Ethiopian Outback
A Journey through the Lower Omo Valley

By Kevin Brown - The sign in front of the African village’s barber shop actually read “abandon hope all ye who enter”. It is one of those strange anomalous fragments of Western culture that sometimes appears in third world countries, like an abandoned New York City taxi cab, a GAP tee-shirt, or a book of matches from the Ritz-Carlton, completely out of context and completely unaccounted for. It could well be a legacy of the missionary establishment or merely a piece of verse copied from a scrap of paper by a sign painter without a word of English. Whatever the case, I might have been well advised to think twice before choosing this particular barber.

African hair is simply not like the hair of the white man. It is strong and stiff and tightly curled. It does not easily get wet nor can it be easily shaped into any form other than its own. As such, the role of an African Barber is considerably different from that of a European or American barber. He has not so much to cut as sculpt the hair. When this principle was applied to my own comparatively fine and flat hair the results were predictably disastrous. No two adjacent hairs were of equal length and, most curiously, part of my forehead had been shaved in an attempt to give me the McHairstyle no. 5 special. This is what I would take back with me to New York.

Thus ended my two-week expedition to the Lower Omo Valley. The Lower Omo Valley is one of the most remote and exotic locations on earth. Set in the outback of Ethiopia, one of Africa’s poorest countries, the Lower Omo can be reached only by driving several days through the roadless bush. Temperatures regularly cap 100 degrees and malaria is endemic. However, this region is home to one of the largest concentrations of mostly untouched tribal cultures left in the world.

When word got out in Addis Ababa that I was planning an expedition to the Omo, the street touts descended upon me like vultures to a kill. As it is so difficult to reach, visiting the Omo Valley is just about the most expensive thing you can do in Ethiopia. You need to rent a heavy duty four wheel drive vehicle, a guard, a driver who knows the ways and who speaks at least a few tribal languages (and believe me, these guys are few and far between and know well their value), and purchase all of your foods and other provisions in advance. Given a potential profit of several hundred dollars in commission from the car rental agencies, the greedy gaggle of touts nearly instigated a full-fledged free-for-all street fight as they jostled to be the first to hand me the business card of the car rental agency of the highest commission. Of course, they were all proffering the same card – it was merely a matter of which one I would accept. In Ethiopia, once you accept a card from one person, then that individual essentially owns you. As a matter of professional courtesy to other touts, no other guide will take you and no other agency will rent to you. Knowing something like this might have been the case, I refused to accept any of the cards – infuriating the lot of them.

In the end, I was saved from all of this by the intervention of a Danish friend who lived in Ethiopia and offered to rent me his Land Cruiser for the duration of my expedition. The street touts became so angry at this that they gathered in front of the car in order to prevent me from leaving my hotel compound. In frustration, I was finally forced to call in the police. They asked that I identify the offenders; I did so, and they simply said, “We’ll take care of it.” The next day while driving out of town I saw one of the touts covered in bruises with two black eyes and a nasty forehead cut. It was a harsh lesson in third world police justice, but I could not help the feeling that they deserved it.

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