To travel to Ethiopia’s remote Omo River Valley is to wade into a morass of moral ambiguities. You will be on a safari where people—not wildlife—are the attraction. You will observe traditions that seem exotic, and at times shocking. You will feel like an intruder and a human ATM. You will witness ancient cultures about to disappear, in part because of your presence. Susan Hack reports on the ultimate trophy trip—and culture clash
We’re traveling by boat on the southern reaches of the Omo River, motoring up a swift current from our camp toward Mago National Park. A large crocodile swimming across our bow submerges in a swirling eddy. Startled baboons dash up a riverbank, stirring dust at the feet of ancient fig trees whose exposed, handlike roots hold the land in place and the water at bay. Although the 472-mile-long Omo was first mapped from its highland source near Addis Ababa to its mouth on Lake Turkana in 1896, this part of Ethiopia is still so undeveloped that a GPS device shows no details, just the snaking line of our route through a land with few roads and no bridges, the size of New Hampshire.
A few miles from the park boundary, we spot a family striding along a bluff, carrying their household possessions toward a dry-season settlement. Long-limbed women wearing nothing but hide skirts balance sleeping mats and butter gourds on their heads. Men with vintage rifles slung over their shoulders take up the front and rear, while small boys run ahead wielding bows and arrows. These are Kwegu people, our guide tells us, one of sixteen ethnic groups living on the banks of the Lower Omo as it flows down from the Shewan Mountains toward the harsh semi-desert of the Ethiopia-Kenya border.
Farther upriver, we wave to Nyangatom men, tall Nilotic warriors guarding a west bank path where their cattle come down to drink. Ahead lies Lebuk, an east bank outpost of the Karo tribe where locals have tipped us off to an evening courtship dance; at sunset, we find a circle of youths painted in white clay and yellow ocher singing about cattle raiding while leaping and strutting their stuff in front of the village girls. For the next six days, I am on a human safari. I have not come to see wildlife (dry and pestilent, the terrain supports abundant birdlife and not much else) but to photograph some of the most extraordinary tribes in Africa as they go about their daily life. Essentially, I am a voyeur, a gawker, and already my trip’s eleven-thousanddollar price tag and the business of intruding on people who have little control over the forces of tourism have me feeling a bit uneasy. Some of my encounters will prove so troubling that I will, at points, wish I had never come to this place, whose extremes seem to pitch between a wild, primordial version of It’s a Small World and a twenty-first-century Heart of Darkness.
In 1980, UNESCO declared the Lower Omo Valley a World Heritage Site in recognition of its uniqueness: Nowhere else on the planet do so many genetically and linguistically diverse people live as traditionally and in such a small space. It has been a crossroads for humans migrating in many directions over many millennia. Improbably in an era of cloud-based businesses and Internet revolutions, 200,000 Omo pastoralists, cultivators, and hunters still pursue preindustrial lifestyles in a region that until now has been judged by outsiders too scrubby and remote for exploitation. Possessing few items from the modern world besides plastic jerry cans for carrying water, the men, women, and children here ritually adorn themselves to express status and tribal identity, sculpting their hair with animal fat and clay, scarifying limbs and torsos, wearing jewelry of beads, bone, and metal, and painting their entire bodies with white minerals, black charcoal, and red and yellow ocher. The unlikely survival of these customs and of still-authentic rituals such as bull jumping and gladiatorial stick fighting attracts a few hardy missionaries, anthropologists, and, increasingly, photographers and curious travelers like me.
The significance of the Omo tribes is more profound than their visual appeal. Amid layers of cracked mud and volcanic tuff along the Lower Omo’s banks, paleontologists have discovered precious remnants of our shared heritage: the oldest known remains of anatomically modern humans, folks who might not look out of place in Times Square, who hunted and gathered here an astonishing 195,000 years ago. DNA analysis suggests that every person now living is related to a single woman from the Omo Valley, some of whose descendants left the Horn of Africa during a period of climate change and migrated across the Bab el Mandeb strait to Arabia and beyond somewhere between 60,000 and 120,000 years ago. Her relatives who remained behind branched into fourteen genetically distinct founder populations from which all African ethnic groups descend. If Ethiopia is humanity’s womb, the Omo River is its umbilical cord.
