April 2011
5 posts
3 tags
Gambella stories
Gambella, West of Ethiopia, on the border with Southern Sudan. Extreme borderland, entangled with multiculturalism and wars. There’s a smell of genocide in Gambella. This is the story of a margin on the margins. Ethiopian colony in Sudan, Sudanese enclave in Ethiopian territory. Ethnic groups -Nuer, Anuak- , Highlanders (forced) migrants and Sudanese refugees of civil wars. The failure of...
“the air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish”.”
– Conrad.
Gambella city: The Baro river
Baro River flows to Sudan (cf. this picture). It is also the heart of the Gambella region and Gambella city. People use to go to the river to wash, refresh, chat or just take some time. People belong to many different groups: indigenous Nuer, Anuak, Majangir… or settled Highlanders (for the Abyssinian highlands regardless Amhara, Tigray or Oromo) or Sudanese refugees. The situation of...
Part 2. Gambella city (Britney in the jungle)
“the earliest beginnings of the world”
Or “the earliest beginnings of the world”. Of course Conrad confused Eve and Britney Spears (cf. previous picture). In the age of globalization, the scramble for Africa seems to belong to a remote time. Nowadays remote and margins are the centre of the World!
(Click on the map to see where we are. The map doesn’t show the picture was taken in a...
December 2009
2 posts
3 tags
Before the integration of Gambella to the Ethiopian kingdom, the region was occupied by five groups, mainly the Anuak and the Nuer. They still live in this region, between Ethiopia and Sudan. The Nuer were nomads and pastoralists. The ‘grand-father’ of anthropology Evans-Pritchard studied the Nuers in the 1930’s. He showed that Nuer society is a “segmentary”: that...
3 tags
November 2009
11 posts
3 tags
Road to Gambella (day 2)
From Jimma to Gambella: coffee plantations, forests, tea plantations, deforestation, timkat…
Click on the picture below to see the trip on a satellite image. Then you can play with the scale and change from satellite to map, from map to relief…
“Demain, dès l’aube, à l’heure où blanchit la campagne, Je partirai… “
(I always remember Victor...
5 tags
Soundtrack: Mulatu Astakte, Kasalèfkut Hulu (From...
3 tags
4 tags
5 tags
“True, by this time it was not a blank space anymore. It had got filled since my...”
– Conrad, Heart of Darkness
8 tags
3 tags
“The Sun never sets on the British Empire”
– Conrad, Hearth of Darkness
3 tags
Going down the Highlands, snaking through the...
“When whole communities go to war — whole peoples, and especially civilised peoples — the reason always lies in some political situation, and the occasion is always due to some political object. War, therefore, is an act of policy” (Karl von Clauswitz, On War)
3 tags
“Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the...”
– Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
3 tags
3 tags
Arriving
Contrary to Conrad’s novel, we were going down the river and the way was strewn with relics of past wars: Soviet machine guns (Ural half-track truck), refugee camps lost in the bush. Dreams of reason. Failed. Arriving in Gambella, the thickness of history proved to be struggling with the “earliest beginnings of the world”.
←Gambella Day 1 →
Home
October 2009
10 posts
3 tags
3 tags
“if you can stand the climate you outlast them all”
– Conrad, Heart of Darkness
3 tags
Part I. On the road to Gambella
Gambella is far from the Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. It takes two days to cross Oromia. A two days road trip through the country up to the edge of the Abyssinian plateau. Then the way goes down until the Plain of Sudan.
The car was following the Timkat (Epiphany) ceremonies, the most important Coptic Orthodox feast. Timkat is three days long: Saturday, Sunday, Monday. The leitmotiv of...
3 tags
Soundtrack: Hédètch Alu/Muluquèn Mellèssè, early...
7 tags
6 tags
3 tags
“Each station should be a beacon on the road towards better things, a center for...”
– Conrad, Heart of Darkness
7 tags
7 tags
7 tags
