Tag: Ethiopia

Ethiopia’s running camp in the sky

On a cold and wet morning in the lush green hills high above Addis Ababa, Ethiopian track star Kenenisa Bekele circles a brick red track, slowly, steadily rebuilding his strength.

His muscular legs hit the ground in a quick rhythm. The only noise in the serene silence is his breath, piercing through the thin air 2 700m above sea level.

The world-record holder in 5 000m and 10 000m and triple Olympic champion, who has suffered from a calf injury for three years, is running at the centre he opened late last year to improve training conditions for Ethiopia’s renowned runners.

Now he is looking to attract foreign athletes too, transforming his camp in Sululta into what he hopes will be a world-class training centre.

“We are inviting athletes, we want to have other international athletes from all over the world, so we want to be part of training centres of the world,” he told AFP, speaking after a training session on the track, 10 kilometres from the capital.

Ethiopian running greats Kenenisa Bekele (L) and his brother Tariku Bekele train at Kenenisa camp in Sululta outside Addis Ababa on September 1 2013. (Pic: AFP)

Bekele says the new training centre was initially set up because there were no adequate tracks in the country, but was now also welcoming professional distance runners eager to train in the ideal climate and altitude of the Ethiopian highlands.

Bekele is also hoping to attract running enthusiasts of all levels, finding a new way of marketing Ethiopia as a tourist destination and tapping into a growing market of ‘hobby joggers’ the world over who are eager to rub shoulders with east Africa’s elite.

The size of the potential market related to the current running boom is certainly huge, with major big city marathons like London, New York, Boston, Chicago, Berlin and Tokyo systematically selling out their tens of thousands of places within hours.

Keeping up with the Kenyan
It’s also a market that neighbouring Kenya, the other distance-running giant and Ethiopia’s arch rival, is already tapping into.

In the Kenyan Rift Valley town of Iten, elite runner Lornah Kiplagat has opened a High Altitude Training Centre, offering the austere eat-sleep-run regimen and a diet of thin air, endurance boosting hills and simple, unprocessed organic food to a growing number of elites and enthusiasts.

Four-time world champion Lornah Kiplagat. (Pic: lornah.com)

Bekele hopes Sululta will be the next Iten, and has already hosted several international track runners, including Algeria’s Taoufik Makhloufi, the 2012 Olympic 1500m champion, and Sudan’s Abubaker Kaki and Djibouti’s Ayanleh Souleiman – both 800m specialists.

It is Ethiopia’s second training camp, though Yaya Running Village on the outskirts of Addis Ababa – sponsored by fellow Ethiopian distance legend Haile Gebreselassie – lacks a track.

Bekele’s facility has one of only two world-class tracks in Ethiopia. The other, in the congested and dusty capital, was only recently refitted with a suitable track for long distance training.

Bekele had long complained the old track was too hard and likely worsened his stubborn calf injury, which has stilted his performance in recent years.

Bekele won gold in the 10 000m in Athens, and followed up with the 5 000m and 10 000m double in Beijing in 2008. But since then he has been beset by injury, finishing 4th in the London Olympics and missing out on the Moscow World Championships in August.

“Every time we go over that track, [we were] getting injury. It’s very strong, it’s not good for muscle,” he said.

“It’s a big challenge for me… not only me, many athletes have injury over that track,” the 31-year-old runner added.

Today, he is looking to regain his past fitness, training twice daily ahead of this month’s Great North Race, where he will face Gebreselassie and Britain’s Mo Farah.

Training with a legend
The centre is part of Bekele’s steadily growing business empire. In addition to a cinema and real estate in central Ethiopia, his first hotel opened in August on one of Addis Ababa’s cramped thoroughfares.

Bekele said that in addition to boosting tourism he is keen to invest to spur industry and create jobs, leaving a lasting legacy once his legs can no longer perform on the track.

“If I get more money, if I have that money in my pocket, if I’m not spending to create jobs, if I am not sharing with other people, it’s no sense,” he said.

Today, near the existing 17-room hotel neighbouring the track, the outlines of Bekele’s planned expansion stand tall.

It is the site of a new 100-room lodge, which will boast two swimming pools, a gym and basketball and tennis courts. He is also planning for a nine-hole golf course nearby.

Bekele said he wants to boost his business with these extra offers and hopes that, combined with the centre’s close proximity to Addis Ababa, its safe environment and clean air, Sululta will become a top international sports destination.

