If I Had a Hamer

Hamer bride
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By Dan

Shortly after leaving Turmi, it was time for our next visit to a traditional village. This time, it was a Hamer village. After our Arbore visit of the prior day, we had a better sense of what to expect, and were mentally prepared for the somewhat surreal experience. The Hamer are known for their elaborate body decorations, all of which mean certain things. The style of necklace a woman wears indicates whether she is a first or second wife, and the earrings a man wears indicate how many wives he has. At different stages in a person’s life, he or she starts or stops wearing certain things. The overall look was really awesome, as we looked around. At the Hamer village, we were ushered into a hut with a low door that required us to squat walk in. A Hamer guy translated from Hamer to Amharic, and Melaku translated into English, so we were able ask a lot of questions. After sitting on the ground for 20 minutes or so, I’ll confess to squirming a little to learn that the floor was made of animal dung, but, hey, I already didn’t smell very good. We were in a hut that belonged to a young guy and his new bride, although his mother was there as well, keeping an eye on a lot of the village kids as well as her daughter-in-law.

Hamer groom
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The Hamer are best known for the coming-of-age ritual for boys, who at a certain point in their adolescence get the opportunity to attempt to run across the backs of about 15-30 bulls who are lined up side by side. Oh, and by the way, they’re buck naked. (The boys, that is – but I guess the bulls are, too.) Oh, and by the way, they do it in front of the entire community. Oh, and if they manage to do it once without falling, they get to do it about five more times. Oh, and here’s the worst of it: if they don’t manage to get back and forth without falling, they are subjected to enormous amounts of abuse from their friends and family, especially the women of the community, and don’t get to be treated as full fledged members of the brotherhood of males. Pretty much a lifetime as the Lonesome Loser. And you thought there was a lot of pressure taking the test to get your driver’s license. Of course, the men aren’t the only ones who suffer. The females of a bull jumper’s family have themselves whipped as a show of support, and must show no pain as it happens, or risk jinxing the chances of the bull jumper. To spice things up, and get permanent credit for the suffering they endured, they take steps to make sure that the scars resulting from the whipping get nice and big by rubbing in dirt and ashes. We saw some pretty spectacular scarification displays. Makes you think that smart girls hope they don’t have a lot of brothers.

Hamer children
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Once again, Abby was a very popular object of interest with the Hamer, and there were a number of offers to keep her. I think I could have gone home with quite a few cows, if I’d been willing to deal, but I decided to keep her. We’re having to wash her shirts more often than anybody else’s, because she gets pawed so much. Grayson again held court with the younger male crowd, where they swapped burping and farting techniques, or whatever it is that pre-adolescent boys discuss. Christina took pictures, and I doled out the 2 Birr payments for photos. Every once in a while, though, I’d make myself pause and just take it all in – here I was on a nice Saturday morning, in a village of grass huts in far southern Ethiopia, with an entire community of folks who were about as exotic as they possibly could be from my Northern California suburbia perspective. Very, very, very cool.

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After leaving the Hamer village, we drove another 20 km or so to the small town of Demeka, passing crowds of Hamer folks along the way. Since 90% of the folks we passed were dressed traditionally, it was clear to me that they didn’t dress that way just for the chance to earn 2 Birr here or there. This is how people dress. Demeka is the site of a big market on Saturdays, and we had timed our visit intentionally to take it in. Christina and I both love local markets, and I have been to some very cool ones in my life, but this may have been the best yet. Again, the vast majority of the folks there were dressed in beads and goat skins, for the women, or short skirts, ammo belts, and mud hats for the men. At first, we were the only gringos there, and there were never more than a handful of other tourists, so we attracted a huge crowd wherever we went. It wasn’t a large market, but it was full of interesting stuff. There were piles of the ochre-colored sandy soil that the women use to color their hair; piles of the butter that is also used for styling hair (some of which was traded in cans that formerly held cooking oil and had an American flag and the message “A Gift of the American People” – glad to see our tax dollars at work!); a huge pile of sandals made from tire treads; loads of bananas and long stalks of sugar cane; and a variety of other things that I didn’t recognize.

Hamer village
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Many of the Hamer men wore a sort of mud skull-cap that covered about a third of the head, that usually had some feathers and beads on it. Apparently, you are entitled to wear one of these skull-caps if you have recently killed an enemy or wild animal. I don’t think there are a lot of fatal battles taking place, and the lion population is pretty well zero in this region, so I’m not sure how people are qualifying these days. Maybe killing a lot of mosquitoes or tsetse flies? You wouldn’t want to mess your snazzy skull-cap up with the dreaded bed head in the morning, so Hamer men use a wooden head-rest as a sort of pillow. (And they say that women suffer more to look good. . . .) The nice thing is that it doubles as a stool, so Hamer men carry their head-rests around with them all the time. I suppose it’s nice to be ready for a nap at any moment, but I kept having visions of men walking down the streets of San Francisco with briefcases in one hand and pillows in the other. One guy sort of adopted me, and held my hand throughout our visit as we wandered through the market. Due to the language barrier, I wasn’t able to ask what he had done to merit the right to wear the skull-cap. He didn’t seem all that ferocious, but maybe that’s because he was holding my hand.

ochre sellers at the Demeka market
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Eventually, it was time to move on, so we said farewell to our Hamer friends and hopped back in the car to continue the journey. The next 40 km or so took about 3 hours, as it was the worst road we have yet experienced. The views were great, though, and we passed lots of very colorful people along the way. Soon after leaving Demeka, we left the Hamer area and were into an area populated by Banna, who are pretty closely related to the Hamer, but have plenty of distinctive traditions and are really into body painting. We also spotted our first game – four dik diks – by the side of the road.

Traditional scarification
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At Key Afar, we joined a much better, although still decidedly dirt, road, so the last 50 km to Jinka was much faster. We were rising up and out of the Rift Valley, through lovely green valleys of corn, bananas, sorghum, and cotton, with acacia and juniper interspersed and steeper mountains rising all around us. The colors were spectacular, since things seem to grow effortlessly in this fertile environment. There were bougainvillea, jacaranda, and hibiscus all flowering, in addition to large trees of poinsettias (perfect to put us in the Christmas mood!) and all sorts of things we didn’t recognize. Christina said that she periodically does a GoogleEarth exercise in her head, zeroing in on just where we are, and it always makes her laugh. As you can see from the map, we’re near where Ethiopia, Sudan, and Kenya come together, and as I told the kids, they’re going to have to work hard in their lives to get any farther away from it all than we are now. The absence of infrastructure, the number of days of travel it has taken to get here from a town of any significance, and the sights and sounds around us all remind us of just how remote this is. Great adventure!

Demeka market
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Please see additional photos attached.