1This paper presents some elements towards an attempt to understand Ethiopia using horses as a vehicle of understanding. Ethiopia is experiencing rapid change at an everincreasing speed, with globalization, modernization, and economic and population growth together with increased communications and an opening onto the world and the African continent of a long ‘remote’ land. We propose that the country’s long standing equine culture and the continued use of horses (and mules and donkeys) for transport, and the dissemination of horses along ancestral trade routes such as the ‘Wello Road’ linking the north-western region to the capital Addis Ababa, together with other routes, linking donkey, horse and mule producing areas to other regions in need of animal power, can be ways to penetrate and understand Ethiopian culture.

From ‘eternal Ethiopia’ to the irruption of modernity in rural areas

2Ethiopia had seemingly changed little over the centuries, with a feudal society based on agriculture and caravan taxation. Ethiopia’s unchanged nature has been a common trope at least since Gibbon (1788) – ‘Aethiopia slept for a thousand years…’ – and has been perhaps overused. Nevertheless, in such a country the irruption of modernity in all of its forms is provoking change that sometimes seems to happen too quickly to even be recorded. In ‘traditional’ markets, you can observe side by side the Isuzu trucks loading grain for the city and cattle for the booming export market, and mules and horses covered in silver harnesses and red pompoms which are tied up outside mud hut bars where their riders are drinking their gains. Yesterday – a couple of years ago, that is to say eons ago – they drank home brewed ale and mead, today they guzzle bottled beer, watching satellite TV programs from the Gulf and pause to answer their mobile phones. The mobile phone that earlier enabled them to know the town price of the grain they were selling.

3The Ethiopian space is experiencing a complete social and economic upheaval, and has changed more in twenty years than in twenty centuries – perhaps Gibbon had got something right. Life styles, ways of transport and the understanding of a country long divided by difficult or impossible travel during long periods of the year, the aspirations and desires of the country’s inhabitants: no tradition is left unturned by modernity’s restless foray into Ethiopia. The rapidity of the change is so tremendous that it can be seen with a ‘naked eye’, as if a fast forward film was being played out in front of us. Eternal Ethiopia – legendary Ethiopia – that was believed to be unchangeable and classical, is no more, and a new country and people are being born. The country of the queen of Sheba with highways, tenement housing allotments in all regional capitals and hydroelectric dams to produce surpluses to sell to neighbouring countries. A country that sometimes seems to be one huge building site. A ‘Chinese’ development model, very far indeed from the images – now also legendary – of the biblical-like famines of the 1970s and 1980s.

4And then there is the other Ethiopia of course, the one where people continue to live ‘as before,’ like their forebears. This is a deeply rural world – in a country where agriculture still keeps 80 % of the workforce busy – in which people’s lives continue to be rhymed by seasons and religious festivals, and that one could believe to be immutable. But in reality there is only one country of course, and this rural world is changing too: chemical fertilizers distributed by peasant associations, schools and health centres that are built including in the most remote areas. If the oxen continue to plough a furrow that goes all the way back to the civilization of Axum, it would be foolish to believe that the man who cracks the whips is not different, if only in the new aspirations born from the wave of modernization engulfing the table top mountain. In the flotsam and jetsam of this globalizing tsunami, there are mobile phone masts and television networks and fast changing mores.

5Donald Levine’s Wax and Gold, published more than fifty years ago (Levine 1965), is a study of a popular culture in Menz, and posited that the wax and gold form of speech in which people say one thing and mean another (from the lost wax technique of moulding jewellery, in which the wax form is melted away to reveal the golden jewel underneath), was a central and revealing figure not just of speech but underpinned the inner working of society at large. He used the wax and gold trope to try to understand what he came to see as an inherently conservative society which valued form over content, secrecy over openness and was fussy and obsessed with protocol, rather than with essence. Indeed, Levine went on to say that Ethiopian ‘culture’ – or at the least, the Ethiopian culture he had chosen to study and took to represent the whole – was by its very nature antithetical to modernity, with its stress on openness, a level playing field and adaptability and constant change. Perhaps this was true back in the 1960s, and part wishful thinking on the part of Levine, a self-professed ethiophile, a group for whom Eternal Ethiopia is often a gabi clad, traditionalist gripping the handle of a plough for eternity. Nevertheless, Levine’s cultural analysis was, and still is, relevant, even in today’s Ethiopia with its mobile masts and fast roads.

