In Ethiopia, a few million nomads still walk: behind their oxen, towards gold, towards God or towards salt. In the south, near the Kenyan border, the Borana herders lead their herds from well to pasture, Kalashnikov over the shoulder. In the west, tens of thousands of men are digging up the Dima forest on the strength of a rumour. In the north, pilgrims go for years from monastery to monastery, and in the Danakil Depression, in Afar territory, the caravaneers still load the salt onto their camels, wondering what will become of them when the new road brings the lorries.
It is said there may be 2,000 metres of salt in the Danakil: a virtually inexhaustible reserve, worked as it was centuries ago.
“There are five good reasons to run in Ethiopia”, says Christophe: livestock, salt, gold, God, and women.It all begins at the bottom of a well, where a chain of men pass jerrycans to one another to water cows that have come from tens of kilometres away. Gofu, a Borana herder, welcomes Christophe, his nose damaged by the hoof of a cow that did not want to leave her calf, and takes him to pasture. His life is set by that of the goats, the cattle, the dromedaries, the donkeys and the horses: he moves all the time to find them grass and water, and when he is hungry, he sacrifices one on the way. The size of the herd is kept quiet: “you never know whose ear it will fall into, maybe a thief’s.” The Kalashnikov is for the Hamer, the neighbouring tribe; last year, twenty of theirs were killed, and a murder is repaid with some thirty oxen. Further on, at the camp, it is the women who build the huts, while the men dig the wells and guard the animals: “The life of the camp belongs to us.” When Christophe wants to weave a section of wall, he is sent away: it is not for him to do that. One of Gofu’s four wives explains that the bride-to-be is abducted before the couple’s tent is built; for her ten children, she wishes they will go far, to school, and stay there.
In the beginning, the herd was guarded with a stick, then with a spear; among the Borana, today it is with a Kalashnikov.
In the savannah, the climate is “hyper-changeable”: rain and clouds arrive so fast that it “even scares the donkeys”.
Every four months, at the end of the rainy season, the camp sets off towards greener grass: an hour to take down a tent.In the west, towards Sudan, Dima is the biggest gold rush Ethiopia has seen in ten years. People get there crammed onto lorries that get bogged down in the mud, each of them taxed along the way. The driver, for his part, is not looking for gold: he sells his beer, up to 50,000 birr a load, and will head north when summer stops the mine. The first prospector arrived two years ago; 15,000 were expected, there are said to be 40,000 or 50,000, with their restaurants, their hotels, their prison. Every morning, an hour’s walk leads to the holes in the forest, dug by hand to thirty or forty metres, where a man at the bellows sends air down plastic tubes. A young man comes up from the bottom after two hours, with nothing; he will stay two, three, five years if he has to. “I can’t wait to become a man, to be worthy of respect, to get to where the others are.” Bent over the pan, a site boss teaches Christophe to tell stone from gold. The boldest come from Gojam and Gondar, a thousand kilometres away; the biggest nugget weighed seven kilos, and the man vanished with it. No one doubts: those who find leave, the others stay, it is only a matter of time.
As soon as gold is found, whoever started digging becomes the owner of the hole, and a whole economy springs up, down to the donkeys laden with water.Further north, the mountain and the Christian monastery of Debre Damo. On the way, Christophe walks with only a few pilgrims. One of them has been on the road for ten years: after the death of her brothers, she lost her taste for life and gave everything up, even her children, left with her mother. You sleep where night falls, on a farm, in a church, a monastery, and the next day you walk on. She prays for a long life, for her two children to grow up well. Others walk for livestock or for gold; in the group, they tell Christophe that gold does not interest them, that they are seeking the way of the Lord. They met on the road: if one has a splinter, the other takes it out, and if one dies, it is the other who will tell the family. At the foot of the great rock, 50,000 pilgrims gather once a year. The monks chant all night in Ge’ez. The monastery is reached by fifteen metres of a rope made of buffalo hide; women and the elderly are asked not to try, and so is Christophe. Legend has it that in the sixth century, a monk who had come from Egypt prayed for twelve years before the Archangel Saint Michael sent him a serpent to haul himself up.
For Christophe’s neighbours in the crowd, the finest thing of recent years “is having installed electricity at the top of the mountain”.
At the summit, the legend goes on, the grass was green and the ground flat enough to lay the first stones of the monastery.On the road, Christophe gives a lift to Stephanos, who is setting off on foot for Saudi Arabia: three to four months of walking, twenty to twenty-five thousand people making the journey, for a good wage and a large family to feed. He gives a warning: among the Afar, anyone who runs over a camel is a dead man. The Dallol, “disintegrated” in their language, is nothing but lakes of acid and fumes of sulphur. Close by, in a depression 130 metres below sea level, whole caravans come to fetch the white gold. Slabs some twenty centimetres thick are prised off with sticks and cut with an axe, as they have been for centuries. One cutter does not fear the new road: the lorries will be able to do nothing without them. At noon, at 50 degrees, the cutters go back to the village; the caravaneers remain. Amadu, a herdsman who became a caravaneer seven years ago, misses his herd, the milk and the meat: “Before, I looked different. I was handsome and plump.” Salt used to sell well, the market is dead, and the road coming down from Mekele frightens him. They walk by night to spare the camels, eat bread baked in the sand, and set off again when the star has gone down.
Loading takes three hours; then, all at once, all the camels are ready, and they set off for two days of travel, at 45 degrees.“But it makes me happy to make the journey, to see the world.”Amadu