Читать книгу Travels With My Hat: A Lifetime on the Road - Christine Osborne - Страница 5

Mother was a great armchair traveller. Seated on the verandah of our eventual home on Lake Macquarie, she would glance up from reading and say, ‘I don’t need to see the world: the world comes to me through my letterbox.’ A Yorkshire doctor, her grandfather had sailed to Australia in 1841 as Surgeon Superintendent on the 406 tonne barque Georgiana. Settling in the Hunter Valley district of New South Wales, he had sired three daughters and six sons; four of the boys he sent back to the ‘old country’ to study medicine.

A gracious lady more suited to croquet and church fetes, mother should really have been born in the green environment of England, not the sunburnt plains Down Under. I once found a scrap of paper in her recipe book advising of First Aid treatment in the event of a funnel-web spider bite. It explained her anguish every time she did a spot of gardening.

On sifting through the hundreds of letters I wrote home during more than forty years of travels, I can appreciate why she never wished to go further than the High Street where she shopped at the butcher, Mr Burns, and collected her daily copy of the Herald from Cooper’s corner store. Some of my letters in envelopes post-marked from places such as Sana’a and Freetown, even frighten me today. Did I really have such adventures? There was never anything gentle, like an appreciation of the Florentine masters in the Uffizi Gallery, or a description of Royal Kew Gardens in spring. Yes, I religiously visited Rome, Paris and Amsterdam, but my real interests lay east of Suez.

‘I wish you would grow a little more cultivated,’ she used to say, enrolling me at Wenona Ladies College whose boarders were brought up as though they were daughters of an English country estate, wearing black velvet dresses for dinner and once a week, speaking only in French. But deprived of culture in 1940s Australia, mother yearned for something a little highbrow. When I was nine, she took my younger sister Julia and me to a performance of Swan Lake in the Mosman Town Hall. The ballet was a momentous event for Sydney, but when she asked what I thought of it, I’d replied: ‘you could see the men’s bottoms’.

Poor mum certainly tried while I lived in Australia, but she gave up when I sailed away, only to appear on flying visits ever after. However, she was an excellent correspondent herself. At the poste restante in places such as Rawalpindi or Khartoum, I used to wait patiently for the clerk to sort through correspondence from the pigeon-hole under the letter O. I could spot the thin, blue aerogramme long before he did and snatching it up, I would repair to the nearest café to devour her news. Of how the seeds I’d sent out from the Seychelles had grown into a tree, and of feeding bits of chicken to the blue-tongue lizard living under the house. In Dubai, I once miraculously received an envelope in her neat handwriting, addressed simply: Christine Osborne c/- Hotel InterContinental, Trucial States.

Finding myself short of funds in London in July 1975, I reluctantly put on the dreaded nurse’s uniform again and began a day job caring for a bedridden lady living in Chelsea. Mrs Graham’s three-storey Victorian terrace was a short walk from my small rented flat off Sloane Square. My brief was to prepare her breakfast and to tidy her bedroom, and when this was finished, I used to sit on a bathroom chair writing articles about my travels.

After five weeks on the case, I returned home to find a letter in my box. Ethiopian Airlines, one of many companies I’d contacted since coming to England, was organising a press trip to Addis Ababa. The invitation was to mark the first anniversary of the overthrow of His Majesty Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, whose imperial government had been replaced in 1974 by a Revolutionary Military Council known as the Dergue.

‘Addis Ababa,’ said Mrs Graham, sharply cracking the top of her egg, ‘is where Sylvia Pankhurst is buried.’

The cause of Haile Selassie’s death, on 27 August 1975 was given as a cardiac arrest but at that time the whereabouts of his grave remained unknown. Later reports indicated he was likely to have been murdered, and in 1992 witnesses came forward to say his body was buried under a lavatory in the Imperial Palace.⁴

My employer, the Lancaster Gate Nursing Agency, was sympathetic to my request for ten days leave, although accustomed to nurses taking a week off to holiday in Spain, or the Greek islands, they were astonished to learn I was going all the way out to Ethiopia. Just for ten days. A snooty person, Mrs Graham cared not a toss who looked after her, provided her egg was boiled for precisely three-and-a-half minutes. Not a second more. So after writing out instructions for the relief sister, I hung up my uniform behind the bathroom door.

On my first British press trip, I found myself in the company of journalists from distinguished papers such as the Guardian and the Times. Jonathan Dimbleby, who had covered the Wollo famine of the early seventies for the BBC, was on board with a television crew. In fact, converging on the Ethiopian capital were more than seventy journalists from all over the world.

With time before the Revolution Day parade on 13 September, we were split into sightseeing groups. Mine was to visit Dire Dawa, an important market centre and a stop on the Djibouti-Addis Ababa rail route to the Red Sea. In 1930, a young Evelyn Waugh, sent out to report on the coronation of Haile Selassie, found the entire train had been rented out to the Duke of Gloucester in whose party was Wilfred Thesiger, the first British child born in Ethiopia in 1912, when his father was in charge of the British Legation.

According to Thesiger, the coronation embraced all the pomp and ceremony the emperor could muster. However something happened to the fireworks display, when to everyone’s surprise, they all went off at once.⁵

The first serious threat to Haile Selassie’s government had arisen not from domestic issues such as the critical need for land reform, but from Mussolini’s designs on the Horn of Africa. Abyssinia, as it was then known, was one of the few African countries to escape colonisation and in October 1935, declaring intervention on ‘humanitarian’ grounds, the fascist dictator had launched a full-scale invasion against the Armed Forces of Ethiopia of whom many were only equipped with muzzle-loaders and spears. In a war remembered for the use of mustard gas, Haile Selassie—225th emperor in a line dating back 3,000 years—Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Lord of Lords, and God incarnate of Rastafarians—was forced to flee, and in May 1936, Italian troops entering Addis Ababa proclaimed Ethiopia, a part of Africa Orientale Italiana.

The male journalists, railway buffs like many Englishmen, watched the night train from Addis Ababa pull into Dire Dawa before retiring to our hotel pool. It was sublime weather for swimming, but I set off to explore with Dorothy, a tall, black reporter from Uganda, in a horse-trap taxi. Spared aerial attack during the conflict, Dire Dawa had become something of an up-country resort for divisions stationed in the capital and as our garis clip-clopped along its tree-lined streets, we noticed an Italian influence in several candy-coloured houses and cafés advertising caffé latte.

But here similarity stopped. We’d struck market day and Dire Dawa was thronged with peoples: Oromo and Ahmara farmers from the central highlands, Tigrinya from the Tigray region, Saho from the Red Sea coast and Somali pastoralists all buying, selling and exchanging news in a babble of different languages. There were also Afar tribesmen from the Danakil Desert, a harsh region of intense heat and sulphorous springs abutting on north-east Ethiopia.