6A relevant aside here would be the story of starting a horse riding enterprise in Ethiopia, the bureaucratic struggles inherent to this process and the daily vexations of working with people who indeed may display an immoderate use of the famed wax and gold figure of speech – even for the most simple operations and subjects. Form is paramount and forms will indeed be filled, for every purpose possible and imaginable – I remember once having to fill in a form in order to remove horse manure from my own yard, and an operation which was straightforward and simple ended up requiring five times the time and energy it should have done. And so it sometimes seems that working in Ethiopia amounts to cleaning the famed Augean Stables…

Prestige, trade and farming: the plural equine legacies in Ethiopian history

7Ethiopia has a million and a half horses and mules. From time immemorial, horses – and mules – have been both prestige and power symbols, as well as one of the main actors in the conquests, wars and comings and goings inside the Ethiopian theatre. One cannot imagine an Ethiopian culture, civilization, without equines. Marco Polo evokes the famed horsemen of the king of Ethiopia, and Prester John’s missive to the Pope in the twelfth century tells of the Prester’s 100 000 strong cavalry, ready to storm Jerusalem and give the Turk a lesson (Ramos 2006)… Alvares in the sixteenth century relates that the horses of Ethiopia are innumerable (Alvares 1540) and later on, the Scott James Bruce will mention that the ‘black’ cavalrymen of Gondar are the best read men in the realm (Bruce 1790)… Nevertheless, this equestrian culture is an unknown side of the country, even and more so today, when just two generations ago, a ruling dynasty and an aristocracy that saw itself as having held the reins of power by god granted fiat for millennia was rudely taken down from its high horse and deposed.

8The horse, long a preserve of the military and of the aristocracy and of tantamount importance in a country of little roads and frequent uprisings – until well into the second half of the twentieth century – suddenly becomes an object of backwardness. Motor worthy roads, become the development mantra and the economic – and symbolic – worth of equines starts a long decline. If Theodoros, Yohannes, Menelik, and even Haile Selassie, all have horse names, to sing their praises, one cannot imagine except as a facetious joke to give Mengistu Haile Mariam or Meles Zenawi a horse name. The imperial stables, once full of Lipizzaner and Arab stallions are now so ill-kept one could see sabotage rather than animal husbandry, and horses now acquire the pungent smell of the country bumpkins who ride them. The horse, and even more so the mule and the donkey have now been relegated in the imagination of the country to the very lowest rung of prestige.

9However, if new ribbons of asphalt now festoon the land, and if monumental dams are being erected on all rivers, it nevertheless remains that huge swathes of the population go on foot, on horseback, by mule, and if they use chemical fertilizers to increase the production of their fields, the bags will have made it from the brand new Isuzu parked at the local market to the field on the back of their animals.

10And it is these markets and the trade routes that link them, that interest me. To buy horses for my stables, I had to visit these markets of the Gimbichu, Guddu, Jidda or Kottu towns in Northern Shewa. I would buy horses and ride them back over several days, following the routes that link the markets to other regions that don’t produce equines. I met there horse traders, mobile traders that take these mounts of Shewa over several hundred kilometres, to the west, to the north, and this on foot, or perched precariously on their wooden saddles. They are following trade routes that I imagine to be well-established routes, of trade, transhumance and conquest.

