacred artefact. No one else is allowed anywhere near the ark and, just before the monk is due to die, another one is prepared to take over the holy function.
A restaurant for two
We decided to have dinner at the Yeha Hotel on the second evening, after the good impression we’d got there at lunch the first afternoon. The hotel sits advantageously on a wooded hill with a panoramic view of the city’s major sites – the Stellae Field and the St Mary of Tsion Church.
As we watched the sun go down behind a nearby hill, we could hardly credit that we were the only people enjoying this magnificent view. Although we enjoyed the exclusivity of our evening, our hearts went out to the staff and owners, even if it was the government.
The maitre d’ was a thin, middle-aged man dressed in a loose-fitting black suit. His sombre, weary features hung as loosely off his face as his clothes did off his body as he shuffled towards us with a laboured gait. His measured pace seemed to match that of the establishment in which he worked.
It took him quite some time to set our table and exchange the set menu for the a la carte one, but the wait for the food went unnoticed as we soaked in the atmosphere. Our friendly attempts to talk to him and break through his serious demeanour caused him to loosen up a little and try to chat with us in his broken English.
For our third day in Axum, we decided we’d earned the right to take it easy and we spent the morning and early afternoon on the Yeha Hotel’s terrace reading, writing and having lunch. We also went shopping and strolled aimlessly around the town.
We even took a long evening walk out of town where we encountered a galloping donkey trying to escape its owner and a group of children who looked at us as if we’d just stepped off a spaceship and sat down on the little road bridge near their stomping ground.
Tigrayan trouble stirring
On the first evening, back at the Africa Hotel – where you hold the whole of Africa in your hands (at least the key-ring version of it) – everyone was glued to Eritrean TV, hanging on every word emanating from the flickering box. Judging by the set up, it looked like a political programme and we wondered whether this was a regular night’s evening in a border region or whether there was trouble brewing at the frontier.
While we were waiting for our dinner, Tom the hustler (Tadius was his real name, I believe) joined us uninvited at our table. He offered to sell us just about everything that was not nailed down. He first started by proposing to guide us around Axum. We explained that we weren’t interested because we preferred to explore by ourselves and the city was so compact that it was very easy to navigate.
Undeterred, he soldiered on. Next on his menu were daytrips to Mekele or Debre Damo. We were interested in going to the beautiful stone Debre Damo monastery, despite the fact that women are not allowed in. The mountains in the area are beautiful and the monastery is surrounded by sheer cliffs. In fact, the last 15m to the summit can only be reached via a leather rope which is supposed to symbolise the magical serpent that took the monastery’s founder, Abuna Aregawi, to the top when he went there alone in his hermitage.
However, we did not trust Tom and the prices he was quoting were higher than the going-rate for such daytrips. We politely declined his offer. Unrepentant, he then proceeded to retrieve a steadily growing stream of tourist kitsch from his pockets and a leather pouch around his waist until our table looked like a miniature souvenir shop.
Apparently oblivious to the comic absurdity of his get-what-you-can-out-of-the-dumb-tourists approach, he ploughed on and we continued to hold him off. Keeping his piece de resistance till last, he informed us that he had antique coins, “some from BC,” he claimed.
Disbelieving his claim, we proceeded to inform him that selling antiquities was illegal. He said that it was okay and everything could be taken care of. Katleen told him that he should not be squandering his country’s history which was not his to sell, and if he had coins, he should give them to the Axum museum. He protested that the museum doesn’t pay.
Contributing my penny’s worth, so to speak, I suggested that the museum was not obliged to pay for antiquities and that even if he genuinely had antiquities for sale, I was not interested, since being Egyptian I knew what it was like to have more of your history outside your country than inside it. Growing impatient at his tenacity more than anything else, I asked him if he could leave us alone to eat our dinner when he showed no sign of leaving.
Tenacious Tom’s tantrum
But this would not be the end of our encounter with Tenacious Tom. The next day, he contrived to run into us at least twice on the street. In a desperate bid to get rid of him, I offered him a price for a daytrip that I knew he wouldn’t accept.
The second evening, after our beautifully scenic dinner on the panoramic terrace of the Yeha Hotel, and our half-hour digestive stroll back to the Africa Hotel, we decide to have a couple of beers before we turned in.
