Not even a head of state can expect this kind of reception in Ethiopia.
When two heavy suitcases with the remains of Lucy were brought to the national museum in Addis Ababa on Wednesday, there was no holding back the emotions of onlookers and even journalists.
The 3.2-million-year-old fossil of a female hominid had been on tour throughout the United States for the past five years. Now Lucy is back in her African homeland. A woman wearing traditional African garb even offered a red rose to welcome Lucy’s return.
“There was a feeling of emptiness in Ethiopia while she was away,” said anthropology professor Berhane Asfaw, who has been researching human evolution for the past 30 years. “Lucy is an icon for all the people in the country.”
US palaeoanthropologist Donald Johanson, who made the discovery of the bones in the Afar Triangle in 1974, also did not pass up the opportunity to take part in the welcoming ceremonies.
“Lucy has a message that overcomes all cultural barriers,” Johanson said. “She is proof that the seven billion people in the world all have the same origin and that basically speaking, we are all Africans.”
But this alone does not explain the worldwide fascination for the skeleton of the “Australopithecus afarensis”, a primate closely related to the Homo genus, which includes modern-day human beings. Johanson said he believes people see more than just a fossil in Lucy.
“She is like a person with whom they can identify,” he said. “In addition, there is naturally an extremely attractive name that comes with it.”
A rare find: the skull of a hominid child known as Australopithecus afarensis, who palaeontologists say lived at a key stage in primate evolution more than three million years ago. (AFP)
Lucy got her name because on that November night when Johanson’s team discovered the bones, a tape cassette was playing the Beatles’ song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
And what was everyday life like for human-like species back then?
“We assume that Lucy lived in forest areas and was a vegetarian,” Johanson said.
She might have also eaten crocodile and bird eggs, he said, “and she lived more of a nomadic life while sleeping in nests up in the trees as protection against wild animals.”
In her Ethiopian homeland, Lucy is called “dinknesh,” which means the wondrous one. The find was the first proof that our human predecessors could already walk upright 3.2 million years ago.
Although some human-like bones have been found dating back six million years ago, worldwide, it is the name Lucy that has become synonymous with the origin of the human species.
Ethiopia is often mentioned in the same breath as drought and starvation. Its people have long been trying to throw off this negative image, and they have become proud that, thanks to Lucy, the country is also dubbed the “cradle of humanity”.
“There was a huge uproar when she was sent to the United States in 2007,” a taxi driver who gave his name only as Tewodros said. “Many people thought the government had sold Lucy to America.”
Some of the cities in which Lucy was displayed were Houston, Seattle and New York, and the interest was huge. At the same time, the bones were studied further. Now the studies are to be continued in a complex built in the national museum in Addis Ababa.
“The new Ethiopian laboratories meet the highest standards,” Johanson said. “I have no worries whatsoever about Lucy.”
From next Tuesday, the roughly 1-metre tall primate would be unveiled to the public. A five-day special exhibition would make it possible for people to see the original.
After that, however, the skeleton will once again vanish behind thick walls for its own protection. What Ethiopians would have then is a copy of her in the museum – along with the knowledge that Lucy is finally back on her home soil. – Sapa-dpa
I have always wanted to claim some kind of artistic savvy, the more so now that I write for public consumption. Alas, that is not the case. I live on a steady diet of DVDs and genre fiction, driven entirely by an insatiable appetite for entertainment that feels good. There is perfectly enjoyable high-brow stuff out there, but somewhere between having Salman Rushdie and Catcher in the Rye thrust upon me I learned discernment. I mostly read historical romance novels now, with a very light sprinkling of titles that are more admissible in public.
Up until three or so years ago, I cheerfully consumed Hollywood products. Something has happened to Hollywood, though, hasn’t it? These days only Robert Downey Jr., Star Trek and 007 will get me anywhere near a Cineplex. There is always a silver lining and in my case it has been the expansion of horizons. Now that I don’t care what Tinseltown does to itself, I am present enough to notice some of what is happening closer to home. Turns out that there are diamonds in my backyard after all.
I grew up in Brazzaville, Bujumbura, Mbabane and Dar es Salaam in the eighties and nineties on state broadcasters and the very occasional video that was deemed age-appropriate by the adult mafia. My parents especially made substantial contributions to the Disney empire. There wasn’t any opportunity to even imagine that the culture I consumed might reflect me in any way. The African female audience member? Laughable notion. The closest I ever came to relating to any character was the youngest Huxtable kid, and that was a stretch.
