ADDIS ABABA – The National Museum of Ethiopia, in collaboration with the University Museum of Tokyo, Japan (UMUT) showcased on Wednesday a “Special millennium exhibit” under the theme ‘Human Evolution Time Line in Ethiopia’.
Created by the University of Tokyo University Museum and the National Museum of Ethiopia to exhibit Ethiopia’s unique contribution to the understanding of human evolution, the Millennium Exhibit was opened at the National Museum lobby venue with the aim to introduce the entire timeline of Ethiopia’s world famous fossils a number of which were unveiled to the public for the first time.
Ethiopia is the only country in the world which possesses 12 categories of the 14 key species of fossil remains spanning the entire timeline of human evolution. This particular exhibition reveals the more recent discoveries that extend the country’s fossil record even further back in time than Lucy’s and Selam’s such as the 10 million-year-old “Chororapithecus” which made international headlines being the latest discovery, according to information dispatched Wednesday.
It was distinctly stressed that “there is no exhibit in any museum in the world that has the entire timeline of Ethiopia’s rich and newly discovered fossils now on display.” It was added that some of the exhibited fossils were found between the late 1960s and late 70s, however, a key educational lineup like this one has so far never been displayed in such a comprehensive setting inclusive of 1990s discoveries by the Middle Awash, Konso, Gona, and Dikika research projects.
Speaking at the opening, Mamitu Yilma, Manager at the National Museum, said the exhibit was conceived as an Academic Exchange program signed between the Ethiopian and Japanese museums in 2005. She thanked Dr. Gen Suwa, the co-establisher from the University of Tokyo side, to have availed himself as well as his fellow associates “who were instrumental in realizing this special millennium exhibit from its concept inception up to its installation.” Dr. Suwa on his part announced that Ethiopia’s unique prehistoric fossil discoveries did not end at the 6th stage of human timeline which was when Lucy was found. Now the 12th stage is also uncovered in the same country. He told The Daily Monitor that the venture was a rewarding experience that himself along with Ethiopian paleontologists Dr. Birhanu Asfaw and Dr. Yonas Beyene have set up designing last September.
Among the speakers Seyoum Bereded from the National Millennium Celebrations Secretariat remarked that the exhibition of Ethiopia’s unique antique fossils helps a great deal in curbing the appalling image that is given to the very word ‘Ethiopia’ often being associated with famine in dictionaries.
Kinichi Komano, Ambassador of Japan to Ethiopia, for his part congratulated his compatriot and Ethiopian archeologists on the findings and for the immense contribution the distinguished fossils render to Ethiopia’s tourism and economic development of Ethiopia at large. It will also serve as “a bridge between Ethiopia and Japan,” he said.
Ambassador Mohamoud Dirir, Minister of Culture and Tourism, also spoke on the occasion saying “The discoveries have proved that Ethiopia is indeed the origin of man kind”. He thanked all participants involved for bringing to light the collection of “the remains of humans that first walked on planet earth”, pronouncing that they were Ethiopian.
It was noted that the UMUT engages in the applied research of new outreach methods called “mobile museum” and “modular-unit concept” the later of which employed design concepts applied on external contexts in producing the present Timeline Exhibit.
The composition of fossil remains exhibited in separate glass cases at the National Museum comprised: Chororapithecus abyssinicus, Ardipithecus kadabba, Ardipithecus ramidus, Australopithecus anamensis, Australopithecus afarnesis (where Lucy and Selam belong), Australopithecus aethiopicus, Australopithecus garhi, Homo habilis, Homo erectus and Australopithecus boisei, late homo erectus, Homorhodesiensis, and Homo Sapiens, placed in order of chronology.
The exhibits are said to be on display for the next six months on.
ADDIS ABABA — The Ministry of Mines and Energy (MoME) and Falcon Petroleum Limited, a company from Cyprus, signed an agreement enabling the later explore and develop petroleum in the Abay Basin, around Wollo, in the Amhara regional state.
