Adventuring Among The Fierce And Unfriendly Danakil Nomads

Because the geological expedition I had to photograph was being delayed, I traveled to Tendaho, a dusty town at the southern end of the Danakil Depression in the Aussa Danakil sultanate. Here were the fiercest Danakil, and their scrutinizing eyes made me feel virtually naked. It was evident that I must have looked like some freakish blunder of nature.

     In those days a Danakil man wanting to marry still had to kill a man, emasculate him, and offer his trophy to the woman he wanted. It proved his virility, which in this infernal country was indispensable to the survival of a family.

      An Ethiopian official warned me not to leave the village without a letter from the sultan. Unfortunately he was absent. After searching for a possible interpreter, I had to settle on a 53-year-old Moslem named Mahmud, who spoke Danakil and Italian. He did not speak English, but understood some. I did not speak Italian, but understood some. Mahmud went to ask a balabat, or local chieftain, for his protection.

     The next morning there would be an important market in Aisayita, a small town 35 miles (56 kilometers) to the east, which would attract many Danakil. To get there on foot in time we left that very night. The balabat lent us two men to guide us and two two camels to carry our luggage and water.

     Towards 4:00 a.m., five armed Danakil warriors emerged from the darkness to have a close look at me. One of them tested my biceps, commented on the vigor of my handshake, deluged Mahmud with questions about me, the ferengi, or foreigner , and asked us for cigarettes (though a non-smoker, I always carried some). While those men nailed us there for a while, our two guides moved on ahead. Then, with that same man holding my hand, we walked together for a while, though too slowly to catch up with our guides.

     Not long after the five Danakil had finally drifted away, the dark nightmarish desert produced four new warriors--younger and evil-looking.  They too assailed Mahmud with questions as we kept walking. Over the next 15 minutes or so their voices behind me got louder and louder, with the word ferengi bouncing back and forth. And there was disturbing tussle.  Pretending to be unaware of what was happening in my back, I did not allow myself to look around as I kept walking. Doing so would have forced me to interfere, stopping the march, and putting us at even greater risk.

But at some point Mahmud could no long contain his tormentors.

     “Make trouble! Make trouble!” Mahmud cried, his voice shaking with rage and anguish. “I know, Mahmud” I replied. “But please let’s keep calm.” Still, I started wondering whether my manhood would end up hanging in a woman’s tent or from a horse’s bridle, as was the custom.

     When Mahmud was pushed against me, just as our two guides had finally become visible and Mahmud was crying for their help, I turned around to see that one of the men had unsheathed his large curved knife. Fortunately, our two guides, animated by a devilish fury, came rushing back, shouting what must have been insults and perhaps the name of the balabat, our Tendaho protector. Sheepishly, though chuckling to keep face, our tormentors walked away.      

     Mahmud’s face was ashen (I could not see my own), and for an hour or so I could not get anything out of him. Finally, he told me that the Danakil had grabbed our cigarettes and a box of biscuits he was carrying for breakfast. When a man asked him what I carried in my camera bag, Mahmud warned him that my people would seek revenge on him if they harmed me in any way. But he had found this amusing.  “This man carries no gun and has no armed escort,” he said. “He’s a nobody, and no one will come looking for him after we kill him—and you.” When he was going to pull my camera bag from my shoulder, Mahmud hit his hand with the stick that Ethiopians always carry around. At that, the man had pushed him and pulled his knife.

     At Aisayita, which was crowded with heavily armed Danakil men, I photographed many. Ignoring their suspicious eyes, and working quickly from one man to the next, I pretended it was the most normal thing in the world and got away with it. Later I would spend some time documenting the daily life of some Danakil encampments.

     When I returned to Makale once more, I found the geologists installed at the hotel. I thought I was safe now. But my recklessness would see to it that my adventures were only just beginning. I’ll tell you about them in other posts.

View photos below, following French translation.

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Comme l’expédition géologique que je devais photographier n’arrivait pas, je voyageai à Tendaho, un gros village poussiéreux au sud de la dépression Danakil dans le sultanat des Danakil Aussa. Beaucoup de ces Danakil pratiquaient encore la fâcheuse coutume qui exigeait de l’homme en quête d’épouse de tuer d’abord un autre homme, de l’émasculer et d’offrir à sa bien-aimée le trophée qui prouverait sa virilité, indispensable pour assurer la survie d’une famille dans ce pays infernal.