11This equestrian culture has been very strong in Ethiopia, and this until very recently. There are poems dedicated to horses, legends and stories, and, as noted earlier, men of valour were known under the name of their best horse – Aba Tatek for example for Emperor Theodoros, Aba Dagna for Menelik (Pankhurst 1989). D’Abbadie – the famous French explorer of the nineteenth century – speaks of horses only fed from the hand of their master, ‘as in Hejjaz,’ and Theodoros having rhetorically asked: “where is the horse’s country found?” goes on to give the answer: “in the eye of his master!” that is to say loved, protected and esteemed (d’Abbadie 1868). And in the widespread zar possession cult, let us not forget that the possessed is said to be the horses of the demon that then rides them (Lewis 1984).

12In the time of Emperor Haile Selassie, the imperial stables are full of beautiful mounts, the princely gifts to the negus from the world’s rulers. The stable master is an Armenian captain and the parades are sumptuous. The Emperor holds the country on a tight rein and the aristocratic and feudal system, with its regional courts, and its balabat land owners live in simple luxury: a plethora of foot servants, while the lord rides high on his horse, or better still, as in the first propaganda pictures of the twentieth century, on the back of a richly decked mule – the first pictures of Haile Selassie on a horse appear a decade later. They show him on a white horse and are a piece of propaganda aimed at westerners and show that ‘globalization’ started a long time ago. Where an European would have seen a conquering monarch, one of Levine’s peasants from Menz would have exclaimed: “Where is the man’s mule?!”.

13The 1974 Revolution takes the emperor down from his pedestal and off his high horse, and with him the aristocracy. A bizarre ‘Marxist’ program is put in the driving seat, progress is the order of the day and the horse, the mule and the humble donkey become contradictory symbols: they represent both the backward aristocracy and the bumpkin peasant. Not a good time for equines – not a good time for people either, in an animal farm kind of communist revolution. A rich equestrian tradition is just about lost in one generation, and horse breeding – now deprived of its aristocratic patrons – becomes a poor man’s pursuit. Breeding programs are abandoned, the horses of the imperial stables allowed to go to seed. The copper and aluminium plated tack of yesteryear no longer shine and martial equestrian games are seen at best as useless pastimes at worst as counter revolutionary activities. This happens at a time of rapid population growth and the extension of cultivated areas over grasslands and an increase in motor transport that renders going to town cheaper and easier. In a couple of generations, a millennia-old equestrian tradition is nearly lost.

Exploring the horse market networks from Shewa to Wello

14I want to attempt to rediscover this rich equestrian past, by collecting testimonials from people who experienced the pre-revolutionary times and by exploring and following the routes that link the horse, mule and donkey markets to each other and to other regions. These routes are of special interest as they must be characterized by traditions and traditional bylaws to ensure their functioning. There must be pasturing rights, ‘hostels’ for the drovers, and ‘stables’ for the animals as they traverse the high plateau for sometimes several weeks. What are the traditions still present here? And for how long – as motor roads expand at lightning speed, Isuzus take over, and young men no longer desire to run along for ten hours a day to ferry donkeys and mules from one end of the country to the other?

15In June 2012 I took a trip on horseback, from Ankober (120 kilometres north-east of Addis Ababa) to Sululta (just behind Addis Ababa and Entoto). The trip then continued from Sululta to the forest of Menegesha Suba, 40 kilometres to the west of the capital, on the flanks of Mount Wuchacha. This trip had two objectives in mind: the first was to establish a highland equine trekking route between the eastern escarpment forest of Wof Washa near Ankober and the mountain forest of Suba. Not only are these two forests some of the only indigenous mountain forests left standing in central Ethiopia, but they are also linked by a strong indigenous story of conservation as the early fifteenth century emperor Zara Yacob is said to have not only forbidden the further clearing of the forest of Suba, but also to have brought seedlings to restore it from the forest of Wof Washa in Ankober. The new equestrian trekking route, baptized of course the Zara Yacob trail traverses the highlands north of Addis Ababa, running west from Debre Berhan into the grasslands found between the Entoto range and the river gorge of the Jemma River. These grasslands were the second objective of the June exploratory trip. The area forms a vast triangle with a base of some 100 kilometres running along the Jemma gorge, from Debre Libanos to Debre Berhan, and the point found some 70 kilometres to the south, just behind Addis Ababa.

