SOLID AS A DEAD ROCK

IN REHANA'S WORDS

I am confident I will be forgiven for my delay: what follows are my thoughts about Harar, which we left two weeks ago. They are probably half-formed and slightly unfair because my fever delirium began there and my plans to tour it for a day or two were cut short when a doctor sent me to bed. But still, I have strong opinions and I mean to voice them.

Once again, I found myself in an African city unprepared for the depth of the peoples’ religious fervour. Until I arrived there I had no idea that Harar regarded itself as the fourth-holiest city in Islam. I knew about the importance of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem in the religion, but had never heard of Harar. And I think it should stay that way for most Muslims and the rest of the world.
Harar was established in the eight century by a Saudi, Sheikh Abadin. By the 15^th century it had grown into a significant trading centre linking the middle east with Africa, and Christian Kingdoms to the north were eying it with greed. The Arabs built a wall around the city to protect it in 1550, with six gates leading inside – a geography that still exists today.

One of the gates in Harar, a walled town.

I’m wracking my brain here to come up with a reason why they rank the city with Mecca and Jerusalem and they only thing I remember from Abdul, our Harari guide, was that the city has 99 mosques, the same number as the names of Allah in the Qur’an. Some of the mosques were built by families for their own use and so accommodate around six people, but still, this makes the city holy.

According to Abdul Harar was not only a trade centre hundreds of years ago but also a centre of Islamic study and research, with several colleges. He claims it still is today, but then couldn’t say what they’re studying or name a single college. He says Islamic scholars come from around the world to Harar, but couldn’t name an Imam they’re studying with.

In the privately-owned Harar Museum we met Ilyas the book restorer. With one exception, all the ancient texts he was restoring with the most clumsy methods (he banged one book on a table to show us how he does it) were Qur’ans.
The other book counted how many times Allah’s name appeared in the Qur’an, how many times Mohammed’s name appeared, how many times the letter ‘e’, ‘t’, ‘c’ appeared. Shades of Kaballah?

Ilyas the book restorer

The museum had one shelf of artefacts dedicated to showcasing Islamic scholarship – I mistook the shackles for those used on slaves (they were smaller, meant to punish Muslim children who struggled with their Arabic). The paddles used to beat the deen (religion) into the kids were quite clearly marked with Muslim texts. Not much has changed since then, madressahs still use them around the world.

As far’s I’m concerned what disqualifies Harar mostly from being a holy site of Islam is the drug culture, already alluded to by Julia. Trade in Harar today consists of several markets – the khat market seems the biggest; there’s loud and proud smugglers market where grey goods are brought in from Malaysia and other eastern countries (it's brought to Harar by trucks from Djibouti and Somalia); the second-hand market; and the Muslim and Christian markets. No one blinks an eye at the grey, tax-free goods on sale in the smugglers market and khat is completely legal.

The second-hand car parts market. Harar has more Peugots on the street than anywhere else in the world

The garage where we had our clutch cable fixed.

Abdul insisted that khat is a stimulant, but in all my time in Harar I did not see one person on their feet chewing it, they all lie down in the filth. They are clearly addicts, usually older men and women who mumble misty-eyed with branches stripped bare of leaves collecting under their chins.
Rawda, at whose guesthouse we stayed, had workmen replastering her walls. They arrived with their bunches of khat and rolled up mats, stretched out full-length in her courtyard and delicately nibbled the leaves off their branches for an hour or so before starting to work. Not for them a leaf or four followed by a huge spurt of energy.
Nowhere in Harar did I see anything but dull eyes among the khat chewing community. Move along, nothing holy to see there.

To Harar’s credit, we only heard one azhan from Rawda’s guesthouse, not 99 competing cacophonies. There were evenings when Rawda and her employee Khadija went to madressah and while they were away a hum rose up from the city, which is only one square kilometre.

If Harar wants to be recognised as a holy city it better start behaving like one. The place is filled with filthy beggars, many of them clearly seeking their next branch of khat. There is no attempt to feed or shelter the beggars, and I saw two naked ones within 10 minutes of entering the city.
Abdul kicked a young peanut-seller out of my way when he was leading me to the main road to catch a tuktuk to hospital. Not on.

One thing other “Muslim cities” can learn from Harar is their attitude to women’s dress. They are mostly modest, but proof that there’s no merit to wearing black. I meant to work on a photo essay before I took to my bed, because in Harar the womens’ hijabs range from pastel peaches and purples to bright reds and hot pinks – my favourite.

Here's an orange hijab  – now think pink

They're not all in hijabs.

A small aside: we struggled to find good food in Harar, which is quite unacceptable in Ethiopia, the land of good food. Rawda made us excellent breakfast pancakes with honey but the local restaurants had the boring standard fare, and then quite tasteless. 

I asked for local specialties and then was quite relieved they were only prepared on feast days – they were a broth of either intestines or tongue boiled up for a few days before serving.

Harar's beauty is hard to capture

IN JULIA'S WORDS

15 September

Amidst the rolling folds and multilayers of mountain ranges, patchworked in luminous, yellow-infused and other greens, we are now in that famed ancient town of Lalibela.

