On walking alone and walking with others: Framing research activities by time and distance in Kafa zone, Ethiopia

Abstract

Of the many landscapes in the sub-Saharan country of Ethiopia—from the largely desert scrubland of the Danakil depression with its shallow salty lakes and long chains of active and dormant volcanoes (‘home’ of the Pliocene hominid fossil Australopithecus afarensis nicknamed ‘Lucy’ by archaeologists, or Dinknesh to Ethiopians); to the Rift Valley with its steep terraces on the edges of cliff-sided mountain chains and rising up to huge tabletop plateaus where gullies rush through with clear, fresh water—the landscape that exerts the most powerful presence and to which I feel most deeply connected, and where I have lived the longest—even if my memories are warped by time and abraded by distance (Macfarlane 2012)—is in Kafa Zone in the southwest, where the montane rainforest, renowned for being the habitat of wild Ethiopian coffee and the origin of the genetic diversity of Arabica coffee (Coffea arabica), is now recognised as one of the biodiversity hotspots of the world.