OUT OF AFRICA
Tim Johnson
Staff
The Burlington Free Press

Burlington man relishes experience living among indigenous people in Ethiopia

Some time this past spring, having lived for three months among the Mursi people of southwestern Ethiopia, Will Hurd realized it was time to leave.

He was getting worn out. It wasn't the endless walks through the bush, or the drinking of goat's blood, or the peril of crocodiles, that got to him. It was something else, something that, in a remote part of the world, might just as easily befall any plain old tourist -- which Hurd decidedly was not. He was not an anthropologist, either, although his goal -- to live among the Mursi, to learn their ways and their view of the world -- might make him seem like one.

No, Hurd was just a guy from Burlington -- a tree-trimmer by trade -- with a spirit of adventure and an arcane interest in experiencing how indigenous people lived hundreds of years ago, before the spread of Western civilization.

That interest began with American Indians. After high school, prompted in part by his fractional Cherokee ancestry, he retraced "the trail of tears," seeking out tribal elders and hitchhiking all the way, from North Carolina to Oklahoma. On the reservations, though, he saw people who were, as he puts it, "driving pickup trucks and smoking Marlboros" -- not exactly pre-Columbian. His attention turned elsewhere.

"I thought that in Africa, I could find someone who was living like people lived 400 years ago," Hurd said recently. "I found a blurb about the Mursi in a travel guide. My whole purpose was to live the bush, some place where people rode in dugout canoes."

So, four years ago, Hurd made his first trip to the Mursi. He flew to Addis Ababa, caught a bus to Jinka, hitched a ride into the Mago National Park, then walked into the bush in the Omo River Valley, in search of the Mursi.

"Everybody said the Mursi would kill me, or steal everything I had," Hurd said, matter-of-factly. He believed otherwise, and he was right. The Mursi not only were not hostile, they let him stay in their villages. Befitting their reputation they were, however, heavily armed. "It seems like every old man has an AK-47," Hurd said. Guns and money, he found, were among the Mursi's few concessions to outside civilization.

The Mursi are probably best known for the lip plates the women wear. The plates are discs, up to 6 inches in diameter and made of fired clay, that are inserted in the lower lip for ceremonial occasions and when serving meals. The women don't typically wear the plates when they're building houses -- one of the wife's customary roles. Mursi houses, made of grass and sticks, look like upside down nests, Hurd said.

These people are "semi-nomadic -- they have villages, but they're always on the move," Hurd said. "So, you find that they'll walk a day, as much as 35 miles, to a village to visit someone or get grain, stay two days, and walk back." They raise cattle in camps set away from the river, to minimize the disease risk. They grow sorghum, a grain, on the river banks as seasonal floods retreat.

Hurd stayed a month. He tried to see as much as he could, walking more than 200 miles. Then he came back to Burlington. That first trip was awe-inspiring enough to make him want to go back. 

Material "creativity"

When Hurd walks around town these days, he often carries what is probably Burlington's most unusual shoulder bag. It's the hide of an eviscerated goat. He recalls a ritual he witnessed, and joined, in the first Mursi village he stayed in.

"They killed a goat, and everybody put their feet in the stomach hole," he said. "Then they took the digested grass from the stomach and rubbed it on their legs."

Their resourcefulness, or material "creativity," impressed him. "They have a much greater vision of how to solve a material problem than we do," he said. "If they need a strap, they'll walk into the bush, tear fibers of a plant, and turn a sack into a backpack. If you give them a shirt, they can make a bag out of it in under a minute."

After he got back to Burlington from that first trip, Hurd started writing about his experiences. He wrote 240 pages, but he didn't try to get it published, he said, because he didn't want to generate more tourism.

David Symons, a friend, read the manuscript and found it interesting, a "personal story" of someone he considers a "remarkable character."

"I didn't know him that well before he went to Africa the first time," said Symons, a singer and accordianist in a band, Black Sea Quartet, that rented a studio next to where Hurd lived. "We'd keep him up all night playing Eastern European gypsy music," Symons said.

What struck Symons was Hurd's willingness to do something "pretty daring, on his own, outside of any academic or political agenda."

