4 Jan. 2020
On his Dark Star Safari trip 20 years ago, Paul Theroux noted that Ethiopians loved to fling the epithet faranji! at him. It just means ‘foreigner’ or ‘white person,’ a term that sweeps from Ethiopia across South Asia and into Thailand, where you still hear tourists called farangs.* I can happily say that in spite of the massive changes that have rocked Ethiopia in the past two decades, things remain much the same. I’ve been peppered with faranji! as I’ve wandered Addis: out of a car window as I cross the street, from a headscarfed woman who gives me a thumbs-up as she sits in the shade outside her house, from the man at the shop window next to my guesthouse, who chains the word into a happy chant: faranji-faranji-faranji…
I’m certainly not the only foreigner around, but I notice they tend to bunch in certain spots: The Italian restaurant I stumbled into on a hot afternoon for a bowl of carbonara, the rather underwhelming National Museum, and the clinic where I topped off my vaccines. The Ethiopian doctor I met with there gave me a stern run-down of the potential risks of travel in the region. She seemed slightly surprised that I was here as a tourist at all, which I in turn found slightly surprising.
I’ve met a few foreigners at my nine-room guesthouse, too. I spent my first afternoon in the company of Jim and Sylvia, an Australian couple in their sixties who were here for six weeks on business: Jim has a range of ventures in Ethiopia, including a project to extract clean water from air moisture and a system that he claims can produce mud-brick houses in an unusually efficient manner. “You’re gonna enjoy it here,” he said in his typically genial Australian manner. “Wonderful people here.” His only complaint? “If you’re near a church, or a mosque, bring earplugs or you’re not gonna sleep at night. They all have loudspeakers, and they compete with each other to be the loudest. And they go all night. The government needs to crack down on noise pollution.” Two nights of semi-fitful sleep later, punctuated by the melodic drone of a mosque some indeterminate distance away, I can attest to this.
Another Australian, a middle-aged guy named Jason, was staying in one of the rooms across the courtyard from me. He’s the only other backpacker I’ve met thus far, albeit one by necessity: He lives in Cape Town on a tourist visa with his South African girlfriend and was here on a visa run. The South African government mandates that non-citizens visit a non-contiguous country before returning, which means that you have to at least hop past Namibia and Zimbabwe to be allowed back into the country. I found Jason interesting because his destination in Ethiopia was Gambela, the former British-Sudanese jungle town far in the west and one of the least-visited parts of the country.
There were also Laura and Hanna, two German sisters here to interview members of Ethiopia’s Afrofuturism community for Hanna’s Masters thesis. On Friday night, we went together to Addis’s most renowned nightlife venue, Fendika, founded and run by a famous Ethiopian dancer named Melaku Belay. It’s a hip place, with a colorful open-air bar set next to a small enclosed art gallery and a lively performance space. An Ethiopian jazz band played while dancers wiggled their shoulders in the traditional dance called eskista. It’s an ecstatic and irresistible move. Even to a jazz ignoramus like myself, I could tell that the band was fantastic. Drinks on tap included Habesha Breweries’ Cold Gold, Ethiopia’s premier beer, and a sickly-sweet wine made from fermented honey called tej. The crowd inside the bar sat shoulder to shoulder, smoke rising from hand-rolled cigarettes. It was the first time I felt fully relaxed outside of my guesthouse since leaving the States.
What a difference a day makes. I’d actually been at Fendika the night before too, a Thursday. I’d spent the day alone, and having heard of the venue’s reputation, I hoped to find a sociable crowd inside. Instead, I sat in the nearly abandoned performance space while a band played a perplexingly arcane brand of Ethiopian folk music. Two drummers hammered out complex polyrhythms while a man warbled and muttered a melody and stretched a bow along a screechy stringed instrument that looked like a Chinese erhu. I began to doze off in the corner, ambushed by jetlag and a cocktail of beer, coffee, tea and whiskey.
* Etymological note, possibly of interest only to me: While the English word foreign and the multilingual faranji sound similar, they are unrelated: The former is derived from the Latin foris, meaning outside, while the latter stems from Franci, the Germanic tribe who gave their name to France and who also came to represent generic Europeans to people of the Near East.