GRAND REPORTAGE
CULTURE, HISTORY AND CIVILIZATION
A special correspondence from Dakar, Senegal, by Gakar for CPGNNews: CaribPulse Global News Network, focusing on a singular moment in the Ethiopian calendar when Pagumen, the thirteenth month, accompanies the passage toward Enkutatash and reveals, behind an apparent difference in calendars, a profound story of memory, identity, transmission and hope.
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An immersion into contemporary Ethiopia through its calendar, its traditions, its flowers, its songs, its families, its children, its elders and its diaspora, but also through that quiet tension running through so many contemporary societies: how can we move toward tomorrow without allowing the gestures, stories and memories that taught us who we are to disappear?
Special Correspondence from Dakar, Senegal | By Gakar for CPGNNews
CPGNNews | Global Perspective, a view from the Caribbean
September 2026
Think the Caribbean, Understand the World!
DAKAR, SENEGAL: There is something profoundly human about a year that refuses to end too quickly. While much of the world already sees September as an ordinary month, firmly inscribed within an international calendar that has become almost universal, Ethiopia approaches a different moment. For five days, sometimes six, Pagumen settles between the year that is ending and the one that is about to begin. Only five days, yet long enough to give time another kind of breathing space. Families prepare for the celebration, think of loved ones, revisit memories, watch children grow and perhaps wonder, as human beings have always done, what the coming year will bring. The Ethiopian calendar contains twelve months of thirty days, followed by this singular thirteenth month. Then comes Enkutatash, the Ethiopian New Year, on the first day of Meskerem. In 2026, it will be celebrated on September 11. To someone looking at this reality from the outside, the difference may seem strange. To those who live it, it is simply natural. It is their time, the time in which birthdays, celebrations, family stories, childhood memories and hopes passed from one generation to another have been inscribed.
One must then imagine what a new year means when it does not arrive at the moment the rest of the world expects it. It does not emerge amid the universal roar of a countdown shared by television screens and great capitals. It arrives differently, carried by a cultural memory that belongs to itself. A mother may think about the year ahead while looking at her children. A father may measure time through the increasingly grown face of a son. A grandparent may hear in a song a melody already familiar from childhood. A family far from home may draw closer through a simple phone call. And somewhere, a child may discover for the first time that their people do not count the years exactly like everyone else. At that moment, the calendar ceases to be a matter of numbers. It becomes a story of transmission.
THE TIME OF A CIVILIZATION
The Ethiopian calendar belongs to an ancient chronological tradition, deeply rooted in the cultural and religious history of the region. Its structure is both simple and distinctive: twelve months of thirty days, followed by Pagumen, the short period that completes the year. This architecture of time has endured across centuries and continues to live within an Ethiopia that nevertheless belongs fully to the contemporary world. International dates are used in diplomatic, economic, scientific and administrative exchanges. Young Ethiopians study, work and communicate within a world in which the Gregorian calendar is widely dominant. Yet when the moment comes to celebrate, to remember and to bring families together, another rhythm takes its place again. Two calendars can coexist without one needing to destroy the other. It is a quiet reality, but it says much about how a civilization preserves its identity in a world that constantly pushes toward uniformity.
We sometimes tend to imagine that modernity necessarily erases older ways of living. Ethiopia tells another story. It shows that a smartphone can rest in the hand of a young person who continues to listen to the stories of elders. That a student can work within an international scientific environment and return home to celebrate a tradition whose roots reach deeply into the history of the country. That a capital can welcome diplomats from around the world while preserving family practices that resemble nothing found in an international conference room. Modernity is therefore not always a rupture. It can also be a conversation between what is coming and what was already there.
ENKUTATASH, RENEWAL
When Pagumen comes to an end, Enkutatash arrives with an energy that goes far beyond a simple change of date. The Ethiopian New Year is associated with renewal, reunions, visits, songs and flowers. In many regions, the yellow flowers of adey abeba become one of the most recognizable signs of the season. There is something in this meeting between the calendar and nature that touches the oldest human experience. Human beings look at the landscape, see colors return, observe the seasons and recognize a promise. Nothing guarantees that the new year will be easier than the one before it. Yet people begin to hope again. Perhaps this is what calendars around the world have been trying to tell us for centuries: we know that time passes, but we still want to believe that it may have something more to offer us.
Within families, that hope becomes tangible. It appears in a carefully prepared meal, in a visit, in a conversation, in clothing chosen for the occasion, in a child waiting eagerly for the celebration. It also lives among those who are no longer there. Great family celebrations often possess this double capacity to bring the living together while reminding them of those who are absent. A chair may be missing around a table. A name may return in a conversation. A memory may emerge through a song. Thus, a new year never means only that the calendar is moving forward. It also reminds us how deeply time has transformed those we love. It is this intimate dimension that gives Enkutatash a depth that purely touristic descriptions can never fully convey.