Most people fly to Lalibela, we drove. Van Gogh would have drooled.

Teff growing along the road

On the outskirts of the town

Once named Roha, and before that Lasta, it became Lalibela after the legendary king credited with carving the 11 impossible churches out of the solid rock (well, him and the angels).

Three things made what was always going to be an incredible experience that much more wondiferous. The first is that this is low tourist season. Lalibela's apparently teeming in December and January when religious festivities are amok – Christmas, for example, is celebrated by thousands here on January 7. Bar one or two other faranji strays, we had the churches to ourselves.

The second is our feeble Rehana. Unlike most other tourists, we couldn’t do the whirl-of-a-tour of all 11 churches in one day. Rehana’s at her most sprightly (which is not very sprightly at all) in the mornings; afternoons she sleeps, then we have an early dinner and then it’s back to bed for her. So we visited the churches over three days, snail-ly and incredulous-eyed, giving us that much more time to savour their amazingnessessess.

Taking a breather before climbing the next four steps

Our third and perhaps greatest good fortune was having Hailu as our guide. The churches are seriously his personal heritage, his intimate stomping-ground since his birth. He was baptised in the well at St George’s church; played soccer with his mates in a large underground room which has recently been claimed as the 12^th church (it will be opened next year). 
His mum died from malaria when he was young, and his dad was a member of the communist party, who was tried and found guilty of persecuting people when the Derge fell, and died in prison. So he was raised by his grandparents – his grandfather being the head priest of St George’s. 
All his life he has known the dark tunnels that join the churches, has had privileged access to monkish grottos and spaces reserved for the priesthood.

Hailu knows every nook and cranny of the church complex

He was baptised in St George's Church, in the green pond to the right

Hailu is thus steeped in the lore and legends of Christian Lalibela – but he is by no means the mouthpiece of the priesthood. He is thoroughly alive to the many tensions and controversies that continue to play out on this most marvellous of stages. 

This is a UN World Heritage Site, which - as the priests have become uncomfortably aware – comes not only with international prestige and World Bank financial assistance, but also with bevies of archaeologists, historians and other students of antiquities with their pesky insistence on verifying folklore and priestly claims with scientific methods. (The UN also comes with extraordinarily crude structures with which to cover and “conserve” these outstanding ancient phenomena. How unpleasantly ironic!)

The despised Italians apparently got the Unesco tender, and this is the shit they deliver!). How inconvenient for the holders of All Truth, the priesthood, to have interlopers, often from distant lands, doubting the received wisdom, prodding and probing artefacts and ancient chisel marks for proof of their age and likely originators!
The negotiations for access to undertake scientific analysis of many of these ancient sites are ongoing; not lightly will the priests permit those adherents of the religion of science to gather potentially contradictory information and therefore cut their authority from beneath their holy feet in their own backyard.

Damn Italians built a protective roof

While these disputes rage on around him, Hailu has personal and burning issues with the priesthood too. There’s his deep dissatisfaction with the current Very High Priest (or patriarch, or whatever the word is for the head honcho of all the Lalibela churches) – a man appointed a few years ago, apparently not for his holy religious ways, but because of his political connections. Worse, the man (I don’t remember his name but there is his photo in the museum here) is accused of atrocities as a member of the Derge during the communist era, for which he is apparently soon to go on trial.

Perhaps worst of all, though, Hailu sees the priestly villain’s leadership to have taken the Lalibela priesthood away from what their traditional and right role should be – like caring for the community – and towards cynical and materialistic concerns.
For example, under this man’s tenure, the entrance cost for faranji to visit the churches has rocketed in the last three months from Birr 350 (about R175) to US$50 – triple the price. The church keeps all the proceeds (although I think Unicef enjoys a 10% split) – the community gains nothing.

Hailu's grandfather's house. His grandmother was recently evicted

Hailu’s other deep-hearted issue as a believer which puts him at odds with the priesthood is something fantastically reminiscent of the medieval European battles over language – and therefore accessibility to the gospels – and the Catholic church.
In Europe the battle was between vernaculars like English and German versus the rarified dead language of Latin that the Catholic church uncompromisingly insisted on using. How better to entrench the power relations of priests as Those Who Knowest and the ignorant commoners, who must rely on those in frocks to mediate meaning between them and their religion/god?

In contemporary Lalibela (all Ethiopia? I’m not sure), the priesthood insist on delivering their sermons in the ancient and now “dead” language of Ge’ez, rather than the everyday language/s of the people (Amharic is the official language, but there are 80+ in the country). 
Hailu objects to what he sees as their insistence on making their teachings complex and inaccessible to the people; as a result, he prefers to do his own readings of his Amharic bible, avoiding the priests’ sermons altogether. He is as dangerous to the priests’ tenacious and jealous grip on Christian “truth” as Wycliffe or Luther ever were.

Hailu’s a graduate from Addis Ababa University (in Social Anthropology), and due to start his five-year law degree in a few weeks’ time. His ambition is to use his law degree to work for justice for the poor.