Abruptly, after so many millennia, the old river world may be entering its twilight. In a gorge three hundred miles upstream from where we are photographing the young people of Lebuk sweating in their beads and animal skins, construction is under way on the colossal Gibe III dam, the second-largest hydroelectric project in Africa—designed by Italian engineers, partly funded by Chinese banks, and scheduled to begin generating 1,870 megawatts of electricity in July 2013. With 83 million citizens, Ethiopia is Africa’s second most populous country, and one of its poorest. Planners of the dam say that the output, the equivalent of that of two nuclear plants, will make Ethiopia electricity sufficient, with enough power left over to sell to neighboring states. Crews are paving roads connecting major towns like Jinka and Omorate. According to Survival International, an NGO working in the region, Ethiopia is contracting corporations in India, Israel, Malaysia, and elsewhere to run giant farms that will be irrigated with Omo water. As a result, fragile cultures that are crucial to the study of art, anthropology, and genetics may soon be displaced and disappear before we fully appreciate that they were here in the first place. There’s another conundrum: Foreign travelers— thirty thousand last year, according to the government—are arriving to see the tribes before development overturns their way of life. But by taking pictures of the tribes, I am actually hastening that change.
Foreigners began trickling into the Omo River Valley just prior to the 1936–1941 Italian occupation, after historian Carlo Conti Rossini described Ethiopia as a “Museum of Peoples,” a still-repeated reference to its eighty-three ethnic groups. But those early visitors were mostly military officers and anthropologists. Organized tourism didn’t really take off until the 1990s, after the country abandoned socialism (introduced by Ethiopian soldiers who overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974) and Addis-based tour operators began marketing expeditions on which foreigners could meet tribes who are in effect distant relatives with colorful customs living in the homeland of our earliest ancestors. Starting from Addis, it takes three bone-jarring days in a fourby- four over unpaved tracks to reach a handful of southern towns with basic hotels and weekly markets. Tribal people reliably show up in traditional garb after walking long distances to barter animals and bush honey for coffee husks and chewing tobacco.
The “highlight” of the Omo market circuit is usually a six-hour round-trip from Jinka for a chaotic half-hour stop at a village deep within Mago National Park. Here, travelers photograph women of the Mursi tribe, famous for their pierced lower lips holding clay plates up to seven inches in diameter. In exchange for permission to be photographed, the Mursi demand from each tourist five birr, about thirty cents in the Ethiopian currency. To attract the lens, the women riff on their culture, for example by wearing old puberty belts on their heads. The resulting scrum is full of antagonism, as foreigners compete with one another over camera angles, and the Mursi vie for attention from these human ATMs.
Photos of The Omo River Valley tribes from Sebastião Salgado's forthcoming book Genesis (Taschen, 2013).
**To travel **to the Omo as responsibly as possible, I join a weeklong photo expedition organized by Steve Turner, a second-generation safari guide from Kenya and the head of Origins, a Nairobi company with a reputation for respectful dealings with local people. Its clients, who have to be willing to put up with physical hardship and ethical challenges to spend time amid indigenous cultures, include environmental activists, photojournalists, European royalty, business tycoons, and philanthropists; the Omo sub-tribe includes retired schoolteachers, a cofounder of Starbucks, and several well-known fashion designers.
“If you are inconvenienced by spartan accommodations or intense human contact or are apprehensive in unfamiliar situations, then I’m sorry but this expedition is not for you,” Steve emails me before it’s too late to back out. Lumale Camp, our base, receives fewer than sixty guests a year. Although my Omo trip seems terribly short given the cost and logistics of getting here, few visitors choose to stay longer in a river environment prone to tsetse flies and hot, dusty ninety-five-plus-degree days with no air-conditioning, Wi-Fi, swift medical evacuation, or flush toilets.
I charter a Cessna from Nairobi to the northeastern end of Lake Turkana and am driven three hours across the desert to the Ethiopian border town of Omorate for my rendezvous with two other travel companions. Charlotte Rush Bailey is a retired marketing and communications executive from Connecticut with a side career in fine arts photography, and Gul Chotrani, an economist from Singapore, is packing the latest Leica M9 and S2 models, along with a satellite phone and a chronometer with an emergency transponder. Accompanied by Steve, the gregarious son of a former British Colonial Police officer, we set off in a cobbled-together Toyota Land Cruiser to meet the boat that will take us the final leg to camp.
