Jinka

The hills of South Omo were home to the Ari and their neighbours long before any town existed here: farming communities on the well-watered slopes, with pastoral and agro-pastoral peoples on the plains below, exchanging grain, honey, iron goods and cattle at fixed market places. The area was drawn into the Ethiopian empire during Menelik II's southern conquests at the end of the nineteenth century, when garrisons and administrators were established in the southern highlands and tribute was imposed on local rulers.

Jinka itself grew in the twentieth century as an administrative post, chosen for its healthier hill climate above the malarial lowlands. Under the imperial government and then the Derg it acquired offices, schools, a clinic and an airstrip, and its market became the meeting point between highland farmers and the lowland peoples of the Omo. Mago National Park was established in 1979 on the plains to the south-west, and the road connection east towards Key Afer and Konso gradually improved from track to partly paved highway.

For decades the town was the seat of the South Omo Zone, a unit of several hundred thousand people covering an extraordinarily diverse area. Research institutions arrived — the museum and research centre on the ridge was founded to study and document the region's peoples — and so did a steady tourist trade drawn by the Omo Valley. Regional reorganisation divided the old Southern Nations region: the South Ethiopia Regional State was formed in August 2023, and Ari was separated from South Omo as a zone of its own, with Jinka as its administrative centre and South Omo's seat moved to Dimeka.

Jinka is an Ari town at the meeting point of many peoples. The Ari farm the hills around it — enset, coffee, grain and livestock — while potters, tanners and blacksmiths form distinct occupational groups that have long held a marginalised position in Ari society. In the town itself, people from all over Ethiopia work in administration, trade and teaching, and Amharic is the common language of the street.

The market is the cultural centre of the zone. On trading days, Ari farmers come down from the hills and Banna, Hamar, Tsemay, Mursi and other lowland people come up from the plains, in their own dress and ornament, to buy and sell. The occasion is one of business and news rather than display, and visitors are guests at somebody else's weekly errand. Local guides, many of them from the communities concerned, negotiate the terms on which outsiders take part.

That negotiation is the town's most delicate cultural question. Tourism in South Omo brings income to communities but has also made photography a transaction, with a fee expected for each picture, and has drawn criticism for turning people's appearance into an attraction. Ceremonies such as the Hamar bull-jumping that marks a young man's passage to adulthood are family occasions, not performances. Households in town keep the ordinary Ethiopian courtesies: greetings before business, food shared from a common platter, and coffee roasted and brewed for a guest.

Jinka is a small town by Ethiopian standards — an official estimate put its population at about 22,500 people in 2005 — but the largest place for a long way in any direction. Its work is government and public service — zone and district offices, schools, the hospital, the research centre — along with trade, transport, and a tourism sector of guides, drivers, cooks and lodge staff whose fortunes rise and fall with the roads, the rains and the security situation. In the surrounding hills, households farm enset, coffee, maize, sorghum and vegetables and keep cattle, goats and bees.

The day begins at first light, when traders set out for the market and buses leave for Konso and Arba Minch. Middays are hot and slow; the afternoons bring coffee, and evenings are quiet, with little street lighting and power cuts common enough to be unremarkable. The rains close tracks for days at a time and can leave the lowlands unreachable.

The town's pressing issues are those of the whole zone: pressure on land and water, changes to the Omo's flood cycle since the upstream dams and irrigation schemes were built, drought in the lowlands, disputes between communities over grazing and cattle, and the uneven spread of schooling, clinics and mobile coverage into valleys that were isolated a generation ago.

Jinka eats the food of the southern highlands. Enset, the 'false banana', is the staple: its stem and root are scraped and fermented for weeks, then baked as kocho, a dense and slightly sour flatbread, or processed into bulla, a finer starch cooked as porridge. Kocho is eaten with ayib, a crumbly fresh cheese, with cabbage and kale, and on good days with kitfo, minced beef warmed with spiced butter and mitmita chilli.

Injera made from teff, or from a mixture with maize or sorghum, is served with the national repertoire of stews: shiro, the smooth chickpea purée, lentils, split peas and greens on fasting days, with tibs of sautéed goat or beef and doro wat at celebrations. Sorghum and maize porridges are everyday food in the surrounding countryside, and in the lowlands the diet is largely pastoral, based on milk, grain porridge and, on important occasions, meat.

Honey is a local speciality, collected from hives hung in trees in the hills and eaten with bread or fermented into tej, the honey wine; tella, the home-brewed barley beer flavoured with gesho, is the everyday drink. Coffee grows on the slopes around the town and is roasted over charcoal, ground and brewed in a clay jebena, served in three rounds with incense — the daily social ritual here as everywhere in Ethiopia.