No fire in Zion

Cricket in Ethiopia is not played by expats. It is not played by locals. It is played by a people stuck in between. The community of Rastafarians who play the game in this grey zone have been locked for decades in a purgatory of stateless uncertainty, and their legal status in the country is more often than not described as "unresolved". In Shashamane, cricket is a game played by shadows.

It would be easy to say that cricket as played in this nondescript town, which lies some 250 kilometres south of Addis Ababa and 12,000km west of Kingston, Jamaica, is a microcosm of the larger problems faced by its ex-Caribbean community, and it would not be too far off the mark.

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