CONVERSATION
CONVERSATION
CONVERSATION
HUMAN TRACES:
ETHIOPIA
HUMAN TRACES:
ETHIOPIA
THE BALANCE OF FACTS
THE BALANCE OF FACTS
THE BALANCE OF FACTS
THE BALANCE OF FACTS
DESTINATIONS
DESTINATIONS
The Dreamtime, or the Dreaming, portrays the Aboriginal beliefs in spiritual existence. According to the tribes that first settled down in the continent, the Dreaming's roots date all the way back to the very begging of the creation of the world. The meaning and ideology of the term is generally not so well-understood by non-indigenous people as it is referred to as part of the culture of one of the early nations, which differs from modern perceptions.
The Spirits were the creators of everything. They made the land and the seas, the rocks and the plants, the sky and the earth. They were the higher power and the Australian Aborigines spent their lifetimes honoring this power, which guided their path and shaped their way of thinking. Not only creators of everything, which could be seen as well as felt, the Spirits also gave the Aborigines the Dreaming.
The time when everything started existing according to the initial Australians, was called the Dreaming. This is the foundation of the continent's culture. The origin of the Dreaming goes way back - 65 000 years back in time to be exact. The Ancestors of the nation shaped the land, forming some parts of it as sacred. The Aborigines were very careful and overprotective of those places, strongly believing in their significance.
The Australian Aborigines are known to have believed that the world didn't have any shape and was therefore empty. Darkness dominated, and life was simply asleep, but this changed when the creation began happening. After the Dreaming and the influence of the Spirits, objects began taking shapes and came to be. They created the four elements: water, earth, air and fire, as well as all the planets, the Sun and the Moon. The Dreaming therefore is a continuous process, which never ended. It is a small cosmos on its own, unifying the past, present and the future into one.
The Australian Aborigines' home riches so many vivid areas of the continent, including Fraser Island, Tasmania, Palm Island, Groote Eylandt and Mornington Island. The Aborigines had very strong believes in relation to the powers of the land, claiming that they never owned it - it rather owned them. The only reason they were able to call it their home is because they were looking after it and the land was taking care of the people in return.
Equally important to the Dreaming was the tribes' understandings of the disappearance of the Spirits. There came a time, when the creators of everything vanished from sight. Some of them were thought to have started living in sacred places, which is why the Aborigines perceived their homeland to be so sacred. The ancestors of today's Australians used to believe that the creators started living in rocks, in water holes and some went up to the sky to guide the people from above and keep them safe. Others transformed completely, taking the forms of the rain, the lightnings and the thunderstorms so they could be part of peoples' life.
Among the hundred's different Aboriginal languages, there isn't a word to describe 'time', because to them this simply doesn't exist. Dreaming and Dreamtime are used to replace it and summarize the ideologies of the Aborigines about everything they knew, everything they could see, feel and experience. This is why the Dreaming has such a vivid, and overwhelming meaning and has survived the obstacles of time. For the past couple thousand years, the Dreaming has built a rich cultural heritage that can identify a whole nation.
Read more about the Land, its connection to people and the way it has been perceived from different generations in the very first print issue of ORIGIN. The Land Issue covers varied topics, most of which remain related to cultural aspects of the land and its importance.
A lot of people travel to explore places and learn about them which is the message that ORIGIN wants to spread. With traveling, however, comes certain responsibilities that we should all be aware of. Elephants riding has become a popular way to explore locations by land. People have been doing this as part of their trips, mostly to places such as Thailand, Nepal, Cambodia and other parts of Asia. It is a common thing to see in certain places in Africa as well. We investigated the activity to explain why it is wrong and riding elephants should be banned everywhere.
Our first print issue studies culture and traveling represented through the land. We explored various location around the globe and learned what makes the land so valuable, which nations cherish it and how it helps us establish an identity. Traveling is important to us but traveling responsibly and making an impact is what we feel proud to stand behind. This is why riding elephants as a way of amusement should be reconsidered.
