There are over 50 “tribes” across Ethiopia. However, some of the most isolated and relatively unassimilated are 1200 miles south of the capital, Addis Ababa, in the Omo River Valley, an area roughly the size of Ohio. The lonnnng dusty multi-day journey crosses through the Rift Valley, past small villages, terraced fields growing cotton and sorghum, and hillsides dotted with Acacia trees.
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Landscape through Omo Valley
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Tribal home in the bush
The road was a driver’s nightmare. Towns were congested with donkey carts, walkers, tuktuks, and cows and goats going in every direction.
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Traffic jam
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Where are the lanes?
To keep it entertaining, there were rest stops for camels, roadside shops selling crazy patterned mattresses, an occasional van with a chicken strapped to the roof, herds of cattle across the road, and colorfully clad tribes people carrying guns.
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Camels
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Mattress Store
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Chicken for dinner?
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Cattle roadblock
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Just a gun-toting tribesman
In addition, there was dust like I’ve never seen. Potholes that were so big goats would lay down in them, deep deep ruts caused by rain run-off. The holes and goats meant the driver was swerving from one side of the road to another literally ALL the time. Obviously we didn’t make great time. It was teeth jarring and the drivers were checking the tires and wheels every couple hours. It was a Dramamine day!
The tribes have some cultural traditions in common, but most are distinct in both small and important ways, including varying languages and dialects. All live very subsistence lifestyles, some based on agriculture (the Konso) but most rely on cattle and goat herding. They turn, primarily, to traditional medicines of varying local herbs (e.g. moringa), practice animism with the Christian Orthodox and Protestant religions beginning to take hold. Few send their children to school, despite government iniatives, and important village decisions and disputes are taken up by village elders. There are varying ceremonies marking puberty for boys and girls. And a bride price is the norm, usually being some number of cattle, or its equivalent in goats. For example: one gun or four cows or forty goats. It seems the same amount must be paid for each subsequent wife and that a husband must rotate (nightly?) from wife to wife to keep harmony!
We were able to visit communities of six different tribes. Although this is tourist season, the villages do not know anyone is coming and the very few tourists there are all scatted among different tribes. In other words, the visits aren’t particularly staged.
One tribe of roughly 50,000, the Hamar, is dispersed in the mountains above the Omo River. They are most well-known for the pink color of the women’s hair, which is created through a combination of local clay, butter and a bit of incense to keep it smelling fresh.
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Hamar women
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Hamar women
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Hamar women
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Hamar women
The first two photos above are “first wives” as designated by the heavy goat skin and metal and bone “necklace.” Young girls may also have the pink hair, but it is cropped short. The women clearly put incredible effort into their looks.
Hamar young girls
You may have heard of bull jumping...a tribal tradition when young men of marrying age are required to jump, successfully, over the backs of (a couple?) bulls. They must do this an even number of times (two, four, etc.), otherwise it is unlucky. The women, too, have a tradition. If they are attracted to a man, he whips them. Many had visible welts and scars on their arms, legs and back. The government has, apparently, tried to educate people that this is not “right,” but this culture has resisted. Much as they have resisted education.
Hamar scarification
While this is abhorrent in our culture, to the Hamar women, the scars also serve as visible proof, later, of their commitment and value to the marriage. The men also present their wife with a stiff necklace made of leather and metal to be worn as we would a wedding ring. The larger one shown in the pictures above denotes the first wife, who typically will have more power and authority. The double rings are subsequent wives, all of whom live in separate homes.
Hamar Village home
The “yards” are incredibly neat and clean relative to other villages.
As the picture below shows, Hamar men also are scarred, representing their achievements in battle. This is generally only seen on older men as most intractable-tribal warfare no longer occurs.
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Hamar elder - scars show he has won many battles. Holding neck rest.
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Hamar boys playing on fence
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Hamar woman - not first wife
The Hamar are very animistic, placing high value and importance on their dogs and believing they can tell the future by reading goat intestines.
