We have been to the land of milk and honey and it is in southern Ethiopia, former Abyssinia. A generation ago many of the tribes in the Omo River region did not know they lived in modern day Ethiopia and yet a mega hydro-electric dam, the Gibe III, could render the chalice of the last authentic tribes in Africa a casualty of globalization. If the dam is completed, tribes such as the Hamar, Mursi and Surma will lose their subsistence farming because the natural silt deposits on which their farming and subsistence economy depends will dry up. Up to 100,000 tribal people could lose their livelihood forever. The dam would also block the southwest part of the Omo which runs for 760 kilometers into Lake Turkana which is mostly in Kenya and also affect the Turkana people. The lower Omo is a UNESCO World Heritage Site yes, but it remains a crucial battleground between those forces of modernity that believe in progress at all costs and the tribal people of earth and the life force that is desperately holding onto an increasingly tenuous planet. The alarm must be sounded for those who are being sacrificed to the juggernaut of modernization like the Xingu fighting the Belo Monte dam in Brazil. If the film Avatar has any relevance to our time, it is that we must speak out for those tribes who represent the last authentic relationship to existence and the planet.The struggle is perhaps best exemplified by the words of Beryl Markham who wrote West with the Night,” Competitors in conquest have overlooked the vital soul of Africa herself from which emanates the true resistance to conquest, The soul is not dead, but silent, the wisdom not lacking, but of such simplicity as to be counted non-existent in the tinker’s mind of modern civilization.
Or as Charles Baudelaire wrote so prophetically in his Intimate Journals,”True civilization…is not found in gas or steam or table turning. It consists in the diminution of original sin. Nomad peoples, shepherds, hunters, farmers and even cannibals, all by virtue of energy and personal dignity, may be the superiors of our races of the West. These perhaps will be destroyed.”
Cyril Christo and Marie Wilkinson
