There are few things more
striking that you’ll find when spending any time in Ethiopia than the sheer
amount of people living rough on the streets. Back home we have more than any
so-called ‘developed’ society should have, but in Ethiopia beggars are notable
not only by their numbers but also by their variety. I have almost certainly
seen female or elderly homeless people back in the UK, but I can’t remember
where or when – at home they are nearly always men. I think and hope that the
reason I don’t see elderly homeless people in the UK is because at a certain
stage, social care takes over, and, for the time being, there are refuges for
women.
People living on the streets here
are male and female, from the cradle to the grave – often literally - there are
homeless at every stage of life. Many, mostly boys, live their entire lives on
the street. By adolescence many show signs of developing mental illness. I have
seen no grown men living on the street here who aren’t severely mentally ill or
drug dependent. Most are both.
Skeletally thin, these men seem
all but lost. They refuse offers of food. When not chewing chat many wander the streets, their clothes hanging off in raged
strips of assorted fabric, not faintly aware of being fully exposed.
A man with grotesquely swollen
lips indiscriminately eating rubbish from the gutter, laughing. Another sitting
stark naked for hours on end in a skip being picked through by dogs and goats.
A skeleton wrapped in dark brown skin and rags lying in the gutter at the bus
station as commuters jostle past one another, drifting through their morning
routine. These things don’t shock me anymore but they’ll never leave me.
People
The label ‘beggars’ reflects in
some measure how they are perceived and treated here in Ethiopia and in the UK.
I was once admonished by a friend with words to the effect of “he’s just going
to spend it on drink” for giving 50p to a man sitting wrapped in a sleeping bag
next to an ATM in Belfast. We were just about to go into a club to spend the
money on drink ourselves. The man was right there, well within earshot. I doubt
my friend knew - in saying this, I doubt he cared.
We use words in this way when we,
consciously or not, want to replace or qualify someone’s personhood – their
humanity – into a special or different category. Something deviant, other, or
entirely alien, and it’s always pejorative.
Loosely, you can do this by turning the adjective describing the person
into the noun representing the human – encompassing the whole of their identity.
Think:
A gay man - A gay.
Of course, like anything in
language, like most things really, no rule holds for all cases. Think:
A Pakistani - A
Paki*.
To call someone ‘a Pakistani’ is
to frame them primarily in terms of their nationality, but it isn’t necessarily
pejorative. My friend’s attitude wasn’t an aberration. It’s entirely normal and
almost everybody does it. It’s an attitude that reflects this ‘othering’ of a
marginalised population of people. You’ll never hear this construction of the
identity of someone powerful or successful other than in a light-hearted
way, not even when they are being
criticised. I can’t even think of a nickname with the slightest chance of
sticking to rich people. There probably are some for powerful women.
My point is that in language and
in action they are treated like something other or less than human. The logic
would seem to be that ‘they are suffering, therefore they deserve to be
marginalised’.
Beggars and choosers
Everybody chooses. It just
happens that often the choice is between difficult to distinguish bad options.
A homeless person might ‘choose’ this life, in that their choice might be
between homelessness and, for example; physical or mental abuse, crime, or any
of a long list of awful things
that they find less preferable to homelessness.
Many of East Africa’s homeless
people find themselves in this position because their lives have been ruined by
clumsy forms of ‘development’. Enclosing common land and creating enormous
arable farms benefits those who come to own the land, which is almost always a
very small number of people who become incredibly wealthy. When those people
who once lived there try to bring their animals onto land that was once free
for them to use, cowherds are beaten, imprisoned, given ludicrous fines they
couldn’t possibly pay. In desperation, people come to towns where they might
find a job. They rarely can. Landing a job as a security guard in an expat
compound is about the best many can hope to achieve. In Ethiopia this usually
pays about £30 a month, but very few can land regular work. Most hang around
car park areas to blag 20 birr (60p) for an hour’s work watching cars.
Maybe some people end up on the
streets because their families rejected them for being drunk, addicted, violent.
Maybe a lot of them do. Are you going to assess a human being on the basis of a
set of media-filtered assumptions?
*I’ve had people say to me, with
a completely straight face, that it’s ok to say ‘Paki’ because you can say an
‘Afghan’ or a ‘Tajik’.