Let’s talk about the details. Elephants are very caring and extremely intelligent animals. It is a well-known fact that they never forget anything. When kept in captivity instead of spending their life in the wild, elephants die younger. Unlike in other species, this is common for the gentle giants and is often a result for stress.
Many African cultures respect elephants, believing they symbolize strength, loyalty and power. However, power can be a very tender concept. Elephant used as a tourism tool suffer from great pain daily. Elephants can be hurt very severely from the weight of carrying people and a trainer on their backs. The reason for this is the design of their spines. They have sharp protrusions, extending upwards from their spine instead of having round spinal disks. The protrusions and the tissue that serves to protect them can be harmed easily from weight pressure. Once a damage to their spine has been made, there is no going back and sometimes the harm can be irreversible. While this can’t be physically seen, the harm that the chairs can do to the elephants’ skin is. It is often the case that the chairs and the weight on their back can damage the animal’s skin and cause pain to their body. The chair, called Howdah, that gets attached to their backs, rubs on their skin and can cause blisters, which can sometimes get infected.
The training that elephants are required to go through when in captivity sometimes adopts a traditional Thai ‘phajaan’ or ‘crush’ technique. Explaining the technique would compare it to the animals’ spirits constantly and continuously being broken by the means of torture and social isolation. This is done in order to tame them. Elephants are wild animals, this is their nature as they are born in such conditions. Making them safe and obedient around people requires them to go through such training. As horrible as it sounds, in some places young elephants are taken away from their mothers to be abused with nails, bull hooks and bamboo sticks to make them obey rules, given by people. The animals often lack sleep and are starved to become submissive.
Actions from such nature are cruel and harmful as the technique is used to crash the animals’ spirit. Once wild and free, elephants become a source of tourism and entertainment. Nobody, who cared about sustainable tourism should ever ride an elephant.
In a sense, elephants have a human soul. They socialise and feel everything – pain, happiness, grief, sadness etc. They spend their life building families and finding friends. The largest land animals are a gift from nature and it is our responsibility to take special care of them and make sure they live according to their nature. Many animals, who are kept in captivity, are forced to live in isolation and carry heavy loads all day long, which is a wrong way to treat them. Their strength and power shouldn’t be abused but treated gently and celebrated by people. Elephants require minimal care to stay happy and healthy, which comes from giving them freedom to behave naturally and socialise. It is our responsibility to be culturally aware while traveling and make sure to spread awareness about the problem.
You can read the rest of the article as published in the LAND issue.
HUMAN TRACES:
ETHIOPIA
Trace the human origins in the country that serves as a symbol of African independence
Words: Aleksandra Georgieva
Photography: Roberto Nickson
04 April 2019
Home to the second-biggest nation on the African continent, Ethiopia has a unique cultural and human heritage. It served as a symbol of independence for the African nations during the colonial period. Is the oldest independent country in Africa and has never been colonised apart form a five-year occupation by Mussolini's Italy. The country served as a base for several international organisations and was a founder member of the United Nations. The Ethiopia Orthodox Church was one of the oldest Christian denominations.
Ethiopia has suffered many human and cultural threats from drought to civil conflicts. Yet, the country's 2018 Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, aimed for political liberalisation and launched a campaign that put an end to the war conflict with Ethiopia's bordering country Eritrea.
The population of the African country outnumbers 102 million people. With its largest city and capital Addis Ababa, the country covers more than a million square kilometres (420,000 sq mi) of land. It is believed to be the region that people first left to seek the unknown land of the Middle East and the regions beyond. Evidence for some of the oldest skeletal archaeological findings of an anatomically modern human were from Ethiopia. For the majority of its history the country was a monarchy, dating all the way back to second millennium BC. Linguists conclude that during the Neolithic era the first Afroasiatic-speaking populations settled in the region.