“Bon soir,” one of Tom’s gang of hustler called out from a nearby table. This was the third or fourth time he’d addressed me in French and I decided to find out why. He said that I looked like I spoke French, so I asked him what exactly it was about me that suggested that. “You look African American,” he explained, which sent me into a miffed silence, and Katleen and I tried to figure out what the hell he was on about.
As we were enjoying the cool evening air and the good Ethiopian beer, Tom gate-crashed our peace and quiet yet again trying to sell us daytrips yet again. I told him that, even if he offered us a free trip, I didn’t want to go anywhere with him. A friend of his tried to come and calm the situation and salvage what he could from the disaster Tom had created.
We declined his offer for a better deal and him as guide, explaining that it was a little late to arrange anything – we’d already psyched ourselves down for a day of relaxation.
Just before we went to bed, we heard a knock at the door. It was the hotel manager saying there was a driver outside who said he’d come to make arrangements for the morning. We asked him to get rid of the guy and expressed our displeasure about Tom and his gang. The manager complained bitterly about how they were hijacking his establishment and how even the police was doing nothing.
In the morning, the new guy joined us at breakfast and his friendlier demeanour won us round to agreeing to a trip at a price that sounded reasonable. He said he would bring the jeep driver to finalise the negotiation. The first sign that things weren’t as they should was that he turned up with a microbus.
I told him we were expecting a 4×4 and he said this was just as good. They invited me in to try it out and talk to the driver. Then the driver added on an extra €20 to the price I had agreed with the other guy. Totally drained by this stage, I fell into a fuming silence and told them to take me back to the hotel.
When I returned, Katleen admitted that she was a little concerned about me because I was gone for so long. “I wasn’t sure if they’d driven you somewhere isolated and robbed you.”
But the story had an epilogue. That evening, an angry Tom confronted me on my way to buy some water, accusing me of having complained to the tourist office. I told him I’d done no such thing. “Have I caused you any trouble?” he asked. Confounded that he could even ask such a question, I told him I didn’t want to speak to him.
All through dinner, he sat at a nearby table throwing me aggressive looks which I ignored as Katleen and I chatted and joked, pretending nothing was going on. He disappeared for a while and then re-emerged drunk and rowdy and threw a tantrum near me, hurling a steady stream of abuse my way.
“All Egyptian are liars,” he said, revealing an unexpected bout of racial discrimination. I finally lost my cool and jumped out of my chair, warning him that if he didn’t shut his mouth, I’d break it for him. In a panic at my rage, he ran out on to the street and picked up a rock. I mocked his picking up a rock and told him that if he wanted to fight, he should come here and use his fists.
While this was going on, Katleen had announced loudly that she was going inside to call the police. She returned during our standoff and announced the police were on their way. Tom dropped the rock and vanished into the darkness down the street. His friends followed suit, one of them in mid-chew, leaving the rest of his dinner on the table.
Run in with the police
Their haste was uncalled for as the police took over an hour to arrive. The policeman was wearing a woollen blanket wrapped around his shoulders and torso and was carrying a Kalashnikov over his shoulder. The hotel manager translated what I was saying and the policeman wanted us to come down to the police station the next morning to make a formal statement so that he could suitably punish the guy.
We asked for an explanation of what “punish” meant and the policeman said that he would keep him in custody for a day or two to teach him a lesson. Concerned at what this “lesson” would involve, we asked if he couldn’t just let him off with a warning this time.
To get out of dropping Tom into too much trouble, we explained that we were catching a flight the next morning. The whole incident caused a stir of excitement in the hotel in this normally quiet town. We found perfect strangers come up to console us and offer their friendly apologies for Tom’s behaviour. We were at pains to point out that we would not allow a run-in with one person to colour our picture of a great city and its friendly locals.
The next morning, the hotel manager joined us on the microbus to the airport and we found ourselves taking a detour through unpaved side streets. He explained that he needed us to make a formal statement to help his case for evicting the troublemakers from his hotel.
The police station was a collection of small buildings that did not much resemble a police station. The officer had not yet arrived and so, with a great deal of reluctance because of the possible repercussions for Tom, I offered to write an account of what happened in English on the way to the airport.
In the eye of a political storm
Prior to our return to Addis Ababa, we’d heard snippets of information suggesting that the capital was in turmoil. Lacking access to media we could understand, it took us some time to piece together a clear picture of events.