Plus, he jokes, his own experience comes with the centre – a chance for aspiring runners to be trained by a living legend.

“I will give my experience, I will share my experience,” he laughs, exposing his characteristic toothy smile.

Jenny Vaughan for AFP

11 years ago

The Ethiopian nun whose music enraptured the Holy Land

From a small, spartan room in the courtyard of the Ethiopian church off a narrow street in Jerusalem, a 90-year-old musical genius is emerging into the spotlight.

For almost three decades, Emahoy Tsegué-Mariam Guebrù has been closeted at the church, devoting herself to her life’s twin themes – faith and music. The Ethiopian nun, whose piano compositions have enthralled those who have stumbled across a handful of recordings in existence, has lived a simple life, rarely venturing beyond the monastery’s gates.

But this month the nonagenarian’s scribbled musical scores have been published as a book, ensuring the long-term survival of her music. And on Tuesday, the composer will hear her work played in concert for the first time, at three performances in Jerusalem. Guebrù may even play a little.

Her music has been acclaimed by critics and devotees. Maya Dunietz, a young Israeli musician who worked with Guebrù on the publication of her scores, says in her introduction to the book that the composer has “developed her own musical language”.

“It is classical music, with a very special sense of time, space, scenery,” Dunietz told the Guardian. “It’s not grand; it’s intimate, natural, honest and very feminine. She has a magical touch on the piano. It’s delicate but deep. And all her compositions tell stories of time and place.”

Emahoy Tsegué-Mariam Guebrù. (Pic: emahoymusicfoundation.org)

Guebrù’s inspiration comes not only from her faith, but from her life: an extraordinary journey from an aristocratic family in Addis Ababa, with strong links to Emperor Haile Selassie, to a monastery in the historic centre of Jerusalem .

She was born Yewubdar Guebrù on December 12 1923 and lived in the Ethiopian capital until, aged six, she and her sister were sent to boarding school in Switzerland. In one of two seminal moments of her life, there she heard her first piano concert, and began to play and study music.

After her return to Addis Ababa, and a period of exile for her family followed by yet another return, Guebrù was awarded a scholarship to study music in London. But she was unexpectedly denied permission to leave by the Ethiopian authorities.

In the bleak days following this calamity, Guebrù refused food until, close to death, she requested holy communion. Embracing God was the second seminal moment of her life. She abandoned music to devote herself to prayer, and after several years joined a monastery in northern Ethiopia. She spent 10 years there, barefoot and living in a mud and stone hut.

It was here she changed her name to Emahoy Tsegué-Mariam. It was only after rejoining her mother in Addis Ababa that Guebrù resumed playing and composing and even recorded a few albums.

Guebrù and her mother later spent six years in Jerusalem, and she returned to the Holy Land to take up permanent residence after her mother’s death in 1984. She has remained at the imposing circular Ethiopian church ever since.

Dunietz came across her music eight years ago when her husband, the conductor Ilan Volkov, brought home a CD he had bought in London. “We listened and were amazed by the strange combination of classical, Ethiopian and blues,” said Dunietz. “And then we read the sleeve notes and discovered she lives right here in Jerusalem.”

The couple found Guebrù sitting at the piano in her room at the church, and began a series of visits. “In the beginning there was a lot of silence. We felt there was a lot of longing and sorrow and loneliness, but slowly a connection started,” said Dunietz.

Guebrù was still playing and composing in her room, but she had not performed in public for several years, and her music was “not much appreciated” within the monastery. Dunietz immediately understood the importance of publishing the nun’s scores to create and preserve a musical legacy, but the project did not get off the ground until two years ago.

“She handed over four plastic bags — old wrinkled Air Ethiopia bags — containing hundreds of pages, all muddled up, a big mess, written in pencil, some of them 60 or 70 years old. It was all the pages of her music that she had found in her room. ‘Make a book’, she said.” It was, added Dunietz, “like an archaeological dig” to piece together the scores.

Daunted by the task, Dunietz sought the help of the Jerusalem Season of Culture, which organises an annual summer festival of art, music and food in the city. As well as the book, the three concerts have a huge significance for Guebrù.

“This is the first time she will hear her own music performed in concert by professional artists,” said Duenitz, who will play the piano. “It is what every composer wants.” Guebrù, she says, is feeling overwhelmed by the attention and has largely withdrawn into the solitude of her monastery room, declining requests for interviews and meetings.

