Damien Enright: People of the Rift valley have a long history of walking

ETHIOPIA will forever leave images of solitary walkers in my mind’s eye, lone men and women walking beside country roads or on paths across endless plains, miles from villages or any habitation, writes Damien Enright.

The women are always in bright clothes; sometimes one even sees, far ahead a parasol, a circle of pink or yellow against the burnt land. Some walkers are old and walk with difficulty, but stoically trudge on.

The young women remind me of the ‘guairá’ of Cuba, the farmers’ daughters whose easy gait is immortalised in the cadences of ‘Guantanamera’, an exile’s lament, and one of the world’s best travelled songs. The ancestors of these girls may well have seeded Cuba with it guairás. Ethiopians, like other Africans, were enslaved and transported to the cane fields of the West Indies.