Scrutinising one man, I decided his wiry hair was similar to my own and I wondered whether it had ever been washed. His traditional garb, a khaki skirt and shirt affair, was complimented by a jile, a vicious looking double-edged dagger, and he wore a bone bracelet on his wrist. Wilfred Thesiger has left a vivid impression of the Afar encountered when he lead an expedition across the depression in 1933.⁶ Our driver, speaking un po’di Italiano and waving his whip to emphasise the point, indicated that most were camel-owning nomads, coming to sell slabs of salt and to purchase fuel.

The Kefira market, spread out on bags beneath the trees, stocked everything the tribesmen needed for survival in the arid wilderness outside Dire Dawa: spearheads, knives, tea, sugar, salt, cloth, corn, ropes and camel-halters. Beautiful, but melancholic, Somali women selling baskets of chillies, moved among the traders with the painful, flat-footed gait characteristic of the circumcised female. Swathed in red, white and yellow cotton robes, they pressed around Dorothy, who was wearing a tight T-shirt with Bob Dylan on the front, flared jeans and platform sole sandals. Black, she was obviously one of them, but why did she look so different? No one could explain. Even our press group knew nothing about Dorothy, though rumours said she was the personal emissary of His Excellency, President for Life, Idi Amin Dada, the ‘Butcher of Africa’.

Ethiopia’s national dish—wat and injera—on our dinner menu explained the chillies. Along with other spices, red chillies are a potent ingredient in this palate-scorching casserole made using goat or lamb. Injera, a spongy, grey pancake affair, is used to grasp morsels of the meat and to mop up its unctuous juices—slurp, slurp.

Dabbing at tears with a table napkin, Dorothy exclaimed: ‘This is even hotter than our own curries.’ And soon the entire press group was weeping.

‘We also like raw meat in this division of Ethiopia,’ said a waiter in a crushed white dinner jacket, smiling broadly as he sliced a steak off a side of beef suspended on a coat-rack behind the buffet table.

I tried it with some berbere sauce, another hot local delicacy, but although I love a well-made steak tartare, I found the taste too primitive, even for my by now well-seasoned palate.

‘If one must eat meat raw,’ said Laurens van der Post, who had tried berbere during a visit to Ethiopia, ‘it is surely best done in this way, for the sauce gives the impression of being hot enough to cook the meat right on your tongue.’⁷

On our second day, we were to visit Harar, a devoutly Muslim town forbidden to infidels until 1887 when Menelik II incorporated it into ‘Greater Ethiopia’.

Travelling by minibus, we left the plains behind for rolling hill country sown under coffee, teff (the cereal used to make injera) and qat, a leaf having mild narcotic properties which is widely chewed throughout the Horn of Africa and in the Yemen. Climbing higher, we passed roadside markets selling cheese, eggs, and cow-dung fuel and in contrast to the half-naked tribesmen of Dire Dawa, people here were wrapped in blankets and wore woollen jumpers against the chill. In one place where we stopped, everyone was busily knitting garments, even teenage boys. Eventually we reached Harar, a town perched on the eastern rim of the Great Rift Valley escarpment and surrounded by a medieval wall holding it together like a surgical corset.

AFAR TRIBESMAN LOADING PACK CAMELS IN DIRE DAWA MARKET, 1975

Many myths relate to the founding of Harar, but it is usually associated with Sheikh Abadir, a holy man from Southern Arabia who settled there in the tenth century. The town subsequently became the spiritual centre for Ethiopia’s Muslims, developing its own language—a mix of Cushite and Semitic—even minting its own coinage. The great wall was built in the sixteenth century by the Emir Ibn Mujahid al-Nur to protect the town from Christian raids. More than 4 metres (13 feet) high, its five gates were bolted at night, locking in the Hararis, and equally keeping out wild animals.

‘Jugol, the old walled town, is the sacred heart of Harar,’ announced Mr Abdulwasi, our local Harari guide, in the Oxford accent affected by many foreigners when speaking English.

We trailed along behind his dapper figure wearing a green woollen hat and a three button, centre vent tweed suit. Harar is 1,885 metres (6,184 feet) above sea level, and several women who hurried past wore leather leggings against the cold. The cobbled lanes lined with squat stone and clay houses and the shops filled with silversmiths, weavers and leather-makers, bestowed a living museum feel, rather like the medieval town of Fez in Morocco. Everywhere were glimpses of local life, of coffee-sellers, sugarcane grinders and women selling bundles of qat, freshly plucked on the misty mountain terraces.

‘A carpet draped over the entrance to a house indicates a daughter has reached a marriageable age,’ said Mr Abdulwasi as we peeped into the courtyards of buildings likely hundreds of years old.

Mr Abdulwasi said his family had lived in Harar for six generations. One of five children of a wealthy coffee merchant, his paternal grandfather had been a bookbinder who specialised in ornate copies of the Qur’an. A devout Muslim, he used to perform the hajj pilgrimage to the holy shrines in Mecca every three years, travelling across the dry plateaus of Christian Ethiopia to Djibouti, where he caught a dhow to Saudi Arabia.

‘His boat was lying off Jeddah on the terrible night a pilgrim ship from Karachi caught fire. Pakistani hajjis cooking on little stoves were blamed. Leaping overboard to escape, most drowned or were eaten by sharks. Grandfather told us before they jumped, they cried Allahu Akbar—God is great’—said Mr Abdulwasi gravely.

Sir Richard Francis Burton, the celebrated British explorer was the first European to visit Harar in 1855, but its most celebrated resident was Arthur Rimbaud, the rebellious child of nineteenth century French poetry. Rimbaud who has been described as both ‘a brat and a genius’, was certainly one of those individuals in the manner of Henri de Monfreid, Lady Hester Stanhope, or even Dame Freya Stark, who only discover their true focus in life through travel and adventure.

‘Monsieur Rambo,’ said Mr. Abdulwasi, pronouncing his name very carefully, ‘spent eight years in Harar, becoming a personal friend of the governor, Ras Makonnen, the father of our future Emperor.’⁸ He stopped outside a house, different to others being a double-storey timber affair, with an enclosed upstairs verandah.

‘This was Monsieur Rambo’s house,’ he said, moving back for us to admire the building. ‘Once owned by the Egyptian conqueror of Harar— hence its name, House of the Pasha—it was subsequently rented by the French traders, Bardey et Cie in Aden, for their new agent in Africa.’

