We should treat grand theories about the Ethiopian kidnaps with great scepticism

As we go to print the five kidnapped tourists in Ethiopia have been returned alive, but mystery still surrounds the circumstances of their capture and the motives of their kidnappers, while some of the Ethiopians who were captured with them are still missing. I expect a good deal of theorising in the week ahead. Some of it, like the speculation we’ve been hearing over the last ten days, will be wide of the mark. The released tourists are themselves likely to be confused about what was going on. This, I believe, may well be because their kidnappers themselves were confused. Chaos and misunderstanding are the explanation for so much that baffles us in Africa, and attempts to explain events within the framework of European logic are often misplaced. Local knowledge — but, more than local knowledge, a sense of how people think — is the key.

I was in Hamed-Ela, where these people were kidnapped, a year ago. I slept in the yard where they were abducted. And while it would be idle to pretend to any great knowledge of this godforsaken yet weirdly beautiful place or the notoriously volatile Afar tribe who inhabit it, I have learnt (in two visits) more than most outsiders know.

The Danakil Depression is not (as one BBC report claimed) ‘a vast desert’. It is a small desert, mostly less than 20 or 30 miles across, shaped like a long trench (an arm of the African Great Rift Valley) and running north–south. The frontier between Ethiopia and Eritrea runs with it. To each side are ranges of dry mountains. The western range lifts the terrain towards the escarpment of the Ethiopian highlands, a couple of thousand metres up. The eastern range (in Eritrea) holds back the Red Sea. A channel excavated through would turn the depression into an inland sea, up to 300 feet deep, with a handful of volcanic cones poking through.