The thing is, no matter how open a person is to the range of human creativity, deep inside she craves the familiar. Everyone wants to see themselves on the page, on the screen. We want our stories told.
About ten years ago, a particularly involved conversation with an African American about depictions of black people in popular culture prompted me to dedicate my senior thesis to exploring depictions of Africans by Hollywood between 1930 and 2001. The only good thing I can say about this exercise is that I met a man from New York with an excellent collection of African cinema. The rest was tears and horror.
Things have changed – there was nowhere else for Hollywood to go but upwards. Nonetheless, the experience left me with a rather unfortunate prejudice: the idea that only Africans can make competent movies about Africans.
Well, I was wrong. There is no explanation for Nollywood products and their unfortunate imitations throughout Anglophone Africa. I tried to find something palatable in those eye-rolling, garish, tasteless and superstitious cretins that pass for “characters” and failed miserably. The depths of loathing that I reserve for Nollywood can only be matched by how I feel about stepping barefoot into a pile of thorn-laden, fermenting excrement.
Development cinema saved the day for me, since it is always too long between good pieces of African cinema. Listen, I am horribly surprised about this, and embarrassed. We’re all Africans here, we know the deal. The NGOs and the Breton Woods and the savior-complex poverty tourists equipped with cameras and an internet connection have been framing us, selling us and commercially spreading the gospel of their cause for years. Sweet ancestors: are these people for real?
But then one day there I found myself alone with YouTube and a link to some locally produced, externally funded efforts.Twenty four hours later I was sold on the television series Siri ya Mtungi. It had so much that my soul needed to see: gorgeous Tanzanian women who look like the plumptious, dark-skinned, beautiful, complex and intelligent people I know. Men as venal and stupid and morally bankrupt, as delightful and gentle and wise and generous, as I have ever encountered. Conflicts that I can understand. All to the tune of an excellently curated local soundtrack.
There is also lots of sex. We’re all Africans here so let’s tell it like it is. Our sex is always depicted as exotic, deviant, or fraught with danger and disease. Like I said: tears and horror.
Siri ya Mtungi is not exactly innocent. It aims to change the sexual behaviors of Tanzanians in order to curb the spread of HIV/Aids infections. Refreshingly though, there is no fire or brimstone here. Just good old fashioned storytelling spiked with provocation. They’re trying to throw condoms at the viewer, in the hopes that she might catch one like an unplanned pregnancy.
I literally watched my favorite uncle die of the slim disease in the nineties, slowly and painfully. Don’t need any additional behavior-change messaging, thank you kindly. Condoms come as naturally to me as eating my vegetables. Consequently I am not watching the series to learn anything new – I have a natural immunity to messaging – but I am very interested in the depictions of our sexuality.
Sex is a great lens through which to examine life. When someone gets your sex right, they get you right, donor-funded or otherwise. I hooked onto this series simply because it showed me … well, us. The smiles were familiar. The cadences were familiar. The settings are enchanting, the women feisty, the men handsome kinds of bad news. Finally. I can tell Hollywood and Nollywood to kiss my bountiful African posterior, for I have found some satisfying measure of truth on the screen.
Elsie Eyakuze is a freelance consultant in print and online media from Tanzania, working mainly in the development sector. She blogs at mikochenireport.blogspot.com. Connect with her on Twitter.
When talking about Africa, many people still wax lyrical about vast, empty savannahs, The Lion King, flies, drums and naked women. And then they share their fears of violence, disease and crime.
By far, my greatest fear in Kenya is Njeri.
She’s the mobile “beauty therapist” who makes sure my lady bits – and those of many other expats and foreigners – are under control. Call her anytime you need her and she’ll take a matatu (taxi) and come to wherever you are, with her equipment.
When she arrives at my house she immediately sets to work. She puts her pot of wax – which she’s made with sugar, water and lemon juice – on the stove, and takes off her top. The heat along the Kenyan coast is brutal and standing over a hot stove with no fan or air-conditioning is hard work.
The process is the same every time: Njeri tells me to place an old sheet on the bed and to drop my pants and lie down on it. Then she politely asks me to spread my legs.
