Icons of magnificence and misery
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Photo:
©2005 K. Diab/K. Maes |
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 eleven of the most magnificent examples of rock-hewn
churches in the country.
Carved out of solid rock, these imposing and
elegant structures speak of a 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.
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Photo: ©2005 K. Diab/K. Maes
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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 snapping: “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 short-sighted 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 him barely
alive, but do nothing to make him well or to help him 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 revenues
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 Tigrean 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.
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A Lalibela church cut out of the solid rock
Photo: ©2005 Katleen Maes
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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.
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Photo: ©2005 K. Maes/K. Diab
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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 my
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 slew 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.
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Photo:
©2005 K. Diab/K. Maes |
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.
ã2005 K. Diab. Unless otherwise stated, all the content on this website
is the copyright of Khaled Diab.