4 Jan. 2020
One natural consequence of being a faranji is that my phone is now peppered with Ethiopian numbers, relics of people I’ve met on the street. To walk around Addis is to expose yourself to the attention of an assortment of characters who occupy a hazy spectrum of friendliness and fixation on your money. And all of them want your number.
Scrolling through my contacts, I see Feyisa the lawyer, whom I met by the light rail tracks. Also Asha and Abi, two reggae musicians who promised to hook me up with “whatever I need,” be it a tour in the east or something more illicit.
Then there were Adisu and Wisdom, two small-time hucksters whom I encountered in the chaotic center of Addis, by the football stadium. They claimed to be students, studying business and tourism respectively; Adisu was light-skinned and wore a jaunty hat and jersey with the Ethiopian yellow, red and green. Wisdom was extremely skinny and dark-skinned and wore sweatpants with a faded print of American money splashed on it. This design was a foreshadowing of their intentions; I’d already heard that students or self-professed students target tourists with a potpourri of scams, so it wasn’t very surprising when they began to needle me for a few hundred birr: “Dictionary here very expensive. We need dictionary to write thesis. You can help us out, please,” in Wisdom’s earnest words.
Nonetheless, I was in a social mood that afternoon and I enjoyed walking around with them, although they became distinctly less warm when it became clear I wouldn’t fork over their requested amount to the dictionary fund. We walked together up through the heart of Addis, past the African Union building and onto the grounds of the squat white Beata Maryam church. One of the deacons was languishing outside, and for a fee he offered to show me the inside, which was under restoration. We walked downstairs into the crypt, where the Ethiopian emperor Menelik II is buried with his family and a couple of other notables in a row of white marble tombs. Upstairs, the deacon gestured at a wooden case propped up on the floor, which he opened to reveal a peeling painting in Renaissance style, depicting, I think, the Virgin Mary, Jesus, and John the Baptist. “Is original Michelangelo,” he said, and went on to tell me that it was gifted to the church by the Italians in a prisoner swap, sometime before or during the occupation of the 1930s. I raised my mental eyebrows at the painting’s supposed provenance, but if it was true, it was slightly appalling to see it on the dusty floor of this church, where two average-sized people could walk out the door with it.
My eyes turned to the center of the church, where red curtains surrounded an unseen object. When I asked what was in there, the deacon responded, “Holy of holies.” Ethiopia has a long and interesting relationship with claims on art and artifacts. Most notably, there’s a long-held belief that the Ark of the Covenant is kept at Axum, in northern Ethiopia, where only a single designated handler is allowed to set eyes on it. You’ll probably know the Ark either as the chest containing the original Ten Commandment tablets and other biblical paraphernalia, considered by the Israelites to be an embodiment of God, and not seen since the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem in 587 BC; or as the mysterious object that Indiana Jones went to so much trouble to save from the Nazis. Most scholars don’t lend any credence to the Ethiopian claim on the Ark, but there’s enough circumstantial evidence to string together a narrative that sounds just plausible enough to be intriguing. At any rate, it makes for interesting reading if you’re into fringe historical theories.
The object behind the curtains I was looking at now was a copy of the Ark, of which there is one in every Ethiopian Orthodox Church, each evidently customized to that locale. The deacon assented when I asked him whether he’d seen it. I entertained sacrilegious thoughts at that moment of ripping the curtains aside for a peek. Or how many birr would it take?
Instead, I walked out into the sunlight, stopping to look at a pair of large tortoises chilling on the lawn, good-luck symbols for their longevity. I shook off Adisu and Wisdom, paying them a small sum for showing me around. The light-rail was congested with Ethiopian football fans in their yellow and maroon jerseys, fresh off a victory in the Stadium. I stood looking over the railing as they walked through the streets, chanting and cheering. The trains were jam-packed beyond reason, and after two went by I decided to find my way back by taxi.