Someone Else's Perspective: Omo Valley Cultural Crawl

I rode up along the side of Lake Turkana into Ethiopia. The lake is the receiver of all the waters from Ethiopia’s Omo Valley, and as I think I said, the area has been populated since long before people were people. And even today the area is literally rife with different cultures. Its quite a long way from anywhere and is not very useful or productive land compared to the areas around it, and that seems to have protected it somewhat from the cultural corruption of all the colonizing waves from North Africa and Arabia and Europe and Missionaries etc.

And there are probably about a dozen different tribal cultures that are alive and doing reasonably well in their traditional ways… And with the peoples of the modern world’s ever growing narcissism and desire for exotic easy travel destinations, the area has become one of the major tourist destinations in this area of Africa. And so there is a lot of cultural tourism going on as Europeans come to southern Ethiopia and go on a tour of the different tribal cultures on offer… They get to see initiation ceremonies and traditional dress (or lack thereof) and feel they have really got in touch with some primitive peoples and seen “how we used to be”… Its really quite an exotic experience for those of us who live otherwise mundane suburban lives…

… and Im not really any different either and I acknowledge the interest in these things and even if I had ridden North via a different route Id still have come here to take a look…

I was concerned though that it would feel like a tourist circus and that the tribal villages would really probably just be “performance art” for the tourists and wouldn’t reflect current tribal values or would be somehow degrading for both the people in the villages and for myself too for that matter. I only went to see two specific villages out of the half dozen or so that were “available” without too much effort… And in some respects my assumptions were correct and in others I was wrong… Here’s what I saw…

First the Hammar people… These are the most numerous group and they are originally a nomadic cattle herding people but as things have changed in more recent times they have become much more sedentary and their villages no longer move around. Now you cant go visit the villages without a guide which is really just so there is someone to be a fluent translator. There are a great many villages in the Omo valley and some villages decide to allow tourist visits and some don’t (its their own choice). But the ones that do allow it end up becoming quite wealthy while the others do not, and the wealth of course gets put into the form of larger herds of cattle (which is just begging for trouble when the next long drought comes along in my opinion… but that’s their culture; and we wouldn’t want to change that would we!).

Anyway, I first visited a village and had a good long walk around (though there is precious little to see) and sat in a hut with the occupants and drank some of their fermented sorghum beer and otherwise looked at how they lived. It was a rather unpleasant and mostly rainy day (the rains finally made it out into the desert the day I after I made it through the crossing… phew!) so the People here were all very cold and not that happy as they huddled in the huts and wore every scrap of clothing they had J I spent an hour or so doing that before I even unholstered the camera and then there was about 20 minutes of posed pictures (all individual photos required me to pay a small fee to that person). To be sure some of them were somewhat dressed up for visitors, but people come every day and the villagers go about their lives pretty much as usual…

It’s a simple life of tending the cattle, raising a few crops, preparing and cooking some very simple meals and that’s about it as far as I can tell. But we humans get bored easily and at first glance there is pretty much NOTHING going on that would entertain anyone as far as I could see… But the people are just as intellectual and mentally developed as you and I, so that leads me to believe that their “entertainment” must be in the form of “social interaction”, and in that case they are probably more “developed” in that area than most people from our Western cultures in the “modern world”… Interesting.

Anyway, here are a bunch of pictures… Again, clothing for the upper body tends to be a matter of personal preference/style.