Hurd kept studying the Mursi, as best he could, in Burlington. He'd never taken courses in anthropology -- he attended the University of Vermont for two years after graduating from Burlington High School in 1995 -- but that didn't hold him back. He read as many articles as he could get by David Turton, a British anthropologist and Oxford University professor. Turton, now retired, has made film documentaries about the Mursi and acknowledges that he is the only "Western" authority on the tribe.

In November, Hurd went back to Mursi country for a longer stay. His mother, Susan Hurd, was understandably apprehensive, but there was something about her son that reassured her.

"He has a basic faith in the human spirit," she said. "That helped me a lot." 

A minority within a minority

This time, Hurd wanted to see parts of the territory he hadn't visited before. He also wanted to see some wildlife. He did plenty of both, walking hundreds of miles and seeing zebra herds, baboons, herds of lesser kudu, and hippos along the way.

Several times, he walked into unfamiliar villages and was told he was the second white-skinned person to be seen there. The first had been Turton.

Hurd hired guides to accompany him some of the time. All the while, he was picking up parts of the Mursi language. His limited vocabulary, much of which he'd gleaned from articles in anthropological journals, ran to the obscure. He didn't know how to say "friend," but he did know the names of various stars and cattle diseases. He drew some amusement from the Mursis' personal names: "Zebra hits the rock," or "Load in the Ground," or "Grinding Stone Wife."

Soon after he arrived and settled into a village, war broke out. The word was that the Bodi, another tribe, to the north, had stolen Mursi cattle. "This is a serious offense," Hurd said. "It means death."

All the men left the village to go fight. They invited Hurd to come along, but he declined.

Hundreds of women and children from the area convened in the village to wait out the fighting. The days passed and Hurd got bored, so he took off again.

The war was short-lived. The Ethiopian government intervened; a truce was declared; the men came home.

"They teased me, 'You didn't go to war with us,'" Hurd said, smiling. "I said I didn't have a gun. They said, 'You could have used one of ours.' "

Other than avoiding the fighting, he tried to fit in, at least up to a point. He got a Mursi tattoo on his back -- raised bumps, cut with a razor blade. He had his hair cut in Mursi style -- concentric rings of hair on the crown of a shaved head, with a tuft extending toward his forehead.

As a minority, the Mursi encounter plenty of disrespect from the prevailing, Amharic-speaking population.

"They view them as very backward, a lot of the time they call them 'animals,'" Hurd said. "Their treatment is horrible. When they come to town, people yell slurs at them.

"I was known as 'the white Mursi.' They'd insult me, too."

A minority within a minority, he came about as close as an outsider could to being accepted in their society. But, of course, he was an American, which meant he had money. The Mursis' constant requests for money started to get to him, reminding him of the scene in Bele, the one Mursi village that tourists are customarily brought in to see. There, the Mursi paint themselves up, put on a show, ask for money. That's the extent of the interaction between the Mursi and tourists, who generally don't venture into the bush, much less on foot.

"The Mursi tourist experience is detrimental for both the tourist and the Mursi," Hurd wrote in a recent e-mail. "Three-quarters of the tourists that come back from Mursi say they did not like their experience because they find the Mursi aggressive. The Mursi use the tourist money to buy alcohol. The village where tourists visit is known for Mursi getting drunk and shooting each other."

Finally, he felt it was time to get back to his family. On his way home, in Addis Ababa, Hurd finally met Turton. They had corresponded for four years. Asked via e-mail if Hurd had developed some familiarity with the Mursi and their customs, Turton replied: "Without any doubt."

When Hurd returned to Burlington, he wrote an article on the Mursi for Cultural Survival. Now Hurd's mission is to forestall what some Mursi fear will be the tribe's eviction from the land in the Omo and Mago national parks so that those parks will be stocked with wildlife to attract tourists. There's a precedent for that in the Nechisar National Park, from which another indigenous group was evicted to make way for animals.

Hurd wants to do what he can to keep this from happening to the Mursi. He's not sure he wants to go back, though.

Lately, he has been setting his sights on the Amazon.

The Mursi place

Ethiopia, almost twice the size of Texas, has a population of about 73 million, including dozens of distinct groups who speak more than 80 languages. The national literacy rate is about 43 percent; the per capita annual income, about $800.

