The Omo Valley, often more precisely called the Lower Omo valley, is a place like no other. Home to a number of tribal communities the variety and diversity of life – truly a melting pot humanity – will blow you away. We think it’s a must-visit if you want to understand Ethiopia and Africa more broadly.
The concentration of experience and variety, often so juxtaposed to your own daily life, forces you to reflect on what it means to be human in today’s world.
The Lower Omo Valley region has been as UNESCO World Heritage Site since the discovery of human remains dating back nearly 2.5 million years.
As you explore the region, you’ll discover fortified hilltop settlements, terraced fields, anthropomorphic grave-markers, and rock engravings dating back 5000 years.
The Omo also has some beautiful landscapes; Nech Sar National Park frames much of the region with mountains, lakes and forests, and harbours 70-plus mammal species, as well as prodigious crocodiles and the endemic Nechisar nightjar – the latter arguably the world’s rarest bird. In our today’s edition we would like to introduce some of them.
The Mursi
The Mursi are one of the better-known tribes of the Omo Valley, with a population of around 8,000. They are described as being a traditionally migratory community, although in reality they only move from the banks of the Omo in the dry season to the grasslands during the rainy season. The Mursi place considerable importance on cattle, the exchange of which marks most relationships, such as marriage, and their diets are also based around cattle.
They speak a Surmic language, which comes from the Nilo-Saharan language family. Their history is kept alive through a rich oral tradition of storytelling.
The most distinctive and recognisable feature of the Mursi women is wearing ornamental clay disks (debhinya) in their bottom lips as symbols of beauty and adulthood. When a girl is in her early teenage years, her bottom lip is cut and kept open with the clay disk until it heals. This cut is then progressively stretched over a series of months by inserting slightly larger clay disks each time, and each individual woman decides how far to stretch their lip.
Another feature of the Mursi tribe is their ceremonial duelling. This is where teams of men within the population fight with 2m wooden poles (donga), which only ends when one man either falls to the floor or has to retreat due to injury. These contests usually take place over several days and are treated extremely seriously. The women also have a duelling ceremony involving iron bracelets (ula) which they strike each other with. It is said that the ula is a symbol of strength, and only the strongest women are worthy of wearing it.
Bodi(Me’en)
The Bodi tribe are neighbours with the Mursi tribe, and the two groups frequently trade. They are pastoralist people who place a lot of importance on cattle and do not typically take part in cultivation practices, preferring instead to trade for maize and other agricultural products at tribal markets. They are nomadic communities, moving to prevent depletion of the land and to find new grazing areas for their cattle. Due to the importance of cattle in their lives, the main diet of the Bodi is also centred on cattle. In particular, they drink their milk mixed with their blood, which they obtain not by killing the animal by opening a wound in their neck.
Bodi men wear fabric skirts, whilst women wear clothes made from goat skin. Both men and women take part in the ritual of scarification, which is used to show the beauty and courage of individuals.
There is an incredibly unique tradition carried out by the Bodi people, called The Holiday of the Fat Men (Ka’el). This is where, each year, men are nominated by their families to take part in a competition whereby they spend six months putting on as much weight as possible by eating fatty food and stopping physical work. On the day of the ceremony each competing man covers himself with clay and ash before walking around a sacred tree, watched by all the members of their communities. Once the fattest man has been chosen a cow is slaughtered and the man is honoured with fame and hero status. In this tribe, fat is considered very attractive and so women also use this ceremony to look for potential husbands.
Hamar
The Hamar tribe live in an area east of the Omo River and have villages in Turmi and Dimeka. Their huts are made up of wood, straw, and mud with sloping roofs.
The Hamar people are best known for their ritual where women blow horns and shout taunts at male members of their family, who then whip them. The women allow themselves to be whipped until they bleed as a symbol of their devotion to the men. One of the most recognisable features of the Hamar women is their hair. They fix their hair in short, dense ringlets and mix in butterfat and red ochre to give it a characteristic dark red colour. Colourful bracelets are also worn around their waists and arms, in addition to shells adorning the edges of their goatskin dresses.
The men of the Hamar tribe are well known for their Bull Jumping ceremony. This is where a young man who wishes to marry must jump on top of a line of 10 to 30 bulls and run along their backs four times, completely nude and without falling, to prove their worth to the family of the woman they intend to marry. The entire ceremony can last up to three days. After this ceremony, the man is able to marry, own cattle, and have children. Following the bull jumping, members of the Hamar tribe will perform the Evangadi (night dancing) and enjoy a feast.
Daasanach
The Daasanach tribe are found in the most southern part of the Omo Valley and have a population of around 20,000. They live at the point where the Omo River delta enters Lake Turkana, in fact their name means ‘People of the Delta’. They are primarily pastoral people, growing maize, beans, and pumpkins at the time of year when the delta floods. During dry seasons they rely on their cattle and goats for milk, meat, and hides. Their homes are dome-shaped, made from branches covered with hides with mats covering the floor, and they have their own unique language.
The lower class of the tribe are called Dies, and are the people who have lost their cattle and hence their livelihoods. Rather than living with the rest of the tribe, they live near Lake Turkana and find food by fishing or hunting crocodiles.
The Daasanach have developed an extremely unique way of making jewellery from items such as SIM cards, old digital watches, and bottle caps. In fact, their headdresses made from bottle caps are particularly recognisable. Women wear pleated cow skin skirts with many bracelets and necklaces, whilst men wear a cloth around their waist.
Omo valley dancing
The Ethiopian Herald 28 October 2021
