Visual Literacy and Photography Series at AAU

As an outgrowth of the previous workshops I ran at Addis Ababa University, I’m offering a four part visual literacy and photography series through the University’s English Language Improvement Center. Yesterday’s talk was a lot of fun. Student and professors from several departments attended. We viewed an analyzed work by photographers from Richard Avadon to Lolo Veloko to Lise Sarfati, not to mention Seydou Keita, whose photograph is used on the flyer. Quite a number of students have expressed interest in next week’s topic. If you’re in Addis Ababa, do stop by.

Floating Like Angels

One of today’s dance performances at Hope for Children.

Where Time and Space are Not Rationalized

In an earlier post, I made a fumbling attempt to describe local conceptions of time that can leave foreigners like me confounded and frustrated here in Ethiopia. Sociologist Donald Levine does an amazing job describing this and many other aspects of Amhara society in his 1965 book Wax and Gold. The following passage had me laughing hysterically for all the foiled attempts as making plans or soliciting information about past events that it brought to mind. Levine’s work on the Amhara peasant of 40 years ago remains relevant for understanding the urban Ethiopian of today.

In the Abyssinian world view, time is not rationalized for secular purposes.  Some peasants calculate the hour by the shadows on the mountains, but the effort is not taken very seriously. Units of time are of little concern in the workday world.  When a man says he is going on a trip ‘tomorrow,’ everyone assumes that he means he may be leaving a few days later. Many appointments are made, but few are kept literally; so that the phrase habesha qataro (“Abyssinian appointment”) has come to signify an appointment to which one comes quite late or not at all. There is little sense of time in the abstract.  When an Amhara peasant is asked how long a certain trip takes, he does not reply ‘ten hours,’ but rather; ‘If you leave here at dawn you will arrive there before it turns dark’; and his estimate of the arrival time tends to vary according to whether or not he wants to questioner to make the trip.

Historical time is still more vaguely conceived than local time. The Amhara peasant has little sense of knowledge of history. He considers all that happened before Menelik’s day as ‘ancient times,’ and more or less as an undifferentiated period. He knows very few of the earlier emperors, no historical dates, and often not even the exact year, let alone date, of his own birth.  He has no idea when the church in his area was built and no interest in preserving such historical monuments or mementos as may exist in his country…

Space, like time, is not regarded as an amoral and homogeneous continuum to be submitted to systematic measurement… The reluctance to rationalize space is conspicuous even in the capital of Ethiopia, where to this day there are no street numbers, so that places can only be identified roughly as near a certain police station or past a certain hospital. Directions are indicated with difficulty.  The points of the compass are almost never used, though there are words for the four directions.  Instead, the vague terms for ‘up’ and ‘down’ serve to answer almost every question about location.

You can probably see how this way of looking at time and space would throw a Type A New Yorker like me for a loop. It also helps explain why so many people I talked to about Ethiopia before I arrived spoke with bitter frustration about the time they spent here.

Another factor contributing to this frustration is the wax and gold poetic tradition that is the main subject of Levine’s book. Wax and gold is a poetic style characterized by double entendres.  The wax is what the words ostensibly mean and the gold is the hidden meaning.  In day-to-day communication, this tradition can manifest as active deceit that is praised as cleverness in traditional Amhara culture.  By no means do all Ethiopians espouse double-handedness, but the implications of this cultural tradition is a topic of concern for organizations like the Ethiopian Institute for Nonviolent Education and Peace Studies.  When he wrote his book, Levine was hopeful that the wax and gold tradition could facilitate modern Ethiopian diplomacy.  Unambiguous communication is only part of maintaining bureaucratic, rational systems.  The most effective administrators though have a high tolerance for ambiguity both in practices and in communication in the effort to maintain harmony and minimize interpersonal tensions.

The Little Rainy Season

A view of afternoon rain falling on Olympia in Addis Ababa.

