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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 the trip.
Saturday is also the market day for Muslims. The road is crowded with walking people going to pray, going to sell, lots of donkeys, loads of overloaded trucks. Up and down the hills, the road is drawing a sociology of the Ethiopian society. Running through the cereals fields, then the coffee and the tea plantations, the asphalt disappears and ends up in the no man’s land where the landscape falls in the Plain of Sudan.
"Gambella stories" presents words and pictures collected in and about Gambella, a remote place on the Ethiopian border with Southern Sudan. A place entangled with wars, failed dreams of reason and casualities of unproductive globalisation.
"Gambella Stories" is not a proper documentary or an essay but a thoughtful daydream. The disconnection between pictures and texts tries to reflect the disjunction between the apparent quietness of the place and the concealed ongoing dynamics of violence.
The narratives parrallels Conrad's Heart of Darkness sarcasms: going down a river, searching for light in the Heart of Darkness.
Contact: turkairo@gmail.com
All pictures and texts: ©turkairo, 2008 and 2009
Do not use without my authorisation.
Quotations ©Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, London, Penguin Books, 2000 for the present edition.
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