By Emily Raboteau
I stepped off the bus from the capital at noon, or six o’clock in Ethiopia where the hours are counted from dawn, and hailed a bajaj in the driving rain. I was in Shashemene, Promised Land of the Rastafari, 150 miles south of Addis Ababa’s ring of hills, scrim of car exhaust, thickets of eucalyptus trees, mass of Orthodox churches, and luxury hotels towering over tin-shack slums. Though Addis Ababa was hardly romantic, Shashemene was far less so.
“It’s a truck stop,” assessed Fekadu, the man who sat next to me on the long bus ride along the Cairo–Cape Town Highway. He meant it was a grubby place, a nothing place, a place between other places. Shashemene was known, he explained, for its leprosarium, its poverty, and its draught. Fekadu was perplexed that I should want to travel there rather than the hot springs of Wondo Genet or Lake Ziway, famed for its birdlife. “Where is your husband?” he asked, genuinely concerned. “Why does he let you travel alone?”
“I’m not married,” I answered, a little too forcefully. Who was this guy to tell me I couldn’t ride the dirt-cheap public bus to Zion? I told him I didn’t need my boyfriend’s permission to travel.
“Then surely he must not know how many thieves from Jamaica are in Shashemene,” Fekadu chided. “What are you going there to study? Marijuana? Ha!”
I didn’t laugh. I was growing more cheerless the closer we drew to my destination. July in Ethiopia was surprisingly cold and damp and I hadn’t packed for such weather. Now my sinuses were swelling, my throat felt sore, and I had a slight cough. Either out of pity, or to make up for being a little judgmental, Fekadu shared his breakfast of injera and wat. We lurched along the rain-slicked highway past fields of teff, barley, wheat, and corn, and Dutchowned plantations growing long-stemmed roses for the flower auctions of Europe. Along the way I learned he was a cameraman for Addis TV, on his way to record footage for a story about the adverse effects of the Dutch fertilizers upon the land and the lungs of the Ethiopian workers employed in the greenhouses. The land was sick, Fekadu said, and so were the people.
“Have you ever been assigned to film a story about the Rastas?” I asked him.
“They have a stupid religion,” he scoffed. “When your deity is not happy with deification, you’ve got problems.” He said he was unaware of anything positive the Rasta community had done for Shashemene, just as the bajaj driver whom I flagged to deliver me into its heart had never heard of my hotel, the Zion Train Lodge.
When I got off the bus I had to disagree with Fekadu. Shashemene was more than a truck stop. It was a bustling market town of one hundred thousand people, a good number of whom were hustling along the crowded main street where donkeys mixed with traffic, impervious to the rain shower. The driver zipped me around in his blue covered motorcycle dodging raindrops, trucks, and market women burdened with loads of firewood. There were restaurants, a post office, and an Internet café. These businesses looked sad through the mask of the rain, but so did everything.
Shashemene was just a trading post at the time of its foundation and it remains a hardscrabble, slapdash place. The town sits at a crossroads in the Rift Valley along an old trade route where spices, coffee, ivory, gold, and slaves were once carried. A railway ran along this route during the Menelik II era, between Addis Ababa and Djibouti on the Red Sea coast. Later, during the Italian occupation from 1935 to 1941, Shashemene was used as a garrison.
“Zion, Zion?” my driver asked the locals with increasing frustration.
As we crossed a bridge spanning a dirty river, I began to wonder if there was such a place, if I’d imagined making a reservation, or if the hotel had simply shut down. The good people of Shashemene were shooing us out of town toward another place called Jamaica. That much, I understood. We followed their directions north along the main road for fifteen minutes and finally found the sign for the hotel propped on a pole the height of a gallows. The driver dumped me alongside it with my luggage and a look of condolence. The rain gave no sign of quitting any time soon and, like a putz, I’d left my umbrella next to Fekadu on the bus.
I looked up. Midday, and it felt like twilight. Bats would have fit the scene. The Zion Train Lodge’s sign was in three languages—English, Amharic, and Orominya, for we were in Oromia Province. I looked down. The hotel was not beneath it. Nor was this sign in Shashemene proper but on its outskirts next to a gas station in the neighborhood of Melka Udo, which was, inarguably, a truck stop. The hotel was nowhere in sight. It was down a narrow road lined by huts made of wattle and daub the color of dung. In front of the huts half-starved dogs with skin diseases and distended nipples mixed with angel-
faced children who were dressed in rags and had snot coming out of their noses. They seemed unbothered by the rain. Not one of them had on shoes.