Any illusions we have about being among the only outsiders to reach tribes in a pristine environment evaporate before we even reach the river. Leaving Omorate, we drive past a labor barracks and newly planted seedlings on the edge of a vast Italian-managed palm oil facility. Transiting the Murelle hunting concession, we see the work camp and helicopter pad of a Chinese company prospecting for oil amid ant chimneys, camel thorn acacias, and herds of tiang antelope.
The six-tent Lumale Camp, on a bend in the river, proves more comfortable than I expected. There are high-thread-count sheets on the mattress inside my private tent. In the morning, Karo camp staff lay a carpet of green leaves and bring fire-heated river water for my bucket shower.
Lumale Camp is managed by Lale Biwa, a locally respected translator and Karo community leader who also serves as our translator and guide during the trip. Except for a visit to a Hamar market, we will ditch the car that brought us from Omorate and use the river as our highway, voyaging by day aboard the Omo’s only motorized boat, a hand-built replica of an Azores whaler. The plan is to visit three Karo villages and locate temporary dry season settlements of the Mursi, Kwegu, and Nyangatom peoples, some of whom, Lale claims, have not seen a foreigner in more than three years.
Susan Hack's photographs
I awake to the dawn howls of colobus monkeys clambering in the fig tree above my tent. After breakfast in camp we climb into the boat and slalom upriver between floating logs—many of which turn out to be crocodiles—past fish eagles and goliath herons hunting along the riverbanks. Our first glimpse of Dus, the Karo capital, is thin silhouettes of villagers drawn to the bluff edge by the noise of the boat engine. Carrying daypacks and digital cameras, we climb out of the boat and hike a goat path to a collection of conical huts, stilted granaries, and animal corrals on the far side of sorghum fields. To the north, rising over acacia plain and myrrhstudded hills, I see blue mountains marking the start of Ethiopia’s highlands, where the Omo originates with rainfall tumbling down gorges and scouring mineral silt that turns the river the color of milk chocolate as it winds south. Vultures lurk on the ground near the ceremony house where Karo tribal elders receive tributes of sorghum beer and discuss important business. Dus lacks electricity and running water, and wild scavengers know that the settlement offers a reliable source of food: human excrement.
With fewer than two thousand people spread among a handful of villages on the Omo’s east bank, the Karo are one of the smallest ethnic groups in Ethiopia, indeed in all of Africa. Rain is infrequent and irregular, and the Karo depend for survival on the river’s annual flood, as did the ancient Egyptians living along the Nile. Between September and October, the Omo spills its banks and recedes, leaving behind a new layer of silt. The Karo plant sorghum, maize, and beans; keep goats and cattle; and cleave to rituals they believe ward off bad luck.
A bare-breasted young woman wearing trade bead necklaces and a supple goatskin skirt offers us shade from the midday heat by inviting us to rest on a cowhide inside her house of sticks, leaves, and long grasses. Her name is Gilty, meaning “the dark of midnight, when something can’t be seen,” according to Lale Biwa. She is the treasurer of the Dus Women’s Association, formed two years ago when Steve donated two thousand dollars to enable village women to buy foodstuffs in bulk—grain, coffee, tobacco—to create a market for Dus that would remove the need to walk three days to Dimeka, the nearest trading town. Gilty admits that most of the cash was actually spent hiring a truck to transport cases of novelties—bottled beer, Fanta, and Pepsi—a mistake, in retrospect, since Dus has no means of refrigeration.
Gilty offers us hollow gourds filled with buno, a scalding traditional drink of boiled coffee husks that tastes of wood smoke, tannin, and animal fat. When I ask what she thinks about the dam, she shrugs. “We’ve heard about it, but we don’t know what will happen,” she says. “The government claims they consulted the Karo, but most of the people can’t read,” Lale Biwa interjects, “and we don’t have television or even a representative in parliament, so what can she really know about it?” I’ve read that the government has promised to release a ten-day artificial flood each year from a ninety-four-mile-long reservoir behind the dam to replicate the Omo’s cycle. But it’s unclear, according to the environmental group International Rivers, whether this volume will be sufficient for farmers downstream, whether the Omo’s level will drop, and whether nutrients that had fertilized the land near the river will sink to the bottom of the reservoir. Whatever trepidation Gilty feels about the future is a mystery she keeps to herself. I put down my notebook, and catch myself staring at the rows of ritual scars on Gilty’s stomach, her hammered-metal armbands, and the scar on her forehead made by a wildcat that was stalking her baby goats and which she surprised in the night.