Seeds for an Ethiopian Photo Curriculum

At Addis Ababa University’s Graduate Journalism and Communications program, I ran a two-day workshop on technical aspects of photography as a prerequisite to a month long intensive production course. During the workshop, it became clear that many of the students had little exposure to tools like cameras and minimal visual literacy skills, at least in relation to mass media. We made a lot of progress in two days, but they clearly needed some instruction on photographic visuality and its various applications for the field of journalism.

Alice Klement, the professor of the course, invited me to guest lecture on photographic composition, documentary photography, and visual storytelling. The follow up lectures vitally supplemented the technical skills training that the students received during the prerequisite workshop.

The 33 first-year students of the Masters in Journalism and Communications were chosen for the program by Ethiopia’s Ministry of Education. They will all continue on to teach at the 13 new universities currently under construction across the country. The students intend to use my presentations in their own classes after they graduate. The positive response to the workshop and lectures has been overwhelming, and I’ve received a number of effusive thank you notes over email.

You can see the presentations below. (The final presentation is in 2 parts.) I regret that there are not more examples of work from Africa by Africans. I decided it was better to stick with what I know and admit its limitations rather than deliver a weak lesson by using work I couldn’t effectively speak to. Alice Klement reassured me. “Won’t it be great to come back in a few years and find versions of your presentations retooled with Ethiopian examples and interpretations?” It totally will be.

Timkat

Timkat, the Ethiopian celebration of the Epiphany, was celebrated early this week in Addis Ababa with huge crowds gathering at several sites around the city for religious ceremonies, processions, and dancing. These photos were taken at Jan Meda on Tuesday. Many thanks to Adane for guiding me through the crowd and insisting that I try the dances and the home brew.

Theater as Catharsis in Grappling with HIV/AIDS

Most of Hope For Children’s daylong celebrations include somber testimonies from community members who have suffered with HIV/AIDS and plays by the youth about fictionalized family dramas where HIV/AIDS is a strong theme. During the Christmas celebration this past weekend, one play enacted the tragedy of a mother who dies from AIDS because her negligent children do not take her to receive medical attention in time. The play moved many in the audience, including the small children, to tears. While this might seem out of place for a Christmas celebration, the ritual is deeply cathartic for all those involved and reminds attendees of the hard work that the community is engaged in with the help of Hope for Children.

Click image and zoom to view full size.

As part of my Fulbright project here in Ethiopia, I am exploring the influence these community plays have on the films of Sudden Flowers Productions. Participation in plays at Hope For Children is one way that members of Sudden Flowers have developed the sophisticated sense of personal narrative that they draw on to produce their films. One of the films will be screened at the Rotterdam Film Festival at the end of this month. “Fighting With Father” is a true story about Yonas’ struggle with his mother’s death and his father’s alcoholism. Congratulations to Sudden Flowers Productions and director Daniel D. Negatu in bringing this story to an international audience.

New Years?

Only the faranjis (foreigners) in Addis Ababa are celebrating the New Year now. Ethiopia’s New Year starts on September 11th. It is currently the year 2002 according to this calendar, hence one local tourism company’s slogan: “Visit Ethiopia and feel 7 years younger.”

Time in Ethiopia offers a variety of challenges for faranjis. Aside from the different calendar year, there is the unique system for noting the time of day. Hours in the day are counted sequentially with daylight hours. Being so close to the equator, Ethiopia sees very little variation in daylight hours from season to season. 6am, when the sun is about to rise, is considered 12 o’clock. 7am, the end of the first hour of sunlight, is 1 o’clock, and so forth through to the next 12 o’clock, or 6pm faranji time, when the sun sets. To convert between faranji time and Ethiopian time, just look to the opposite number on the face of an analog clock. Luckily, most Ethiopians assume I’m working from faranji time when I make plans with them. I only had a few botched attempts at scheduling meetings due to confusion about what system of time we were using.

