Ethiopia –
Primed for
Change
6
In October 1984, a BBC correspondent and cameraman
captured dramatic footage of people living in the Wollayta
feeding center in southern Ethiopia. For the first time,
viewers saw just how fiercely famine had affected this
enigmatic nation in East Africa. People around the world
were exposed to images of hunger and death like never before.
In her book Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease,
Famine, War, and Death, Susan Moeller describes the
footage this way:
Wizened men trudge, leaning on sticks for support.
A skeletal multitude sits in the sand. Burlap wrapped
corpses lie in rows. A mother and the baby she bore
two months ago are shrouded together. Another mother
cradles her dead child; a second baby lies dying in her
lap. A 3-year-old, last of a mother’s children, dies.
Dies on camera.
The world was moved. Donations to non-governmental
organizations poured in. Other news agencies followed the
BBC’s lead and finally dispatched their own reporters and
camera crews, after years of warnings from various sources
that the famine situation in the Horn of Africa was dire.
Singer and songwriter Bob Geldof and U2’s Bono and many
others performed at Live Aid, raising millions of dollars
toward relief efforts.
Unfortunately, famine plagued Ethiopia long before Live
Aid and has remained part of the landscape intermittently
ever since. In 2011, the Horn of Africa experienced its worst
drought in 60 years, according to the United Nations, and the
entire region has been affected. Mid-year, officials said that
about 700,000 people in Ethiopia were in need of emergency
food aid. Some 100,000 refugees have poured over Ethiopia’s
eastern border from Somalia, fleeing instability and hunger.
Author: Mark Kramer
These days, you can travel to most any major city in the
United States and find an Ethiopian restaurant wafting the
aroma of berbere spices and injera, fermented flatbread. And
within these restaurants you’ll find Ethiopia’s cultural and
economic vanguard touting their country’s achievements:
Ethiopia was the only nation on the continent not colonized
during the “scramble for Africa”; Ethiopia produces some of
the world’s greatest long-distance runners; Ethiopian coffees
rank among the very best of brews; human civilization, some
say, actually began in this crossroads to continents.
Still, there’s no hiding the sad facts. A country that
maintains one of the largest armies on the continent also
has an estimated five million orphans (which has fed an
increase in international adoptions). The majority of people
in Addis Ababa, the capital, live in slums and lack access to
safe drinking water. One in four Ethiopians lives on less
than one dollar a day.
The state of Ethiopia is so much more complex than those
stereotypical famine icons can convey, and yet the need for
economic justice and holistic renewal remains.
Mark Kramer is author of Dispossesses: Life In Our World’s Urban Slums and
a freelance writer. Mark is based in Pittsburgh, PA, where he lives with his family,
teaches creative writing, and helps manage a community center. He is a long time
supporter and has championed the work of LIA for many years.
So for many, those infamous images of famine – or “famine
icons,” as Susan Moeller calls them – typify and define the
country of Ethiopia, and even the entire continent of Africa.
But by no means is Ethiopia some unchanging monolith
of starvation and suffering. Yes, Ethiopia remains one of
the poorest nations on earth, but famine icons obscure the
complexities of this poverty, not to mention the grandeur of
this nation’s history, ethnic diversity and culture.
A communist nation during the last 15 years of the Cold
War, Ethiopia’s famines have resulted as much from
misguided land management and corrupt officials as a lack of
rain. Meanwhile, ongoing conflicts between the government
and various rebel forces, generally defined by ethnicity in
this nation comprised of more than 80 people groups, create
further instability. Journalists reporting on these clashes have
been detained by the national government for “encouraging”
or providing “moral support” to these “terrorist groups.”
And the integrity of recent elections has been contested.
Economically, Ethiopia recently established its own
commodity exchange to facilitate and make transparent
trade in such crops as coffee, corn, and sesame. A joint
private-government venture, the exchange is viewed as a
pioneering model for other African nations looking to develop
effective trade within agricultural sectors. Growing exports
include leather, livestock, and hydropower, as Ethiopia is
currently building several massive dams to harness the power
of a mountainous landscape replete with rivers and water
basins, including most of the Nile River’s watershed. Still,
Ethiopia remains dependent upon foreign aid, receiving a full
$3.3 billion from other nations in 2008. At the local level,
this dependency is manifested in a lack of job opportunities
and training. And the aid that does reach villages and
households often comes, some contest, at the cost of loyalty
to a repressive regime under prime minister Meles Zenawi.
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