According to oral tradition, the Karo settled on the banks of the Omo after following a red bull there almost two centuries ago. A devastating disease—possibly sleeping sickness—is reported to have diminished the population at the end of the nineteenth century. Surrounded by larger tribes, they developed a complex social hierarchy to prevent intermarriage and to keep their bloodlines pure. Before wedding a Karo woman, a young Karo man must complete a bull-jumping ritual. Leaping naked across the backs of lined-up cattle four times without falling is the easy part. The difficulty lies in the preparation. A man cannot jump until all of his older brothers have married, and bull jumping will not be staged for an individual: Cohorts in the same age group must prepare simultaneously. Each candidate must grow enough sorghum to make beer for a party hosting every female of his clan, and he must also provide beer for all the tribal elders. With all the requirements, it can be as many as seven years between rituals. In times of drought, there is not enough sorghum, the main food staple, to spare for beer, and since polygamy is permitted, there can be a shortage of women. Just nineteen candidates participated at the last Karo bull jumping, in 2010. “I’m actually thinking about whether I will ever become a bull jumper,” says Gudree, a student I meet later on the riverbank, with a sigh, adding that he is considering marrying outside the tribe. He is on summer holiday from the Department of Natural Resources at Dilla University, dressed in a T-shirt, sweatpants, and sneakers. “It’s very difficult. I’ll have to come live in the bush and wear kudu skins, and making beer for everyone is very expensive. Plus I’m the youngest of three brothers, and I have to wait for them to jump first.”
Like other Omo tribes, the Karo require each safari client to pay a small sum of birr to every individual they choose to photograph, in addition to a general fee paid to the village elders for the privilege of visiting; like the beer tribute, demanding money from outsiders is a ritual, another way for the community to share resources. So when the sun lowers, offering a soft, sideways, tangerine light, my travel companions and I stand under an acacia, holding wads of five-birr notes, surveying a crowd of old men, women, adolescents, and small children who’ve turned their entire bodies into abstract canvases of spirals, polka dots, and handprints of white, yellow, and red paint. Patterns mimic guinea fowl feathers, zebra stripes, and leopard spots. In the Karo’s eyes I read pride, hope, curiosity, and, in some cases, utter boredom. It feels as awkward as a high school dance—and as mercenary as a model agency cattle call.
To help break the ice, Steve and Lale have previously drilled Charlotte, Gul, and me on Karolanguage greetings. “Hoe-poe!” I say cheerily, offering a handshake to an elderly woman with a silver ring in her chin. I’ve been told that the ritual reply is Hoe-poe-na, to which I should respond Sali, and then she Sali-na. The lady cuts right to the chase. “Photo,” she says, in English, spitting a brown stream of chewed tobacco next to my sandals, “five birr!” To be equitable, I try to photograph everyone who asks and then search for interesting faces.
It’s impossible, in this situation, to get to know people slowly or to hang back, observe, and then wander around taking pictures incognito. Each camera click requires negotiation and sometimes confrontation, as when a mother demands not just five birr for herself but two birr for the infant riding on her back as she grinds sorghum on a millstone. I don’t know what’s more troubling, the discrepancy between the two birr (the equivalent of twelve cents) and the five-figure cost of my safari, or the fact that I corrupt her culture and her child by placing the birr in the baby’s fingers. Our presence in the village is an entertainment for the children, who follow us incessantly. They respond to Charlotte’s grandmotherly warmth, but I can hear the frustrated Gul bellowing, “Kids, kids, you’re ruining my picture!” The village rock star is a charismatic old man with two ostrich feathers in his mud skullcap and ivory piercing his chin. He’s carrying a carved wooden headrest, a hide-sheathed knife, and a walking stick, and he puts his chest out and his chin up, the Karo Mick Jagger.
