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Hamboricho Mountain is
the heart of Kembatta. It towers over towns where, not long
ago, you could hear wild animals roar at night. Today Kembatta
is one of the most densely populated rural regions in eastern
Africa. Forests are being cut down. Water sources are threatened.
Kembatta’s land, like its women, have been exploited
as passive resources.
Kembatta’s songs, art, architecture, and recipes –
alive just two or three generations back – are also being
lost. Kembattegna, an oral language with no written history,
is being left behind by people determined to embrace Amharic,
the tongue of commerce and Ethiopia’s majority.
“Our people, especially the elders, feel these losses,”
says KMG Founder Boge Gebre. “They feel especially the
deforestation of Hamboricho Mountain, which was forested even
when I was young. Now, it is growing bald from the bottom
of the hill up.”
Boge says that of KMG’s three program threads –
health, livelihood, and the environment – protection
of the environment has been the hardest to raise. “When
land is scarce and food comes from land, how can KMG tell
people not to cultivate every inch?” she asks.
She began searching for a symbol of these collective cultural
losses that would spark elders into addressing environmental
issues and finally found it: a traditional round house.
These large, intricately thatched homes are virtually disappearing
from Kembatta’s landscape. Masterpieces of organization
with intricate storage lofts for drying grain, they also institutionalized
life according to gender with two sides: one for women and
children and milking cows, the other for men and guests and
animals they valued most, such as oxen and horses.
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"As
a small girl I walked
for hours every day,
carrying a heavy clay
pot, to gather water."
Fikrete Gebre |
Today, there are tin
roofed-houses everywhere. As a young girl, Boge herself saved
money from scholarship stipends to build her father the first
tin-roofed house in the village. In a society where men are
known by the accomplishments of their sons, people came from
all around to see the house that Gebre’s daughter built.
Years later, in the spring of 2002, Boge built a roundhouse
at KMG Center and named it Heritage House. The house took
an artisan three months to make, and when it was built, KMG
invited 300 men and women elders for the raising of the centerpole,
or utobo. Recipes were found to prepare foods traditional
for the occasion, and the guests sat inside Heritage House
on traditional three-legged stools.
“One man cried,” she says. “It was the first
time I ever saw an elder cry.”
It was at that ceremony that Boge raised the issue of the
environment by talking about Hamboricho Mountain and asked
the people what they thought should be done.
“How will we live if Hamboricho dies?” one elder
asked. “Hamboricho is our stomach, our backbone. It is
where our ancestors worshiped. How can we bring it back to
life?”
They recalled that only a few decades ago, there were gates
encircling the base of the mountain, each guarded by an elder
and opened once a year to hunters. They talked about species
of plants, which were hardy and which had fallen victim to
civilization. Then they began to talk about plans to divide
up the mountain and replant.
It was just the start of KMG’s larger environmental program.
Now, native plants are being sown in KMG Center, and KMG is
working toward a permaculture program in 2003 that will allow
its people to live off the land without depleting it. Because
no environmental program is possible without including women
who grow much of Kembatta’s food in small plots of land,
women will be principal architects.
Kembatta has true cultural assets, self-help institutions
that were created before memory. In communities where there
have never been doctors, there are still Idir, organizations
of villagers who care for the sick and help bury the dead.
In communities with no banking systems, there are still Ekub,
communal funds that help people in time of need.
HIV/AIDS is eroding even these institutions because they can’t
keep up with all the burials. KMG must rush to find ways to
build on them before they die out altogether. Kembatta’s
songs, art, and traditional architecture -- all are disappearing.
So is its language, an oral tradition that is being left behind
by people determined to embrace Amharic, the tongue of Ethiopia’s
majority.
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