Ethiopia's Glastonbury
We visit the Thousand Stars Festival
WORDS | CHRISTOPHER MICHAEL
ILLUSTRATION | NILS DAVEY
WE WERE STILL WORRIED ABOUT THE IRRITATING GREEN HORSEFLIES WHEN THE CROCODILE ATTACKED THE BOAT. We didn’t see her coming. One second the water was calm, the next surging with the metal hull rocking over to one side from the force. There were eight of us on the low, four-metre catamaran, and I think we all squealed like schoolgirls. The captain was a grizzled man who hadn’t uttered a single word the whole morning. As I caught my breath and realised the boat was croc-proof and likely wouldn’t tip, I looked up at him. He was laughing, in perfect silence.
It was a heart-pounding welcome to what may be Ethiopia’s best-kept secret: the south. The typical Ethiopian tourist trail is the orthodox Christian north – dry Gonder, dusty Axum and the vertiginous rock churches of Lalibela. But a day or two’s drive south from Addis Ababa, and the rocky mountains turn into banana fields, the skinny chicken dishes become delicious fresh fish concoctions, and you’ll find adventures galore – including the one we’d just paid 100 birr (£8) per person to reach: the Crocodile Market.
This is no handbag store. Here, as they say, the crocodiles do the shopping: 20 of them, clustered on a small spit of land. Sunning themselves, they look peaceful enough. But when boats approach – our guide took us as close as three metres away – they do what is probably the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen an animal do: they open their mouths and hold them open, motionless, sitting there, staring at you, their jaws agape and locked, somehow emanating both boredom and pure malevolence.
The captain’s relatively mature age and normal number of limbs were reassuring though and we grew cocky as we left the Crocodile Market to find the hippos. There were about a dozen, droning about slowly near the bank like zeppelins, looking cool.
Then one of the hippos turned to face the boat, and, with two mighty stomach sploshes, plunged beneath the water. The captain’s grin vanished. He crossed himself and muttered, “She is coming!” – the first words we’d heard him speak – and gunned the engine. Only later did I learn hippos kill far more people than crocodiles.
We hadn’t come to Ethiopia’s Lake Chamo to court danger, however. Rather, we were in Arba Minch – a picturesque lakeside spot with the occasional wandering ‘digdig’ deer and, crucially, considering the parlous state of Ethiopian roads, a small airport – for Thousand Stars.
Often called the Glastonbury of Ethiopia, this festival has no bands to speak of. Instead, the call goes out to the southern tribes of the Omo valley region, people who live the way their ancestors have for thousands of years. Last year 55 tribes answered the call, and for three days the Arba Minch football arena hosted an impressive spectacle: the Yem, who stomp along wearing huge gazelle horns; the Hamer, elegantly streaked with chalk and decorated with everything from leopard skins to two-litre Highland water bottles; or the colourfully garbed Wollayta, the local favourites, who get a raucous cheer from the 3,000-strong crowd – some of whom are Wollayta themselves and rush the stage in their jeans and T-shirts to stamp alongside their brethren.
When the sun gets too hot, everyone retires to the cafés for injera (the slightly sour pancake that is Ethiopia’s national staple), beer, and the not-as-disgusting-as-it-sounds combination of red wine and Coke. Locals also spend the hot afternoons chewing chat, a mild leaf stimulant. They gather in special rooms, put on loose skirts, relax on cushions and spend hours drinking ceremonially prepared coffee, chewing bundles of the almond-shaped leaves and discussing politics. In a café on the main road, I ordered a macchiato and a doughnut – two surreal remnants of Ethiopia’s brief occupation by Italy.
Next to me was a table of Mursi women whose bare backs were marked by elaborate scarification. More disconcerting, though, were their lips. Mursi women wear frisbee-sized lip plates – possibly to make them, as one theory suggests, less attractive to covetous neighbouring tribesmen – and they had removed the plates to eat, leaving their wrinkled lips dangling. Everyone in the café was staring at them. They stared right back: everyone a strange sight to everyone else.
A few hours’ drive south from Arba Minch lie the villages of the Konso people. Walking these wonderfully elaborate mazes is like stepping into the Lord of the Rings. The paths twist and turn, snaking among gnarled, thatched houses. Children dart among the sheep and goats; old men smoke long water pipes. One house is just a large roof, open at the bottom but with steps leading up to a dark attic: here the young men of the village live before marriage, acting during that time as a kind of all-purpose volunteer workforce, fire department and constabulary.
In the wide village square, stone markers represent leopards (and neighbours) killed by local warriors. Above them reaches a crooked tower of grey, bleached tree trunks that indicate the age of the village – although as they are not replaced and occasionally fall victim to lightning or termites, it falls short of exact science. Rather than begging, the locals make wooden tourist trinkets. These are mainly pipes and small devotional figures, but one boy aged eight or so had made a Kalashnikov, with a realistic metal ventilation grille and a nail for a trigger.
The road leads back through the coffee fields and banana trees, passing what is known as Manhattan – a city of towering limestone pillars, eroded into spiky stalactite cliffs. The countryside around here is green and glorious; it was hard to imagine the famine that swept the country in the 1980s.
Then the van crested a hill and entered a valley shrouded in smoke: a village, still smouldering. A neighbouring tribe had burned it down, part of an age-old conflict between Konso agriculturalists and lowland pastoralists over land use. Members of these tribes had been dancing on the same stage the previous day.
And were again that night at the Paradise Lodge hotel, undoubtedly the world’s finest luxury lodge that costs less than £20 a night. The collection of round stone bungalows look out over the Bridge of God, a mountain that rises between Lake Chamo and Lake Abaya. The lodge perches above the treetops of the forest that hugs the mountain. Baboons saunter up from it, quizzically but relentlessly interested in the guests’ breakfast. The staff throw rocks at them. That night, the Omo valley tribes set up food stalls among the guest huts, lit three giant bonfires and danced the night away.
Thousand Stars lasts three days. On the third day, I wandered ‘backstage’ – behind the temporary straw huts basically – where the tribespeople were hanging out: talking, laughing, fixing each other’s costumes. One young Hamer warrior, in full bodypaint, approached me. We stared at each other. I said my name, he said his. We stared some more. I noticed his earrings – a key in each lobe – and pulled out my own hotel key. He nodded, as if I were a bit slow.
I realised I was in a staring contest. I tried to think of something to say. We shared no common language or culture. We were both here for a music festival, but he probably wouldn’t even have ever heard Tigrinya, the local pop music, let alone Blur. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw an Ethiopian man mugging for a photo with two girls from Ireland. My self-consciousness got the best of me. I touched the Hamer warrior’s arm, looked down in defeat and walked away.
The Thousand Stars Festival of Music and Dance will take place 12-14 December, in Arba Minch, southwest Ethiopia, www.gughe.org