Near dusk, I ask a heavily pregnant woman with a yellow- and red-beaded goatskin covering her belly if I can take her portrait, but she is hesitant. It emerges that while she is newly married, she and her husband have not observed the protocols required before intercourse. The baby, Lale explains, will be considered mingi, or cursed. The custom, still practiced, is for tribal elders to take the infant from the parents as soon as it’s born and kill it so its bad blood won’t pollute the tribe and cause misfortune. Twins and toddlers whose upper teeth erupt before their lower are also considered mingi and face the same fate. Babies born to unwed girls who get pregnant after having sex with their boyfriends are mingi too.
The Ethiopian government, as part of a campaign to eliminate harmful traditional practices, has begun requiring its health clinic in Dus to register all Karo pregnancies and births, Lale tells me. But the system is not perfect. It remains easy to deny a newborn food until it starves, telling the government worker it died naturally— or, in the old manner, to slip into the bush, stuff its mouth with dirt, and leave it for the hyenas, or just fling it into the river.
As Lale relays this information, I’m horrified and paralyzed. What seemed to me a benign request has turned into a moral crisis. I want to ask this woman what she intends to do with her baby. Hand it over to the government? There’s a private orphanage for rescued mingi kids in a distant town called Jinka. Can she take the baby there? Should I follow up the case? Is it even any of my business? This is the dispiriting, ambivalent outcome: I respect her privacy, ask no questions. I take her picture, pay her the five birr, and wish her good luck.
That night, over red wine and barbecued steaks, we have the first of many discussions about the ethics of Omo travel and our personal motives for this trip. Steve tells us that he has wealthy clients who have been to the Omo as many as ten times, drawn back by the desire to help. One American, John Rowe, a photographer and philanthropist, joined with Lale Labuko, from the Karo tribe, to found the Omo Child Foundation, which oversees the shelter in Jinka where more than thirty mingi children now live.
Charlotte, Gul, and I all admit that we traveled to the Omo with a “soon it will be too late” mind-set; we share a desire to witness cultures before imposed change and pressure to assimilate render them unrecognizable. But the experience has been a reality check, offering insights not mentioned in the safari brochure into the lives of people whose customs we find exotic.
We have been hoping to photograph a bull-jumping among the Hamar, whose men, unlike the Karo, perform the ritual individually. Part of the frisson for outsiders is the custom of women begging to be whipped by the maza—men who have already completed the jump. A woman’s scars are proof of her courage and ability to bear pain—qualities important to a man seeking a wife—and a kind of life insurance. If ever the woman finds herself in difficult circumstances, she can count on the bull jumper for material support and protection. The next day at the Hamar village of Arba, there are no bull jumpers, but there is a public beating. As we walk around taking photographs of Hamar women in their iron neck and leg rings and thickly ochered tresses, a drunk man named Arko staggers from his thatched house, shouting and lashing his young wife Koto with a switch. Her brother Ama and his friends pull them apart, and Koto sinks to the ground, stunned, her back against the tire of our vehicle. Koto has old welts from prior bull-jumping rituals, and the men have rallied to rescue her from violence they consider unjust. The dust settles, some elders drag Arko off to cool down, and Ama poses for us, jauntily wearing a pair of Charlotte’s reading glasses to break the tension.
Violence extends well beyond ritualized beatings. The lack of roads—which keeps out global goods, HIV-infected truckers, and, happily for us at Lumale Camp, other tourists—has also kept out widespread schooling and medical care. But it has not kept out guns. During many of our village visits, we observe that the only piece of modern technology widespread among the tribes is the automatic weapon. The end of the Mengistu reign in the 1990s and ongoing conflict in Sudan and Somalia have created trade in surplus Russian Kalashnikovs and European G-3 rifles. Guns are used to hunt, to protect cattle, and to settle scores. Battles are so commonplace that in Kareme’ngima, a Nyangatom village, I photograph children wearing jewelry made out of empty shell casings.
On the drive to the weekly market in Dimeka, three hours by car from camp, we pass bullet traders from the Konso tribe marching cattle bartered for ammunition. In Dimeka, where Hamar women sit on blankets beside small piles of sorghum, and men trade surplus goats for cows and vice versa, an alarming thought becomes inescapable: The market rate for a bullet is fifteen birr, the price of three photographs. Some of the faces I capture are haunting—the light-eyed Hamar mother with butterand ocher-matted ringlets, who would be beautiful no matter what she was wearing; the young Karo men painted in yellow and white diatomite for courtship dancing; the Nyangatom warrior whose Nilotic skull and carved cheekbones look like the bust of Pharaoh Akhenaten in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum. But it seems entirely possible that some of the birr I pay for my Omo portfolio could in turn purchase bullets that spill human blood.
