A Walk on the Wild Side

All cities have their murky, seamy side; their raw, dark underbelly and these need to be visited sometimes in order to get an idea of the way in which the ‘real’ people live. Well at least that’s the theory.

And so it was that I set out (with very little trepidation, really) earlier this week with a Habesha friend to visit the Abashawl area of Asmara and to sample some local Suwa in one of the many drinking dens to be found there.

Abashawl was known as “the Native Quarter” in Italian colonial times (Eritreans were not permitted to live in the main part of the Italian city at that time) and remains to this day a warren of unmade streets seemingly thrown down with little planning on a hillside on the edge of central Asmara. Its buildings are small and have painted plastered walls, with light-blue being the predominant colour, unlike the sherbet of the rest of Asmara, and with sometimes-rusting corrugated iron roofs.

It has also served as Asmara’s East End or Lower East Side with new arrivals from the country-side to the big city traditionally being able to take cheap accommodation here (often with many sharing a room) while they found their economic feet.

Suwa is a local alcoholic brew whose main ingredient is said to be sorghum. It’s really an unfiltered, cloudy beer and is typically not very strong although it’s highly variable in both strength and colour (from dark to a kind of muddy brown) since it’s home made.

Upon arrival it wasn’t long before my friend pointed out a few Suwa Houses. “How can you tell?” I asked. Well, it was explained that each has a sign consisting of an inverted metal drum with an inverted enamelled suwa cup on top of it just standing outside. So we stepped into the heart of darkness, where respectable Asmarinos fear to tread … actually it was more like stepping into somebody’s old and battered but very clean and well-kept front-room with the other (all male) participants in the drinking orgy sitting quietly on wooden benches sipping from suwa cups and being served by the very polite daughter of the household.

In general the occasion just seems to be a chance to catch up on gossip for a while – as far as I could gather subjects for conversation ranged from the current state of the harvests to the cold day that it had been, later the lady of the house came in with a charcoal stove, presumably to heat the room, and joined in the conversation. At one point the worry was expressed that prices would rise if too many “like me” came for suwa but it was agreed that I could come back provided I didn’t spread the word.

Later we went on a brief tour of Abashawl, before our return to downtown Asmara. The streets were alive with children playing and women with open fires preparing suwa and coffee and, in one street, there were girls standing provocatively in doorways; they were, perhaps, selling something a little different.

P