- The Observer, Sunday January 20 2008
The Festival of 1,000 Stars takes place in Arba Minch in the heart of the Rift Valley every December. It's a 10-hour drive south from the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa; over three days, you can catch the traditional music of most of the 50 indigenous tribes who inhabit the southern regions.
Many of the tribes hail from extremely remote areas and all enjoy their own unique language and culture. Music and dance is completely intertwined with their daily lives, with hunting and farming practices, with weddings, funerals, and songs for heroes. It's a world away from the jazz-tinged soul of Addis as captured on those celebrated Ethiopiques CDs.
When the groups come to perform in Arba Minch, many of them are discovering other participating tribes for the first time. Some find that it's a place where deep tribal conflict eases. One Hama man told me: 'At home we are having a big fight with the Dasenach' - just as the presenter of the BBC's Tribe, Bruce Parry, recently discovered - 'but here we have to spend the night in one big hall. We are getting to know each other and becoming friends through the music.'
This makes for an event not just of remarkable diversity but of emotional intensity. Over the course of the festival an audience of roughly 50,000 Ethiopians enjoy, as one festival-goer put it, 'tradition and beauty such as I have never seen before in my life'.
All the performances are acoustic, and all the instruments are traditional. There are lyre-like 'kras' and bamboo horns, pan-pipes and flutes and rattles and sticks and drums. Dancers jump straight-legged, two feet into the air from standing, some turn somersaults and others move in a way strangely reminiscent of Mud performing 'Tiger Feet'.
The performers' dress is as diverse as the music. There are people carrying spears and shields and wearing monkey-skin crowns. Some sport leopardskin cloaks, others beaded hair and bare chests.
The festival was the idea of Dr Wolde Gossa Tadesse of Californian-based philanthropic body the Christensen Fund. Conceived as a way to help regenerate traditional cultural practices, it has taken place on the football pitch here for the past three years.
Three days in the heat and bright sunlight might have been exhausting but instead for me, as one of the few Westerners to make this remarkable festival, it proved utterly uplifting.