On our last night in camp, I ask Lale if it’s been difficult for him to help us visit tribes who are sometimes considered his community’s enemies. “It’s complicated,” he says with a sigh, and goes on to tell us a chilling story. When he was a toddler, a party of Nyangatom cattle raiders waded across the Omo during the dry season and attacked his family. Lale’s mother put him on her back and ran into the forest along a baboon trail, intending to hide in a tree. Lale’s oldest brother, a boy of seventeen, refused to flee. “He was proud, but he didn’t have a gun, and the Nyangatom killed him,” Lale tells us. “I remember seeing a body covered in yellow paint.”
Lale’s uncle eventually killed two Nyangatom to exact revenge for his brother. Two years ago, Lale’s best friend was murdered by the relative of a slain Nyangatom man, and weeks before our visit, another of the fragile cease-fires negotiated by the government broke down. Lale relates these facts with equanimity. One of the first Karo to be formally educated, he spent six years at a missionary school and came home from university fluent in Amharic, English, and several Omo languages spoken by his schoolmates. Because he holds no grudges—and brings tourist income—he is liked and respected up and down the river.
The government says that the controversial Gibe III dam will make the Omo region less susceptible to conflict over increasingly scarce arable and grazing lands by permitting controlled flooding even in poor rain years—which in theory will irrigate South Omo farms and replenish grazing land. However, conservation and human rights groups, as well as UNESCO, question Ethiopia’s agenda and environmental-impact studies. They say the Christian-dominated, Amharic-speaking government wants to divert water from the Omo to irrigate several areas, which combined are larger than Rhode Island and are earmarked for industrial sugarcane and cotton plantations. These critics say the government intends to do so without consulting the tribes, which it considers primitive, about whether they want to be relocated or become industrialized farm laborers. They also condemn the lack of consultation with the rural communities downstream, including the 300,000 Kenyans who depend on the lake, which the nutrient-rich Omo feeds, for both fishing and water for their livestock. Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has lashed out at dam opponents, claiming that “even though [South Omo] is known as backward in terms of civilization, it will become an example of rapid development.” Zenawi has also said that those opposed to the dam, many from the West, “want the pastoralists and their lifestyle to remain as a tourist attraction forever” and “a case study of ancient living for scientists and researchers.”
As important as it is for the government to exercise wise leadership, it should, in an ideal world, be up to the people of the Omo Valley to determine whether their children go to university, marry whom they want, and never have to worry about their brother being gunned down or their child bringing a curse on the village. Currently, only minorities with populations of between 10,000 and 100,000 qualify for direct representation in Ethiopia’s parliament, and the Mursi, Karo, Kwegu, and other small Omo tribes remain largely voiceless about their future, including the issue of how and whether their homes should remain a tourist attraction. I try to imagine myself on the other end of the lens barrel, how I would feel if I lost the power to decide what was right and wrong for my family, how much grace I might summon if random strangers turned up at my door offering money to photograph me in my bathrobe making coffee, or how hurt I would feel if I were a little Karo girl and some tourist blew me off because my face paint seemed inadequate.
Meanwhile, change is drifting down from the north. The television signal arrived two years ago enabling the Omo peoples to watch the World Cup taking place in South Africa. Cell phone towers are under construction. In Dimeka, highland traders offer tribespeople radios, batteries, bras, and Barack Obama and Michael Jordan T-shirts.
Lale Biwa, one of the few university educated members of his tribe, who wears beaded bracelets, khaki pants, a canvas sun hat, and a striped polo shirt, tells me he’s convinced that “in twenty years, everything will be finished—the bull jumping, the mingi, all the rules.” He’s talking about the beliefs that make up his culture, not external aesthetics that could remain as a tourist asset. For good and bad, the world as he knows it is receding. He’s already in a nostalgic mode—and one of the first of his tribe to carry a digital camera.
Photographs by Sebastião Salgado from the forthcoming book Genesis (Taschen, 2013)