It transpires that a couple of days before our arrival back in the city, thousands of people took to the streets to demonstrate against the official election result which had Meles Zenawi’s widely disliked government slated as clear winners against the popular opposition Coalition for Unity and Democracy. During the protests, police opened fire, killing at least 26 people. Some Addis Ababans suggested to us the figure was nearer 40.
The first sign that something was awry was the difficulty with which we found a taxi – there was only a smattering of the government-owned yellow ones and none of the private blue ones – to get us from the airport to the hotel, where the reception staff greeted us with big smiles like reunited friends. When we asked them what was going on in town, they seemed reluctant to divulge too much – perhaps because they did not wish to alarm us or give us what they thought was a poor picture of their country.
We eventually managed to get them to confirm that there we were in the midst of a three-day transport strike and that there had been clashes. “But it’s nothing for you to worry about. The city is safe,” one of the receptionists reassured us.
“We’re sure it is,” we agreed.
There is something both eerie and intriguing about walking around a large city that has more or less completely shut down. The private transport strike had more or less brought Addis to a grinding halt, since public transport was not enough to keep the city moving.
It also struck me that many shop owners had used the strike as an excuse to join the protest, because there were thousands of people milling around but hardly a commercial establishment for them to enter.
In the phantom city, we had to get everywhere on foot and it took us two hours of walking around before we found an internet connection so that we could check our e-mails to make sure that Katleen’s colleague’s sister was coming to pick up her money.
The New Flower revolution
During our walk around, Addis seemed calm – we joked that it would be hard to see the signs of vandalism in such a rundown place – but there was an underlying tension. It seemed to flow beneath the city’s streets, in the murky depths where a sewage system should have been, carrying the barely concealed discontentment and disillusionment of a population that had been shat upon by generations of uncaring leaders and ignored by an outside world preoccupied with other matters.
Katleen and I were impressed that in such a poor country – where no work often equated to no food, and there were no union funds to support striking workers – people could organise such an effective strike action. In the two days we were back in the capital, we saw no more than half a dozen blue taxis and at least 90% of the shops were closed.
However, despite this show of public courage, it occurred to me that this defiant display of popular will would go hardly unremarked by the outside world. The media would not fall over itself to give Ethiopia’s revolt against the status quo an inspirational name – it would not merit the prefix Orange, Cedar, or even New Flower affixed before Revolution.
But we were quite sure that this would not be the end of the popular movement and we feared things might get uglier after our departure.
Even Live8, which is ostensibly dedicated to Africa and particularly Ethiopia, did not spark too much interest in the election and its fallout. It is almost as if Ethiopia is only invited to the party if it is dressed in the sufficiently wretched attire of emaciated and hungry powerlessness. A defiant and rebellious people complicates the simple telegenity of starving children – especially if they can turn up 20 years later looking healthy and as stunning as a supermodel.
Ever since my return from Ethiopia, I have not been able to see Bob Geldof or the Live8 effort without succumbing to a severe dose of scepticism. I’d like to believe that it will have some impact and I wish it will, but the signs are not good.
Even its limited goal of showing G8 leaders what people think did not seem to worry them unnecessarily. I suppose the superrich celebrity spokespeople charged with delivering the message are too much a part of the status quo to worry the leaders of the world’s superrich countries, even if Sting delivered a stinging rendition of Every BreathYou Take, telling those leaders to watch their back.
Live8 was more of a low-cost gesture to make the affluent feel good because they were doing their bit to make poverty history. But just as a one-night stand does not constitute a relationship, the biggest concert ever staged is unlikely to make a shred of difference to the net sum of poverty in the world – in fact, it might only succeed in making sub-Saharan Africans feel cheap when they wake up the morning after to find that the rich world has forgotten their number again, despite the wonderful night of flirtation and intimacy.
Friday the thirteenth
Our second day in Addis Ababa was also our 13th day in Ethiopia, which also just happened to be a Friday. Although I am not superstitious and find it amusing that the number 13 – especially when combined with a Friday – should bother anyone, the coincidence of walking through the troubled ghost city on such a day appealed to my poetic side.
Determined to make the most of our last day in the country, we set off fairly early in order to make time to walk everywhere. Our first stop was the excellent Ethnographic Museum which is housed in Haile Selasie’s former palace, on the campus of Addis Ababa University.
The informative and interesting exhibition is laid out along the theme of the human lifecycle, from birth to death. It delves into how the country’s diverse ethnicities deal with each of these phases of life. The glossy and modern museum starts with the nation’s founding myths, including the Queen of Sheba’s famous encounter with Solomon.
