Mursi Herdsman
Sala, EthiopiaThis photograph is of a family of herders from the Mursi tribe in southwestern Ethiopia, not far from the border with South Sudan.
The following is an extrat from a story I’m writing about a trip I made to Ethiopia in 2019,
As time passed, the rains slowly started and eventually the whole country was soaked and the tsetses were so bad that the Mursi began to move to drier pastures further south. It’s a conundrum that plagues them their entire lives. They depend on the rains for the grasses their cattle graze, but with it comes the relentless onslaught of the flies that carry the fatal disease known as Nagana, a form of sleeping sickness. It was something I had learned many times over the years in different parts of Africa; that life and death are forever joined and that within the essence of the very thing we depend on, lies also our ultimate fate from which we cannot ever escape.