The Mursi tribe, with fewer than 10,000, are nearly extinct. They are perhaps the most widely known, but were the most remote and hardest to reach of the tribes we saw. They are popularly known for the decorated ceramic plates or discs the women place in their lower lip.
Mursi woman with lip plate wearing blanket
The next photo is actually my favorite. I feel it tells a lot about these women and their lives, having been disfigured since they were teens, and the gradual disappearance of this culture. This woman hides her face. You can’t see what has happened to her or to the tribe.
Mursi woman covering her face
To accommodate the plate, the teen girls have their lower front teeth pulled. Remember: there are no dentists here! A small slit is cut in the lip and, over time, it is stretched and enlarged to make an even larger opening. Because the plate is uncomfortable, the women usually remove it during daily living.
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Mursi woman with lip plate intact
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Mursi woman with lip plate removed for comfort
While this particular tradition is disappearing among young girls, they still (like the Hamar women) place great importance on making themselves beautiful (And I’m thinking this is not unique to these Ethiopian women!), just in different ways. Perhaps with earrings, bracelets, scarring, lipstick, or head pieces.
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Mursi woman with earring
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Mursi woman with earring
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Mursi teen wearing lipstick
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Mursi woman with bracelets
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Mursi woman with headdress
Thr life here is hard, as you see this woman grinding sorghum for the village and the kitchen tools for the entire village piled against a tree. And always, there are babies feeding on breasts that have been scarred.
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Mursi woman grinding sorghum
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Mursi kitchen equipment
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Mursi woman nursing child
The men, are tall and lean and handsome, but spend most of their time in the bush with cattle.
Mursi man
The Karo tribe is another very tiny tribe of about six thousand survivors. Quite handsome and living close to the Omo River, even the men are noted for body painting. Several of the men carried Russian kalashnikovs which they trade for across the nearby border with South Sudan.
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Karo tribesmen
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Karo man with gun
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Karo elder
Some men continue the tradition of unusual hairstyles, while the women color their hair pink with mud like the Hamar but keep it closely cropped.
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Karo man hairstyle
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Karo woman cropped hair
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Karo tribe member colorfully adorned
The ornamentation continued onto their goat skin clothes. This woman had created a fringe out of bottle caps that actually looked very cool and had clearly taken a lot of work!
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Karo woman with children - see “fringe” decorating garment
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Close-up of garment “fringe” - bottle caps!
The Karo women are known for being extremely strong, working side by side with their husbands, in addition to doing traditional women’s work. They have a ceremony during puberty where a thin toothpick-like stick is inserted below their lower lip.
I thought these people had the most gorgeous teeth! Straight. White. Strong. Seems they, and many Ethiopians, chew on a twig of African Olive Tree. Dont’t know. But look at some of these photographs and tell me how this happens!!
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Karo tribe member
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Karo child
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Karo tribe member
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Karo tribe home with animals
The Dorze, an ancient tribe numbering about 40,000, are known for their weaving. Growing cotton, the women spin the yarn and the men weave the fabric which is fine and truly very well made. Their weaving skills are even apparent in their bamboo fences.
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Dorze tribe men weaving
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Dorze women spinning yarn
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Woven bamboo fence
They are also well known for their homes made from bamboo and banana leaves. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a great full-on photo, but the homes, with their shape that features a protruding front door and two upper “windows,” supposedly look like the elephants that used to roam this area: the body, the head, the ears.
Oddly, these are also called shrinking houses, which explains why many doorways are so low. As a home gets infested with termites, the infested part, near the ground, is simply cut off and the house is now a bit lower. Hence older homes are clearly shorter than newer ones.
Dorze home
After preparing a snack of their banana bread, kotcho, and sharing some of their fermented “Holy water,” (see previous post about food), this friendly, welcoming village treated us to a performance of happy singing and dancing! The white cloths over their heads are indicative that many of the Dorze are orthodox.