But this isn’t what faranjis are complaining about when they bemoan habesha time.¹ Habesha time refers to an Ethiopian style of living in the present, which comes into conflict with the tendency of most American and European to live in the future. Anticipating, premeditating, planning, all deeply ingrained activities that characterize how Americans like me get things done, do not mesh easily with how most Ethiopians get things done. While I assess my effectiveness based on my ability to carry out plans, Ethiopians measure their effectiveness based on… well, I’m not sure exactly yet, but whatever it is, it seems designed to foil mine! Hopefully after another 8 months here, I’ll have a better understanding of the perpetual present that my Ethiopian colleagues live in. It’s markedly different from the siesta-inflected cyclical time of Mexico/Central America or the monumental bureaucratic time of India.

If time and making plans didn’t already sound complicated enough, here’s another twist. The Amharic language doesn’t have a future tense. The future is implied contextually with certain uses of the present continuous tense. This means that only Ethiopians who are completely fluent in English will use the future tense when they speak in English. In my conversations with Ethiopians, I often struggle to understand what has already happened, what is happening and what will happen.

Is my new year’s resolution in keeping with Ethiopian conceptions of time, or just a faranji’s attempt to maintain sanity in spite of it? I’m resolving to enjoy procrastination.

First Encounter with OLPC

Today, I had my first encounter with an OLPC laptop. It was in the home of a member of Sudden Flowers Productions. The mission of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is to enhance educational oppertunities for poor children by providing them with their own robust, open source laptops. After hearing so much about the initiative, I was ecstatic that one of the youth I’m teaching is using of an OLPC laptop to do some independent studying.

Oh Friday, we had our last Photoshop lesson, reviewing what I taught them about layers and color correction. I thought they could use more time to play around with what they learned, but they insisted that we move on to discuss web design. It was pretty gratifying to arrive at the office this morning and find several of the youth on the old Windows laptop messing with the highlights and saturation of photos they took last week. Seems they do have that all figured out and are ready to move on. The next three hours consisted of playing with and discussing a few web based interactive projects (1, 2, 3, 4) followed by writing some simple HTML and CSS documents.

Tensaye (on the left in the first photo below) was especially eager to learn about web design.  “This is my dream,” he confided in me last week.  “Okay,”  I told him, “We’ll make it happen.”  After today’s lesson, we headed to his house to load the example files onto his family’s desktop computer.  That way, he could experiment on his own until the next lesson on Friday.  But the computer didn’t have the right drivers for my USB drive.  After unsuccessfully trouble shooting for a few minutes, Tensaye suddenly perked up and asked one of his relatives to get the “little computer.”

I gasped with delight when I saw the green OLPC OX-1 laptop.  Seems that it sat largely unused in the house since Tensaye’s older relative had received it in school a few months ago.

Tensaye plugged my USB drive into the laptop, and it loaded no problem.  He copied over the examples and resource files.

What totally endeared me to the device was the keyboard.  Characters of the Amharic fidel were printed alongside the Roman letters!  I asked Tensaye if any other keyboards were set up this way.  “Nope,” he said. ”First in Ethiopia.”

I showed him how to swivel the screen around for easier reading.  “I will use this a lot,” he said scrolling through the documents.  “You have to test me.  On Friday, ask me what I learned over the week on my own, and I will show you.”

Thanks, OLPC.  Mission accomplished.

Sheger FM: Ethiopia’s First Independent Radio Station

Sheger FM is Ethiopia’s first independent radio station. In operation for about two years now, the station reaches between 5 and 7 millions listeners in the Addis Ababa area.

Antenhe Safio, Program Producer.

Much of the broadcast equipment was donated by Voice of America.

Some of the station’s music collection.

Satellite dishes on the station’s roof recieve programming from Voice of America and Deutsche Welle, among other sources.

                               Solomon Guangul, News Editor.

Johannes Yehalawork, Politics Editor.

External Programs Head Tefari Alemu, left, General Manager Maeza Birru, center, and Technician Wongelawit Berhanu, right, prepare to record a commercial.

Meseret Bezu, Technician.

Technician Desalegn Mekuria repairs equipment.

Music Program Editor prepares a show.

General Manager Meaza Birru at her desk.

Gifts from listeners displayed in the station hallway.

                               The Shegar FM radio tower on the roof of the station’s offices broadcasts on FM 102.1.