“Farengi, farengi! Money!” they shouted with glee. They wore Coptic crosses on black strings around their necks to protect them from bad spirits and the evil eye, which, it is believed, has the power to transform people into hyenas in the night. Some of them pantomimed at their stomachs to indicate hunger. Some of them, practically babies themselves, balanced babies on their hips. Some of them stopped playing soccer with a battered moldy calabash to approach me.
I knew the rule not to give directly to begging children but to the organizations put in place to serve them. I knew that one such local organization, the Jamaican Rastafarian Development Community (JRDC), sought philanthropic donations for its kindergarten and elementary school, but I didn’t know yet whether that school served any of these children, who were habesha, native Ethiopians. I swiftly calculated how much money I had on me and how I might divide it among so many.
There was no way. There were fifteen of them, then twenty, then forty. They came pouring out of the huts to gaze at me, the farengi, the foreigner, looking forlorn with my wet hair plastered down my back. A group of girls giggled at me and I knew I would have giggled at the sight of me too; that it was not malicious but rather inquisitive laughter. Their laughter was infectious, and laughing with them, I curtsied to make them laugh louder. If I’d known how to juggle, I would have. Whether or not I looked like a white woman didn’t matter to me. I forgot, momentarily, that I felt sick. I was playing a goofy game with a bunch of kids, and laughing with them in the rain made me feel good.
Aside from the Antarctic peninsula, this was the most foreign land I’d ever traveled. I wasn’t from here and I couldn’t pretend to be one of its people any more than I could pretend to be an Adélie penguin. This obvious discovery didn’t make me sad like I’d felt, to varying degrees, in Jerusalem and Kingston. How could I feel sad about my feelings of homelessness in the joyful asmari bets of Addis Ababa, the ancient stellae fields of Axum, the cryptic churches of Lalibela, or in the presence of these children? They crept closer, daring each other to see who might come nearest, and I loved them for their daring. Finally, the boldest boy grabbed my suitcase and I followed him, thankful that he hadn’t run off with my belongings and trusting that he knew the way.
My escort led me down the muddy road for at least a quarter mile, my suitcase bumping against his skinny legs with every step. He had a shaved head and looked to be eleven or twelve, though he might have been fourteen and malnourished. “Are you here for His Majesty’s birthday?” the boy asked in halting English. He must have been used to Rasta tourists and settlers who revered Haile Selassie as the living god. “Yes,” I said, though more than that I was there to witness how the Rastas reconciled their reverence for the emperor with the dark matter of his dictatorship.
That Friday, the twenty-third of July, Haile Selassie would have turned 118 years old if he had gone on living. The Rastas do not believe he died. Because he is their Messiah, the day of his birth is a high holiday, like Christmas. And they believe that, like Christ, he will come again. They maintain that Haile Selassie disappeared one day in 1975 when the Derg announced his death.
Many Rastas, including Bob Marley’s widow, Rita Marley, were present a quarter century later at the ceremony in Addis Ababa where Haile Selassie’s bones were reburied in a state funeral. Citing the fact that the coffin was too large for the King of Kings, who barely cleared five feet, the Rastas refused to accept the corpse as his. Officials claimed the remains were contained in a smaller box within the oversized coffin, but the Rastas insist the bones were too long to belong to the emperor, Elect of God, Lord of Lords, Defender of the Faith—man of many titles.
“Bones lie,” they said.
I followed the boy past the carcass of a donkey, its stomach being devoured by birds of prey. The donkey’s innards were marbled with fat; its intestines were stretched in the beaks of the birds. We turned left at a desolate cornfield and then right onto a narrower, muddier pathway. Somewhere along that track, the mud sucked off one of my shoes. It was then I feared I’d made a mistake in coming to Shashemene.
This was the Promised Land the Rastas dreamed of? The relentless rain combined with the obvious poverty made this Zion appear despairing. Of all the remote places I’d ever been, it reminded me most of Cooter, Missouri. I stopped in Cooter once in my college days on a road trip to New Orleans, drawn off the interstate on a whim by the name on the side of the town’s rusty water tower. A black boy, not much older than this one, spotted my
Jersey license plates and begged me to bring him along so that he could have a crack at something other than a backbreaking sharecropper’s life. Not even Cooter was as dispiriting as this.
Finally we came to a dead end and stopped before a tall wooden gate. Its doors were painted with twin guardian angels wielding swords. Soaking wet and shivering in the cold with mud up to my ankles, I looked at the boy for
a clue. “Zion,” he announced, smiling brightly, dropping my suitcase in a puddle, scratching a scab on his scalp, and holding out his hand for a tip. I gladly paid him this, along with the granola bar in my sweatshirt pocket and a hug that surely benefited me more than it did him. Then I rang the bell and the gates opened into what I can only describe as Swiss Family Robinson meets the circus.