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Dorze woman dancing
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Dorze woman dancing
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Dorze women singing and performing traditional dance
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Dorze girl carrying toddler
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Dorze woman
Finally, the Konso tribe had perhaps the most enduring visible culture. This group of over 300,000 are spread across the hills and valleys on incredibly impressive dry stone terraced landscape that covers an area nearly the size of New Mexico. For my money, these were more impressive and extensive and accomplished than the terracing seen in the Sacred Valley of Peru.
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Terraces built over centuries by Konso tribe
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Terraces built over centuries by Konso tribe
Recognized by UNESCO for the 21 generations that have survived and prospered in this harsh terrain, the Konso also have ancient fortified towns with rock walls well over five feet. Built in concentric circles, a village would live, protected, inside the walls. As the village grew, they would build another rock wall in a circle beyond the first. And subsequent generations would do the same. Wall at back of photo is one of the oldest going back 10 generations.
Stone wall alley
The Konso rooftops have a unique two tiered shape to accommodate light and ventilation. Interestingly, this shape is reflected in the tiered look of the traditional Konso woman’s skirt.
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Konso tiered rooftop
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Konso woman tiered skirt
The Konso are unique for having a community house where elders meet, where young men sleep before their wedding and where traveling guests may spend the night. Outside the community house are “generation sticks.” One stick is erected every 18 years. Hence, you can estimate the age of a village by multiplying the number of sticks by 18!
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Konso community house
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Generation sticks
While generous with their smiles, the Konso life is still quite hard, with animals living below the sleeping quarters, women stirring corn in old inner tubes and children caring for children.
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Goats under house
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Woman stirring corn
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Konso child
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Konso man
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Smiling Konso woman
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Konso children
After a week of long drives into the mountains and through the brush, it was fascinating to go into the small dusty crossroads of Turmi to visit a market. Besides giving people an opportunity to barter and sell goods ranging from the colorful beads to tobacco to ubiquitous rubber shoes,
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Market display of beads and rubber shoes
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Women selling tobacco
it’s an important way for people to gather and chat with friends from other villages. You see young couples trying to have a private conversation, women gossiping.
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Young couple talking
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Group of women
The display of spices rivaled that in the spice souk in Dubai where I began this trip, what now seems like eons ago in a different world.
Spice display
And, although coffee is truly everywhere in Ethiopia, these people cannot afford it. Thus they sell the coffee bean shells, essentially what’s discarded in the processing. They then roast the shells to make a very light, almost tea-like, coffee.
Women selling coffee bean shells
The market was a great opportunity to actually see men using the headrests they carry everywhere. I don’t know if they use them when sleeping, but just as every man in northern Ethiopia carries a stick, every man in the Omo Valley carries one of these to sit on! They carry them in town, in the village and out in the bush.
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Men carrying headrests
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Men sitting on headrests
Despite knowing I shouldn’t, I was tempted to compare many of these Ethiopian tribal people to those I met two years ago in Papua New Guinea. It is wrong. Truly their only commonality is the limited exposure to us in the rest of the world.
But...for the most part, these people of the Omo Valley seem less ready to smile. They seem to be not angry, but maybe reluctant to share the little bit of tradition they have left with a van of camera-toting tourists? Maybe they didn’t want a camera in their life? (Although these cameras are -yes, unfortunately - part of their livelihood and what may help insure their survival. Kinda a strange symbiotic relationship I’ve spent some nights trying to decipher.) It was harder to make babies smile. It was harder to goof around with the 9 year old boys. The moments of joy were infrequent enough to be quite noticeable when they did happen. Others among my ridiculously “well” traveled group noticed the same.
It was hard to comprehend the incredible differences between these six tribes who, really, live fairly close together. Harder still was trying not to judge their traditions, but simply realizing I was fortunate to see cultures that will soon disappear into some homogenized version of how most of the world lives. As the Ethiopian government gets close to completing a dam which will increase hydroelectric power but limit the water these people desperately depend on for crop irrigation, for their animals, for themselves, that time is coming quickly. And they know it. And that would make me feel angry and vulnerable too.
