Tribes & Tribulation: Photography, Ethics and the Omo Valley
“I had to mute you on Instagram. Your posts were triggering for me.”
My friend and someone I respect enormously as a human and photographer was referring to images taken during a recent trip to Ethiopia to visit some of the tribes of the Omo Valley. The issue at hand was the way tourism was impacting the tribal ways of life and that I had participated in a “human zoo”.
The indictment turned my stomach. Had I engaged in some murky, unethical act without thinking about it? Had I contributed to the destruction of the tribal way of life, exploiting people for the chance to add to my portfolio?
While there were parts of the trip that were uncomfortable, Jayne, the photographer who organised it, and I often discussed what we saw, experienced and did and how our visits impacted both the tribes and ourselves. The reality, like most things, is not black and white and while we witnessed behaviours that were questionable, we also experienced the sheer joy, beauty and kind-heartedness of some remarkable people.
The trip to the Omo Valley was in two parts: the first was camping with the Suri Tribe near the South Sudan border. The second was doing day visits to tribes from a base in Turmi in South Ethiopia near the Kenyan border. Both were incredibly different experiences.
The Land Of The Suri
Suri laughing and joking around
The Suri we camped with and photographed were some of the happiest, friendliest people I’ve ever met. They enjoyed being in front of a camera and boy were they good at it. They enthusiastically painted their faces, dreamed up stunning floral headdresses and possess an astonishing ability to look straight down the barrel of a camera lens.
There was also a commercial transaction. Each person we took pictures of received a small payment. No money, no photo. And the act of selecting who to photograph and who to leave out was awkward, but was never met with any kind of disappointment or created any fuss between tribe members and we did our best to include as many people as possible.
This is not the preferred approach. The one that Jayne and our tour organiser, Mule (pronounced Moo-Lay), always try for is a single lump-sum payment to the whole village. This way only those who want to be photographed participate but the whole village benefits. This arrangement depends on what mood the village chief is in when you arrive - and this time the negotiations were for each individual to be paid.
One of the criticisms of tourists and photographers visiting the Suri centres around the fact that the face painting and floral creations are largely put on for the sake of visitors. It’s a performance for money rather than “authentic” life being captured and once the photographers are gone so are the face paints and flowers.
While it may be true that the Suri have learned how to be in front of a camera and get paid for it, it didn’t feel inauthentic either. There was a lot of joy and laughter during our shoots and the moments just being around the Suri without a camera were some of the most memorable.
Behind the scenes we had a lot of fun
The Suri, however, benefit from one thing that some of the other tribes we visited didn’t. Distance. They are still relatively hard to get to and are not part of the southern loop of the Omo Valley that most tour operators prefer because it’s logistically easier and you can visit more tribes.
And this is where things change. Mostly.
The Photographic Hit & Run
In this part of the country you’re more likely to come across larger groups of tourists who go crashing into villages armed with cameras and cash in a kind of photographic hit and run.
We didn’t see much of this on this trip, but there are plenty of reports of convoys of photographers falling out of 4x4s wielding long lenses, spending 20-30 minutes in a village before driving off.
Like the Suri, these tribes dress up and behave in ways that are likely to be pleasing to tourists to part them from their cash, diluting their own rituals and artefacts in order to make them more commercially appealing.
The difference that matters most then, is in how you show up, interact and behave as a visitor.
What we did see was the horrible habit of local guides bringing sweets, “caramels”, to bribe to local kids into having their photos taken.
Equally, a bull-jumping ceremony we attended, where a young man has to run over the backs of large bulls several times, marking his transition to manhood and his right to marry, had a clutch of tourists with cameras out, crowding around him while he looked understandably pre-occupied at having to leap over the large beasts, avoiding the sharp bits.
Young Hamer boy coming of age at a bull-jumping ceremony
It was at this ceremony that I saw ugly behaviour from a European man in his 50s, keen to pose with some of the young tribesman. They obliged, but didn’t smile. If you’ve spent more than 5 minutes with a tribe you learn very quickly that smiling is not their natural reaction to a camera. This tourist took his phone back to his guide and proceeded to swipe through them saying: “Wrong, wrong, wrong…he’s not smiling. What’s wrong with him?” and berating the guide. Of course, the guide, under pressure to get his tip at the end of the experience intervened with the boys, yelling at them to cooperate. Everyone is worse off as a result of this kind of behaviour.
The bull-jumping ceremony is something of a trade-off between the local tribes and tourists. The fees that tourists pay to attend the ceremony help to fund the celebrations that can last for several days, so there are incentives to bring tourists in to witness these types of events.
All of these things can be managed better. Better education for tour operators and guides to help them understand how to protect heritage and let tourism still happen respectfully.
One of the principle arguments is most of the economic benefit of tourism flows to the tour operators and local tribes only receive fees for camping on tribal land and those paid to individuals for photographs taken and the goods they sell.
But this largely depends on who is running the tour and how it’s run. Many of the larger group tours are based out of a town called Jinka which, like Turmi, is a good place from which to visit many tribes. The operators here are lower cost and in general do not pay the local guides and tribes adequately. They also only go to the closest villages to save on petrol, so those are the ones that receive the most tourists and the experience is quite different.
