The program of the House of RasTafari in this year’s Sunsplash is available and we were in it!
So we left for a few days to the beautiful scenery of Osoppo to join our new friends. We spent three days and two nights of impossible sleep and filmed, interviewed and exchanged opinions with Italian Rastafari.
Giulia Bonacci is in Paris for a few days and we jump at the chance to meet her. She is currently working in Belize on the influence of black nationalism (correct me if I’m wrong) and is planning to fly back very soon. We meet in Belleville and spend hours in a cafe talking about Rastafari, our project and her book.
Sometimes you wish you would like something even before you see it…(but then you don’t).
When we heard about the new comic miniseries Volto Nascosto, set in Eritrea/Ethiopia during Italian colonialism, we were so excited, the next day we ran to Madda’s to take a look at past issues. Well, summarizing: it’s really an (old) old-school comic, (yawn).
It’s April and we finished our first video of the trip, “Rastafarians presence in Ethiopia”, about the conference we went to in November and the DVD is now available (at the moment we have just 7 copies)!
We would like to thank: Barabba for the camera and the white DVDs, Miche for the microphone and the DVD serigraphy, Simo for the tripod, Forrow and Carlitos for coming to the presentation and finally Madda for the Glue!
We presented our video last wednesday, during Luca Queirolo Palmas‘ Sociology of Migration course called “Derive e approdi”, held in the University of Genoa, faculty of Education Sciences.
In Etiopia, ogni istante è accompagnato dalla musica proveniente da negozi di dischi, bar, ristoranti e autoradio. Inizialmente, la difficoltà consiste nell’adattarsi al volume degli altoparlanti, che sono sempre al massimo e spesso in overdrive, ma superata questa fase, dopo la prima settimana, si cominciano a capire e ad apprezzare i gusti musicali degli etiopi.
One of our last days in Addis, Luisa brought us finally to meet her beloved grandfather: Jagema Kello is an 80-year-old man full of stories to tell. Still a young boy, he was already one of the leaders of the Ethiopian anti-colonial resistance.
He showed us a lot of pictures of himself during the guerilla years: his Afro hairstyle was supposed to scare the Italian soldiers, but we find it incredibly beautiful.
The DV 2009 is very popular in Ethiopia. The US green card lottery makes many dream with migration. All over Addis Ababa, internet shops offer the possibility to help fill out online questionnaires. For a small fee (around 7br) anyone can fill out a form prepared in the shop and give in some photos (or make them there as well). The internet shop takes care of the rest.
The Green Card lottery program enables non-American natives to obtain their US immigration Green Card citizenship through a lottery based program that makes available 50,000 permanent resident visas annually to persons from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States.
For a European citizen a lottery system sounds like something only American could invent. It carries with it the fate and the luck that a self made man needs. Europeans seem rather to set on a more anal question of rights.
The new millennium came on September 11th to Ethiopia, and it is still present everywhere, with national flags or what is remaining of them, welcoming signs, the unavoidable Ethiopian coffee grain, a government campaign and t-shirts, earrings and songs (like Teddy Afro’s Abebayeoh)
The image for the Ethiopian New Millennium is a grain of coffee surrounded by the national flag, because coffee plays a very significant role in Ethiopia. It is its main export product (or the 2nd according to our research) and is celebrated in everyday life with the timely coffee ceremony, where women make coffee starting by roasting the grain. They burn incense at the same time, another typical Ethiopian product, alongside with slaves, especially for the Arab peninsula.
In Ethiopian mythology, Kaldi, a young goatherd, first noticed the effects on coffee back in the 10th century. Kaldi’s coffee is also the name of the fake Starbuck’s that opened near the Airport, in the modern Bole Rd area. Its owner, a priced women entrepreneur, Tseday Asrat, in Addis Ababa supposedly asked Starbucks for a franchise and did not get it, so she went on her own. Kaldi’s resembles Starbucks, the same green aprons, lettering and expensive coffee.
Maybe Howard Schultz visited Kaldi’s lately during his official visit to President Zenawi. They have ended the months long dispute, earlier this year, because Starbucks’ opposed Ethiopia’s plans to copyright its coffee, Starbucks has signed distribution, marketing and licensing agreements with Ethiopia.
As usual, coffee is business.