And so it was in the care of this delightfully knowledgeable, critical and socially conscious young man (he’s amazingly regal looking too. I could see features of his face reflected in the 800-year-old – verified by carbon dating – artworks in the churches) that Rehana and I were introduced to Lalibela’s marvels.

The sketch I gathered from Hailu about Lalibela’s story is this. Born in early 11^th century, his brother ruled the area, then called Roha. The king dreamt that Lalibela, not his son, would lay claim to the crown after his death. Lalibela was persecuted and fled (why does this sound so damn familiar?!?).
His exiled wanderings took him to Jerusalem, and it was there that he was poisoned (apparently by henchmen of his persistent brother). For three days Lalibela was in a coma, and it was then that he had his divine vision: he must build a replica of Jerusalem in his birthplace, Roha.

Somehow or other his brother’s worst fears were eventually realised and Lalibela did return to become king. And so his life became devoted to conjuring in the rock of his home town the vision he had while in a coma in Jerusalem – to recreate that Holy City here in the volcanic mountains of Ethiopia.

Some say it was by his hand and with the help of angels alone that all the buildings were created in 23 years. Others say it took more than 150 years, and the hands that chiselled great masses of rock away to create the buildings were very human (and perhaps included both Syrian and Indian master-builders – Arabic iconography and swastikas are very much in evidence).
Still others say that, some of the structures at least, are not attributable to Lalibela’s handiwork at all – that they are older, perhaps temples to pagan deities.

Tunnels link the churches hewn into the rock

And were all these stone-hewn buildings actually meant as churches at all? At least six of them are so carefully designed around Christian symbolism - the division of space inside into threes, cross-shaped windows (whether the crosses are Maltese, Axumite or in Lalibela’s own design), and a whole lot of other evidence I can’t quite recall. There’s no arguing that St George’s church, for example, was intended to be every bit a church.

But the four buildings cut from a great hunk of rock on the southern side of the cluster can be differently interpreted. Was the one with a seeming moat around it Lalibela’s palace? Was the dingy structure with its pokey dark windows – linked by a quite terrifyingly long and pitch-dark tunnel to the other buildings – a prison, rather than a metaphorical “passage to Hell”, as the priests would have it?
Was the building, now mostly collapsed, that would have been the biggest of them all, in fact a former court of law/justice? Those holes cut through the inside pillars – were they meant for threading through the chains joined to the prisoner’s shackles, or simply as holders for torches, as the priests say?
Perhaps they’ve been used for both over the many hundreds of years they’ve been around.

A lesson in ancient technology

Whether by the hand of a king and his helpful angels, or by the many hands of mere mortals, the engineering and architectural wizardry of all these places is gobsmacking.
Weak Rehana may have felt, but entirely inspired she was too. On the first two mornings we looked at the churches with Hailu from 10 until 12.30 – that was enough for Rehana. Day three turned out more than enough for her when we lingered an hour longer than we had on the two previous days.  She opened the door and vomited her guts out out onto the cobble-stone road just a minute after climbing inside the car.
The road was busy with many white-cloth draped people. Most ignored her gagging form – there was little but water and bile for her to spew. Only one boy was gawking and callous enough to nag the vomiting Rehana and me for money (he eventually moved off, probably having learnt a good handful of new swear words).
One white-clothed woman arrived with concern all over her age-creased face and a tin can full of water. She poured it over Rehana’s head where it stuck out from BRC’s open door. “Amasigenello, ma, thank you, ma”, Rehana repeatedly gasped as the kind woman rubbed and patted the cold water from the old can into her hair.

Water dripping down her face and soaking into the passenger seat, bile her taste and perfume, Rehana made it in a pale-yellow way back to Panorama View Hotel, and soon to sleep between the clean, white Ethiopian-cotton sheets.

We lingered for this church, it was worth the vomit

Tomorrow we move on. Lalibela has been more than kind to us – inspirational too. It’s vindicated the risks we took driving further north from Dessie, Rehana just out of her terrible sick bed, and us driving without Mike and Carol to back us up.
But we’ve had to revise our ambitions of going north to Axum – it’s too far and too hard, with too little time left for us in Ethiopia, for us to attempt. Next time, we’re telling ourselves. Instead we’ll go west to what’s described as “the Camelot of Africa” – Gonder.
We also won’t be trekking in the Simien mountains north from there, but it’s close enough for us to consider a day trip and a picnic.

Rehana is edging towards betterness, day by slow day. For sure travelling is physically and mentally demanding at the best of times, so we’re building all our plans around ensuring Rehana has the breaks for the rest she so badly needs. Also, as sole Nurse and Driver I need to realistically pace myself too – won’t do to have an exhausted and grumpy fuck after an epic toil, will it now? Tomorrow’s journey towards Gonder, for example, we’re breaking in two: about three hours to Debra Tabot, then we’ll stop and travel the remaining four hours to Gonder the next day. Somewhere in those parts soonish we should reunite with Mike and Carol, who’ve been up to Axum in the meantime.

Or so go our plans, anyway. Let’s hope reality pans out in tandem.