Democracy Video Challenge: Ethiopian Semifinalist

Last Thursday, the United States Embassy announced three Ethiopian semifinalists for the Democracy Video Challenge, an annual competition sponsored by YouTube and the U.S. State Department.  Short videos completing the phrase “Democracy is…” are submitted from across the globe. The Ethiopian semi-finalists’ films will be submitted to the continent-wide competition. Global winners will be voted by the YouTube audience in May. Last year, the first year of the completion, no entries from Ethiopia were submitted. The U.S. Embassy was eager to change that this year.

I helped by running a workshop on the competition in November. In information sessions, the embassy identified concerns on the part of local filmmakers about delivering a powerful message in three minutes, as the competition required, and competing with the work from countries well practices in sophisticated film and animation techniques. I attempted to address these concerns by analyzing past competition winners and sharing examples of techniques for quickly communicating abstract ideas through film. The results were stunning. 30 entries were submitted, making the Ethiopian selection among of the most competitive in Africa.

Here are the semi-finalist films: (See all the entries from Ethiopia here.)

Enjoy Procrastination

Today’s trip to Shiro Meda neighborhood to get work done with Sudden Flowers turned into a morning of watching football (the youth center vs. the scouts) followed by an afternoon coffee ceremony and Ethiopian Idol.  I’m making good on my New Year’s resolution to enjoy procrastination.

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.