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Ethiopia. Named ‘land of the sunburnt people’ by the Greeks and Abassinya, ‘land of the mixed people’, by the Arabs. Ethiopians don’t like being called Abassinyans; they think ‘mix’ sounds pejorative, though naturally they do sometimes say they eat Abassinyan food. Perhaps we could start there.

Despite what you’ve heard, there is Ethiopian food that doesn’t come from a UN parcel; it’s odd and rather good and wholly unique. You find yourself saying that a lot in Ethiopia. Its uniqueness comes in bewildering quantities - it is the only African country never to have been a colony, and it boasts the only African army ever to comprehensively beat a European one since Hannibal. It was the first ever Christian country. It says it has the Ark of the Covenant, and it has the only Semitic language that reads left to right.

All that is unique and interesting, but it doesn’t come close to capturing the oddness of the place. Ethiopia hides in Africa, indeed it’s the oldest African country known to the outside world. But, caught on the continent’s horn, it isn’t of Africa - it is neither Arab north nor Bantu south. Singular is perhaps a better word for Ethiopia. Unique implies artisan, crafted, elegant and expensive, and that isn’t right. It does contain things of ravishing craftsmanship; rock-hewn churches, clerical vestments, silver work, books, paintings, women - but the overall feeling, the sense of the place, is of an ancient, inevitable hourglass decay, a turning to dust, echoing all those sombre phrases clucked by romantic poets. Rose red cities as old as time, stately pleasure domes, trunkless legs in the desert….

Ethiopia has always been in a state of flux, of decay and of rebirth, none of it easy. The famines that so caught western attention were only one part of a murderous history that has at its heart the most ancient and beautiful of Christian civilizations.

In the rather tatty national museum, laid out in a corner, are the partial remains of a woman. They look peculiarly symbolic of Ethiopia, surrounded by the rich European court costumes of the emperors. But this is perhaps the most considered and minutely investigated person in the world, more exciting and inspiring than any pneumatic centrefold or Hollywood pin-up, more evocative than the Mona Lisa or Venus rising from the foam. She is a relative of yours and mine, but no-one knows her name, or even if she gave herself a name, but she’s been given one anyway - Lucy. A strangely Catholic appellation for a girl who lived a hundred thousand years before organised religion. Lucy, because the men who disturbed her bones were listening to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds at the time. If you can say that our race started anywhere, that the beginning of the life of humanity had a parent, then it might as well be Lucy, the oldest hominid.

The huge rift valley that begins up here and stretches on south in a collection of great lakes is, in the nursery language of archaeology, the ‘cradle of mankind’. When someone asks, ‘Where do you come from?’, you imagine some great city or rural cul-de-sac. Actually, you come from Ethiopia, and if you ever consider returning home for a visit then you’ll probably stay in the Sheraton in Addis Ababa, without doubt the grandest hotel in Africa, rising like a pristine piece of Rodeo Drive out of the shantytowns.

Now there will be some of you who find the idea of sitting in a comfortable air-conditioned hotel, ordering drinks that cost the equivalent of a months’ indigenous salary from a bow-tied waiter whose home is made out of Oxfam plastic bags, distasteful. Well frankly, I have no time for that sort of industrial sensitivity. Not only do you use 90% of the world’s resources, live in unimaginable splendour, have free time to holiday abroad, (not to mention the fact you probably live twice as long as most of your Third World contemporaries), but you insist on taking the lion’s share of warm sentimental guilt as well: you have what they want - how dare you piss on other people’s aspirations by feeling guilty about them? And neither do I have much sympathy for those of you who think that you are just too sensitive to be able to stand the proximity, the smell, the real-time sight of beggars and poverty, because you might just be so overcome that you’d have to give everything away, and then where would you be? Well, like them actually. No, you must go to Africa, to Ethiopia, and live with it. You only have to do two weeks; Ethiopians have to do it forever. And what you’ll see is that poverty is more than a balance sheet, that the worthwhile things in life come in more guises than can be measured in a bank account. You suffer as much deprivation as the financially poor.

Things to see and do in Ethiopia: go to the oldest Christian church in the world and hear a service that is closer to Christ than any other. See the highlands as fecund and beautiful as you could wish for. Ethiopian painting and silver work. Amazing bird life, and in the south, some of the most remote people in the world. And while you’re at the Sheraton Hotel, go and get rubbed by the blind masseur who was trained by Haile Sallasie’s Royal Blind masseur’s school. He will hold the soles of your feet and tell you which countries you’ve walked over. But most important, bring the memory of it back home, and you’ll understand that poverty is far richer than you’d imagined.

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