She moves the boiling hot pot from the stove to the bed, places it between my legs, and tells me not to move. She dips an old rusted butter knife into the pot and blows on it in a feeble attempt to cool the wax slightly. Then she spreads hot wax, like butter on toast, onto my lady bits. I can’t move or scream without knocking over the pot between my legs. I have to stay deadly still and scream on the inside.
Njeri then takes a scrap of material that she cut up the night before. Her wax strips are cuts of fabric from old bed sheets, clothes, jeans, whatever she can get her hands on. She spreads it over the hot wax, rubs up and down, and starts making clicking, clucking noises and shaking her head.
It’s her way of preparing her client for the pain to come.
She rips the fabric and wax off my bits, and immediately pats my skin and shushes me, like a mommy placating a crying baby.
“Oh, shhhhh, shhh, shhhhhh.”
And she does it all over again. Once she has used up a strip of fabric she throws it on the bedroom floor, for me to walk around collecting afterwards.
(Graphic: Kenny Leung)
When she is done, it’s time for my legs. Half an hour later she showers my body with baby powder and tells me what a good girl I’ve been. She puts her hand out for her 400 Ksh (about R40) and heads out, leaving me on my bed, still sticky with remnants of wax, surrounded by strips of dirty fabric, and covered in powder.
Fast forward to the evening.
When my husband gets back from work, I tease him a little and tell him about my bikini wax. He doesn’t need much teasing and follows me into the room. Just as things are getting hot and heavy, Disco, our psycho cat (named such because she fell out of the thatched roof of the local bar and landed head-first on the dance floor), attacks me.
Turns out there is a stand of string from Njeri’s fabric strips still stuck to my butt. At first I didn’t realise that it was Disco who was clawing at me to get to it … so I scream.
I’m on my husband, the cat is on me, and in an epic climax (not quite the one I had in mind), in runs the security officer with his rungu (wooden baton) because he’d heard the commotion and thought something was wrong.
So much for a romantic night with my man.
Bash, from South Africa, is a freelance project development analyst based in Kenya. She spends most of her time snorkelling, is obsessed with giraffes, has too many tattoos and loves travelling.
“London or Minneapolis?” a soft female voice asks. It comes from a few tables behind me at Village Restaurant – a popular hangout for Somali diasporans in Mogadishu – as I finish a call to my friend.
“Eastleigh,” I respond, trying not to disclose my London background. Eastleigh is a district in Nairobi, inhabited mainly by Somalis.
Clutching a shisha pipe in her right hand that is patterned with henna flowers, she blows thick white smoke that fills up the dimly lit corner of the restaurant. “You may dress like a local but you don’t sound like the Eastleigh type. You definitely don’t look like one.”
Moving her chair to to my table, she introduces herself as Hamdi from Hamarweyne, a district in Mogadishu. In the dim lights her gold necklace and rings are hard to miss, and one can smell the incense smoke she perfumed her long, black, orange-highlighted hair with from a mile away.
Her two female friends soon join us. They’ve come here in the hope of mingling with their preferred type of men – diasporan guys.
With fragile peace holding up in Mogadishu, Somalis who have been living abroad are flocking back home for a visit. Most of them are single men – eligible bachelors. They are to Somali women what English Premier League footballers are to London women: the cream of the crop.
Most local women think Somalis living abroad, especially in the West, have lots of money. It’s easy for diasporan men to seduce them with cash, the perceived chance of a better life abroad or love. There are unproven theories that diasporan men are more romantic than local men; that only a diasporan man will drive for miles to the one flower shop in town to buy his lady flowers; that, unlike local men, diasporan men listen to their ladies while romantically gazing into their eyes.
I ask Hamdi how she knows I’m not a local. She smiles. “I can even tell what you do for a living.”
She and her friends reckon there are three types of diasporan men in Mogadishu. Like spots on the skin of a leopard each group has unique features, they say. They dress and carry themselves differently.
1. The government workers
This group is mainly made up of former taxi drivers from London, Minneapolis, Toronto and Sydney who have returned home to work in government.
They wear oversized two-piece suits and walk around with briefcases whose contents are a mystery. To finish off the look, they sport dark glasses (plastic). This group, the girls say, don’t have the most amount of money. They’re very visible at the beginning of the month just after they’ve received their meagre pay cheques. Their strong point is that they have access to power, which means they can potentially help you land a job if you play your cards right. This group attracts unemployed female university graduates looking for work in government offices, Hamdi’s friend Fartun reveals.
