They live today almost the way they could have lived one or two hundred years ago, and this way differs a lot from that of their neighbours. We look at the main traits of their culture by analyzing the fundamental stages in a person’s life: birth, puberty, marriage and death. Birth. It is remarked with…

Travelling around the Gumuz region we did not see specific place for worship. Of course they have explicit acts of worship, but these are few and not particularly elaborate. They do not require a specific place, specific people to carry them out, special clothes or a precisely set ritual. And yet it would an error…

Changes go very fast. There are many agents responsible for these changes. The first is the government and its laws and programmes of development, which in a society that had been regulating itself by ancestral traditions, has a tremendous impact. The Gumuz have been living so far on their primitive farming of ‘slash and burn’,…

We have travelled for 500 kms in northwest Addis Ababa. First, it was along the road which joins the capital with Bahr Dar, up to Injibara (or Koso Berr). Then, in Injibara we turned straight west in the direction of Sudan. After leaving Chagni behind, the last town of the Amhara Region on that road,…