In the book accompanying Guebrù’s music, Meytal Ofer, a regular visitor over recent months, describes her: “I enter a darkened room and catch my first glimpse of her, an elderly woman, not a wrinkle on her face, lying in bed. It is a modest room with a small window. In the room is a bed, a piano, piles of musical scores and a picture of Haile Selassie and the Empress Menen hung above the papers.”

Guebrù is wrapped in a blanket against the winter cold, writes Ofer. “Emahoy Tsegue-Mariam is in her own world; she speaks slowly with an inner peace, her soothing voice caresses the listener and her infectious smile sneaks into the conversation every now and then … The disparity between the room’s sparseness and Emahoy Tsegué-Mariam’s spiritual richness reaches deep down into my soul.”

Harriet Sherwood for the Guardian

11 years ago

Ethiopian long-distance champion eyes 2015 election race

As his feet hit the pedals at lightning speed, Haile Gebrselassie barely breaks a sweat on an exercise bike at his gym in the Ethiopian capital’s upscale Bole district.

He then proceeds to work on his chest muscles, hours after jogging down the forested hills in the northern suburbs of Addis Ababa.

The 40-year-old still maintains the tough regimen that brought him track glory and international recognition for two decades, after clinching the 5 000 metres and 10 000 metres races at the 1992 Junior World Championships in Seoul.

Some 27 world records, two Olympic gold medals and four World Championships titles later, Gebrselassie, regarded by many as the greatest long distance runner of all time, says he still does not know when he will retire from sport.

But he has yet to start on his one longstanding ambition – to enter politics – something he now plans to do at Ethiopia’s legislative elections, in two years’ time.

“Now I think I am a little bit mature. As I told you in 2010, my ambition was politics,” he told Reuters. “Now 2015 is the perfect time.”

“People think I will become a parliamentarian, but the competition won’t be easy. That’s why I needed to prepare two years in advance.”

Haile Gebrselassie celebrates with his national flag after competing in the men’s 10 000m final at the “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium during the 2008 Beijing Olympics. (AFP)

Known as “The Emperor”, Gebrselassie enjoys immense popularity in the Horn of Africa country and has used his winnings to build a successful business empire including hotels, a car dealership, a cinema and a sports complex.

But some in Ethiopia have expressed their surprise at his political aspirations, given the country’s dubious democratic track record.

Politics is dominated by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, in power since 1991 when it ousted Mengistu Haile Mariam’s military junta.

In Parliament, all but two of the 547 seats are held by the ruling party. There is one independent member and only one from an opposition party, which often accuses the government of arbitrarily arresting its members.

Gebrselassie plans to run as an independent, and says he is not daunted by the prospects of politics tarnishing his reputation as a sporting hero. The ruling party had yet to express a clear opinion on the popular athlete’s bid for public office.

Sport scandal
“We are dreaming about a democracy like the ones in Europe and America, it’s a long process. How can you expect [that] in 20 years?,” he said.

Ethiopia has come a long way, he says, from the days of military leader Mengistu Haile Mariam, whose purges killed tens of thousands of people in the mid-1970s when victims’ bodies were often left in the street to discourage dissent.

“We have to give chances. Now we are here, at least we are safe to come back home, at least we are safe to do something else,” he said.

Gebrselassie has yet to issue a policy manifesto, but he says he would support measures to help fight poverty and enable Ethiopia to become a middle-income country.

“As citizens, all of us have a responsibility. Its not only a responsibility for the government or the opposition, all of us have our own responsibility,” he said.

“If we achieve that … we can change this country, we can reach the democracy we dream [of] and we can eradicate poverty.”

Speaking on the latest doping scandal to hit international athletics, Gebrselassie urged anti-doping bodies to widen the scope of their investigations, after former world sprint champion Tyson Gay failed a dope test but denied knowingly taking a performance-enhancing drug.

The scandal marked yet another blow for the sport after former world 100 meters record holder Asafa Powell and Olympic 4×100 meters relay silver medallist Sherone Simpson also said they had both tested positive for the stimulant oxilophrine at June’s Jamaican championships.

Gay said he had “put his trust in someone” and that he had been let down.

Gebrselassie said he “still could not believe” the weekend’s disclosures.

“It’s better to stop these problems from the root. You don’t know sometimes, [whether] in these kind of problems there is someone behind [the athlete’s doping],” he said.