By the age of nineteen, Rimbaud had ceased to write poetry, but he continued to correspond with his mother in Charleville, a town near the Belgium border. Writing in November 1889, he said: ‘... The company has founded an agency in Harar, a region that you’ll find in south-east of Abyssinia. We’ll export coffee, hides, gum and so on ...’⁹

As well as becoming an expert on bunna, the Amharic name for coffee, Rimbaud made several excursions into the unexplored hinterland. But while the ‘grand house’ where he lived with a beautiful Abyssinian woman provided a welcome base, living conditions in Harar were primitive. His letters mentioned a lack of water, lepers, beggars and the constant odour of human excrement. Following an expedition to the Red Sea in 1887, he described the town as a ‘cesspit’. With no sanitary arrangements, the good citizens of Harar used to throw their rubbish—the dead included—over the walls to attendant hyenas.

And hyena-feeding was the final bizarre attraction of our own quick visit.

‘Ask not what started the custom,’ said Mr Abdulwasi staring up at the sky. ‘Some say it began during a famine, when people put out durra porridge to stop hyenas attacking their livestock. But no one really knows. Lost in the mists of time,’ he murmured.

The ‘hyena man’ was waiting for us outside the Erer Gate where Sir Richard Burton had entered Harar, disguised as an Arab merchant. A farmer by day, at night he transmogrified into the ‘hyena man’, staging a show for anyone willing to pay for this rustic entertainment.

When we were assembled, the ‘hyena man’ knelt down, and waving a chunk of meat, he uttered a chilling canine-like call. At first there was no response, but then I discerned four or five animals skulking in the shadows.

‘Batu!’—come and eat, he called.

Growling the scavengers jostled each other like footballers in a scrum. Then one dashed out and snatching the meat, it loped off with that peculiar canter of the Hyaenidae family. When John Gritten of the Morning Star boldly stepped up to repeat this feat, the other men insisted that I follow suit. Barely forty-eight hours had passed since I was preparing Mrs Graham’s breakfast: now I was about to feed Africa’s second largest predator. Picking up a lump of offal, I stretched out my arm as far as it would go.

‘Batu! Batu! ’ cried the ‘hyena-man’ again. But the pack stayed back. What’s the matter? I thought. Don’t they like the colour of my nail polish?

‘Batu,’ he called once more and sniffing the air, a big spotted animal, took a few steps towards me. Head lowered, it edged closer. It was now so near I could smell a putrid, feral odour and its jet-black eyes reminded me of a shark encounter off New Caledonia. Curling back its lips over a fearful set of teeth, it grabbed the meat and made off, leaving me shaking. None of the men said ‘well done’, but it seemed I had passed a test.

‘Are you crazy?’ scolded Dorothy on the bus back to Dire Dawa. ‘Hyenas can slink into a hut at night and bite the face off a sleeping person.’

The aircraft taking us back to Addis Ababa next morning arrived three hours late, and missing the official press conference highlighting the achievements of the revolution, we were whisked by police escort to the centre of the parade, watched by 100,000 people.

The three strongmen of the eighty member Dergue Revolutionary Council were seated on a platform. In the centre was Chairman Brigadier General Teferi Bente; on his left, the second-in-command, Lieutenant Colonel Atnafu Abate; and on his right, the soon-to-be President of Ethiopia, Major General Mengistu Haile Mariam. Seated beside these atheists and looking very uncomfortable, was white-haired Bishop Abuna Tewofilos, Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church who would be executed by the Dergue, in May 1976. Next to him, looking terrified, were three young women waiting to release white doves of peace.

I was standing beside this tense little group as wave after wave of people passed: Wollega blowing long reed pipes; Gambela shaking medieval shields; Arussi tossing lion’s mane headdresses; Gurage from the Awash area; dark-skinned Berta and Nilo-Saharan Anuak from the southwest river divisions; Agaw, Irob and scores of other prancing tribesmen who had been trucked in to help celebrate twelve months of dramatic revolutionary change.

However, the parade was not a happy one. Despite the soldiers guarding the route, also marching were unemployed graduate students bravely waving signs reading: ‘WE NEED WORK’ and ‘WE NEED BREAD’. Other people called out for civilian rule and the release of prisoners, among them the twelve Ethiopian princesses¹⁰ detained by the Dergue. When the float from the reviled Ministry of Information drew level with the generals, some 50,000 sat down in protest against the regime we were invited to publicise.

FRONT MEN OF THE DERGUE MENGISTU (L) AND BENTE, 13 SEPTEMBER 1975

Under the late emperor, all fertile land in Ethiopia was owned by a feudal landlord, living in affluence and indifferent to the hardship of the peasant-farmers who were obliged to surrender half their harvest to him. But while the revolution may have been well intentioned, it had turned society upside down, and Mengistu’s own ruthless policies were accelerating desertification and starvation.

The situation we found was on the cusp. Studying the grim features of Teferi Bente¹¹, I decided he wore the look of a doomed man, an expression to become familiar on my later travels in Iraq. As Soviet MiG-23 fighter aircraft swept low overhead, I felt apprehensive and with my colleagues nowhere in sight, I shouldered my camera bag and found my own way back to the Ghion Hotel.

When the crowds had dispersed, I slipped out to explore Addis Ababa, a city of small disconnected neighbourhoods, dotted across the foothills of the Entoto Mountains, 2,400 metres (7,874 feet) above sea level. Most buildings were corrugated iron shacks standing side by side with round, thatched-roof Ethiopian tukuls (huts). There were few cars and no traffic lights; in one place, I crossed the road among a herd of goats.

Then suddenly I saw gum trees. Ethiopia’s previous capitals had been abandoned when the supply of wood used for cooking and heating, became exhausted. Addis Ababa had faced a similar fate until the introduction of the rapid-growing Eucalyptus globulus—Australia’s gift to the world. Picking some leaves, I crumbled them between my fingers, releasing a haunting citronella fragrance reminding me of home.

Unlike today’s tourists, armed with an abundance of maps, apps and advice from Trip Advisor on where to eat, sleep and locate a cyber café, in 1975 there were no such things. The solution was to find a companion who could speak some English and near the Ghion Hotel, I met Gebre, an eighteen-year-old Christian student. A tall, sad-faced youth, he said he was studying law until the Dergue had closed the university and dispatched its 50,000 students into the countryside to educate the illiterate peasantry.

‘We needed change, but no one expected a Phoenix-like Ethiopia to arise without more bloodshed. It’s like awakening to a river in the morning that will change its course many times by the afternoon,’ said Gebre, fingering a silver cross below a rather pronounced Adam’s apple.