The Zion Train Lodge was an explosion of color. Everything that could be painted had been painted red, green, and gold—the colors of the Ethiopian flag. Three round Sidamo-style guesthouses with bamboo walls and pointy
grass roofs sprouted like mushrooms amid jacarandas, tiki torches, hot-pink hibiscus blossoms, and banana trees strung with hammocks made of hemp. Fat orange marigolds surrounded a vegetable garden bursting with radishes, tomatoes, and squash. To the right a small stable sheltered two donkeys, two goats, a brown horse, and a large round mound of hay. To the left, a guard snored in a watchtower that looked more like a tree house. In the center of the property, a caramel-colored boy with blondish dreadlocks practiced driving a carriage, drawn by a white horse, in circles, jingling the bells of the harness and shouting commands in French like a little lord. The canopy of the carriage was brightly painted with the likeness of Haile Selassie and Empress Menen in their ornate gold crowns and embroidered robes. There they were again decked out in their imperial regalia on the
concrete water tank at the back of the property next to a chicken coop. The tank fueled an outdoor shower near a pair of red, green, and gold doghouses painted with the words ROOTS and CULTURE. I assumed these were the names of the two yellow dogs chasing after the boy in the carriage. Compared to the feral canines on the other side of the gate, these two were fat and happy. It occurred to me that, like Noah’s ark, there were two of every animal on the property of the Zion Train Lodge. So where was the captain of this ship? I picked my way through the flora to the main house and found the proprietors inside.
Ras Alex, from the island of Guadeloupe, was a rail-thin black man with dreadlocks so long they brushed the floor. Sister Sandrine, his French wife, was a composed woman with porcelain skin, close-set blue eyes, and no
eyebrows. In her white head-wrap she reminded me of Vermeer’s subject in Girl with a Pearl Earring, aged twenty years. Their English was far better than my French. I came to understand from Sister Sandrine that several other guests would be arriving from France that evening for the holiday weekend, and from Ras Alex that the four-year-old hotel was the fulfillment of his dream to reach the Promised Land.
“Get on board the Zion train,” he said as he welcomed me, pulling the chord of an imaginary steam whistle and tooting twice.
I told Ras Alex I thought it was a good catchphrase for his business and he nodded in appreciation. There were three other families in Shashemene from the francophone Caribbean, he counted, only fifteen people in total. They were a small minority in the Rasta community, which was itself a small minority, totaling only about two hundred permanent settlers (double that if you count the impermanent ones and triple that if you count the visitors who swooped in for high holidays such as this). He hoped more settlers would repatriate from Guadeloupe, Martinique, and St. Barths in time so that he could be more easily understood. Today he was joyful that his older sister’s family would be among the other guests arriving. They lived in Paris but were building a house on the property next to the Zion Train Lodge. So whatever the state of the Rastafarian settlement at large, Ras Alex’s homestead was steadily growing.
Shashemene was not only a home for blacks, he assured me, gesturing to his white wife. According to the couple’s reasoning, Ethiopia was the cradle of humankind and therefore the shared ancestral home of every race. All of us descended from this Eden. Ras Alex wondered if I had visited the basement of Addis Ababa’s National Museum to pay my regards to the hominid Lucy, whose bones were three million years old. I had. And was I a Rasta? I admitted I was not. Then what, he asked me, was I doing in Shashemene?
“I want to know if this is the home you dreamed it would be,” I explained. How were the Rastas who settled here accepted by Ethiopians and to what extent had they integrated into larger society? What impact did an actual, physical repatriation have on Rasta notions of Zion? Was Zion a state of mind? A physical reality? A combination of the two? Could the return to Zion, as one dream fulfilled, become an end in and of itself?
“Êtes-vous journaliste?” Ras Alex asked drily.
“No,” I hedged. I wasn’t a journalist. I didn’t know exactly how to describe my role.
Skeptical of my aims, Ras Alex showed me a newspaper clipping from the French Courrier International and a short Italian newsreel, both of which ridiculed the Rastas’ exodus, portraying them at best as outdated tribalists and at worst as clowns. Who in their right mind, these dispatches questioned, would emigrate to Ethiopia? Ras Alex said I was welcome here, but it would lie on my conscience how I chose to depict them. I understood
what he was trying to tell me. He thought of me as a reporter and, as such, an agent of Babylon.
“Je suis un chercheur qui écrit,” I attempted. That seemed about right.
I am a seeker who writes.