When we visit the Mursi tribe there’s a definite change in the emotional temperature. The Suri are most often compared to the Mursi as they share many of the same characteristics, the foremost being the wearing of lip plates. Because they’re easier to get to they have become one of the most photographed tribes in the Omo and it seems to have taken its toll. The tribe looked jaded and even contemptuous of our presence there and the whole experience was geared to them selling lip plates and other artefacts - and who can blame them? It was the one place I wish we hadn’t visited and yet it’s the tribes themselves that remain open to and take fees from tourists for their visits. I’m not sure that this is their only means of subsistence so that they are forced into this. 2 of the 3 Mursi tribes had gone elsewhere and were unreachable by tourists. There is an element of choice in these arrangements.
Tourism vs Development
As much as the presence of tourists in the Omo has an effect on the tribal way of life, the hand of progress is also re-shaping these regions and the impact from this has the potential to be far more devastating.
There are maybe 1,000 tourists a year who visit the Suri. However, the government has opened up mining and agricultural rights on Suri land and new roads are being laid to help transport the spoils of these to far off places - none of the benefit of which goes to the Suri but brings them into more direct conflict with vested interests (pdf) that will have a much larger and persistent effect on their way of life.
Bananas as far as the eye can see. Industrial scale agriculture is transforming the landscape.
Driving through the southern part of Ethiopia you can’t miss the massive industrial agricultural efforts that are transforming the landscape supported by new road networks and the Gibe III hydroelectric dam which depending on which reports you read could impact the lives of over 200,000 indigenous people and has been described as “a disaster of cataclysmic proportions for the tribes of the Omo valley”. Equally, there are benefits to be had from this project, but the politics of this are far beyond what I’m qualified to talk about or offer an opinion on.
How To Visit the Omo The Right Way
Having witnessed as well as participated in some of these activities - had I been unethical? When I reflect back on the experience, who I did it with and the approach, I don’t think so and this is where I think intent plus action matters. How you show up and what you do when you get there makes a difference.
You see, I wasn’t part of some large tour group that came crashing into villages on a photographic drive-by. My trip was a 1-on-1 private tour with just the photographer, tour operator and at one point a chef, and the approach and what I experienced was very different.
Jayne first went to Ethiopia 7 years ago and fell in love with the place. Her motivation for setting up her own tours was precisely because the first time she went she saw how not to do it and has now been running tours for the last 5 years.
Jayne has a deep love and affection for Ethiopia and its people
Every village we went to, the people there were genuinely pleased to see her and there was a great deal of affection and lasting relationships that had been built over time. Rather than show up and start shooting, everywhere we went (with the exception of the Mursi) we spent time talking to the people in the village and getting to know them first - and while there was a fair commercial transaction that ultimately took place, there was always a human connection that took place first. It was done with sensitivity, empathy and a lot of love for the amazing people we visited.
When we arrived at the Suri, for example, we didn’t take a single photograph for the first 1/2 day we were there - leaving our cameras in their bags and instead meeting with, getting to know and, in Jayne and Mule’s case, saying hi again to familiar faces.
Jayne also carried with her a huge bag filled with medicines, dressings, antiseptics, and antibiotics that were handed out to those in the villages who needed them most as well as clothes and blankets for those that had requested them from her previous visits. This is not the act of some insensitive operator who’s there to bully and cajole the local tribes into getting the photographs they wanted.
Mule, too, is one of the kindest, most generous souls I’ve ever met. He was routinely chiding other guides and drivers for bribing kids with sweets and educating them on how to act responsibly. We joked that there was nowhere in Ethiopia for him to hide as he knew everyone and commanded a lot of respect amongst the other guides and operators.
Mule - one of the kindest souls you’ll ever meet!
To understand the measure of the man, as we were driving out of one of the towns we had stayed in we suddenly pulled over to a roadside cafe (a hut really), where a young woman and her daughter ran out to greet him. Just 4 weeks prior to our visit, he’d come across this woman who was deathly sick with a kidney infection. Without hesitation he took her to hospital, paid all the medical bills, raised money from friends back in Addis to rent the coffee shop by the side of the road for a whole year so she could run a small business and send her daughter to school. You see, her husband had been killed in the civil war and she had been kicked out of her own village and had nothing. He saved her. And while that story isn’t directly about tourism and the tribal way of life - those values are there in every situation. It matters who you choose to do business with.
Genet and her daughter at their coffee shop
The “human zoo” as it is - will continue to happen as long as uneducated, ill-mannered tourists and tour operators continue to show up without respect and consideration and tourism remains loosely regulated and poorly enforced. The term is in many ways insulting to the tribes themselves who often choose to be around tourists, have their picture taken and engage with visitors.
Participation in tours run with the intent to be good and do good and engage in a human way is incredibly important as it creates a model for others to live up to.
I claim no moral high-ground and my failure was not being aware of the issues before I went and it’s fair to say I was lucky rather than skilful or discerning in choosing to go with Jayne and Mule. I will be more aware in future and make sure that my research is more thorough.
I’m pleased I went. I’m pleased who I went with and how they approached the entire trip and I’m delighted with the photographs that I got of some of the most incredible people I’ve ever met and who were willing, happy participants in the experience. I would go again.
If you would like to go to Ethiopia on a photography tour you can get in touch with Jayne at her website below. I have no commercial tie to her, I just think she’s the right person to go with.