Travel Weekly editor-at-large Arnie Weissmann continues his
journeys through Ethiopia. Following is the final installment in an
eight-part series telling the tales of his travels and
travails:
Honestly, I'm not a complainer. A
smile is my default expression. Every place gets the benefit of the
doubt when I'm on the road, but there I was in Arba Minch, and I
was not enjoying myself.
The people on the street seemed visibly dour -- in fact, their
looks bordered on hostile -- even though they lived in one of the
most prosperous regions of Ethiopia. Maybe it was the dust -- the
air was extraordinarily dusty, in part because it was the end of
the dry season, and in part because the streets were all torn
up.
I found no escape from the
malaise of Arba Minch in my accommodations. Ethiopians are given
names that are meant to evoke attributes of their personalities,
and the two hotel staffers I had so far encountered could have been
named Listless and Surly.
My room reeked of insecticide. The restaurant offered only one
dish: dry, overcooked fish and chips. The flies swarming my table
were tenacious.
And... I know I'm forgetting something...
Oh yes, the guy in the next room snored so loudly I could barely
hear the mosquitoes hovering around my ears.
Yet, despite all that, I recommend putting Arba Minch on an
itinerary to Ethiopia.
Of course, I wouldn't want anyone to
actually spend their leisure time in Arba Minch. It's just that
that's where the hotels are if you want to visit the villages of
the Konso tribe, and in my opinion, a visit to the Konso is a
highlight of a trip to Ethiopia.
Konso is the name of a town, a region and a tribe. The drive to
the region of Konso from Arba Minch is beautiful, skirting the
shores of the Rift Valley's Lake Chamo. En route, I saw an intense
concentration of colorful birds: yellow-billed hornbills,
saddle-back and maribou storks, Ruppell's rougette, herons, roller
birds and an assortment of hawks, kites, falcons, eagles and
vultures.
From an overlook, I watched fishermen at work with their nets;
when I peered at some tiny black dots near a shore through my
binoculars, I saw hippos.
Upon arrival in the town of Konso,
my first stop was at the Ministry of Culture and Tourism to pick up
my guide, Mr. Denotay.
What, I asked, did his name mean?
"Actually, it's a girl's name," he said. "My parents had two
babies before I was born. Both were boys, and both died. So, to
fool the gods, they gave me a girl's name. And here I am,
alive."
The Konso tribe is well-known throughout Ethiopia, for a couple
of reasons. They enjoy a reputation as being the hardest workers in
the country, having built elaborate terraces into the hills to grow
coffee, cotton, barley and beans. They also live in unique fenced
villages, and -- the reason I wanted to visit -- they create
unusual wooden icons called "waka" to honor the heroes among their
dead.
To become a Konso hero and merit
having a waka carved, you must kill an enemy, a lion or a leopard
-- and prove it. For a lion or leopard, you must bring back the
skin. For a man, you must return with his private parts.
There are nine clans living in about 40 separate villages in the
region, with each village housing between 4,000 and 5,000 people. I
visited Mecheke, the one that most tourists go to (in part because
there are good wakas there and in part because the residents want
tourists to visit).
The villages are maze-like and I was disoriented almost from the
start. A few dozen villagers followed close on my heels, and we
picked up a bigger and bigger crowd as we moved along.
In addition to walking past family compounds (everyone fences in
their home, animals and outbuildings), I passed several
moras, or community houses. They're built on stilts, and
public meetings are held below. They're the sturdiest structures
around, and all men over 12 years of age sleep in the large,
enclosed space above the stilts. They live there until they marry,
and can still come back any time they feel like having a night out
with the boys.
There also were "dance squares" on the perimeter of the village,
overlooking beautiful vistas of terraced hills. In these were
stele-like stones commemorating victories, and in the middle,
several poles bound together. These are "generation poles," and an
additional one is placed there every 20 years to commemorate a new
generation coming of age.
Off to the side of the dance squares are the groups of wakas. In
one group I saw, the hero had apparently owned several plots of
land (depicted by large, flat stones) and had killed three enemies
(represented by three carvings of men sans sex organs). The hero
stood among his family, his manhood intact. This badly-weathered
group of waka, I was told, was 95-years-old.
Other groups of waka were more recently
carved, and the faces had sharper details. One collection showed a
small wooden baboon at the hero's feet, indicating that he
possessed that animal's cunning. Carved leopards and lions were
found among other groups.
My guide Mr. Denotay said there were serious problems with the
waka being stolen and sold to tourists. Several had resurfaced in
European stores and museums.
All in all, I spent about three hours among the Konso. Several
of the people following me around offered woodcarvings to sell, but
none of the little statues resembled the eerie carvings of the
wakas. I would have thought that such carvings would be
sought-after souvenirs, but perhaps they're too sacred to be
reproduced as mere memorabilia.
When I returned to my hotel in Arba Minch, I met a French woman
who worked as a relief worker among the Konso. (Hard-working as the
Konso are reputed to be, they have problems that are similar to
those of other Ethiopians -- the Konso traditionally have very
large families, and are not self-sufficient in food.) She asked
what I thought of my visit.
The waka, I said, were among the most unsettling pieces of
tribal art I had ever seen. I found them to be downright spooky,
with their eroded facial features and missing genitalia, yet I knew
they were heroic and inspiring to the Konso.
I also said I knew that my venture into the Konso village barely
scratched the surface of their culture -- I only had the most
superficial sense of what their lives were like.
She said she was worried about the future effect of tourism on
the Konso. The city of Arba Minch was being developed as a regional
tourist center -- the streets were being torn up because they will
be paved in anticipation of a large resort being built in the area.
The impact of mass tourism on a culture like the Konso, she
thought, could be significant.
She's probably right. Every traveler who seeks out
off-the-beaten-path destinations eventually reads that some of the
remote places she or he has visited have entered the mainstream of
tourism.
On one hand, it's hard to imagine Konso overrun with
tourists.
On the other hand, they're building an airport in Arba Minch.
And airports have brought dramatic changes to once-remote places,
places with names like Cancun and Chaing Mai.
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For the complete archive of Arnie's Adventures in Ethiopia,
click here.