For just as someone’s dish is useless when it is broken, so are their gods when they have been set up in the temples. Their eyes are full of the dust raised by the feet of those who enter.
-The Epistle of Jeremiah
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Ferenji
The Lalibela airport is one small runway and a two story building in the style of abandoned American county airport from the 1960s. Comparing the developing world to America as an American is a livewire, but in Ethiopia the comparisons are often fair. Until the Derg — or, until Kennedy’s assassination for the connoisseur — Americans were Haile Selassie I’s preferred partner for infrastructure. Maybe that’s why Ethiopia is the only place I’ve ever been to where people perked up to hear that the white guy was American rather than European. They don’t like Catholics much there, I noticed.
But I was / am still Ferenji. Ferenji means foreigner, but since the 16th century and the Portuguese it’s mostly meant white. It’s a fairly consistent word throughout all of Ethiopia’s many languages, not just Amharic. Nobody called the Rastafari brethren who accompanied me “Ferenji” because he was Rastaman. Rastaman is its own category in Ethiopia and, contrary to Western propaganda, Rastafari are seen with a great deal of respect by many orthodox.
It is true that Tewahedo do not embrace Rastafari’s version of the trinity and consider some of their ascetic practices to be odd, but depictions of Rastafari as social outcasts or inconveniences in Ethiopia are lies. When I visited Jamaica last year, most of the non-Rasta with ambivalent or negative opinions of the movement talked about how Rasta Ethiopian identity was an embarrassment to actual Ethiopians. This is observably false, particularly amongst the younger generation of Amhara. The ethnography museum in Addis has an entire room dedicated to the first Jamaican pilgrimage to Ethiopia and the subsequent intervention by the emperor and Abuna Yesehaq in the Western hemisphere, for example. On the way out of Lalibela, a group of at least twelve people — and not the kind selling to tourists; I’d learned the difference by then — stopped our tuktuk to pay respect to the two Rastafari leaving the sacred pilgrimage site.
(Notably, the people in the Caribbean who told me this about Rastafari people are also not Ethiopian nor do they speak Amharic, but are still convinced of their authority to declare what is or isn’t Ethiopian about the Rasta. It’s a remarkably strange dynamic.)
My friend in Ethiopia is an orthodox Shewan and when she told me she’d never been to Lalibela, I got her a ticket to fly up with us. Cynically, as an author, I knew that my altruism would also result in better material and a more fulfilling trip. That wasn’t the primary motivation, but I feel better when I acknowledge that there’s always a little bit of selfishness to this stuff. Instead, the primary motivation was that I’d grown fond of her after spending Christmas with her family. The secondary motivation was that I knew if I went to Lalibela without her as Ferenji, I was going to spend the entire time getting hustled.
This sounds like a critical statement, but it’s to be expected, thus I don’t mean it negatively. If I’m in a country with a 50x exchange rate, I expect to eat a little shit and happily pay the mark up for the courtesy of being hosted. Not everyone agrees. One of the funnier common complaints you’ll find on various travel review sites about Lalibela is that it costs $50 US to see the world famous rock hewn churches that are a thousand years old and house some of the rarest religious iconography on Earth. These same people will drop $50 to take a date to their tenth Keanu Reeves gun movie, but apparently the privilege of experiencing the holiest place on Earth is asking a little much. I’m glad Ethiopians seem to like Americans, because I have a tougher time.
My companion — for whom the pilgrimage was a culmination of twenty-five years of faithful adherence to Tewahedo scripture — was less forgiving of the people hustling tourists. “This should not happen here,” she said. “I understand, they need money and there is not much else, but this is a holy place.” I could see her point. Visiting the churches in the late afternoon as Ferenji was a bit overwhelming. My interest in Tewahedo is more than academic and I was admittedly disappointed that I couldn’t get more than five steps without someone trying to sell me a cross with a mythical story or asking for birr in exchange for guidance. It was one of only two times I didn’t have a great sense of humor about being the Ferenji (the other time had significantly higher stakes, which we’ll get to later in this blog).