It also explores birth and mothering among the various tribes and ethnicities in the country, early childhood, initiation into adulthood, courtship, marriage, as well as conflict, sport, music and art.

In the afternoon, we decided to head down to the huge mercato (market) district to see if any shops were open so that we could do some last-minute gift shopping. En route, we observed the nervous movement of police and army troops around the city. I took a photo of a special forces jeep after it passed us. It turned back and the commanding officer asked to see my video camera. I explained it was a normal camera and he let us go. A little while later, while pretending to read our map on a main square, I took a photo of a passing army truck. However, the farcical encounter was still to come at the market.
The walk took us the better part of two hours, so you can imagine our disappointment when we discovered that the entire market, reputed to be the biggest in sub-Saharan African, was completely shuttered. But entertainment was waiting round the corner.
VIP police escort

We had one exposure left on the camera and Katleen used it to capture an old woman walking along one of the Mercato’s side streets. Suddenly, a police constable pounced on us, barking: “No photos.” At this point, I was already putting the camera away and I told him that we wouldn’t take any more photos.
This did not satisfy him and he insisted on seeing the camera. We showed it to him. He asked us to take out the film and we refused. Perhaps not happy at having his authority questioned, he asked us to accompany him to the police station. We refused, insisting that we’ve done nothing wrong.
Caught off guard by our response, he followed us like a lost puppy and we tried to stroll as casually as we could through the closed market district pretending not to notice our tail. As he followed us, he consulted with other policemen and, pretty soon, we found that we were being followed by a small force of half a dozen or so policemen.
Then, all of a sudden, a police pick-up truck skidded to a halt on the other side of the road and the commanding officer leapt out and called us over. We were totally bewildered as to how a simple photo of a woman walking down a street could stir up such a fuss, particularly since we’d already taken much riskier photos.
We concluded that the police were either edgy or bored, and our feeling of indignation at their overreaction mounted. The senior officer asked us to go to the station and I tried to reason with him through an interpreter, asking him to explain to us exactly what crime we’d committed or law we’d broken, and that we were not criminals to be treated in such a way.
“No, we don’t think your criminals,” his assistant explained. “We just want to ask you a few questions.” We told them that they could ask whatever questions they liked there on the street. Katleen, who is normally the patient one, dug into the assistant, asking him if they didn’t have anything better to do with their time than pick on tourists.
Our sense of disbelief reached its peak when a police jeep appeared on the scene with the area commander on board. Katleen asked if she could borrow his mobile to call the embassy and I tried to explain the ridiculousness of the situation to him. He asked to see my passport and then let us go.
We’ll never again look at our erstwhile camera in the same light again. We had never realised that it was such a dangerous weapon that required an entire police squad to disarm us of it. The entire episode gives a whole new meaning to shooting film.
Last supper
Aware of the city’s transport situation, we decided to find a taxi well in advance, but that was more easily said than done. We came across none on our way back to the hotel. I stood outside the hotel several times waiting for a taxi to pass but to no avail. The reception tried to phone around to find us a yellow taxi but the few that were running were already booked.
At the 11th hour, while we were eating our dinner, the receptionist managed to find us a private car to take us to the airport at a premium rate – that is, by Ethiopian standards. The night before we had dinner at one of Addis’s best traditional restaurants and we hoped to check out another of the city’s culinary landmarks in the Piazza district.
However, the taxi drama meant that it was too late to walk all that way and back before our transfer to the airport. We sat down for dinner in the hotel’s emptying restaurant. Just 20 minutes earlier, the restaurant, reception area and adjoining lounge had been buzzing with activity.
Perhaps owing to the transport situation, it emptied out in a matter of minutes and we were left alone with the hotel staff. The solitude was a little eerie and disconcerting. We felt a little like the last people left behind in an evacuated city. A chilling silence had gripped the hotel staff as they watched the flickering television screen in the lounge with visible apprehension.
We asked one of the waiters what was going on and he said it looked like the government wasn’t going to back down over the elections and there was likely to be more trouble ahead in the coming weeks.
We thanked John for agreeing to take us to the airport. He drove us through the city’s dark and deserted streets seeming to pick the better neighbourhoods to pass through. Appropriately, Teddy Afro, Ethiopia’s favourite singer, whose lyrics are apparently hard-hitting and political, provided the background music to our final journey in Ethiopia.