Neighbours in Ethiopia are not just
people residing next door. Their social interactions transcend that.
Neighbours are accepted as part of
the family, irrespective of their religion or ethnicity. They eat together, sip
coffee together, and work together.
This relationship is evident even
more strongly in times of grief and pleasure. Close neighbours come to the
rescue faster than a blood relative living far away, as the Amharic saying goes.
Neighbourhoods are also considered institutions in rural Ethiopia.
When a young man grows old enough to
live by himself, neighbours play a major role in getting the ball rolling, as it
were. They build a thatched roof hut in a matter of hours and jointly plough a
small plot of land to help him start his new life as a farmer.
The young man also has the
responsibility to reciprocate by joining others in communal farming.
For all intents and purposes,
neighbours reside closely. An 80-year old man who lives in a village near Jima,
352 kilometres southwest of the capital, Aba Fogi Aba Nemo, was in Addis Abeba
last week for a medical check-up. In talking to him, while he was paying a visit
to his great-granddaughter, he seemed almost shocked and surprised by the
reluctance he observed in the neighbourhoods of Addis Abeba.
Trying to greet people warmly in the
wake of Christmas celebrations, he expected impulsive retaliations.
“Back home in Jima, greeting is one
of the ways through which a good relationship with neighbours or even anybody
who happens to pass by is expressed,” he commented. “In fact, mixing with other
people without paying due respect through warm greetings is tantamount to
reducing a human being to the level of an animal.”
Greetings in rural Ethiopia are
expressed in greater detail, to the extent of inquiring, not only about every
member of the family, young and old, but, also, about domestic animals,
including kids (young goats) and kittens.
Every evening, after long hours of
communal ploughing, harvesting, or grazing cattle in distant pastures, people in
a neighbourhood retire outdoors in their compounds and chat about their
experiences and encounters of the day. They start by exchanging greetings. If
any of the neighbours has been to court for some reason or another, he would
have to do a lot of talking about the hearings or the process of litigation.
In another instance, a father may
have been summoned to school to have a talk about his child with the school’s
principal or any one of the teachers. These experiences engage neighbours in
discussions and knowledge sharing.
In times of holiday celebration,
relations are even more emphasised through feasting together. Members take turns
inviting each other, regardless of their differences in prosperity or social
standing. The invitation starts when the members first go to the house of the
most senior person in the village to express their pleasure and well wishes.
Every member brings some food or
drink to be shared by all. “Coffee sipping” is the name of the game, but there
is more to it. The occasion is used to get everyone together to share thoughts
and personal experiences along with food and drink.
The culture of eating and spending time together (top) has become rare as few
people are upholding the culture while some separated themselves using
electrified fences to keep there privacy.
The next round takes the neighbours
to the next senior person. In many instances, oxen are slaughtered to be shared
by the neighbours. In the sharing process, chunks of lean meat, particularly
liver, are chopped to be consumed by participants and downed with araqe, a local
drink, usually consumed with raw meat.
As a member of a group, it is
important to know the different organs of animal. The dismembering measures need
special skill, so that cutting the flesh follows a pattern that provides every
stakeholder bits of all of the organs, equally.
In other cases, fattened rams or
goats are slaughtered inside individual dwellings. The fate of a ram in every
village is known ahead of time. Children, unlike urban kids, feel sorry for the
animal to be slaughtered because every animal that satiates is considered a
member of the village.
This of course does not mean that
all urbanites are not sympathetic towards animals. It is just that many city
children get excited and yearn to see rams with bigger horns and hoarse voices
slaughtered at their respective homes.
Should any member of the village
fall sick, there are traditional healers, dubbed wugeshas, who come to the
rescue of the sick person. Herbs are used as emergency cures. If a sick person
or a delivering woman has to be taken to the nearest clinic, the neighbours make
a stretcher-like contraption, on which they carry the patient all the way to the
Thus, in Ethiopia, neighbours are
not just people living next door or people who wine and dine together in times
of merrymaking, only. They are there for almost everything. That is why the
neighbourhood is of utmost priority, even if elders like Aba Fogi see it
declining in the city centres.