Alemayehu Tegenu, Minister of MoME and Radhawan Sadik Hadi, Deputy Managing Director of the company signed the agreement which grants 50 million USD for initial phase of the project on Thursday at the Sheraton Hotel Addis Ababa.
“The ministry has granted Falcon Petroleum Limited, an exclusive right that enables the company to engage in exploration and development within the license area for the period specified in the agreement and will have the right to extend as per the agreement”, said a statement from the ministry which highlighted the main elements of the agreement.
According to the agreement, covering an of 25,875 square km, the initial term of exploration period will be four years with possible extension twice each for two years. The development and production period shall be 25 years with possible extension of 10 years, the Minister said.
Accordingly the company shall give preference to the employment of Ethiopian qualified nationals.
Alemayehu also said, “Today’s event marks an extension of the exploration in areas other than the historical Ogaden basin which in itself contributes to our mind set as such petroleum opportunities could exist in volcanic terrains and we will continue working in a similar manner to attract oil companies to explore other parts of the country.” To date, exploration agreement have been acquired which collectively covers more than 70% of the surface coverage of the country, and this is a significant success following which Ethiopia is foreseen to be one of petroleum producing country in East Africa, he added.
Falcon petroleum Ltd is a company registered in Cyprus and is involved in petroleum exploration in different parts of the world. In accordance with the petroleum agreement signed, Falcon Petroleum Ltd shall have exclusive right in the area to undertake petroleum exploration and development.
This agreement encourages other companies to engage in petroleum exploration on the surrounding areas of the basin, the statement added.
DEATH IN THE FIELDS: June rains turned the land near the village of Sedguge green, but too late. An uncle bears the body of a 6-month-old who died of malnutrition [Photograph for TIME by Thomas Dworzak / Magnum]
Paleontologists hunting fossils of early man in the Rift Valley of southern Ethiopia call the area the cradle of mankind. This year it’s bursting with life, especially in the fields where local farmers grow barley, potatoes and teff, a cereal used to make the flat, spongy bread injera. As a warm July rain falls on a patchwork of smallholdings half a day’s walk from the nearest road, the women harvest yams, the men plow behind sturdy oxen and fat chickens, goats and cows roam outside mud huts. And yet for all the apparent abundance, this area is so short of food that many are dying from starvation.
All morning, the hills above the village of Kersa have echoed with the wails of women walking in from the fields. They gather on a patch of open grass before a stretcher made from freshly cut bamboo, bound and laid with banana leaves. On it is a small bundle wrapped in a red-and-blue blanket. An imam calls the crowd together, asks them to take off their shoes and arranges them in two lines, women behind men, facing east. “Allahu akbar,” he says twice. Then four men pick up the bier, easily handling its weight with one arm, and walk a short way to a freshly dug hole, into which they lower the bundle and bury it. Three other small, fresh graves nearby indicate Ayano Gemeda, 6, was not the first child to starve in Kersa this year. The distended bellies and chicken-wing limbs of children looking on suggest he won’t be the last.
In the six weeks to mid-July, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) treated 11,800 Ethiopian children for severe acute malnutrition. At a tented hospital in the town of Kuyera, 50 out of 1,000 died, double the rate MSF expects for a full-fledged famine. “It’s very bizarre,” says Jean de Cambry, a Belgian MSF veteran of crises from Sudan to Afghanistan. “It’s so green. But you have all these people dying of hunger.” The verdure around Kuyera is misleading. It is the product of rains in June, too late for the first of two annual crops. From January to May, the fields were parched and brown. And one failed harvest is enough to turn Ethiopia, a nation of 66 million farmers, into a humanitarian catastrophe.
Hunger has swept East Africa this year, spurred by poor rains and rising food prices. The U.N. estimates that 14 million people urgently need food aid, including 2.6 million in Somalia and more than 1 million in Kenya. In Ethiopia, 4.6 million people are at risk, and 75,000 children have severe acute malnutrition. Nearly a quarter-century ago, an outright famine led to Live Aid, an international fund-raising effort promoted by rock stars, which produced an outpouring of global generosity: millions of tons of food flooded into the country. Yet, ironically, that very generosity may have contributed to today’s crisis.