11 years ago

Learning to be Ethiopian again

“I want to go to Holland or to England because it’s clean and beautiful there,” said my 11-year-old sister Lidya, who has never traveled outside of Addis Ababa or owned a television. Looking out of the taxi’s window I can see that city streets are not too clean, drivers throw garbage out of the window, men pee wherever they feel like peeing and it’s okay for anyone to pick their nose, publicly, for minutes, and shoot little snot balls up in the air. Still, I tell Lidya that Holland is really not that much cleaner or more beautiful than Ethiopia.

“It’s just cold,” I say.

“How cold?”

“Too cold.”

I don’t want to admit to her that streets in the Netherlands might be cleaner because I’m trying to make this country my home again. One year ago, I moved back to Addis Ababa after finishing my postgrad degree. I lived in the Netherlands for 23 years before this, after being adopted by a Dutch family when I was four. I grew up learning how to speak Dutch instead of Ethiopia’s national language Amharic. I watched Dutch cartoons like Fabeltjeskrant instead of listening to the local radio shows my friends tell me about. My favorite food was Wentelteefjes (the Dutch version of French toast), and I almost forgot the taste of Ethopia’s traditional dish, injera (flatbread).

I’m often complimented by strangers for returning ‘home’ – and Addis does mostly feel like home especially when I’m surrounded by friends. I came back to discover what my place of origin is; to see if I was still Ethiopian despite growing up abroad with a European family. And, of course, to see what type of family I would have grown up with had I not been adopted.

Young boys playing soccer on the streets of Addis Ababa. (Reuters)

Strangers ask me daily what happened to me when they notice I don’t speak Amharic. I’m learning though – there’s an alphabet poster stuck to the wall in my home, which has earned me the nickname “Amharic baby” from Lidya. I’m still getting the hang of proper greetings in formal settings and the rules and customs around social interactions.

People usually feel pity for me because I wasn’t raised here and didn’t absorb the culture and language. So I’ve made an effort to behave like a proper Ethiopian girl by wearing my hair straight these days (I used to be pro-Afro) and listening politely to my mother’s pastor who hopes to find me a suitable fiancé. (I’m not too sure if I want to get married, and I feel the pastor is intruding in my personal life.)

Celebrating the return of the lost daughter must seem like a major disappointment for my Ethiopian mother. I cannot imagine what her community says about me. Although she is very sweet and calls me daily – something I have never done with my Dutch mother although I don’t doubt the relationship I have with her – I don’t feel we have anything in common to build a relationship that resembles anything close to a mother-daughter bond. She thanked heaven endlessly for “bringing me home”, but now we don’t see eye-to-eye on religion, the amount of times I visit, and almost any other decision I make in my life. Adoption didn’t turn me into the kind of girl she imagined, and that’s a disappointment.

I decided not to stay with my Ethiopian family when I returned as I’m more comfortable living on my own. I’ve been doing it since I was 19. Despite not being married, I moved in with friends who happened to be guys. Another disappointment.

Lidya, too, is not impressed with my lifestyle. She sends disapproving looks my way whenever I mention going out for drinks with friends, and questions why I’m not religious. Last Friday, I fetched her from the church compound for lunch. My mother doesn’t allow her to eat burgers so I whenever I take her out I let her order whatever she wants. This time, while waiting for our food, she asked me why I only go to church when the service is about to end. I told her I’m not too sure about God – and got another disapproving look, followed by an explanation that this happened to me because I was raised in Holland. Had I stayed in Ethiopia, she assured me, I would have been a decent church-going girl.

One year on, I’ve realised that I’m an Ethiopian that sees most things through the gaze of a non-Ethiopian. Small things remind me of this, like being asked what the breakfast dish firfir is, and getting it hilariously wrong.

But I do feel at home and I don’t complain about Ethiopia like the expats do. However, I also hate the frequent power cuts, the slow network connection that means I can’t waste hours on YouTube, and that there isn’t a range of 35 toothpaste brands to choose from.

My gaze is changing, slowly but surely. When friends from abroad came to visit me here, we end up arguing about the stereotypical and judgmental statements they tend to make about Ethiopia and its people. They don’t know enough to say the things they do.

I’ve decided to stay, not just because I found a great job, or because I’m no longer judged by my skin colour or because I’m still dealing with an identity crisis or because I want to discard my Dutchness. I want to make this country a part of me. I’m curious about how long it will take before I’m Ethiopian enough for Lidya to stop calling me “Amharic baby” (maybe when I start taking my language course more seriously?). One day I want to be able to say I’m Ethiopian with the same confidence with which I say I’m Dutch.

