Tin Mirror
The shape of Addis Ababa is changing: yesterday’s Eucalyptropolis – the word itself redolent of the 1920s and soothing tablets for the throat - is no more. For long, the New Flower had only a mirror of tin to look herself in and it sometimes seemed tin was indeed the only building block known in these parts. Few tall buildings, a spattering of imperial era manor houses and one or two communist era blocks of cement were all the good city had to offer.
Addis Ababa, founded by an Emperor, grew in concentric regal circles in the orb of his power: from this feudal – and rural - vision of life the shape of a town blossomed, each petal a village unto itself, with its own minute rippling circles of power and life. A regal and feudal organization but a peasant one as well: modeled on the family unit, each house – be it a mud hut or a stately villa, had its own fence, service quarters and family retinue. Like a Russian doll, the city had a city enclosed in its belly, which in turn contained a smaller neighbourhood, and finally, the modest hut or the villa, a cascading mirror of related but self enclosed spaces. Addis Ababa had solved the problem of urban life by doing what Alphonse Allais had jokingly suggested: building a capital in the countryside… be it a capital of tin.
But all this is changing, at lightning speed it sometimes seems: better and faster roads –the Gotera exchange was just opened and the Sar Bet one nearly complete- enable cars to commute. The shape of the town, of life itself, is changing for good. This is no feudal architecture anymore, indeed it is something quite novel in the Ethiopian landscape: a real city. It is no longer built in the countryside and it gazes at itself in the glass of blue plated high rises rather than tin mirrors. What new person to appear in this new mirror?
Read more about Ethiopia at Uthiopia.com.
Ethiopia
Ethiopia is a land of myths, superlatives and imagery. Ethiopia is one of the only African countries never colonized: splendid imperial Ethiopia. And also a remote land with arcane religious practices: Ethiopia, the African Tibet – and strange tribes – Ethiopia, the museum of peoples. And of course, Ethiopia is also that modern icon of poverty, famine, war and strife – one-of-the-poorest-countries-on-earth.
All of these facets of Ethiopia are somewhat true, somewhat false, or true sometimes, false at others. It rests that Ethiopia is a charmingly and vexingly complicated country, very far from the simplistic views of it held in the West (if you’d like to read and learn more about Ethiopia, you can find a sample article on the country here, or go to Uthiopia.com to find many texts written on the different facets of the country by Yves Stranger).
A startlingly beautiful country, Ethiopia has changed more over the last few years than in the previous three decades. Growth of around ten per cent per year, fuelled by increases in agricultural productivity and a splurge of infrastructure projects is making a change in the way the country sees itself and is viewed from abroad.
Ethiopia is a country of some eighty million people, of which perhaps half are Christian and half Muslim. Surrounded by Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia and Kenya and with a total area of 1, 104,300 km2, or five times the size of the United Kingdom or two and half times France, the country is largely rural, with eighty per cent of the population living in the countryside. Ethiopia is schematically divided between lowlands to the east and south, and highlands to the north and west and is situated between 3-18 North and 33-48 East in the Horn of Africa.
With altitudes ranging from – 110 in the Danakil Depression to + 4 700 in the Highlands, temperature and rainfall vary immensely and give rise to an incredible diversity of ecosystems, endowing Ethiopia with a rich endemic flora and fauna. There is a rain season in the Highlands, from July to September, during which monsoon like downpours occur daily, and a dry season from September to June, with a short rain season in April.
Our trail rides and treks take place in the woina dega, an Amharic word that labels the Highlands found between 1500 and 2500 meters. Ethiopia has been called the most populated mountain in the world and the areas we traverse, highly salubrious and lacking in tropical diseases –there is no malaria for example- are heavily populated. These Highlands are characterized by great grassy meadows ideal for cavalcades. The local Oromo people still go mostly by horse, or if they are rich, by mule, and are very welcoming to people arriving on horseback, a practice which is for them, quintessentially Ethiopian.
© 2009
Yves Stranger