Over time, sustained food aid creates dependence on handouts and shifts focus away from improving agricultural practices to increase local food supplies. Ethiopia exemplifies the consequences of giving a starving man a fish instead of teaching him to catch his own. This year the U.S. will give more than $800 million to Ethiopia: $460 million for food, $350 million for HIV/AIDS treatment — and just $7 million for agricultural development. Western governments are loath to halt programs that create a market for their farm surpluses, but for countries receiving their charity, long-term food aid can become addictive. Why bother with development when shortfalls are met by aid? Ethiopian farmers can’t compete with free food, so they stop trying. Over time, there’s a loss of key skills, and a country that doesn’t have to feed itself soon becomes a country that can’t. All too often, its rulers use resources elsewhere — Ethiopia has one of Africa’s largest armies.
Why do we get aid so wrong? Because it feels so right. “The American people,” says U.S. ambassador to Ethiopia Donald Yamamoto, “are simply not going to sit tight while they see children dying.” Nor should they: a starving man needs to be saved first, before he can be taught to fish — or farm. But as the world rallies again to Ethiopia’s aid, donors face a dilemma. “We’re not getting to the real problem,” says Yamamoto.
What would? Ethiopia thought it had found one answer. In 2005 a $1.4 billion five-year program identified 7.3 million Ethiopians unable to live without free food and gave them jobs in rural projects, such as roads and irrigation. The idea was to create livelihoods as well as to save lives. It was working, slowly. By this year, says a Western economist familiar with the effort, “a few thousand” had left the program and were making it on their own. Then came the double blow of drought and soaring food prices. Of the 7.3 million, 5.4 million suddenly needed extra food aid. The sobering lesson: even the best efforts to eliminate hunger are expensive, slow and uncertain of success. Depressing as it may be, this may not be the last time Ethiopia needs help.
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With reporting by Kassahun Addis/Addis Ababa
Journalists in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, today reported that police interrogated the editors of Awramba Times and Harambe, two fledgling independent current affairs weeklies over a series of political stories.
Officers questioned Dawit Kebede of Awramba Times over editorials and interviews in five separate editions of his newspaper since April, Deputy Editor and lawyer Wondrad Debretsion told CPJ. The news items included an editorial challenging the government’s assertion of high voter turnout in April’s general elections, and a column by opposition leader Berhanu Nega comparing Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, according to Debretsion. Editor Wosonseged Gebrekidan of Harambe was also questioned over three similar stories.
Today’s development follows Wednesday’s sentencing of Mesfin Negash, the editor-in-chief of the current affairs weekly Addis Neger, to a one-month suspended prison term for publishing an interview of the lawyer of jailed outspoken pop icon Teddy Afro. Negash, who spoke to CPJ via telephone shortly after his release, was detained by High Court Judge Leul Gebremariam on contempt of court charges and spent two days in the cells of the Addis Ababa Police Commission. The author of the comments, defense lawyer Million Assefa was sentenced to a month and 20 days imprisonment and remains behind bar, according to local journalists.
Negash said the one-month suspended prison sentence he received today was his first criminal conviction. In a statement, Addis Neger announced it would appeal the ruling, expressing concern about a potential “chilling effect” on media coverage of court cases in Ethiopia. Nonetheless, Negash expressed gratitude to CPJ for displaying “solidarity” during his ordeal.
Addis Neger, Awramba Times and Harambe have suffered government harassment since becoming the first independently owned political publications since the government banned more than a dozen critical newspapers in a brutal 2005 crackdown on the press and political dissidents.