Our first stop was the Holy Trinity Cathedral where Sylvia Pankhurst, daughter of the famous suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, a friend and adviser to Haile Selassie, was buried in 1961. Just as Mrs Graham had said. From here we took a taxi to visit St George’s Cathedral built in 1896 to commemorate Ethiopia’s celebrated victory over Italian troops at the Battle of Adwa. The Dergue had disestablished the Ethiopian Orthodox religion, and state security forces had slaughtered hundreds of Christians on its steps, but today it was open. To impress the visiting journalists I decided.

‘Our leading artist, Afewerk Tekle, designed the stained glass windows,’ said Gebre kneeling for a moment of prayer. ‘Art in Ethiopia is strongly influenced by faith. You will see this in the mercato, but keep your bag closed. It is full of thieves. They’re not bad, just hungry.’

I’ve seen scores of markets in Africa: the ‘King Jimmy’ market in Freetown while on a commission to photograph Siaka Stevens, then president of Sierra Leone, Kumasi market in the Ashanti region of Ghana, the Sandaga market in Dakar, Senegal (which is certainly full of thieves), Dar-es-Salaam, Lusaka, Harare (during good times in Zimbabwe) and Omdurman filled with bean gourds, ivory and cheetah skin handbags, but the enormous mercato in Addis Ababa was the biggest of all. Literally hundreds of stalls and small shops announced by their smells: spices, incense, skins, wood smoke and the rancid odour of the butter market, where Gurague women, wrapped in white robes, squeezed phallic symbols out of greasy, yellow mounds. Asked the significance of this erotic butter sculpture, they said they didn’t know, but offered to anoint my head with it for a few birr (the unit of currency in Ethiopia).

‘It’s good for the brains,’ they explained, but I declined, disappointing Gebre who said he buttered his own head every morning.

The afternoon slipped by as I sifted through ethnic crafts: baskets for carrying injera, charcoal and qat, shields, textiles, musical instruments, carvings and carpets. Some traders specialised in equine equipment— saddles, bridles and plumes—a horse being the only means of transport in the rugged highlands.

Elsewhere, merchants seated on three-legged stools were selling icons and religious scrolls. The theme of many paintings—an Ethiopian version of The Last Supper—depicted Haile Selassie as Jesus Christ, surrounded by the twelve disciples wearing vivid orange and green robes. Other shops sold religious artefacts cast from the Maria Theresa dollar minted in late eighteenth century Austria and used as unofficial currency in the Horn of Africa where silversmiths found its silver content perfect for making jewellery. In one shop we visited, an elderly jeweller with a prominent nose brought out a cardboard box containing hundreds of silver crosses.

‘They are cast by the cire perdu lost wax method,’ he told me. ‘No two are the same.’ He held up a delicate filigree Gojjam cross, but I was more struck by his nose. Was he a member of the ancient Beta Israelite community of Ethiopia?

‘Yes,’ he said, as if reading my mind. ‘My name is Rada, and our family comes from Gondar. We are many generations of silversmiths, but times are bad.’ He took a quick look at Gebre.

‘I’m Christian,’ said Gebre. ‘You can see my cross.’

‘Our people are being murdered by the Dergue,’ continued Rada. ‘The Beta Jews have lived in Ethiopia since the time of the Book, but they are killing us.’ He put a finger to his lips. ‘There are only three of us left in the mercato.’

Conversation ceased as I sifted through round Solomonic crosses, hinged Lalibela crosses, small hand crosses, the huge processional crosses carried by Orthodox priests at tingkat, the Ethiopian epiphany, and finely wrought pectoral crosses such as Gebre wore. Another box held silver jewellery including lion and leopard claws incorporated into pendants, brooches, and other accoutrements to dress. Like the Bedouin in the Middle East, an Ethiopian woman’s jewellery, is her personal walking wealth.

Born in October, I suffer the irritating Libran trait of indecision. It may be over something simple, such as whether to paint my nails scarlet or pink, or a complex issue that actually causes personal anguish. Confronted by all Rada’s jewellery, after much deliberation I finally bought a silver choker, strung with miniature phalluses whose significance would become apparent a few days later.

Only the political correspondents were invited to the evening banquet in the old Imperial Palace. Back at the hotel, I added my name to the list of journalists interested to visit the famine belt, and next morning, escorted by Ato Shimalis—Ethiopia’s Minister for Relief—we took off for Gode in a chartered DC-3.

Gode lies in the Ogaden, a vast swathe of south-east Ethiopia bordered by Kenya and Djibouti, and sharing a historically disputed frontier with Somalia. A semi-desert region, it supports only scraggy shrubs and trees, but the Webi Shebelle River crosses it before flowing into the Indian Ocean, between Mogadishu and Mombasa, more than 1,000 kilometres (621 miles) from its source in the Ethiopian highlands.

FAMINE VICTIMS IN THE OGADEN, SEPTEMBER 1975

‘We’ve had no response to our appeal for medical teams,’ Shimalis told us in the Gode refugee camp where one skinny doctor, two tired nurses and three overworked dressers, were attempting to care for 12,000 starving famine victims.

‘She will die,’ murmured the doctor of a wasted mite whose arms were no thicker than my fingers. ‘There have to be mass graves before anyone wants to help, and once you find fresh graves, we have lost our battle against the drought.’ He sighed deeply.

Times are never normal, or good in this godforsaken corner of Africa, where Somali nomads roam in a perpetual search for sustenance, for themselves and their herds.

‘They are a primitive people who eat food on the hoof, using a special curved knife to slice steaks off the living animal, then packing the wound with mud,’ said Shimalis.

Hammered by the sun and buffeted by sand-laden winds, the Ogaden had not received a drop of rain in five years. Wherever I looked, bleached bones punctured the landscape. Even the hardy camel herds were dying.

Walking away from my colleagues, I came upon a group moaning softly around a dried-up water hole. One was a mother with twins whose hump had shrunk to a flab of skin. She salivated, rolling her tongue, as they butted her udder in frustration. While I watched, she sank to her knees and rested her chin on the sand. A buzzard took off from a twisted acacia, then another, and looking up, I saw other scavengers circling in the washed-out sky. I had encountered many unpleasant situations on my travels, but conditions in Gode made me weep.

And this was not the first famine in Ethiopia. When the government concealed the Wollo disaster, an estimated 100,000 people perished and it was only when Dimbleby and his team were able to make The Unknown Famine in 1973, that the extent of the calamity was revealed. Ian Studdard, the film’s director, told us of a sumptuous banquet served by the governor of Wollo, a province in north-east Ethiopia, as people outside the gate were dropping from starvation.

The situation we found in Gode was equally catastrophic. Withered by hunger and racked by disease, the proud nomads had staggered into the relief camp from all over the Ogaden: thousands of refugees, needing thousands of tonnes of high-protein food to survive.