Immense relief as we arrived before the sun came up at 5:30 AM for worship service, held daily in Lalibela, to find that the tourist traps were reserved for late in the day. Lalibela is still an active religious community and the locals expect to be able to pray appropriately. At the AM service, the experience as Ferenji was the same I’d experienced everywhere else in Ethiopia: a frequency of radical love and acceptance and an enthusiasm to share earnestly. I spent my service next to a man whose family makes the praying sticks for the rock hewn churches. He handed me different sticks, tracing the differences in pattern with his fingertips to show the variations.
He taught me a few chants when he found out I was practicing my Amharic; guided me to holy water communion and a blessing from the Lalibela cross. I could barely see through the incense, but after two hours the sunlight began to peek in through the stone window and the birds began to sing. “Here we are a family. If you are for God, you are for Ethiopia.” Priests in shiny robes brought the scriptures around, covered in silk, for each of us to kiss in prayer. Emerging from the stone fixtures into a dewy morning of the Lalibela mountains was humbling as a writer, as I still struggle to find words for it.
After the four hour service, the man asked his son to clean up while he took me and his new Shewan friend to Saint George and introduced us to the deacon. Unfortunately for my friend, she was bombarded with questions in Amharic about whether or not she was planning on marrying the Ferenji. I would also be remiss if I did not note that women in Lalibela and Addis Ababa were swooning in Amharic about my hair, if only for the sake of my ego. Ate age 37, I’m not sure how much longer I’ll have it, so indulge me.
On the the most prominent wall of Saint George, the mural had been completely scrubbed. The deacon informed us that this happened during the Italian invasion, as a Roman Catholic Bishop ordered the darker-skinned Ethiopian icons scrubbed and replaced by Roman Catholic paintings. Haile Selassie I returned after it was destroyed but before they could paint the blank space, thus the empty wall is now a two painful memories rather than one.
I was too taken with the scenery to notice the bullet holes in the glass at our hotel. My guard was up because the trip from the airport featured more military than usual, but it was my companion who noticed the perfect circle with stress cracks in the window, about the size of a 5.56mm. Our host let us know that until about three days prior to our arrival, the hotel was being used by the army as a strategic command center in ongoing combat with the Fano, an Amhara militia with unresolvable beef with Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. The fighting stopped long enough for us to visit God. Two days after we got back to Addis Ababa, one of our new friends in Lalibela told us the it started up again.
Most of the specifics of the trip are for the book. The handful of editors I emailed weren’t interested in a piece about Ethiopia, so I might as well save it. Nobody cares in America, far as I can tell, including the people who get tapped to write about it for Prestige Publications. The mainstream coverage is completely nonsensical, either overly reliant on the Ethiopian federal government’s version of events or Western war porn designed to make Amhara look backward to American audiences. There is something foul happening in Ethiopia, and something fouler about the lack of nuance in the coverage that exists in this hemisphere. Expounding on this without the proper word count to explain will only sound paranoid, so best to leave it at that.
We visited Shashamane later that week, which meant we had to take the road through Oromia — a trip that some drivers won’t make, based on how hot militia activity is that week. Things went smoothly until we were just about to the last half hour when an Oromia police officer stopped the car. My companion and I had gotten a ride with an Amhara family she knew we could trust, but the Oromia cop saw a target. They seized our license plates when the driver could only speak Amharic. To that point I’d been pretty good about knowing when my discomfort was a first world thing, but this seemed bad, so I went fishing to my friend and said “well, we just have to play it cool, no big deal.” Before she spoke I could see in her eyes that I was not just being a skittish Westerner. “This is very much not good,” she said, at which point I began to feel just a tinge of panic.
At this point, apparently school had just let out, because many Oromo schoolchildren began walking alongside the only road. The policeman had not spotted the Ferenji, but three schoolchildren did. While Ferenji are always a rare sight — particularly ones with my personal style choices — it’s a little more common in Addis Ababa, and I mostly got funny looks or stares. However, in the rural south, the children had quite clearly not seen someone who looked like me and — in the aforementioned second time I lacked my good sense of humor about being Ferenji — began shouting “Ferenji! Tattoo! Ferenji!”
And would you believe it when I told you that it only got worse from there? At least ten Ethiopian schoolchildren surrounded the van within two minutes of my friend telling me to “keep a low profile” while an Oromia cop considered throwing our Amhara driver in jail for being Amhara. If I engaged, it would only get worse. I sat there sweating my ass off, burping roadside chips (that were remarkably good, by the way; if you’re ever driving alongside the only road that goes from Addis Ababa to Shashamane, be sure to get the chips they sell across from the big row of papaya stands). A man in the backseat who spoke Oromo went and negotiated a bribe, figuring that it was better than waiting for the coin flip on us going to prison. Personally, I appreciated the gesture, and even moreso when it worked out. Based on the endless ethnic violence with no federal intervention, we didn’t want to know what was behind door #2.
[Blogger’s Note: Yes, I had Rastafari ganja grown in Ethiopian mountains. Yes, it was worth the risk.]
There’s enough bad to go around, but it would be a betrayal to my hosts to pretend the fighting overshadowed the experience. The civil war and the automatic weapons were background noise for so many in Addis just trying to scrape by. On Christmas, we butchered a fresh lamb at 11 AM and broke it down, and my new friends were delighted at whatever contortions my face made when I was told the lamb would not be cooked. That tradition was to eat it raw. My first test as Ferenji. Given that I’d watched the thing die a couple hours earlier, I wasn’t especially concerned about freshness so I ate a bunch of it. Later that night I got stereotyped when they asked the white guy to bless the 12 year old scotch. We’re not all drunks!
The Anthony Bourdain worldview that meals are the best way to understand a culture can be overstated, but in Ethiopia I found it to be true. The food itself is reflective of Ethiopia’s diverse history, marinated in spices common in India and the Arab world, cooked slowly outside using whatever appliances the family has scrounged up from the latest country worming its way into their economy, and shared from a common central platter. The raw lamb was cubed next to spicy doro wat (the national chicken stew) and shiro, dusted with a Habesha spice blend, and all sat atop fresh injera — a sour flat bread that also acts as the utensil and eating vessel for traditional cuisine. Prayers of gratitude are said with every course. The communal nature of Ethiopian existence — codified into spiritual law in the Tewahedo tradition — is a necessity, but the joy of sharing is the foundation for each meal. A sign of love and respect in the culture is a gursha, where you feed your family or loved one with a small bite of food directly from your fingers.
(The fellas also hold hands a lot on the street. My companion was amused by my observation that for such a deeply homophobic country, Ethiopian guys do a lot of stuff that American men would consider extremely gay. She then reminded me that other Ethiopian men might not find it as funny as she did so that I should probably keep that one to myself. Noted.)
Juxtaposing this loving culture against the material reality of Ethiopia’s socio-political situation is dizzying. The words of the Shah of Iran Mohammed Reza Pahlavi kept echoing in my head, recorded in 1980 after the country had descended into totalitarian military rule under the cowardly and genocidal Mengistu Haile Mariam — the same communist loser who murdered an elderly Haile Selassie I in cold blood five years earlier. What has happened to Ethiopia?
After spending our last full day in Lalibela going stir crazy — after church service, increased militia and army movement made it such that taxis wouldn’t risk driving us to the cave and cliffside monasteries — my companion and I took our skateboards to the paved road and asked the military if we could skate. After checking our passports, they gave us the OK, and the first loud crack of wheels on pavement brought the kids out of the hills. We gave our boards up and helped the kids stay upright, holding them by the elbows and waist, and every time one of them fell off or the board stopped the pack of kids would swarm the board, bickering and giggling over who was next.
After twenty minutes, the skateboards turned into minibuses, as the kids were loading up 2-3 at a time and riding them as far down the hill as they could before flipping. For an hour, nobody seemed to notice the men in camouflage holding automatic weapons to remind the children that death was nearby. The laughter and the clacking of maple and aluminum and steel and urethane echoed off the canyon and river valley, auditory reminders that Lalibela’s spirit is its people. That it has been here before the soldiers arrived and will be here after the Almighty removes them with prejudice. It was the loudest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.