So laid-back, almost soporific, is the village, and so strikingly is everyone turned-out in their white body paint, leopard-spotted face markings, beads and bracelets, that it takes a while to notice nearly all the men are carrying AK-47s. Each one, naked but for a cloth around his waist and a single upright ostrich feather in his hair, sits on a carved wooden stool, which doubles as a pillow. Bodies are streaked in chalk-white stripes and swirls, like Day of the Dead skeletons. Some wear copper arm bracelets and others have belts recycled from the best source of metal available — spent bullet cartridges.
It has been several years since AKs replaced spears in this south-western corner of Ethiopia, says Lale Biwa, one of few Kara tribesmen able to converse in English. More status symbol than weapon, they are now practically obligatory for any young man hoping to marry. Occasionally they are deployed in skirmishes between the different tribes of the Omo Valley, Biwa says, or used to kill the huge crocodiles that thrash in the river’s chocolatey brown waters.
Here in the Lower Omo Valley, squeezed along the borders of South Sudan and Kenya, few speak Ethiopia’s national language of Amharic. Many cannot name the capital, some 350 miles to the north, as Addis Ababa.