‘There’s enough for each person to have one bowl of mealy mix a day, but it’s a terribly monotonous diet,’ said Abdi Nuir, a gaunt-faced worker for World Vision who was clearly in need of a good meal himself. Showing me into a hot, corrugated-iron shed, he pointed out the worst cases lying on palm mats and feebly striking at flies.

‘We were expecting blankets with the last aid, but none arrived. As you can see, the children don’t have any clothes and at night the desert is freezing.’

Naked, dusty children with Martian-like heads on skeletal frames lolled around as we walked through the camp. Their bellies were distended by kwashiorkor, the result of long-term protein deficiency and gastrointestinal disorders. All had hacking coughs, almost certainly caused by tuberculosis, and their eyes were clogged with mucus feasted on by flies.

Gode’s only fortune was the nearby Webi Shebbelle river providing water, but at least one child, or a woman filling her water jar, fell victim to crocodiles each month.

Abdi wiped his face with his sleeve. ‘We used to have an American Peace Corps boy helping us, but he went swimming one afternoon, and in two chops he was gone.’

Wherever we went, the refugees—obviously briefed on our visit—burst into applause, making me cringe with embarrassment. Of mainly Muslim persuasion, in normal circumstances they would have refused to let me take their photograph, but dignity had vanished in their new dependence. As our plane took off, the pilot made a low sweep over the tin shed and a few of the stronger children chased after its shadow.

Warder, the second camp, was a wretched settlement of stick-and-bag huts in the bleeding heart of the Ogaden. Its 8,000 inmates were receiving food and sighting the men among us, women made a desperate attempt at modesty, biting a corner of their ragged cotton robes to drag across their emaciated bodies. Their naked children, each clutching a tin, sat in a circle around a pot of high-protein gruel cooking over a fire.

‘It takes more than three hours to feed everyone. When they finish, the round starts again, yet the death rate is still five or six a day,’ said Shimalis, who had four healthy children of his own.

The Grim Reaper was everywhere in Warder. There was no river, the wells were almost dry and non-Amharic-speaking Somali refugees compounded the situation. Only a dozen inmates of this terrible place spoke both languages. One, a thirteen-year-old boy called Korani, followed me about as I endeavoured to protect my camera equipment from the dust.

As in Gode, the weakest cases lay coughing on bags in a corrugated-iron shed. In a corner, a mournful boy sat alone, his long thin limbs folded under him like stork’s legs.

‘Is his third time in camp,’ Korani told one of the dressers. ‘All family dead. He go back to desert, but nothing to eat. Not even ant.’

‘Hungry,’ said a tiny child tugging at my jacket pockets, which I’d filled with sweets from the plane. My intentions had been kind, but with thousands of watching eyes, I dared not hand out a single one.

‘The kids are dizzy,’ emphasised the dresser. ‘With no clothes and no playthings, all they do is sleep. Sure we need food and medicine, but ask your people to send us some balls to play with before they die from boredom.’

Saving the nomads from death was one thing. It was equally important to re-settle them somewhere sustainable, and at Gen, the last stop on our visit, two hundred families who were fit enough to make a start, welcomed us with beaming smiles.

The government had allocated each family a plot on which to grow maize and 100 hectares (247 acres) were under cultivation. We watched men digging irrigation gutters off the Webi Shebelle, and famine widows who had formed women’s cooperatives, were busily weeding the fields. Once peripatetic herdsmen who walked great distances in search of a blade of grass, they were overjoyed by the new green shoots.

‘Why doesn’t it grow more quickly?’ asked one man squatting down and cupping his dusty hands around a tiny bud. Shimalis gently explained that maize needs time to ripen and that providing he never forgot to water it, it would likely yield two harvests a year.

On our way back to the airstrip, the driver lost his way and we spent two hours driving in circles through the sandy wadis. We finally sighted the plane sitting like a giant pigeon on the desert runway. However, fifteen minutes into the flight, the pilot announced we wouldn’t make it back to Addis Ababa before nightfall. Bole International Airport had no night-landing facilities so we banked east and headed for the nearest point of human contact. My heart sank—goddamned Gode.

The army quickly assumed responsibility for our unexpected return. They provided us with refreshments and a soldier was sent out to slaughter a goat. Some time after ten, a cook brought out a platter of wat and injera but in spite of my hunger, I could not eat. It wasn’t its toughness, but the thought of the truly hungry, out in the darkness.

We were four women: from the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, an irritable Frenchwoman from Le Nouvel Observateur and me, the only photographer in the group. We were to sleep on the veranda of one of the late emperor’s houses.

‘One of the many he never used,’ said Shimalis bitterly.

Observing protocol, the soldiers placed our stretchers around a corner, out of sight of the men, but the French woman scornfully decamped and set up her bed between the Telegraph and the Times. And watching me clean my teeth under a garden tap, she let fly a mocking remark: ‘Est-ce que tu portes egalement ta robe de chambre? ’—are you also going to wear a dressing-gown?

I slept fitfully under a cotton blanket and was up at dawn; there was frost on the ground and I learnt that three stiff little bodies had been discovered by dressers on their morning round of the camp.

After thanking the commander of Gode for his hospitality, we boarded our plane and returned to Addis Ababa without further incident. The other press joined connecting flights to various destinations, leaving me with a French reporter, Jean-Emile. Apparently we both had reservations on Tuesday’s Ethiopian Airlines flight to Athens, where I planned to spend a few days en route to London. But before then, I had a mission that would take me deep into the steaming heart of equatorial Africa.

In Australia, I’d been travel writer for the women’s magazine CLEO and on learning of my trip to Ethiopia, its editor Ita Buttrose, had commissioned an article on a child adopted by the magazine through Foster Parents Plan. Conrad Hilton, Julie Andrews and the Boston Symphony Orchestra were some of the famous adoptive parents of the charity, founded in 1937 to provide support for families with needy children in various parts of the world. CLEO was fostering Sisay Bonke, a four-year-old boy. My only information was that he lived in Arba Minch, a town in the remote southwest corner of Ethiopia.

At FPP headquarters in Addis Ababa, I learnt that Arba Minch lay on a ridge of the Rift Valley escarpment at a height of 2,000 metres (6,562 feet). Peasant-farmers, the people cultivated coffee and maize, but life had deteriorated under the new Marxist government and as in other parts of Ethiopia, there was increasing dissent.

A message was dispatched to Lloyd Fineberg, the regional director of FPP in Arba Minch, telling him to expect me on the morning flight. So barely twenty-four hours out of the bone-dry Ogaden, I was flying south, to the wettest part of Ethiopia, the only foreigner on a converted military transport aircraft whose passengers included two goats sliding up and down on the metal floor between our uncomfortable webbing seats.

‘Do goats ride free?’ I asked a man holding a briefcase on his knee who looked like my idea of an Ethiopian civil servant.

‘This is nothing.’ He fingered his collar. ‘I once flew down with a flock of sheep.’

Wearing only a cotton shirt and cargo trousers, I froze as wind whistled through gaps in the perspex windows, but surprisingly for Africa, our plans worked and Fineberg, a fresh-faced, thirty-two year old American, was waiting at the tiny airport.

‘It’s great of you to come all this way to meet Sisay.’ He gave me a warm handshake and a Colgate smile.

‘I hope Sisay will like the pens,’ I said, pulling out a box of coloured biros from my backpack.

‘He’ll love them. Most of the people here are illiterate, but with funding from CLEO, he’ll be able to attend the new primary school,’ he grinned.

‘Well, this is Arba Minch,’ he said as we bumped into a higgledy-piggledy settlement of wooden stalls and corrugated iron shops where flame trees on either side of the road were in flower. Wandering about while Fineberg bought petrol, I saw there was little for sale; corncobs, a few onions and bananas, cotton reels, safety pins and combs and although I was a new white face, no one paid me any attention. People here had the dazed look of the hungry, but not quite starving.

The Bonke family lived in Siskela, a small village outside Arba Minch. Mr Bonke was at work when we arrived, but Beru, the FPP interpreter, introduced me to his wife, Marmite. I wondered about her name. I’d encountered a Rothman and a Culture in Africa, but never anyone named after the dark-brown vegetarian spread.

Marmite was thrilled with the beaded bag I’d brought as a gift and, gripping my hands, she bowed almost to the ground. Sisay was hiding behind her skirts but called by Beru, he emerged shyly, eyes focused on his toes, and extended a grubby hand. He was a serious little fellow missing two front teeth. His head was shaved, except for a woollen topknot, and his belly, distended by worms, strained against a pair of grey shorts held up by string braces. Despite the heat, he was wearing a green woollen jumper bought out of sponsorship money received from CLEO.

SISAY BONKE, THE CHILD SPONSORED BY CLEO MAGAZINE 1975

‘He won’t take it off,’ said Marmite introducing her other children, eight-year-old Shyate and her runny-nosed younger brothers, Tamene and Berahun. In the family tukul, she pointed to another child who lay crying on a burlap mat.

‘I had him here.’ Picking him up, she offered a breast. ‘There is an old village woman who helps, but five is enough. I don’t want any more.’

‘Has she heard of birth control?’ I asked Beru.

‘My neighbours speak of something, but we don’t know what it is, or where to find it,’ she told him.

A cane partition in the tukul divided the cooking, living and sleeping areas. Marmite’s utensils were arranged neatly along a log: a large enamel bowl, a small enamel plate, three glasses, a wooden spoon and a chipped cup and saucer. Bean gourds, corncobs and a bag for carrying injera hung from the beams and two earthenware jars stood against the wall—fetching water was also a woman’s chore.

Asked what they ate, Marmite whispered that they’d never eaten wat.

‘They’ve never eaten meat,’ explained Beru, who was wearing a navy suit and tie for the occasion. ‘And they’ve never drunk tea or coffee. Even milk is a luxury they can’t afford.’

Before coming to Ethiopia, I’d planned on taking the Bonke family out to dinner, but while well-meant, the idea was preposterous. There was nowhere to eat in Arba Minch and instead, the Bonkes invited me to share their supper, and while concerned as to whether I would enjoy the experience, Fineberg finally left me with Beru.

Helped by Sisay and Shyate, at sunset Marmite rounded up their animals and lit a rusty hurricane lamp. At seven o’clock, Mr Bonke returned from a day building roads in Gemu Gofu province of which Arba Minch was the regional town.

‘Ten hours a day, six days a week for thirty dollars a month,’ he said wearily. ‘Without help from this CLEO person, I don’t know how we’d manage.’

We were now fifteen squeezed inside the tukul since Bonke’s seven goats—including a rank-smelling, billygoat standing beside me—had staked out places for the night. And tonight, just as they did yesterday and would do so again tomorrow, the Bonke family was eating corn.

Marmite uncovered a bowl of eight uncooked patties she had mashed with water and squeezed into lumps, with haleko leaves—a sort of spinach—draped across them. The thought that mother would be horrified to learn I was eating uncooked food mixed with river-water crossed my mind. Fiddling with my portion, I managed to swallow a mouthful, or two. Its taste was negligible and the texture was like plasticine, but I was glad to have eaten a little so as not to offend this poor Ethiopian family.

‘Is there something they might like to drink?’ I asked Beru, who was seated next to Mr Bonke on the only bed.

‘People here drink tella, a fermented corn beer,’ he replied. ‘I know Bonke loves it, but they’ve only had it twice in their lives.’

‘Tonight’s the night,’ I said, giving Sisay some coins to run and fetch some tella from a neighbour.

Bonke’s eyes lit up when he returned with a ketchup bottle filled with amber fluid. A glass was poured for me, but now obsessed with thoughts of guinea worm and dysentery, I declined as politely as was possible in the circumstances.

‘With one dollar I could start a small tella business and make a profit of two dollars a week,’ said Marmite, staring dreamily into the fire.

As contented snorts came from the animals, I stood up, a good head taller than both Beru and Bonke, and pressing the equivalent of a dollar in Marmite’s hand, I wished her luck with her enterprise.

‘She asks may she keep the plastic bags you’ve brought their presents in. They will be great for carrying her corn,’ said Beru courteously.

Back at Arba Minch’s timeworn hotel, I pictured Mrs Bonke walking about Siskela with Sainsburys¹² carry bags. But I could not sleep. Stomach cramps sent me scurrying to the lavatory where I remained racked by diarrhoea and attacked by mosquitoes as big as bumblebees zooming in through a broken window. Back to bed for a bit. Then up again. Up. Down. All night long, but though utterly drained, next morning I accompanied Fineberg back to thank Marmite for her hospitality. She was at the river fetching water and having loaded her heavy jars into the Land Rover, we drove her back to the tukul.

‘Thank you,’ she smiled. ‘It has saved my back and I’ve never ridden in one of these things before.’

‘Goodbye Sisay,’ I told the little boy. ‘I hope you’ll do well at school.’

‘I’m not excited,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘But I think I would like to go.’ And he ran off surrounded by leaping, skipping children.

I had given the Bonke family powdered milk, rice and biscuits, but as in the Ogaden, I was troubled at not having enough for their neighbours. And everything considered, I even questioned the wisdom of raising one family’s living standards in the unstable political climate of Ethiopia.

Sure enough, between 1975 and 1991, the general situation deteriorated under the violent leadership of Mengistu who mounted a ‘Red Terror’ campaign against all opponents of his wretched regime.

‘Death to the counter-revolutionaries,’ he cried in 1976, and standing in the centre of Addis Ababa, he’d smashed bottles filled with pig blood to demonstrate the fate awaiting them. Students refusing to obey government orders were arrested, given a gun and sent to the front-line battle zone with Eritrea. State security forces tortured anyone suspected of belonging to opposition movements and thousands of ‘dissident’ peasants were killed, at which point CLEO lost contact with Master Sisay Bonke.

After leaving Siskela, Fineberg invited me for drinks with Father John Gannon, an Irish priest who’d spent twenty-five years in Africa and whose parish was now in Arba Minch. A great raconteur, the father was quick to tell me about a local tribe, the Gujis (pronounced just like the iconic Italian fashion label).

‘I recently took an Irish engineer out to survey possible dam sites,’ he said as we sat watching the sunset on his back verandah. ‘We were deep inside Guji Oromo territory when I mentioned their custom of presentin’ a severed penis to the bride on their wedding night. He got quite upset, so he did, but don’t worry Paddy, I told him. If the Gujis attack us, I’ll offer me own, seeing I sort of don’t need it like.’ Slapping his knee and roaring with laughter, he got up and poured us another belt of whisky as the significance of the necklace from Rada’s jewellery shop dawned on me.

‘But it seems so peaceful here Father, and your garden is lovely.’ I inhaled the intoxicating scent of night jasmine.

‘Ai. During the dry season, we sit out here playing the Messiah and watching bushfires. Now don’t you be taking them Gujis lightly.’ He looked sternly at Lloyd.

‘You’re takin’ our friend here to the Neche Reserve. Well, that’s where we saw them. You ask Sister Shelagh now. She’ll be after tellin’ you. She and another of the good sisters went to a Guji village to inspect a clinic. Suspended on six trees were four legs, two torsos and three heads. Work that out. And only last week we found a young lad in the parish who had bled to death in the garden. Turnin’ him over we found he was missin’ his member. The Norwegian doctor here has treated several men who have had their penises amputated by the Gujis. Christine’s all right, Lloyd, but you’d better watch out. Ho! Ho!’

There are moments in travel to far-away places when the mind cannot keep pace with the physical flight—it may find itself in a body seated somewhere foreign, and while not exactly an out-of-body experience, the two are somehow separate. This was how I felt on hearing Father Gannon’s stories, but I’d seen so much since leaving London it was no surprise.

After a second night fighting Arba Minch mosquitoes, I was ready to leave long before Fineberg and a companion came to collect me. The plan was to do some crocodile-spotting on Lake Chamo and to visit the adjacent Nechisar Plains set on a plateau overlooking the Rift Valley.

‘You’re not driving through Guji territory are you?’asked Fineberg’s friend, a tall, lean Swedish pilot, known as Captain Karlsson.

‘There shouldn’t be any Gujis this far north,’ said Fineberg, strapping a canvas water-bag onto the bumper bar of the Land Rover.

Karlsson belonged to a church relief team making food drops to starving nomads in this remote corner of Ethiopia, abutting on the Kenyan border.

‘Around here it’s not so difficult,’ he told us on the way to the lake. ‘But elsewhere rivers and villages on our old maps can be as much as 15 kilometres (9 miles) off course and when this happens, without radio contact, we fly entirely by the seat of our pants.’

‘When we’re searching for a settlement, our routine is to pick a landmark, go left, drift for thirty minutes, then go north. Sometimes we land near a settlement only to find everyone has left because of the tsetse fly. It also hap-pens, like your own experience in the Ogaden, that we reach a place just on dusk. These bush strips are so short that in this event, we just cross our fingers and go down as fast as possible.’ He ran a hand through his blond crew cut.

‘Occasionally we also find ourselves carrying a patient or two. One man had been hit in the brain with an axe. Another, working for the Swedish mission, had his genitals hacked off, but survived a week lying out in the bush. We later heard he’d married and got his brother to fertilise his wife who had three children by him.’

The smaller of two Rift Valley lakes in South Omo, Lake Chamo is fed by a jungle-lined channel pouring into it from the higher elevation of Lake Abaya. Fineberg had organised a boat, but with room only for two, Karlsson agreed to wait with the Land Rover.

As I was about to step on board, a man popped out of the bush and unfurled a python skin twice as long as the jetty.

‘Souvenir, gimme twenty dollars,’ he said and I noticed tribal scars, like crossed bananas, on his chest.

Powered by an old outboard, we set off, travelling some way along the lakeshore before veering into a reed-lined channel where the propeller churned up clouds of insects. Wearing only a T-shirt and swimming costume, I wished I’d brought a jacket, but the thought had not occurred to me in the oppressive heat.

As we chugged further along the narrow waterway, the boatman pointed to the carcass of an enormous Nile perch washing among the reeds. ‘Dem grow much bigger dan dat. Bigger dan dis boat,’ he grinned. ‘Fishing easy here.’

To demonstrate, he swatted a dragonfly with his shoe, threaded it on a hook, and immediately pulled up a struggling tilapia. Then he put a finger to his lips, although it was him doing all the talking. Ahead a huge crocodile lay asleep on the bank. The world’s largest freshwater crocodiles are said to inhabit Lake Chamo: this one was no exception.

‘Easily four metres (fifteen feet),’ whispered Fineberg crouching in the bow.

As we drifted closer, terrified it would wake up and jump into our boat, I begged the boy to start the motor, but my request had the opposite effect. He picked up a paddle and slapped it on the mud.

‘Hey, wake up crocodile. Mister and Missus want to see you,’ he yelled.

Startled, the crocodile rose up and dived in, drenching us with water. Other crocodiles, disturbed by the noise, did similar bellyflops, setting the boat rocking and our boatman shrieking as only an African can. Lake Chamo was crocodile heaven. We counted ten more monsters, but by noon, all were cooling off with just their eyes showing above the surface. I longed to swim, but crocodiles apart, like most freshwater in Africa, the lake was teeming with the parasitic worm, bilharzia. I had to be content with Karlsson tipping the waterbag over me when we were back at the Land Rover.

The appeal of Nechisar is its proximity to Lake Chamo, but the track winding up was very rough. We stopped on several occasions for Karlsson to roll away rocks, but once on top we found ourselves in a stunning landscape of waving yellow grassland backed by blue-green mountain ranges.