16There are only two roads in this vast area – and a few mobile phone masts! – and not only is the horse one the main ways of locomotion – the main form of transport rests of course, like in most of Ethiopia, in walking –, this has also long been a main centre for horse, donkey and mule breeding and possesses many markets. Sirti (on Thursdays), Rob (on Wednesdays as its name in indicates), Arb (on a Saturday unlike what its name indicates as “Arb” means “Friday”), and just outside of the boundaries of our triangle, Gimbichu, Kottu, and further afield, Guddu. All of these markets are ‘horse’ markets, and do a brisk trade in equines, cattle, and they all also have a market place for all sorts of commodities, from the teff cereal required to make injera to mobile phone batteries. People sell donkeys, drink mead and bottled beer, watch satellite TV, recharge their phones and have their pictures taken by itinerant photographers. There is life here, and an exchange of ideas is fermenting like never before in ‘eternal Ethiopia.’ One can remember and contrast this ferment and this colour with the drab and bleached pictures from Levine’s Wax and Gold of markets in Menz in the 60s, where everyone is dressed in gray and everyone sits in front of a colourless and tiny heap of surplus they are selling. It is as if, in today’s Ethiopia, colour photography had finally made it to market.

17As I progressed toward the south from the Jemma gorge between these market villages, asking my way as I went, peasants would wave me to the south. They kept saying: “Just keep to the Wello Road and you’ll be fine”, or “The Wello Road lies behind that hill, follow it”. Although I had no time to stop here to enquire further as the rains were coming, and we had to make it to Addis Ababa, their talk greatly excited me as it seemed to confirm the hypothesis I had made of a constellation of trade routes linking the country’s different regions to one another. And behind the hill, indeed a ‘traditional’ route lay, making its way straight through the fields and sometimes delimitated by rocks, sometimes not, it ran, the farmers and traders told me, all the way from the cattle producing areas of the north eastern region of Wello, to the markets of Addis Ababa. From here, near Addis Ababa, they would walk mules, donkeys and horses north. How long did it take? Weeks, they opined vaguely. Where did it run? Yonder, and behind that hill they muttered…

Conclusion

18The theme of horses and the equine markets of northern Shewa, and the routes that link them to each other and to outlying regions of the country, could well be a vehicle for a better understanding of the change that Ethiopia has experienced and continues to experience, in the last forty years, from a country with millennia-old ‘traditions’ into something else than no one yet seems to quite understand. If modernity were a zar, we would say that it was riding the country at a quick gallop towards a fast receding and as yet undefined new horizon.

19D’Abbadie, A., 1868, L’Abyssinie et le Roi Théodore, Paris, Ch. Douniol.

20Alvares, F., 1540, Ilo Preste Joam das Indias. Verdadeira informaçam das terras do Preste Joam, London, The British Museum Press-Marks.

21Bruce, J. S., 1790, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile in the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772 and 1773, Edinburgh, G.G.J. and J. Roberson.

22Gibbon, E., 1788, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 4, online book (http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/gibbon/04/daf04042.htm, consulted in July 2013).

23Levine, D., 1965, Wax and Gold: Tradition and Innovation in Ethiopian Culture, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.

24Lewis, H. S., 1984, “Spirit Possession in Ethiopia”, PICES 7: 419-427.

25Pankhurst, R., 1989, “The Early History of Ethiopian Horse-Names”, Païdeuma, 35:197-206.

26Ramos, M. J., 2006, Essay in Christian Mythology. The Metamorphosis of Prester John, Lanham, Boulder, New York, Toronto, Oxford, University Press of America.