A SOCIETY THAT REMEMBERS
Ethiopia carries an immense history. It cannot be told through a handful of dates or confined to a succession of major events. It also exists in family stories, languages, religious practices, landscapes, cities and the memories each generation passes on to the next. A country does not preserve its memory only through monuments. It preserves it in the way a grandmother speaks to a child, in the way a family tells its own story and in the celebrations that return each year to remind people that some things deserve not to be forgotten.
This memory becomes particularly precious within a society changing rapidly. Contemporary Ethiopia is experiencing urbanization, economic transformation, the expansion of digital technologies and the growing openness of its younger generations to the rest of the world. Younger people do not live as their grandparents did. They use social networks, consume content from several continents, study new disciplines and imagine their future within a far more connected world. Yet they are not necessarily condemned to choose between their future and their heritage. They can carry with them part of what their parents gave them. This is how culture remains alive: it changes hands without completely losing its face.
ADDIS ABABA, BETWEEN TWO TIMES
In Addis Ababa, this meeting between different times is particularly visible. The city is a modern African capital, shaped by the ambitions of a country seeking to develop its infrastructure, economy, institutions and technological capabilities. It welcomes diplomats, researchers, students, entrepreneurs and international organizations. It possesses the rapid rhythm of contemporary metropolitan life. Yet in the middle of this acceleration, ordinary life continues. Markets come alive. Families meet. Places of worship welcome their faithful. Conversations continue. Traditions find their place within a city that, every day, also looks toward the future.
Addis Ababa is also one of Africa’s major diplomatic centers, notably because it hosts the headquarters of the African Union. In this city, the continent’s major questions are discussed through a vocabulary of security, development, integration, trade and cooperation. Yet behind conference rooms and official agendas live millions of people whose relationship with the world also passes through things much simpler: a family, a prayer, a song, a meal, a celebration. Perhaps this is where the true complexity of contemporary Africa can be found. The continent negotiates its future within international institutions while continuing to build that future from its homes, neighborhoods and communities.
PAGUMEN, FIVE DAYS TO LOOK BACK
Pagumen is short, but its brevity gives it a particular strength. Five days are not enough to solve a nation’s problems, heal the wounds of a society or change a life. Yet they can create a mental space. A space in which human beings are not forced to run immediately toward the next stage. They can look back. They can ask themselves what they have learned. They can think about those who accompanied them. They can acknowledge their mistakes. They can thank those who mattered. They can also simply sit beside their families and allow time to pass differently.
This idea may seem almost revolutionary in a world where every minute has become a unit of performance. We measure time through work, communication speed, deadlines, results and schedules. Phones accompany us everywhere. Information arrives before we have even finished understanding what came before it. We live in an age that knows how to accelerate almost everything, except perhaps wisdom. Pagumen reminds us that some moments are not meant for production. Some moments are meant for remembering. Others are meant for loving. Still others are meant for transmitting what matters. A civilization that no longer preserves such spaces may gain time on the clock while losing something much more important in its relationship with itself.
THE CALENDAR AS AN AFFIRMATION OF IDENTITY
There is a certain dignity in continuing to count time according to a tradition inherited from one’s ancestors. Not because that way of counting would be better than others, but because it belongs to a history. A date can contain a childhood. A celebration can contain several generations. A song can preserve a voice that might otherwise have disappeared. When a child learns to recognize Enkutatash, they are therefore not learning only a date. They are learning that before them, other children waited for this same moment. They enter a human chain whose beginning they cannot see and whose end they do not yet know.
This continuity does not mean that Ethiopia rejects globalization. It shows instead that openness does not require erasure. A country can welcome new technologies, develop its universities, participate in international exchanges and preserve its own symbols. A young person can speak several languages, use the same digital platforms as young people elsewhere in the world and still understand what a national or family celebration represents. Perhaps true cultural wealth lies in this ability to add without necessarily erasing.
THE DIASPORA AND TIME THAT CROSSES BORDERS
For those who live far from their country, certain celebrations take on a particular intensity. Distance sometimes makes memories more precise. A scent can bring back a home. A song can return someone to childhood. A date can bring a person closer to a place they have not seen for a long time. The Ethiopian diaspora knows this experience, as do so many other diasporas around the world. Enkutatash can become an appointment with memory, even when the celebration takes place thousands of miles from the homeland.
Technology has changed the way this memory travels. In the past, people had to wait for a letter, an expensive phone call or a journey to reconnect certain ties. Today, a family separated by several time zones can see one another on a screen within seconds. This does not replace physical presence. Nothing completely replaces a hand resting on a shoulder or a conversation around a table. But technology at least allows memory to travel faster than bodies. It gives diasporas a new space in which to transmit their celebrations, languages, songs and stories to children growing up elsewhere.