     A Tendaho les hommes Danakil, armés de vieux fusils et d’énormes couteaux courbes, m’entouraient de toutes parts. M’observant avec des yeux peu amicaux et hésitant à me céder le pas sur les allées de sable, ils me faisaient sentir  aussi nu qu’à la naissance. Il était évident que je devais être à leurs yeux une sérieuse anomalie de la nature—blond, yeux bleus, rouge de la brulure du soleil… (Un an plus tard, chez les Dayak de la jungle de Bornéo, mes yeux bleus me donneraient une certaine aura. Mais pas ici).    

     Un fonctionnaire éthiopien m’avertit que je mettrais ma vie en danger si j’abandonnais le village sans une lettre de recommendation du sultan. Mais le sultan était absent. Le fonctionnaire me présenta un Musulman de 53 ans qui parlait le Danakil et l’Italien. Il ne parlait pas l’Anglais, mais le comprenait un peu. Je parlais l’Anglais et comprenais un peu l’Italien. En fait d’interprète, je ne trouverais pas mieux à Tendaho et l’acceptai.

     Mahmud me conduisit chez un balabat, un chef local. Le balabat me déclara sous sa protection et me trouva deux hommes Danakil pour nous guider dans le désert et deux chameaux pour transporter nos bagages et notre eau.

     Nous partîmes à pied la nuit même--pour éviter la chaleur du jour, mais aussi pour arriver à Asayita, 56 kilomètres à l’est de Tendaho, le matin suivant. Un grand marché nous y attendait, visité par de nombreux Danakil.

     Vers quatre heures du matin, cinq guerriers Danakil émergèrent de la nuit. Commentant bruyamment notre rencontre, ils assommèrent Mahmud de questions à mon sujet et demandèrent des cigarettes (quoique non-fumeur j’en avais toujours avec moi). L’un des hommes tata mes biceps et se déclara satisfait de la vigueur de ma main, qu’il ne lâcha pas.  Finalement, nous ayant fait perdre beaucoup de temps sur place tandis que nos deux guides Danakil continuaient leur chemin, bien en avant dans la nuit opaque, nous reprîmes la marche tous ensemble, moi main dans la main du bonhomme, quoique trop  lentement pour rattraper nos guides

     Au bout de 20 minutes nos cinq Danakil nous quittèrent. Mais bientôt en apparurent quatre autres, plus jeunes et  l’air beaucoup plus sauvage et agressif. Il devint tout de suite évident que les choses n’iraient plus aussi facilement. Mais cette fois je ne m’arrêtai pas, ni ralentis la marche. Derrière moi les questions des Danakil, ou le mot  ferengi  (étranger) rebondissait constamment, sonnait avec une violence croissante. Je me rendais compte qu’on se bousculait dans mon dos, mais prétendais ne pas le savoir. J’espérais donner l’impression d’être trop important pour avoir á me préoccuper de ma sécurité. Mais espérant rejoindre nos guides, je m’efforçais d’allonger le pas sans y attirer l’attention. Avec eux nous serions quatre contre quatre, quoique non armés nous-mêmes. Par contre, m’arrêter de marcher pour me mêler à la dispute nous ferait perdre encore davantage de terrain sur nos guides. Finalement, Mahmud n’en put plus.

     « Make trouble ! Make trouble ! » cria-t-il dans son Anglais rudimentaire. « Je sais, » lui répondis-je sans me retourner ni ralentir le pas. « Mais garde le calme si tu peux.» Cependant je commençais à me demander si ma virilité terminerait bientôt accrochée dans la tente d’une femme ou à l’encolure d’un cheval, ou ces articles terminaient généralement.

     Quand un Danakil poussa Mahmud violemment contre moi, je n’eus  d’autre option que de me retourner. Un Danakil avait dégainé son énorme couteau, large comme ma main. Cette fois, d’une voix  angoissée, Mahmud appela nos guides. Heureusement, et quoiqu’invisibles dans l’obscurité, ils n’étaient plus loin. Abandonnant leurs chameaux ils vinrent á grands cris nous arracher des mains de ces sauvages. Ce qu’ils crièrent à nos tourmenteurs leur quitta immédiatement toute arrogance, et penauds ils retournèrent à la nuit.

     Le visage du pauvre Mahmud était de cendre (je ne pourrais dire de quelle couleur était le mien, moi qui n’avais pas vu le danger d’aussi près que lui). Durant une heure il ne put ouvrir la bouche. Finalement il parla.