‘Wow. It’s just like Nebraska,’ whooped Fineberg enjoying his day off.

Startled by the noise of our vehicle, a herd of zebra took to its heels while a nervous wart-hog, tail stuck straight up like a flag, made a dash for safety. Farther away, thick black side-stripes identified Thompson’s gazelle. Dik-diks and hartebeest grazed peacefully out on the savannah where a large eland raised its head in curiosity.

However it was the birdlife that fascinated us. Fineberg pointed out a lilac-breasted roller and a colony of weaverbirds, both inhabitants of high-altitude grasslands. We saw golden-breasted starlings, red-beaked hornbills, paradise flycatchers, shining sunbirds and others with equally brilliant plumage. I spotted a black-chested snake eagle and Karlsson saw a Kori bustard with a group of bee-eaters, riding on its back. Quails whirred out of the undergrowth and we disturbed a helmeted guinea fowl, which scuttled across the road, trailed by nine cheeping young.

Suddenly my attention was caught by a circle of bare-chested men, standing 300 metres (328 yards) away under a thorn tree. Focusing my binoculars on them, I saw they were clutching bloodstained spears and staring intently at something on the ground.

‘Guji!’ hissed Karlsson.

Gamewatching stopped as Fineberg drove on in silence. We needed to make our way back to the lake road without showing sign of alarm. From being one of joy at the wildlife, the atmosphere was tense and as we proceeded in a wide arc around the Gujis, no one mentioned a pair of giraffes that seemed to float across the horizon.

‘Want a smoke?’ asked Karlsson.

He passed a joint across to Fineberg, filling the vehicle with the sickly scent of hashish and convinced we’d all be hacked to death, I dictated a final message into my pocket tape-recorder.

Now we were passing the place where I saw the Gujis, but strangely there was only the thorn tree, pricked out against the blue sky. Where could they have gone?

‘Can we quickly go and see what they’ve killed?’ I asked.

‘They might be lying in the grass,’ said Karlsson. ‘Where else can they be? The place is flat as a pancake.’

Reaching the track again, Fineberg slipped into low gear and skidding and sliding on the muddy road, we began the descent.

Halfway down, a man clutching a spear, stepped up in front of us. ‘Shall I stop?’ asked Fineberg.

‘Keep going,’ yelled Karlsson.

‘He might want a lift,’ said Fineberg naively.

‘Let him walk,’ I shouted and pressing down on the accelerator, Fineberg shot past the man, showering him with stones.

Even back at Lake Chamo, we remained uneasy. Where could the Gujis have gone? No one was talking when a bushbuck bounded across the road and swerving to avoid it, we spun off into mud.

‘De-plane!’ ordered Captain Karlsson, clearly under stress.

Jumping out, I disturbed thousands of yellow butterflies that fluttered around us like confetti as the men began breaking off branches and packing them in front of the wheels. A family of olive baboons, attracted by the noise, climbed onto a rock and blinked curiously at the unfamiliar commotion. After some minutes scrutiny, a large dog-faced male dropped down and walked purposely towards us.

‘Get in Christine. He can rip your face open,’ yelled Karlsson.

I didn’t need to be told again and seated in the Land Rover, I realised with beating heart, that it would soon be dusk when animals come down to drink. Bugger the Gujis—my new concern was being surrounded by a herd of trumpeting elephant.

‘Okay. Start her up,’ called Fineberg, and as he and Karlsson leant against the vehicle, up popped the man with the python skin.

‘Gimme twenty dollars,’ he said once again.

‘Put your foot down,’ yelled Fineberg and as I struggled to control the spinning wheel, rocking and squelching, the vehicle roared free.

I reflected that the racket must have been audible to Gujis all over the Nechisar and perhaps also to Father Gannon seated on his verandah back in Arba Minch.

‘Gimme fifteen dollars,’ said the man and passed half that amount by Karlsson, he rolled up the note, stuck it behind his ear, and disappeared into the undergrowth.

Every six weeks, Fineberg visited Addis Ababa for supplies and on this occasion, he’d waited so I might join him on an uneventful trip when compared to our experience in the Nechisar. We passed farmers working their fields with wooden wish-bone ploughs and groups of peasants carrying loads to market. Near Sodo, an ancient town on the Omo River, we stopped for an old woman carrying a bag of charcoal. Getting out she pressed a roasted corncob into my hand that may have been her lunch.

It took us seven hours to complete the journey, and to my surprise, the first person I saw back at the Ghion was Jean-Emile, a dapper figure with a burgundy silk cravat knotted precisely at the neck of his bush jacket.

‘ ’ave you found this child?’ he asked with a wry smile.

‘Yes, and I’ve changed my plans to stop in Athens. I have exclusive photos of the Ogaden and want to get back to London.’

To Jean-Emile’s regret, I changed my ticket, but we enjoyed dinner in the hotel and afterwards took an evening stroll. With Addis Ababa under curfew, few pedestrians were about, but outside the gate, several youths beckoned to us.

‘Shouldn’t we listen to what they may have to say?’ I was astonished by the French journalist’s apparent lack of interest.

He frowned. ‘Non. They bother me all the time you are gone.’

‘Please listen. Something will happen,’ one boy pleaded.

‘It’s always going to happen in Ethiopia. Faites-les, alors,’ Jean-Emile retorted.

My flight left on schedule and touching down at Heathrow, I went straight to News Limited at Wapping and deposited my film of the drought with the picture desk.

On my way to Mrs Graham next morning, I stopped to buy the Times at the kiosk outside Sloane Square Station. My picture of the famine widows weeding maize fields in Gen was on the front page! Dodging traffic, I flicked through to an item of news: police had opened fire on students distributing anti-government literature at Bole International Airport. Several Ethiopian Airlines employees had been killed and passengers were among the injured. It was the Athens flight I had been due to take with Jean-Emile.

‘Well, Sister. Did you enjoy your holiday?’ inquired Mrs Graham when I took in her breakfast tray. ‘Oh! The egg is too soft. I told you how I like it cooked.’

In the following weeks, I sold several articles and photographs of Ethiopia and while none-too-rich, I felt confident enough to hang up my nurse’s uniform for good.

It was a start. But only a beginning. I made the rounds of London newspapers and magazines. Some took my work, most rejected it. Then Elizabeth de Stroumillo¹³, the travel editor of the Daily Telegraph made a suggestion that would change my life.

‘You might be known as a travel writer in Australia, but no one here gives a hoot. If you want to make a name in London, you will have to write a book,’ she told me.

MY PHOTO OF THE FAMINE WIDOWS WEEDING A FIELD AT GEN,

ON THE FRONT PAGE OF THE TIMES, 29 SEPTEMBER 1975