Deconstructing Ethiopia

12 July 2011
Axum, Ethiopia

Ethiopian airlines boarding pass.

I have been attempting to understand what in particular bothers me about Ethiopia or our trip in general. This is not to say that I am not enjoying the trip or that I am not in the most excellent of company. Megan is the perfect travel partner for this trip; one of the few people in the world with whom I feel perfectly free to say what ever I wish about anything I wish. We both muse in the evenings over the conditions of Africa, why we waiver into thinking we never need to come back, and then rambling off lists of African countries we both still wish to see: Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa, Kenya. I suppose it is silly and naïve to say we do not wish to return.

"Macaroni and cheese"

I think some of my dismay comes when we stay in locations that try to live up to standards that are impossible to meet. Don’t tempt me with the offer of the internet for 1 birr a minute if in actuality it will take me 30 minutes to load one page so I can send a message to the outside world that all is still well. That sounds petty doesn’t it? We are both dying for news; usually the foreign channels on the TV don’t work or come in so distorted that we can barely make out the large headlines projected on the bottom of the screen. There is something about the phone hacking scandal in Britain. I have pieced together the words Qatar, World Cup 2024, corruption, Kuwait. Belfast riots. Crete explosion. I was leaping for joy at one point when we got Al Jazeera Arabic to come through. I know the protesters went out to Tahrir on the 8th for the sit-in. Esam Sharif spoke on the 9th and said he would fire the police officers charged with killing protesters during the revolution. The sit-in was still continuing on the 10th, the first workday of the week. I know nothing beyond this. In the brief functionality of one page worth of internet yesterday I saw that pro-Bashar Asad individuals attacked the US and French embassies in Damascus. I know nothing further on that.

10 points for whoever can tell me what this man is doing to this camel.

But back to Ethiopia and what bothers me. We briefly walk through some of the mud-covered villages from time to time. There is that smell I have long since equated with burning trash and extreme poverty. There is no plumbing or sewage system and people wash their clothes where the dirty run off water collects. There are the small children covered only by a shirt, protruding stomachs displaying malnutrition, and, of course, flies. It is stereotypical National Geographic. From outside my body I am assaulted with smells and sensations. The children run up to kiss my hands and touch my clothes. I am chewing gum and think that somehow I carry the clean taste of civilization and wealth in my mouth.

One of our villages. This one was quite cool with the painted houses.

I am greatly conflicted with such experiences. We briefly dash through in our state-of-the-art hiking boots but these people cannot leave. I am irritated that I am objectified as a walking moneybag, but how can it be otherwise? I have the immediate impulse to wash my hands after being touched by all the children and then I feel guilty for such a reaction. I feel stupid and cruel for walking through these places in my clean Western clothes. Somehow I feel guilty for even feeling sorry for these people; I am somehow being patronizing in these sentiments as well.

Kids always like having their picture taken and seeing it on the camera screen.

The children try to sell us anything as we go from site to site, even pretty rocks. They are much too young to be trying to sell things. We agree they must be the kids of the local farmers. It reminds me of the children in Tijuana and Rosarito; exploited by their parents or other adults. I keep thinking about Mexico, the borders and the drug wars, the folly of the US war on drugs, almost as much of a folly as the US war on terror. My disenchantment has reached new levels of extremes. To be honest, every interaction I have at the embassy or exposure I have to what “we” think about situations leads me to deeper despair about it all. I see a perpetuation of the world’s injustices as primarily a function of ignorance and bureaucracy. The ignorance is often a choice or even a desire: “let us not look outside our borders and try to understand it.” But we must understand that though we might turn our gaze inward there is no such thing as isolationism. Our mechanisms are external and working their effects on the world whether we choose to acknowledge and understand them or not. Turning a blind eye is the greater sin.

Local market and sheesha smoking.

We create knowledge about places like Africa. Usually such knowledge centers on internal and domestic reasons for modern unfortunate circumstances. It is a standard human cognition process. We tend to see the negative in others as a function of that other, not external circumstances, and rarely try to stand in their shoes or assess whether or not we might have any impact on the predicament. It is also easy to stand on high in the place of the “winner” and make cold, calculated, “rational,” “academic,” assessments about the state of the world and why the have-nots have got themselves in a position of dependency or inferiority. And for some reason I think that such discussions must take place with British accents. The cause is often narrowed down to culture or religion or even statements like “TIA” or “This Is Africa.” Of course we will dress it up in some fancy academic jargon so we can pander it off as “authentic knowledge” and “objective facts.” This is just the way the world is. Carry on.

Another local market.

What has any of this got to do with me flitting in and out of African villages and being overwhelmed with guilt? Perhaps it is even worse to feel that you have somehow “righted” the state of affairs because you have personally born witness to such abject poverty. You have even momentarily touched it. You are a better, bigger, person for this. In my opinion, this is absolute garbage and nonsense. It is, in fact, another form of exploitation. It is an exploitation of suffering and poverty for a sense of righteousness and worldliness. Seeing does not relieve you of some sort of obligation or wash away complicity in a world-system of asymmetry.

Local high school and bar

 Tourism is a form or asymmetrical contact and exchange that illustrates some of the working mechanisms of our world-system. Many of the people of the underdeveloped world rely extensively on tourism for their economy. In cases like Ethiopia they will sell their own heritage and sacred books as trinkets, to those who will not value them the same, simply for enough money to subsist. These people learn what tourists come to value as the appropriate souvenir for that area- the token for an “exotic” and “authentic” experience. The people quickly learn what is characterized by the tourists as the culture and identity of the strange land they are visiting- whether this is the case or not. What do tourists think symbolize Ethiopian culture? Silver crosses? Coffee? Anything else? What of the silenced Muslim population?

Fabrics for sale.

The people learn to produce according to tourist demand. They make copies of copies, changing items to fit more touristic visions (or assumed visions) of what is supposed to represent the essential and authentic culture of the area. Perhaps over time identity changes, at least in the tourist industry, so that what the tourist originally projected as essential to the peoples’ culture becomes assumed and identified as the more salient characteristics of the “native” identity. This identity and knowledge is projected from the outside. “This is the most important symbol and aspect of your culture and identity.” The change in cultural performance and identity is a result of asymmetry in power (and not usually intentional), the haves and have-nots. The implications of asymmetry are far greater than economic: they are ideological. Of course this is still a somewhat simplified manner of looking at this exchange; interactions are always two-way and there is no such thing as a static and essential/authentic culture in the first place. Culture is a verb. It is a human performance. It does not exist in and of itself. This fact does not decrease the implications of the previous exchange: performance is altered, perhaps faster than usual, as a result of asymmetry and the knowledge projections of the wealthier and external Other. There is incentive to change from the Other; however, this does not eliminate agency on the part of the exploited. But how aware are they of the full implications?