The Mursi are one of Ethiopia's many minority peoples. Anthropologist David Turton estimates their population at around 10,000. Their literacy rate is less than 1 percent -- they did not have a written language until about a decade ago. They live in the Omo River Valley, southwest of Jinka, mostly in the Omo and Mago national parks, which comprise acacia savannah, forests and river lowlands. They are pastoralists, rearing cattle and practicing floodplain agriculture.

During his recent stay with the Mursi, Will Hurd learned that the Ethiopian government planned to turn over management of the two parks to African Parks Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in the Netherlands. The goal would be to boost tourism and bring in more revenue. African Parks manages parks in Zambia, South Africa and Malawi, as well as Nechisar (which also is spelled Nechasar, or Nech Sar) National Park, in Ethiopia.

African Parks assumed management of Nechisar in 2004. Two groups who had lived within the park were relocated, raising a protest from Refugees International, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. "A reported two thousand families have been compelled to leave their homes and relocate outside the boundaries of the Park to accommodate the development of the park by a Netherlands-based foundation," Refugees International reported in December 2004. The report said a fence was to be installed around the park.

African Parks' chairman responded last month that "African Parks has never been and will never be involved in questions of a political nature, such as the resettlement of people. ... We can work very well with people living in Parks, as we do with over 20,000 people living in the Liuwa National Park in Zambia. Resettlement is not a matter for our organisation as Governments are sovereign in these matters in every country of the world."

On its Web site where it discusses its agreement with the Ethiopian government on Nechisar, African Parks states that "Management will require an innovative approach to solving some of the more pressing problems of over-utilisation of the parks' resources. ... The terrestrial boundaries will require fencing to avoid potential animal/human conflict with large introduced animals like elephants and buffalo."

Now, the Mursi are worried that the same thing might happen to them. According to David Turton, they think it is "very likely." The disclaimer about resettlement hasn't allayed the concern.

"African Parks expects to be 'in situ' in the Omo and Mago Parks by September this year," David Turton wrote in an e-mail. "African Parks' position on resettlement is to deny any involvement in it, on the grounds that this is entirely a government matter. It will obviously say the same if the government forces people out of the Omo and Mago Parks."

Richard Burge, a spokesman for African Parks based in London, said in a telephone interview that there is no intention to move the Mursi. "We would not be in favor of that," he said. "The Mursi have been there forever. They're part of the ecology."

He said that if there is any effort to have the Mursi modify their hunting or agricultural practices, it would be done with the Mursis' chosen leaders.

To read Hurd's report in Cultural Survival, go to www.cs.org http://www.cs.org› and type Mago Park in the search box.

The Mursi view

Asked what he had learned about how the Mursi view the world, Will Hurd gave it some thought and replied with this e-mail:

"The Mursi understand that it is very beneficial to be generous. If they have extra of something non-vital, they give it away, if asked, because they know that the next time they need something, they will have a good chance of receiving it if they ask. In this way, everybody gets what they need. With so much give and take and reliance upon each other, there is no loneliness. A lonely Mursi is like a joke. Twenty people will all sleep under the same tree. Here, we often think we should be able to do things without anyone's assistance, but many of us end up lonely.

"The Mursi also hold humor in high esteem. Without technology to entertain them, they invent witty remarks to entertain each other. It is rare to see people together and not laughing. Laughter is constant among the Mursi.

"One thing I learned by living with the Mursi is what we do to make ourselves more comfortable -- the technology we invent to make ourselves more comfortable -- is something that often makes us unhappy, rather than making our lives better. Big houses, cars, Walkmans, cell phones, televisions and even books, are all things that keep us from interacting with real, live, in-the-flesh human beings. These things can all be walls that keep people separated. Sharing time with people is where real happiness comes from.

"If we turned off the gadgets and walked more and had smaller houses, we would find ourselves meeting more people, and we would be less lonely. Also, having places where it is easy to get out of a rainstorm, having shoes, having the option to ride in a car when you don't feel up for walking -- all this gives us a lot of choice in how we experience the world. But to get caught in a rainstorm and drenched, then to come back to a warm bed, to walk in bare feet through powdery soil, or to walk for a whole day -- these are wonderful experiences that we almost always choose not to have."