Word: danakil
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...Victor Englebert (Chronicle; $35). During the past 30 years a Belgian photographer-writer lived and traveled with the last nomads of Africa -- the Tuareg, Bororo and Danakil tribes. His diverting account shows many things these supposedly primitive wanderers have to teach the outsider about family values...
...splendour of Abyssinia" had been fading. The Emperor's bodyguard wore khaki; the palace secretaries were in tailcoats. Thesiger met the celebrated author of Vile Bodies and found him foppish and petulant. He refused Waugh's request to accompany him on an expedition among the touchy Danakil. "Had he come," he adds menacingly, "I suspect only one of us would have returned...
...returning to the scenes of his childhood. A break came in 1930 when Emperor Haile Selassie invited him to attend his coronation in Addis Ababa. After ten days of festivities, the impatient guest slipped off on his first caravan. It took him through the unadministered territory of the Danakil, "Slender figures in short loincloths, their mops of hair dressed with melted butter, they had open, attractive faces, but each of them wore across his stomach a large, curved dagger from which hung leather thongs, one for each man that he had killed and castrated...
...dead last year; some people were so weakened that when a rainstorm struck Dese, the capital of Welo, they drowned in a couple of inches of water, unable to raise their heads from the gutter. Now the drought is expanding into other areas. In Harar province's Danakil Desert, the nomadic tribesmen are in danger of dying out as a race. Carcasses of their cattle, sheep, goats and camels litter the desert; the surviving animals are so scrawny that cows, once worth $60 in the marketplace, now go for $3. "Everywhere there are Danakil graves," cabled Griggs, "small mounds...
...Gaulle's constitution, Harbi was in danger of being removed from office. He fell back on the favorite strategy of desperate Somali politicians-exploiting the bloody rivalry between the Somalis and the nomadic Dana-kils who make up nearly half the population. When a Somali or a Danakil decides to do an enemy in, he usually seals his victory by castrating his victim...