Marthe van der Wolf is a journalist based in Addis Ababa. She holds an M.Phil in African Studies from the University of Cape Town.

11 years ago

A new road for Ethiopia’s ancient salt trade

Abdu Ibrahim Mohammed was 15 years old when he began trekking with caravans of camels to collect salt in a sun-blasted desert basin of north Ethiopia that is one of the hottest places on earth.

Now 51 and retired, he has passed his camels to his son to pursue this centuries-old trade in “white gold” from the Danakil Depression, where rain almost never falls and the average temperature is 34.4 degrees celsius.

Sulphur and mineral salt formations are seen near Dallol in the Danakil Depression, northern Ethiopia. (Pic: Reuters)

But the tradition of hacking salt slabs from the earth’s crust and transporting them by camel is changing as a paved road is built across the northern Afar region.

Although the road being cut through the Danakil Depression is making it easier to transport the salt, the region’s fiercely independent local salt miners and traders are wary of the access it might give to industrial mining companies with mechanised extraction techniques that require far less labour.

“Most of the people who live here are dependent on the salt caravans, so we are not happy with prospective salt companies that try to set up base here,” said Abdullah Ali Noor, a chief and clan leader’s son in Hamad-Ile, on the salt desert’s edge.

“Everything has to be initiated from the community. We prefer to stick with the old ways,” he added.

Thousands of camel herders and salt extractors use traditional hoes and axes to carve the “white gold” out of the ground in the Danakil Depression.

Many of the salt diggers live in Hamad-Ile and hire out their services to different caravans. The work, however exhausting, still draws thousands onto the baking salt flats.

“You forget about the sun and the heat,” said Kidane Berhe (45), a camel herder and salt merchant. “I lost a friend once on the salt desert because he was working too much with no protection from the sun. Eventually he just collapsed.”

Once workers find a suitable place to mine salt, they extract, shape and pack as many salt slabs as possible before starting their two-day journey to the town of Berahile. (Pic: Reuters)

The tarmac road will link the highland city of Mekele with the village of Dallol in the Danakil Depression, a harsh but hauntingly beautiful geographical wonder of salt flats and volcanoes once described as “a land of death” by the famous British desert explorer Wilfred Thesiger.

The road has cut from five hours to three the drive from Mekele to Berahile, a town two days’ trek by camel from the Afar salt deposits that one of Ethiopia’s main sources of the crystalline food product.

New roads like these are gradually helping to transform this landlocked Horn of Africa state, which has a unique culture and history but has been racked by coups, famines and droughts, into one of the fastest-growing economies on the continent.

As Africa’s biggest coffee producer, Ethiopia’s economy remains based on agriculture, which accounts for 46% of gross domestic product and 85% of employment. But its nearly 94-million population – the second biggest in Africa – is attracting the attention of foreign investors hungry for new markets.

Access to market
Further south in the Danakil Depression, at the salt reserve of Lake Afdera, industrial salt production is already underway.

A company named Berhane and Zewdu PLC came to the desert plains near Hamad-Ile in 2011 aiming to produce salt there, according to Noor.

Clan leaders saw the threat to their ancient trade and lined up to oppose the project. Fearing sabotage of its equipment, the company left the following year, local people said.

But Noor still welcomed the new road.

“The new highway will give easy access to the market, which will bring benefits and development to this region,” Noor said.

The development he talks of is visible in Berahile, where caravans from the salt pans come to drop off their cargo so it can be transported to the rest of the country. Most residents are involved directly or indirectly in the salt business.

Telephone and electricity networks have been extended to the town over the past four years, a new Berahile Salt Association was established in 2010 to facilitate trade and a recently built salt store is now the biggest construction in town.

“Thousands of people benefit from this work as the salt here is exported throughout the country,” said the head of the association, Derassa Shifa.

A man prepares bars of salt to be sold in the main market of the city of Mekele, northern Ethiopia. (Pic: Reuters)

For now, tradition and modernity co-exist – the organisation buys salt from the caravans that make the four-day trek to the salt flats and back, then sells it to merchants who carry it away by truck.

The salt blocks, which were once used as a unit of money, are sold across Ethiopia, many of them to farmers to provide their animals with essential minerals. Ethiopia has the largest livestock population on the African continent.

Siegfried Modola for Reuters.