2. The business types/MBA
More often than not, these men are dressed in expensive sarongs and polyester shirts. They’re older than the government workers and tip the obese end of the scale, but they have deep pockets.
What they lack in looks and charm, they compensate for in gifts. They usually have at least one wife outside Somalia and half a dozen children. These men are commonly referred to as MBA – Married But Available. They attract women who dream of shopping trips to Dubai and are okay with being the second, third or fourth wife.
3. The cool guys
According to the ladies, this group has the most fun but the lightest pockets. They’re the new cool kids on the block, sent back to Somalia by their families because they’ve become too westernised in their adopted home countries. They depend on donations from relatives in the West and have the worst reputation among the locals.
Young and fashionable, they sport the latest hairstyles like mohawks and some have tattoos hidden under their long sleeve shirts. If they don’t conceal them, they risk facing the wrath of conservative Muslim locals.
You can find the cool guys chilling on Liido Beach or Hamarweyne, the most liberal district of Mogadishu. They know how to throw underground parties on a budget among the bullet-battered buildings of the city, and supply all kinds of illegal recreational stuff. To be seen with them is to play with fire but the girls who want to be “Hollywood cool” feel at home in their company.
Liido Beach, where the ‘cool’ diasporan men go to mingle with the ladies. (Pic: Hamza Mohamed)
Fartun prefers the business types because they can afford the things she likes in life, like dining at the few nice restaurants in town. A decent meal for two at one of these spots can start at US $25. In Somali culture men always pay for the meal, which means high-end restaurants are out of budget for many of the local men.
With the summer holidays coming up, an influx of diasporan men are expected in Mogadishu in the next few months. Hamdi and her friends say they’re happy about this – the more fish in the sea, the better the chance of a good catch.
Before leaving the restaurant, I again ask Hamdi what she thinks I do and what group of eligible bachelors she’s put me in. After inspecting me from head to toe, she says: “Judging by the sandals and the T-shirt you wearing, you look like they’ve deported you from London.”
Hamza Mohamed is an independent British-Somali journalist. Connect with him on Twitter.
Laughter is the best medicine, wisdom says. But not necessarily in all places at all times. In Zimbabwe, laughter might actually be the worst poison, depending on who or what you are laughing at.
A Zimbabwean man living in the east of the country near the belly of the rich diamond fields drinks a few quaffs of his frothy beer, the semi-traditional Chibuku. It is President Robert Mugabe’s birthday. And the 2012 presidential birthday party is in the eastern province’s capital, Mutare.
The man, who is stubborn in the wholesome traditional personality of that region, does not go to the stadium where the party is being held. He has probably attended many in the past and has come to the conclusion that standing in the queue for hours for a small cup of his favourite drink was not to his liking.
So, the man goes to his favourite bar, which is screening the festivities. As if to torture him further, the national broadcaster is airing the lavish birthday party live. The birthday cake is a crocodile-like monster of a sugary thing weighing 88kg — a kilogram for each year. A massive affair with 88 lit candles fluttering in the wind like tiny butterflies blown around by a soothing breeze.
The half-drunk man chats with a stranger sitting next to him: “At the age of 88, where does this old man have the breath to blow out 88 candles? Did he ask for some assistance?” He is referring to Mugabe.
The stranger walks out of the bar with a stern look on his face and shortly returns with two aggressive-looking men at his heels. “Secret police!” the boozer whispers to himself, recognising them by their dark glasses and familiar, wrinkled suits.
The court trial about a pub joke lasts for weeks and weeks, and people all over the country sympathise with the offender. They feel inspired to make more jokes about the president, despite the risks.
(Graphic: John McCann/M&G)
In Zimbabwe, joking about the president is a serious crime, and many citizens have lost their freedom for having the courage to laugh at the president. If the South African artist who painted President Jacob Zuma’s privates had been a Zimbabwean, he would probably now be languishing in Chikurubi Prison.
The crime: insulting the president. The punishment: months behind bars in a dingy prison cell, or, if the magistrate feels pity for you, a sentence of hundreds of hours of humiliating community service in a public place in the scorching sun.
But one man seems to have gone too far in the southwestern part of the country. He supports Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party partly because it gives him free T-shirts every now and then. Unfortunately, he did not like the president’s portrait on the front of the T-shirt, so one day he laboriously erased the portrait with white paint. When the secret police saw him wearing the stained shirt, they asked him what he had done to the presidential portrait.
