BY MULUGETA GUDETA
In the old tourist poster that is now changed into “The Land of Origins,” Ethiopia was portrayed as the only country with 13 months of sunshine. This may sound paradoxical if we look at it from the climatic or calendar perspective as there are only twelve months in a year. However, a deeper more symbolic and more enigmatic look at the meaning of the motto suggested that Ethiopia is indeed a land of myths and mysteries. “The Land of Origins” is even more enigmatic as it suggests that Ethiopia is the land of human origins and everything that goes with human life. It also encompasses within it the assertion of the old motto about Ethiopia being an exceptional land that God has blessed with an additional month of sunshine.
Many countries might have different cultures when it comes to celebrating popular holidays. Yet, Ethiopia is the only country in the world where boys and girls welcome the end of the rainy season and the advent of the New Year with songs, drumbeats, ululations, bouquets of flowers and whatnot. They go around villages and homes to express their best wishes for the New Year. They wish barren women to get children in the New Year. They wish the poor to be wealthy, those who are ill to recover their health in the New Year and farmers to collect bumper harvests. All this shows how Ethiopians have big hearts and big hopes every time a New Year knocks on the doors.
The traditional small groups of singing boys who wield short sticks or batons, (most probably to chase away the menacing dogs in the villages who bark as soon as they hear the songs), who are making the rounds of villages both in towns and the rural areas are boys-only ‘choirs’. It is not a religious choir as we know it elsewhere but a secular exercise in celebration of the end of the rainy season and the advent of the New Year.
These are moments of celebrations and kinds of childhood rites of passage. Almost all Ethiopians living in the Christian highlands as well as in many towns and rural areas in the southern parts of the country as well as in the capital Addis Ababa have gone through these childhood rites of passages. That is why most of them feel nostalgic about their childhood as soon as they hear the first lines of the boys’ songs that go like, “buhe buhe belu,lijoch hulu” ( All of you children say, Buhe buhe!). It is as if that is the only occasion that children stage their most-loved childhood performances. Buhe means in Amharic “something that is open or visible”, an allusion to darkness giving way to light and visibility or a transition from the darkness of the rainy season with its dark clouds and cold to the openness of sunshine in the New Year.
Then, the songs turn to praises of the heads of families that are often described in the best possible flowery language and are considered heroic, generous, handsome, and given many positive attributes as means of making them happy and so that they give them the donations or gifts they expect. The songs and praises usually start around sunset and continue all through the nights.
The boys brave the dogs barking at them, as they are soaked with rainwater and their feet are stuck in mud during their journeys through the narrow village alleys. Then they get tired and decide to share their earnings before they disperse for the night. And that is the moment of great happiness. In the old days, getting a few coins from such arduous efforts was a triumph for the singers. Nowadays, ‘children’ expect wads of bills to fill their pockets or make them happy.
The boys make the rounds of their neighborhoods, singing the praises of the families, or heads of the families, they visit in expectation of gifts such as loaves of bread and preferably money. Money has long replaced bread, particularly in big towns like Addis; and the singers themselves are interested in the coins than in the loaves.
The old tradition of children making the rounds of the villages singing the praises of Buhe is nowadays a rarity in Addis. It is fast overtaken by modernity whatever this world means. Unfortunately, we sometimes understand modernity as being the complete abandonment tradition and embracing foreign culture. If we are ashamed of our exclusive traditions, we must be seriously mistaken because we are ‘exchanging gold with copper’, to use a comparison. To be more exact, we are abandoning our identity to embrace foreign artificiality. As a result of this, the boys-only Buhe singers are mostly absent from the streets and neighborhoods. The practice may be considered something passé or it might have been taken as backward or unworthy of computer-age children who sit down on their beds and play computer games about heroes they have nothing to share with.
Anyway, as the New Year celebrations or Enkutatash are all-girls’ performances, Buhe is exclusively a male domain. So, there is a kind of gender-based natural or traditional ‘division of labor’ as to who is in charge of the end of the rainy season and who is leading the ceremonies for the beginning of New Year festivities.
“Enkutatash, enquan dehena metash!” (Welcome Enkutatash!), is the famous refrain for the girls’ songs. They too make the rounds of homes in their respective neighborhoods while they are less interested in gifts than the boys who are highly focused on making money. Moreover, the traditional choir girls are more shy, polite and sweeter to see and hear than the Buhe boys who are sometimes rough and ill-mannered. it cannot be otherwise in a male-dominated culture where boys start to learn their ‘superior’ roles as early as childhood.
It is swelteringly hot in many parts of the world while heavy rains are falling at this time of the year and the cold is what folks would call “something that bites deep into the bones”. By the way, there are various folk expressions to define cold weather. Some people would say that it is so cold that one would hug with anyone around-not as a matter of romantic longing but just to get warm at any cost.
For us Ethiopians, the rainy season is one of God’s greatest blessings and gifts to this land of many promises. The rain in Ethiopia is not about just overflowing rivers, or greening landscapes, dark clouds and claps of thunders. It is about farming, about food and about life. It is about saying farewell to the old and welcoming the new. It is part of the annual rite of transition from the old to the new, if you like. It is a kind of spiritual journey from the aging to the just-born. It is a symbol of continuity, immortality and renewal.
There are many myths and legends attached to the bounty of the rain in many Ethiopian cultures. For the Oromo people, water represents life, abundance, hope beauty and peace, sharing and love. Most of all, this is a time of thanksgiving to God, the creator of all things on mother Earth, including nature that is reborn at this particular time of the year. That is why people have such a strong attachment to celebrations of water and life as best illustrated in the forthcoming Irreechaa season that falls in the first month of the Ethiopian New Year. This is also a time when beautiful girls and women parade and sing in the streets and villages and the sites where the highly venerated Irreechaa ceremonies take place.
The same can be said about the rain in the northern regions of Ethiopia where water is the source of life as farmers are expecting bumper harvests that would go into celebrating weddings and other religious ceremonies during the coming Ethiopian summer. That is basically why farmers are enduring the cold in expectation of a better life when the crops mature and there is much to eat and drink around for the rest of the year. Rainwater is here also a symbol of coming abundance, happiness and hope. Although the languages are different, there are similarities in the ways that these occasions are celebrated in many cultures.
In the south and in other parts of Ethiopia, the rainy season is a season of hard work and big expectations. It is a time of dreaming and planning for the coming year. what is uppermost on the farmers’ minds is how much grain they would harvest, where they will be selling the grains and what they will do about the money they collect. Most of the proceeds go into meeting family obligations like buying clothes for the children most of all who are going to school as soon as the September sun shines on the horizon. Some of the incomes go to replenishing the food consumption of the family after selling part of the harvested products. Farmers sell grains and buy salt, pepper, sugar, spices and other items.
All the above narration about Buhe rather looks like tale from a distant land or the sound of an old song played on a broken music player. The young generation is turning its backs to this tradition in the name of modernity and embracing video games on smartphones, laptops and other gadgets. Had it been a song, we would wish someone who could remix it with modern tunes and play it to the new generation that is fast bartering its true uniqueness for alien identities.
Maybe one day a smart boy would come up with the idea of playing ‘hoyahoye’ tunes online and sharing it with his peers as a token of celebration and his parents would give gifts consisting of electronic gadgets to children online. For now, let us turn the pages of our childhood memories in praise of the good old days when Buhe was part of our growing up and a rite of passage to adolescence and then to adulthood.
The Ethiopian Herald August 19/2021