THE ERROR OF EXOTICISM
It would be easy to look at Ethiopia from the outside and see Pagumen merely as a curiosity. A thirteenth month, a New Year in September, yellow flowers, songs and different traditions: all of this can create an attractive image. But such a reading would miss the essential point. This calendar is not an attraction. It belongs to real people. It belongs to families with their difficulties, hopes, grief, ambitions and dreams. It belongs to children growing up in a society undergoing profound transformation. It belongs to elders who understand that certain traditions disappear when a generation stops transmitting them.
Ethiopia is therefore not a country «outside time». On the contrary, it faces some of the great questions of the present. It must think about its development, its economic future, its regional relations, its social transformations and the aspirations of a young population. It is moving through a century that demands ever greater speed, innovation and adaptation. What is remarkable is that amid this acceleration, it continues to preserve moments in which people can still look toward the past without being ashamed to do so. Perhaps this is what the modern world has sometimes forgotten: moving forward does not necessarily mean running.
THE WORLD DOES NOT HAVE A SINGLE TIME
We share the same planet, but we do not all share the same relationship with time. Aircraft cross time zones. Financial markets operate according to precise schedules. Digital networks create the impression that the entire planet lives within one continuous day. Yet behind this apparent synchronization remain millions of different memories. Every people has dates that speak to them more deeply than others. Every family has its own anniversaries. Every individual carries an inner calendar made of encounters, losses, births and memories.
This is why the Ethiopian calendar deserves to be viewed differently. It forces us to move beyond an overly narrow understanding of universality. The universal does not mean that all peoples must measure the world in the same way. It means that we can understand the differences among us without treating them as anomalies. Time then becomes a school of tolerance. It teaches us that what seems natural to us is often simply what our own history has taught us to regard as normal.
A LESSON FOR AFRICA
For Africa, this question carries a particular resonance. Too often, the continent is told only through numbers. Economic growth, poverty, population, debt, infrastructure, conflicts, investment, trade: all these data matter, but they are not enough. Behind every statistic are human beings. Behind a population are families. Behind a growth rate are workers. Behind a diaspora are parents living far from their children and children growing up far from the places their parents describe to them.
Ethiopia therefore reminds us that a development policy should never ask a society to become foreign to itself. Technological progress can be powerful. Infrastructure can transform a country. Education can open immense doors. But none of these transformations should make memory irrelevant. A society that knows where it comes from often possesses greater resources for deciding where it wants to go. African modernity should therefore not be a copy. It should be a creation, nourished by the particular experiences of each people.
FIVE DAYS THAT SAY MORE THAN TIME
Five days may seem insignificant within a year. They are not insignificant when they become a space for memory. Pagumen does not promise that problems will disappear. It does not guarantee that the new year will be gentler. It offers something simpler: the possibility of beginning again. Sometimes that possibility is enough to give people courage. Human beings know that time carries many things away. They know that children grow, elders age, loved ones leave and certain opportunities never return. Yet every new year, people still choose to make room for hope.
Perhaps this is why New Year celebrations have crossed civilizations for so long. They do not celebrate only the passage of time. They celebrate our stubborn willingness to believe that tomorrow can still be different. In Ethiopia, that hope has its own colors, its own songs and its own calendar. It passes through Pagumen before entering Enkutatash. It passes through families and children. It passes through elders and the diaspora. It passes through memory and through the desire to continue. It is a deeply Ethiopian story, but the feeling it expresses belongs to all humanity.
CPGNNews GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE
From Dakar, looking toward Ethiopia as Enkutatash approaches means looking toward another part of Africa with the simple conviction that the continent cannot be understood only through maps, statistics or international conferences. We must also look into homes. We must listen to elders. We must watch children. We must understand why a song can bring an era back, why a flower can announce a season and why five days can take on an importance that numbers cannot measure. It is within this ordinary humanity that the true depth of a civilization is often found.
Ethiopia does not ask the world to live according to its calendar. It simply reminds us that it has its own. This distinction deserves to be heard at a time when globalization can sometimes confuse connection with uniformity. We can share the same technologies without sharing the same memories. We can trade with one another without telling our histories in the same way. We can belong to the same world without having to erase the paths that brought us there. Perhaps this is true universality: not making differences disappear, but learning to look at them with respect.
In a few days, Pagumen will come to an end. Enkutatash will open a new year. Families will come together. Children will once again discover the gestures their parents learned from their own parents. Yellow flowers will appear across many regions. Songs will accompany the celebrations. Loved ones separated by borders will seek to come together, physically or through a screen. And somewhere, a child may ask why their people are beginning a new year while the rest of the world is still on another page of the calendar. The answer may be very simple: because the world has never had only one way of counting time.
And so, while the great clocks of the planet continue their race, Ethiopia will keep a few more days to breathe, remember and dream. Only five days. Five days between what was and what is to come. Five days that may not change the world, but may change the way a family looks at its future. And perhaps that is where the true story of a new year begins.
Special Correspondence from Dakar, Senegal | By Gakar for CPGNNews
CPGNNews | CaribPulse Global News Network
September 2026
Think the Caribbean, Understand the World!