Speaking to CPJ, Awramba Times’ Debretsion expressed the frustrations of many independent journalists:
“Editors are becoming afraid to report anything opposing the government. A democratic government never does anything like this. If they’re a democratic government, they have to allow us to report what’s going on in Ethiopia and in any other country. Most of the times they’re trying to stop journalists from doing what they’re supposed to do. If there’s a democracy, they should give us a chance to analyze things which are not good, not bad, which are true, which ones are not true; they have to give us a chance to do criticism against the government or other opposition parties.
“It’s becoming routine for journalists: You report something, then you go to the police station. … If they continue like this, our democracy might be under question mark.” .
(Goshen College) GOSHEN, INDIANA — After three months immersed in another culture, most college students studying abroad are ready to get back to the comforts of home. The last thing many students would want to do is start over learning a different culture in a new country for another three months.
But for Goshen College senior Lydie Assefa, from Indianapolis, Ind., visiting another East African country – Ethiopia – after living in Tanzania for a semester through Goshen College’s Study-Service Term, felt more like going home.
Assefa’s father, Dagne Assefa, is an Ethiopian who moved to the United States in the 1970s to attend Goshen College. So when she found out she would be two countries south of Ethiopia during the spring, she didn’t want to miss the opportunity to connect with her Ethiopian heritage.
In Ethiopia during the summer, she was able to live with biological relatives, instead of with an adopted host family, as she had in Tanzania. She lived in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, with one of her aunts, and she was also able to travel through the country and visit with family members she had not seen since she last visited eight years ago.
“Before coming to Ethiopia, reconnecting with my family was sometimes a source of anxiety as I wondered how they have changed, if they would remember me, if they would even like this cousin or niece from America who has had relatively little contact or communication with them,” Assefa said.
During her three months in Ethiopia, she was able to visit with and meet about 100 relatives. “When I first got there they kissed and hugged me,” Assefa said. “They were so excited to see me and some were crying.”
While it was easier to connect with her older relatives, the real challenge was warming up to her shy younger cousins who were not born or were too young to remember the last time she visited, and had only heard stories of their cousin from the United States. But Assefa was able to find a way to transcend culture, age and language.
“One day we played jump rope the whole afternoon,” Assefa said. “And then we were best friends.”
For Assefa reuniting with her 78-year-old grandmother was a special experience. “When I first met her I was really nervous,” Assefa said. “But when I walked into the compound, she was running toward me.”
Assefa’s grandmother, who speaks very limited English, didn’t let the language barrier prevent her from spending quality time with her granddaughter. “She just liked to talk to me. She didn’t care if I understood,” Assefa said.
But Assefa’s three-month stay this summer was not just one big family reunion. She kept busy during the days conducting interviews for her college senior history thesis and completing an internship at the nongovernmental organization Compassion International.
For Assefa’s senior history thesis, she chose to research the relationship between the Meserete Kristos Church (the Ethiopian Mennonite Church) and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church – Ethiopia’s predominate Christian church since the fourth century.
The first Mennonites went to Ethiopia in 1945 as relief workers. But with Ethiopia being the only country in Africa that was never colonized – with the exception of an Italian occupation from 1936 to 1941 – the foreign missionaries needed to show the government and its people that they were people of service, not intruders. In 1947, Mennonite relief workers built a 40-bed hospital in the town of Nazareth – the same town where Assefa’s father was born. In 1959, with permission from the emperor, a Bible Academy opened in Nazareth, congregations formed and the Meserete Kristos Church was officially founded.
The Meserete Kristos Church grew in the 1960s and ’70s, and this became threatening to the Orthodox Church. As the dominant, state church of Ethiopia for hundreds of years, the Orthodox Church was worried that the establishment of this new church from abroad would affect its membership and position in society and were therefore suspicious of the practices and beliefs of Meserete Kristos Church members. Meserete Kristos converts – many from the Orthodox Church – dismissed their Orthodox upbringing and looked down on the Orthodox Church. Hostility grew between the two churches, and the Meserete Kristos converts faced varying forms of persecution during this time, including physical beatings, imprisonment and shunning by their families.
