Some personal considerations
After some time of having published the webpage we started receiving emails from both Ethiopian and international travelers, for both versions - Spanish and English. The two versions are slightly different (for that they are versions and non translations), but most remarkable has been the very different tone from the received commentaries, that could be summarized as follows:
Already before receiving no message from anybody we had tried to explain in the initial page of the Web which is our intention: if we report as a tourists we can contribute to improve other tourist's trips. Nothing else, truly. However, the problem is not the discrepancies, but the establishment of the confrontation between Occidentals and Africans sensu lato is a reality that is more remarkable (paradoxically) when you make contact with those Africans that look more like Occidentals.
Pretending the possession of the truth is a chimera, but we could explain here which is our point of view. Although our "point of view" does not exist either as soon as we are three people and each one of us, despite our affinity, have sligthly different opinions. So I prefer to transcribe paragraphs of the book " Ebony ", of Ryszard Kapuscinski, that writes far better that we and in addition it knows in depth what he speaks about:
From the formal point of view - but only formal the colonialism reigns in Africa from the conference of Berlin (1883-1885), in which several European countries (England and France in the first place, but also Belgium, Germany and Portugal) distributed all the continent until the time at which Africa of frees in second half of century XX But, in fact, the colonial penetration had begun long before, already in century XV, and bloomed throughout following the five hundred years. The commerce of African slaves, that extended during three hundred years, was the most brutal and abject phase of that conquest. Three hundred years of searches, casts, prosecutions and ambushes that organized the white man, often with the help of African and Arab pals. In infrahuman conditions, crowding boats, million of Africans were transported to the other side of the Atlantic so that there, with the sweat of their fronts, they built the wealth and power of the New World.
Persecuted and defenseless, Africa was sacked of its people, ruined and destroyed. They depopulated vast extensions of the continent and weeds deserts covered sunny regions with flourishing vegetation. But the most painful and lasting track has left to that time in the memory and the conscience it of the African: centuries of scorn, humiliation and suffering have created among them an inferiority complex and a feeling of moral damage never repaired that nests in the deep thing of its hearts.
Then, the racial difference, of the color of the skin, constitutes the central subject, the essence and the marrow of the African and European relations between; it is the main form of the relations adopted at the colonial time. Bonds, dependencies, conflicts, everything is reduced to the black/white notione, and evidently, the white is better, superior and harder than the black. The white became sir, masters, bwana kubwa, is the unquestionable master and gentleman, sent by God to rule the black. It has been told to the African that the white is untouchable and invincible, and that all the white constitute a compact force...
I arrived to a city like this for several years as correspondent of the Polish News agency. When circulating around its streets soon I realized it was catched in the networks of the apartheid. Mainly, started in me the problem of the color of the skin. He was white. In Poland, in Europe, I never stopped to think about it. There, in Africa, the color became very important, and for simple people, an unique indicator. White. The white is a colonizator, sacker and invader. I have conquered Africa, I have conquered Tanganica, I killed by knife the tribe of whom now is in front of me, I killed all their ancestors. I turned it orphan. An orphan, in addition, humiliated and impotent. Eternally hungry and healthless. Yes, the man who is watching me is thinking: the white, the one that snatched me everything, the one that hit the back of my grandfathers, the one that violated my mother. Now I have him in front of me, look at him well! I did not know how to solve myself the problem of the guiltyness. To their eyes, as a white, I was guilty. Slavery, colonialismo, five hundred years of suffering are associated to the white. The white? So also the target is mine. Mine? It did not manage to wake up with that purifying and liberating feeling that would consist of feeling guilty. To be sorry. To request pardon. All the opposite! I in the beginning tried to counterattack "That you were colonized? We, the also Polish did! During one hundred thirty years we were colony of three invading states. Also white, by more signs." They laughed, hit their foreheads in a gesture more than eloquent and left me alone. I irritated them because they thought I wanted to lie them. In spite of my internal conviction of innocence, I knew that to his eyes I was guilty. Those barefoot, hungry and unalphabetised boys had some kink of ethical superiority, the one that a damn history confers its victims. They, the black, never had conquered, occupied or enslaved nobody. They could watch to me with a superiority feeling. They belonged to a race that, although black, was pure. Among them I felt weak, having nothing to say.
In the prologue of the book he explains something that well could be the moral:
.. So that this one is not a book on Africa, but on some people of there, my encounter with them and the time that we spent together. This continent is too great to describe it. It is like an ocean, a separate planet, an heterogenous cosmos of extraordinary wealth. Only by a reduccionist convention, by comfort, we say "Africa". In the reality, except for the geographical name, Africa does not exist.
Well, that's his opinion, but I believe he is very well documented and intensely lived such experiences. I identify myself with him when I remember what someone has said to us: "you cannot write on a country after a trip of only 19 days", or "a country with a millenarian history cannot be reduced to dirty hotels and mountains of flies tsé-tsé", or "your vision is narrow, tribalist and paternalist". Evidently it is not the problem either, but I believe that the real problem is what he explains, far beyond these opinions are logical or not. This Web it is not for recommending books, but if you have time read this one and those of the Spanish writer Reverte.
Additionally, in May of 2001, an Spanish TV channel (Tele 5) launched a program with the generic title of "the weight of tradition" in which they showed beastly mutilations of Ethiopian children: ablation, infibulation, etc, that whenever memory gets me nervous, as I supposed to be everybody in Spain. As it was emitted and considering the commentaries of the journalists in study (certainly different from that was in direct recording and knowing all the circumstances) it seemed that Ethiopian people were scarcely less than wild beasts with their own children. And it is not so simple either. My problem is trying to understand them and simultaneously looking directly at the face of the girl they have mutilated. I attempt to imagine myself emasculated and saying that there is no problem because it is the culture of my country, and thinking "this will be my son's future" (this case is irrealistic but I only try to be emphatic). I believe that we must try to explain what we feel and then leave themselves the decision, although is not so easy when who is going to decide are not the affected ones. But it is not possible to give them lessons about anything, we the great teachers of ethics and possessors of the absolute truth, children or grandsons of the colonialistas that crushed them.
Summary: the problems of Africa are tremendously complex and fixed positions do not help mutual understanding. And a way to intuit and to know it is travelling there with opened eyes, even if we are just tourists.And all this, to what it comes?
As it has already been expressed, all this subject is very complex, mountains of books have been written it seems to me we are far from mutual understanding. But anyway, we just tourists, with our own perception of the things, and we do not try to judge what we don't know. It is certain that we go there to see tribes and animals, landscapes and towns, in the same way that others come to Spain to go to the beach, to drink sangria, to see flamenco or to go to the bulls (and nobody reproaches to them that they do not come to know the reality of the Spaniards, because there are their vacations). For people interested in these subjects in depth, aside from travelling and knowing in direct, there are nice books on imperialism, colonialism, globalization, slavery, orientalism, etc. written by competent people, available to be bought or to be consulted in almost any part of the world. For that reason we repeat again what it is said in the starting page: