Words + Photos: Yasir Albehzad
My curiosity, love for discovery and seeking knowledge has driven me to travel various regions around the world. I’d watched many a film about tropical rain forests and their dangers, including cannibals! Were these stories real? This was the catalyst to documenting my travels around the world.
My latest trip was to a tribal region hidden far away from the eyes of the world in one of Africa’s most isolated corners, where the native Mursi tribe conduct their lives in the most primitive of manners, away from modernism and with a will for life and persistence despite the harsh nature of their surroundings. I’d read of the imprisonment of journalists and news of the death of several people in southern Ethiopia. Political instability was now at hand due to the country’s leader falling to ill-health. I had two weeks to go to the beginning of my journey, but I wouldn’t let that faze me. I put my trust in god, and set out on the journey south to Omo River Valley before things became much worse.
This was the first trip I’d taken a video camera to shoot a YouTube documentary. The video, which is in Arabic, is extremely popular and garnered much respect and attention for the wealth of information it contained about the region and the lifestyle of several tribes there. One may search for it by typing “Ethiopia Tribes Journey” in the search window.
I was immediately in for a surprise upon my arrival into Ethiopia. Addis Ababa lies 7,500ft (2,300m) above sea level, and I was immediately greeted by massive amounts of rainfall and the cold weather. Nevertheless, I immediately set out to explore the sites and relics of one of the oldest civilizations in the world. Ethiopia, is widely considered the site of the emergence of early Homo sapiens in the Middle Paleolithic period of history. It’s worth mentioning that there exist tribes that still live very much in the same way their ancestors did thousands of years ago, including the Mursi tribe.
However, before travelling south to visit the tribe, I decided to dedicate a day to head north to the source of the Blue Nile. The views were certainly awe-inspiring, from the amount of greenery, water and quality of rural roads. Along this journey, I also stopped to pay a visit to a family in one of the small villages in the region and was met with nothing but graceful hospitality. After sipping genuine Ethiopian coffee, the family elder took his time in explaining to me their lifestyle and how they built their mud homes using certain types of plants for support.
The Mursi Tribe – One of the Strangest Peoples on Earth.
Of the many tribes that I have visited until now, the one that has intrigued me the most has been the Mursi tribe and all those residing on the Omo River. Mysterious and intriguing as they were with their peculiar lifestyles, I was looking for answers to my curiosity and a chance to introduce them to my own culture and religion. And so after three days of journeying from tribe to tribe along the river, we now reached the borders of the territory occupied by the Mursis. We hired the services of a guard with an old AK-47 assault rifle, the same type used for protecting residents of the region from wild animals and tribal tensions. We were told that things may turn from good to bad at any moment for any reason. Perhaps one of the reasons for this polar shift was inebriation, as we’d witnessed an armed man drinking very early in the morning!
Our first surprise upon entering the area was seeing a pride of lions out on the hunt! The sight of the king of the jungle with his family in their natural habitat gliding gracefully through their domain towards the river was truly astounding. With the sounds of birds and monkeys in the background, as well as hippos far away in the river, we went on.
The Mursi tribe is a strong and fierce tribe composed of many skilled warriors that other tribes fear. They are a tribe known for their attention to aesthetics and colour, with their women known to don plates of clay or wood on their lower lips. You may be surprised of their small eyes, peculiar scent and the amount of weaponry they carry, but it is fairly normal to see the men of the tribes in this region armed to the teeth. They do, after all, protect their lands and cattle from other tribes, and cattle in particular are quite important for their material and marriage value.
The tribe lives in a protected territory classified as a UNESCO Heritage Site in the Omo River Valley in the south of Ethiopia, close to the Kenyan border. UNESCO protects this area because it contains archaeological evidence of human evolution and development. The region is rather hot compared to the rest of the country and is primarily a savannah upon which the tribe depends for agriculture and feed.
The males of the tribe decorate their bodies with white mud, carving designs into it at certain parts of the body, while the women use dry plants, dead insects and animal parts as headdress – a rather colourfully strange decoration.
The tribesmen from time to time also rub their body with natural scents, similar to the scent of perspiration mixed in with the scent of animal skins. This is said to protect them from germs and insects. One of the most peculiar pieces of jewellery that the women wear is a necklace made of 28 pieces of bones and human fingernails.
Considered nomadic, the Mursis travel to the shores of the Omo during the dry season from September to February, and return to their farm lands and livestock between March and August. The Mursis farm for corn, sorghum, beans and sometimes pumpkins. Livestock are considered an important part of the tribal life, as they are the only item that can be traded for currency in the seasons of drought. These are especially harsh for the Mursis and Southern Ethiopia in general, leading to pressures to turn the region into protected territory to prevent hunting. As a result, tribes in the region engaged in a struggle for the ownership of the largest available agricultural areas, leading to a rise in tribal feuding and the ownership of automatic weapons in the 80s and 90s.
The lip plate
The lip plate is one of the more famous of the tribe’s traditions. When a girl reaches the age of 15, her mother pierces her lip with the help of her kinswomen and a small piece of wood is placed in the piercing. Usually, the front two or four teeth are also removed and, with time, gradually larger pieces of wood or clay are placed until the desired size is reached. Some Mursi women wear ones with a diameter of 15cm. Considered an attractive piece of jewellery, the lip plate attracts the attention of the young men of the tribe, making the girl’s dowry of cattle or livestock larger. A Mursi girl is given the choice of whether or not to pierce her lip, but if she cannot bear the plate, the dowry for marriage is less. Interestingly enough, the presence of these plates have made the Mursi tribe unaware of kissing!
There are several theories as to the reason for the lip plates, the dowry being one of them. This, however, has been said to be untrue as most tribes agree on the dowry for the girl prior to her reaching the age of 15. Another reason has been linked to the slave trade, as it has been theorised that this was a deliberate deformation of the tribes’ women because slaves transported to Yemen at the height of the age of slavery were chosen based on their attractiveness. Other members of the Mursi tribe believe that these plates protect their women from evil spirits.
Another peculiar decoration habit of the Mursis is the deliberate cutting of the stomach or the chest, and insertion of small maggots therein. After closing the cut, the body fights the maggot until it dies and leaves a scar where it lay as a prominent mark on the body.
The Mursi tribe believes that women are the priests of death and there are several rituals that are practised by wedded couples, but I did not see them nor understood them when they explained to me. These matters could be strange to us, but they see them as mercy, including the ritual of the wife poisoning her husband.
Many of the Mursis medical beliefs are based on the environment and nature surrounding them. They, however, believe that illnesses are caused by tensions between the sick person and someone else or due to social issues the person is dealing with. The tribe has its own priests, as well as appointed political leaders. Women are never elected as leaders and there is no electoral or voting system for a leader’s appointment.
Until recently the tribe had no written language. Now, however, writing is a mixture between Latin and Amharic letters.
Unfortunately, many of the tribes in Southern Ethiopia are being eradicated by the government for financial or developmental projects in their regions, and there are drives to erase their cultural identities. These mainly come under the guise of modernisation.