     D’abord les Danakil avaient arraché de ses mains nos cigarettes et les biscuits que nous nous réservions pour la faim. Quand plus tard l’un d’eux allait s’emparer aussi de la sacoche photographique qui pendait de mon épaule Mahmud le frappa de son bâton, ce qui les mit tous en colère. Mahmud leur prédit des représailles féroces de la part de mes gens s’ils me faisaient du mal. Mais ses paroles les avaient amusés. « Un homme qui voyage sans escorte et sans armes ne peut être qu’un pauvre diable. » dirent-ils.  « Nous allons tuer cet homme, et toi avec lui, et personne ne se donnera la peine de vous chercher. »

     Je passai la journée suivante au marché à photographier les Danakil, tous fortement armés. Ignorant leurs regards méfiants, j’agis comme si c’était la chose la plus normale du monde, mais passant d’un homme a l’autre très rapidement. Plus tard je documenterais la vie quotidienne de quelques campements. De retour à Makale, je trouvai les géologues installés à l’hôtel. 

     Je croyais mes aventures terminées, mais j’étais bien trop insouciant m’en livrer si tôt. En fait elles n’avaient que commence Je les  raconterai prochainement.

Back from Colombia

I’m back from Colombia. Had a great trip. Better than I expected. The country is back to better times. And the people are as friendly as ever. But in that country you can never discount the bad guys, as I have learned firsthand several times.

Many years ago, on a December 26, I lived one of my most unpleasant Colombian experiences. The Cali Fair starts on that day, and at that time lasted two weeks. For the length of the fair, people worked only half days. They celebrated at the bullring, and later at outdoor cafes. It was a chaotic time of booze and irresponsible behavior.

The fair opens every year with a cabalgata, a cavalcade. Hundreds of people ride horseback across town. They stop here and there to greet family and friends among the thousands of people that line the avenues to watch the spectacle. Many of the riders keep drinking from bottles of aguardiente as they move along. Sometimes, too drunk to stick to the saddle, one drops to the ground.

Standing in the middle of the avenue, I photographed the oncoming procession of riders, all dressed up to look like South American cowboys and cowgirls. As I pointed my lens at two men, one of them leaning on the shoulder of the other as they rode side by side, all hell broke loose. Before I understood what was happening to me, four men had come galloping to surround and crush me between their horses from all sides while shouting obscenities at me.

“Give me your camera!” one of the men ordered. Only the powerful drug mafia could act so arrogantly, and I knew that I was in deep trouble. But I could not hand my camera to the first person who ordered it. It would make me feel like a worm.

“Why?” I asked, fearing the worst.

“Because you took our picture, idiot. That’s why. Give me your camera!”

“Let’s do it differently,” I said, striving to look as stupid as he said I was. “Give me your address, and I’ll send you prints.” That threw the man into a fit of worse rage.

“Gringo de mierda! Shitty gringo!” he shouted as he spat on me, immediately imitated by the other men, while they tightened their circle against me again.

Two policemen ran to my rescue. They were carrying machine guns.

“What’s going on here?” one of them asked.

“Hijos de putas! Sons of whores!’ the man who had been leaning on an aide and was drunk now shouted at the policemen. “Do you know who I am?”

The policemen looked up at him, lowered their heads, and turned away, leaving me alone to face those bandits.

“Bueno,” I said. “Here is my film.” And I pulled it out of my flat little Leica, which was fitted with a small wide-angle lens, and out of its cassette. I wanted the film to veil because it was the wrong film, and I did not want them to learn it later if they sent it to a photo lab for processing.

The mafia picture was inside my other camera, a bulkier Nikon, on which protruded a long lens. Not that I wanted to keep that picture and run into any any more troubles. But there were many other pictures on that film that I wanted to save. The Leica film had just been changed and had no more than five pictures on it. The man, who did not notice the deception, pulled the film out of my hands and signaled his minions to follow him as he rode away.

The good people who had watched the attack from the sidelines immediately came forward to lament it and make sure that I was all right. One teenager even wanted to give me his own pictures of the event. But I can’t use amateur pictures. Anyway, I was not finished doing my job, though I would be more careful now.

An hour later, as the horse riders stopped constantly to say hello along the way, I found myself ahead of the mafiosos again. As they passed by, their leader, the one who had been leaning on his lieutenant, saw me in the crowd and lifted his poncho to his eyes while staring at me for a long time, but he rode on.

Days later, having got my film back from processing, I showed the picture that had put me in trouble to a Colombian friend.

“Jesus!” he said. This guy could have killed you. He is the head of the North Cauca Valley cartel, the one responsible for all the corpses floating down the Cauca River with vultures riding on their bellies. He must have thought that you worked for the DEA.

