E-Bay and Ethiopia

Hello subscribers – and welcome new ones!

The “E-Bay” in the title of this Newsletter has nothing to do with “eBay”, the online-commerce company, but is an abbreviation of “Elizabeth Bay”. That’s the name of an actual bay on the Atlantic coastline of southern Namibia, but is also the name given to another diamond-mining settlement near that bay that today is a ghost town.

Yesterday I uploaded a new Blog post about Elizabeth Bay, the third and final one in a series of ghost-town photo essays, after Kolmanskop and Pomona before this new post. E-Bay is different to the other two ghost towns in a few ways: firstly, being on the coast, it is prone to those coastal fogs created by the cold Benguela Current that flows up the Namibian coast (and a ghost town in fog can look especially atmospheric!). Secondly, there is far less desert sand in this rather rocky part of the Namib, so you don’t get those indoor dunes of sand intruding into the interior of houses (which so characterizes Kolmanskop). Thirdly, in addition to the fog there is more wind erosion at E-Bay than at the other ghost towns. Hence you get those crazily eroded brick walls you can see in the photo above. Note that some of the bricks have more or less completely eroded away, while the cement that held them together is still there, creating bizarre grating-like patterns.

This new Blog post is also primarily a photo essay again, but the images are quite different from those taken at the other two ghost towns. I found the industrial ruins of the former diamond-processing plant at E-Bay especially fascinating – an orgy of rusty and mangled steel and crumbling concrete. Do take a look. (More can also be found on my main website, namely here – with yet more photos.)

As at the other two ghost towns, or indeed anywhere in Namibia, I failed to spot any brown hyenas, even though they are supposed to be frequently seen at Elizabeth Bay. Here, however, I saw not only hyena tracks but also hyena droppings – with their telltale white colour (because hyenas eat bones – see also here about their cousin species of spotted hyenas).
  

And at the cue of hyenas, Ethiopia comes in, albeit in a rather horrifying way. As mentioned in this recent article about the ongoing war in and around the province of Tigray in northern Ethiopia, spotted hyenas have apparently been scavenging on the dead humans this brutal conflict has caused, many of whom were not buried but left out in the open air. You can’t really blame the animals, who are simply and opportunistically taking advantage of an easy food source. (Normally, spotted hyenas hunt rather than scavenge, but given the chance will take the “free food” lying around.) But from a human perspective it is of course yet another layer of horror.

Not that this war wasn’t horrific enough as it is. As the BBC article points out it is probably the deadliest conflict in the world at the moment. But in Europe all eyes are naturally on Ukraine. So Ethiopia gets forgotten, despite the extremely dire situation it is in.

The head of the WHO (the World Health Organization), who is an Ethiopian from Tigray, not so long ago ventured another explanation for the under-reporting about Ethiopia in the West: the colour of the skin of the victims. I fear that may indeed play a role too – and it wouldn’t be the first time. It happened before in Rwanda in 1994.

At least I can’t be accused of not having mentioned Ethiopia on my Blog and in the associated Newsletters. I have done so, repeatedly – see e.g. this Blog post from last year (when the situation was different from now).
  

Dark days indeed. But try to stay positive, hard as it may be at times.
  

Best wishes

Peter