This is Africa

Another difference in Addis compared to Kampala is how many livestock animals you see in the streets of this large, and in some ways cosmopolitan, city. Goats everywhere: people herding small herds or individual animals along the road, or very large numbers of them at the feed troughs in the goat market we pass coming home from work every day. Mules or donkeys, two or three at a time, some of them straining under piled-up bales of hay or other heavy loads. A boy leading a monkey on a chain. (Okay, that’s not livestock, but still…) Cows with tall narrow humps behind their shoulders; sometimes in groups as large as 20, more often one or two. A more ordinary cow, standing alone by a kiosk as if picking up some bananas. Once I came upon a cow, untended and quite confused, in the middle of an intersection. Another time two men were frantically chasing after two cattle that had gotten away and were running in and out through the congested rush-hour traffic.

When you first see them, you feel amazement and perhaps amusement at the scene. Then you may feel sorry for the poor animals, which always look underfed, and often terrified. Then, perhaps, you may feel sorry for the people who must subsist on these poor scrawny beasts, “range fed” along the sides of dirty streets, breathing the diesel exhaust, eating the road-side chemicals. Then after all that, you may feel sorry for, or angry about, or discouraged by, the state of our world, and our disparities.

It is one piece of what is contained in the popular phrase: “This is Africa.” And it is a big piece of why not many people, relatively speaking, want to travel here.

Philip Briggs, who wrote the excellent Bradt guidebook to Ethiopia (and also the Uganda guidebook that was our great helper while we lived there), addresses a bit of this in a chapter called “Bridging the Cultural Gap.” He brings strong expertise to the job: raised in South Africa, he has traveled roughly half of each year in East Africa since 1986.

“To someone raised in the West,” Briggs writes, “first exposure to the developing world is always something of a shock. However concerned you may be about the inequality of global wealth distribution, and however much you may have read and thought about the issues, confronting the reality is something entirely different from dealing with it in the abstract. And most of us, to some extent, respond with a feeling of guilt.”

He goes on: “I have long held doubts about my work. I have been torn between the feeling that it is useful and constructive to be writing books that might encourage tourism to little-visited countries, the fear that tourism might in some way damage the country, and an anger at the way that some tourists, most especially budget travelers, ride roughshod over Africa.” In the end – and acknowledging honestly that he is, after all, a guidebook writer! – he concludes that sensitive travel, learning about new cultures and simultaneously spending money in places that desperately need it, is “a far more appropriate response than to travel only in developed countries and pretend the inequality doesn’t exist.”

Theresa and I talked about it many times in Uganda. With all the trials and tribulations, the frustrations and the sadness for the hard life all around us, we felt so enriched. We wished more Americans could travel here. It can be hard – it often IS hard -- but more than that, it is enlightening, and rewarding. This, too, is Africa.