During the first centuries AD, the civilisation in the Ethiopian region was unified under the Kingdom of Aksum, followed by the Ethiopian Empire. The country was among the two, which preserved their sovereignty from the long-lasted European colonial power in the late 19th century. Until 1941 the country was called Italian Ethiopia, as it was occupied by Italy five years earlier. However, in the 20th century Ethiopia was the first independent member, from Africa, to join the UN and the League of Nations.
Ethiopia is considered the land of one of the earliest emerged anatomically modern humans. Evidence for extinct subspecies of Homo sapiens and modern human ancestors were found on the country's territory. The Omo remains, found in the area of Omo Kabish date back to the Middle Paleolithic. Alongside the Homo sapiens idaltu skeletons, found in the Middle Awash valley, having existed approximately 160,000 years ago. Additionally, one of the best preserved hominid fossils and probably best known hominid discovery in the world was found on Ethiopian land in 1974. A man under the name of Donald Johanson uncovered the specimen that was estimated to have lived around 3.2 million years ago. Locally the discovery is known as Dinkinesh, while to the rest of the world it is famous as Lucy, after the Awash Valley of the Ethiopian Afar Region it was found in.
Today the Ethiopian nation is multilingual consisting of close to eighty ethnolinguistic groups including the Oromo, Amhara, Somali and Tigrayans. Ethnic minority groups speak Nilo-Saharan and Omotic languages while the majority of the population uses the Afroasiatic languages, which have Semitic and Cushitic roots. Alongside its neighbouring country Eritrea, Ethiopia uses one of the oldest alphabets in the world known as the ancient Ge'ez script. There have been contradicting suggestions around the settlement of Afroasiatic-speaking populations in the country. Some linguists claim those groups to have arrived there from the Near East or the Nile Valley during the Neolithic era. Other experts distinct the idaltu skull fossil found on Ethiopian land from the modern Afroasiatic-speaking nations, and suggest they settled from Dynastic Egypt and the Horn of Africa.
The Ethiopian nation is quite diverse as it continues to develop. While Ethiopian Jews, known as Bete Israel, inhabited the country prior to the 1980s, today the majority of the population follows Christianity and a third adheres Islam. The oldest Muslim settlement on the African continent is located on the country's premises in Negash. The Hamer people and the Omotic Karo-speaking populations in Ethiopia believed that children and adults with physical abnormalities are ritually impure. The Karo had to officially ban the traditional murdering of those people, known as 'mingi', who were believed to have evil influences upon others. Meanwhile a report was released in 2013 where the Oakland Institute stated that the Ethiopian government forcefully relocated 'over 1.5 million people from their lands' in the region of Gambela so that foreign investors can develop massive agriculture industry. The previous year the Human Rights Watch had brought light to programs for similar resettlement of indigenous people in other areas. Yet, the Ethiopian government spoke against the accusations and gave some positive economy aspects as reasons for further development of the programs.
Ethiopia is rich in some natural resources. It is not only the home to the ghost town of Dallol, located in the Danakil Depression and known as the hottest settlement on Earth. The country also hosts the largest continuous mountain ranges on the continent - the Ethiopian Highlands and the largest cave in the whole of Africa, located at the Sof Omar Caves. The contrasts between the drought lands to the north and fertile rivers and forests found west, in is no wonder that Africa's most World Heritage Sites protected by UNESCO, are to be found in Ethiopia. Currently the country is also among the best coffee producers on the planet.
The human traces in Ethiopia date millions of years back in history. The country has evolved and developed in both humanitarian and economic aspects. It is present on the global map as one of the most intriguing world destinations. Despite its conflicted nation and internal economic issues, the symbol of African independence is the homeland of some of the earliest cultural activity and anatomically modern humans, who have inhabited our planet.
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NOMADSofORIGIN is an independent annual publication with a focus on sustainable travelling and global cultural values. Each issue features interviews, engaging articles and photo guides, which take our nomadic readers through different destinations and introduce them to local people's perspectives.
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