“As I talked to my dad about his experiences in the Meserete Kristos Church as a believer in the late 1960s and 1970s, I became more intrigued with his personal story of persecution by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church,” Assefa said. “This dynamic really interested me, and so I decided to pursue [studying] the relationship between the Orthodox Church and the Meserete Kristos Church by examining it on a personal level through the stories and narratives of individual believers, beginning with my dad.”
For her thesis, Assefa interviewed about 35 people, mostly members of the Meserete Kristos Church who converted from the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and plans on interviewing more Ethiopians and Mennonite missionaries now that she has returned home to Indiana.
When she wasn’t collecting information for her senior thesis, Assefa completed a history internship with the Christian organization Compassion International. The main goal of the organization is to provide children with sponsorships for their basic physical needs and education.
Assefa worked in the communication department interviewing university students to gain a sense of the impact the sponsorship program has had on their lives. She used those interviews to write articles telling their sponsorship story, which were used in brochures and other publication material to encourage further sponsorship.
“Recording and sharing with people their life stories at Compassion International and for my thesis has been a truly rewarding and eye-opening experience, but reconnecting with my family has been unbelievable,” Assefa said. “The most rewarding aspect of reconnecting with my family is rediscovering a large, intimate family that loves me unconditionally despite communication and geographical boundaries.”
-By Tyler Falk
Editors: For more information about this release, to arrange an interview or request a photo, contact Goshen College News Bureau Director Jodi H. Beyeler at (574) 535-7572 or [email protected].
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Goshen College, established in 1894, is a residential Christian liberal arts college rooted in the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition. The college’s Christ-centered core values – passionate learning, global citizenship, compassionate peacemaking and servant-leadership – prepare students as leaders for the church and world. Recognized for its unique Study-Service Term program, Goshen has earned citations of excellence in Barron’s Best Buys in Education, “Colleges of Distinction,” “Making a Difference College Guide” and U.S. News & World Report’s “America’s Best Colleges” edition, which named Goshen a “least debt college.” Visit www.goshen.edu.
EMF – Editor-in-chief of Awramba times, journalist Dawit Kebede and the editor of Harambe newspapers were summoned at Addis Ababa police today, sources said. As part of new wave of attack on the press, the two editors were charged with five and three cases respectively and released on bail.
Meles Zenawi’s regime has recently intensified its attacks against the private press. (Picture: Dawit Kebede, editor-in-chief of Awramba)
Dawit Kebede was charged with supreme law of the land, the constitution of the FDRE. The publication dates of Awramba time’s editions that brought in police investigations include its editorial on April 23-2008 and news stories on May 07-2008, May 20-2008, June 03-2008 and June 10-2008.
Harambe was charged for its editorial on April 15 entitled “EPRDF shall reform itself from the failed elections of 2008.” The other two charges against the editor of Harambe are the opinion from the readers on April 23 publication, and an interview on its May 21-2008 issue.
In its recent press release CPJ has reported that police has threatened on Monday to block distribution of an independently-owned newspaper if it continues its leading coverage of a new political opposition movement, according to local journalists.
“The Amharic-language weekly Awramba Times reported on Tuesday that it had received two separate phone warnings from top police officials to stop any coverage of “anti-constitutional organizations,” Editor Dawit Kebede told CPJ. The warning referred to the paper’s extensive coverage of the activities of the Netherlands-based Ginbot 7 Movement.” According to the New York based media watch dog.
Paleontologists hunting fossils of early man in the Rift Valley of southern Ethiopia call the area the cradle of mankind. This year it’s bursting with life, especially in the fields where local farmers grow barley, potatoes and teff, a cereal used to make the flat, spongy bread injera. As a warm July rain falls on a patchwork of smallholdings half a day’s walk from the nearest road, the women harvest yams, the men plow behind sturdy oxen and fat chickens, goats and cows roam outside mud huts. And yet for all the apparent abundance, this area is so short of food that many are dying from starvation.