The man ended up behind bars, where he got killed eventually. Fortunately, I'm still alive.

http://victorenglebert.com

Benin: Barred From Access To My Car

People ask me sometimes whether I have faced danger among tribal people. To this I respond that it is considerably safer living among them than walking the streets of Allentown, Pennsylvania, where I live, at two in the morning. However, while photographing 35 indigenous peoples in three continents, I have inevitably run into occasional difficulties, as in the following case.

The man stood squarely against the driver's side of my car, a small Renault 4cv, arms and legs spread apart to impede my entrance. Except for a loincloth, he was naked, and his muscles bulged all over the black skin of a medium-height body. His left hand held tightly a big black dog by a chain. We were in the Atakora Mountains, in northwestern Benin, on the west coast of Africa. I was passing through on my way elsewhere, and was returning to my small French car after taking some pictures of the landscape that spread far below an escarpment on one side of the dirt road and of the fairyland miniature clay castles that dotted it.

"Pay!" the man said in French (until 1960, Benin was a French colony, and to this day its official language is French). He was a Somba tribesman, and I didn't need an explanation. The Somba, like many other Africans, demand money for being photographed.

I had not taken his picture, but assumed that one of those picturesque miniature castles, which the Sombas learned to build at a time when they had to defend themselves against the attacks of Moslem Bariba horsemen, belonged to him. I handed him the equivalent of one dollar, but he threw the money down furiously. I gave him five times the amount, but he flung it to the ground with equal scorn.

Considering that, due to the distance, the houses were a small part of my picture, I did not feel that I should have given him anything. But "Paie!" was the only French word he knew, and it was much simpler to part with some money than to try to explain anything to him.

I thought him unreasonable, however, for in 1969 five dollars was a lot of money for a primitive tribesman. And as I now saw other Somba men climbing the mountain in my direction, bows and arrows in hand, I understood that what they all had in mind was modeling fees for every resident. That was impossible, as I wasn't carrying much cash. The only way out was to retake my car by force, and quickly, before the men shot arrows through me.

Because I had boxed in my youth, I might have hoped to win a fist fight, but surely the dog would not watch quietly. What was I to do? I thought fast, evaluating my poor options, and quickly running out of time. And then I thought no longer, and hurled myself against the man. With an eye on the dog, I tried to shove him sideways, but I might as well have tried to move his house. He was immovable. The dog bit through my shoe, leaving a hole in it.

I jumped back and had a better look at the man. He was built like a gorilla, and he stared at me fiercely. I tried to look fierce myself, but it would take more than mean eyes to get out of this absurd situation.

Since I would not win this one by force, I decided to play it by wits. Pretending to suffer greatly from the dog bite, I slowly limped to the car hood, as if to brace myself against it. And then, suddenly nimble again, leaped over it, stormed through the opposite door, scrambled to the wheel, and started the engine.

Unfortunately, if I had left the doors unlocked when marching off to take my picture, I had also left the windows open because of the extreme heat. The dog, which the man immediately released, ran after me around the car, and jumped right through the window. As he landed on me, ready to bite again, I let loose in its ears such a loud and maniacal cry that he kept going right through the opposite window and into his master’s arms.

As I tried to drive away, however, the Somba tried to wrest the wheel from my hands while furiously banging the heavy dog chain on my car's hood. When I started gaining speed, he dropped the chain, grabbed the roof rack with his right hand, and with the left forced the car to turn towards the precipice down which I had photographed his people’s miniature castles. The other Somba, now only fifty paces away, came running faster with great whoops. Everything was happening much more rapidly than I could describe here.

By then, with no control over the car's direction, we were headed down towards the escarpment--I at least, for the Somba could jump off at any time. I had to get rid of the man quickly, and as this was my last option, I punched him in the face harder than I ever punched anyone in the ring. This time he rolled to the ground, and as I righted my car out of its deadly course, nearly ran over him. As I finally drove safely away under a shower of what sounded like insults, I saw in my rear mirror one of the men aim an arrow at the car. It hit it with force, and its metal point left a small hole in it, but I was already driving at full speed.

Four years later, as National Geographic was preparing to do a book on primitive peoples, I proposed to return to the Somba, who are as interesting as they can be aggressive, and to write one of the book’s chapter on them, which I did. This time I first talked to their priestess, and negotiated a price to be freely allowed to take the pictures I wanted. With the Somba as with other tribes, it’s always better to talk first.