As honest as the people from that part of the country are known to be, he declared: “I removed the face of Mugabe. I like the ruling party, but I don’t like the leader of the party.” He says this with a straight face, not knowing what he’s getting himself into — which turns out to be the mouth of a lion of a magistrate, who sentences him to many hours of community service.
The commandment: thou shalt not deface the picture of the president on a party T-shirt.
In the extreme south of the country, near the border with South Africa, an agitated man speaks to himself in a bar. “I am well educated, but have been unemployed for a long time. It is this Mugabe madness. The man has ruined our country.”
He promptly finds himself in a police cell for the common crime that is now called “insult” by the police. Later when they arrest a journalist, they say he is in a police cell for “the crime of the pen”.
The crime: thou shall not introspect maliciously about the president. The thought police are everywhere, you know, the law seems to say. It is already past George Orwell’s 1984! Life gets worse.
Zimbabweans fight in many different ways for their freedom, including the fight for the right to giggle or laugh. But the law instructs otherwise in the area of what or who not to laugh at. It seems the secret police have a secret manual on guidelines to Zimbabwean laughter.
In another incident, a man was walking home during the day. He came across a herd boy who was taking care of the animals in the open valley near the village. The boy was wearing an over-sized T-shirt with Mugabe’s portrait emblazoned on it. The man was annoyed and called the child to come to him. The boy obeyed, as decent African children are always expected to do.
“Why are you wearing a T-shirt with the face of this old man with a wrinkled face? Take it off!” The man then broke a small branch of a tree, whipped the boy and then let him go.
The following day, the man was in front of a vicious magistrate. The practical joker was sentenced to a year in jail with labour. The offender was not charged for whipping an innocent boy. He was charged for protesting about Mugabe’s portrait.
But then, the area is renowned for its traditional voodoo power; mysterious things originate in the area, including the ability to create lightning. Lawyers arrived to defend the culprit for free so they could make a good legal reputation for themselves. While the case was still in the court, the magistrate collapsed and died in his courtroom.
The new magistrate, probably in utter fear, decided to fine the culprit a few dollars, perhaps just in case his magical powers could be summoned with more potent and fatal force.
And one thing to learn from Zimbabwean public transport is never to mention the name of the president in an argument. Two brothers learnt this the hard way. In their argument about domestic issues during a bus ride in Harare, the elder brother, rather fed up with the younger one’s stubbornness, shouted: “Don’t be as hard-headed as Mugabe, young man.”
Silence during the bus trip
All of a sudden, the bus changed its route and stopped outside a police station. One passenger pointed at the joker and said: “That one, he insulted the president.” Soon, the whole country knew the president was “hard-headed”, and they laughed in subdued ways in isolated places.
The law: be silent on your bus trip if you don’t want to arrive at a prison cell instead of at your house. Although technology is the new miracle in human relations, it can cause much heartache. Case in point: a Zimbabwean woman sent a friend an SMS containing a Photoshopped picture of Mugabe in the nude. Imagine, an 88-year-old man in the nude!
She soon realised the gravity of her offensive joke when her friend appeared with a troop of police officers in tow to arrest her. Poor woman, she is still in the courts, waiting to know when the doors to a dirty prison cell will swallow her. The law: thou shall never imagine the president naked under any circumstances.
In Zimbabwe, insulting the president can simply mean complaining about the way the man has ruined the country politically, economically, culturally and academically, or in any sorts of other ways.
I had a share of it myself when a secret agent asked me what I thought about the president’s academic achievements. “Seven academic degrees,” he said. When I said I was neither impressed nor amused, the agent was burning with fury. “Why?” he shouted, spraying my face with his spit.
“They are all undergraduate degrees. Didn’t someone tell him to advance to a master’s degree?” I retorted as I wiped the new washing liquid from my face.
The man then threatened me with the possibility of disappearance: “We will not arrest you. That will make you more famous. We have other ways, disappearance, accidents, many more,” he warned.
Cruel, beloved homeland, deprived of the permanence of laughter, but allowed only to cry with wrinkled faces of sadness, or dance with commandeered joy.
Even our balancing rocks of the Matopos Hills have given up the hope of teaching us to balance life in all its aspects.
Chenjerai Hove is a Zimbabwean writer living in exile in Europe. This post was first published in the Mail & Guardian.
