#462: SPOTLIGHT: Benji Dawes

#462: Benji Dawes 

April 14, 2026

A Backbeat of Community 

Question for Benji:  

 Have you ever been to a place you UNEXPECTEDLY felt truly aligned with your spirit?  Where initially perhaps you didn’t sense you would feel at home but surprisingly either quickly or across time you felt a deep sense of home, belonging, and harmony with its landscape, people, and/or energy in some way?  What was the surprise?

Benji's Response: 

When I was in my twenties I spent a lot of time on my own. Mostly wandering around east London dance floors and coffee shops. I took a trip to East Africa and arrived in Addis Ababa at sunrise. I’m not sure what I was looking for but I found a small two story guest house with a stone courtyard and sat in its eaves watching the sun come up. I was a long way from home, and I felt it. Across the courtyard I noticed a young man deep in his own stuff.

I walked into the sun and said hello. He offered me his name. His father was from Addis but he’d grown up in London, and was here to marry an Ethiopian woman he’d met on a previous trip. I could tell he was nervous. He asked me if I’d like to come to the wedding. I had nothing else to do. Why not?

It wasn’t long before I was designated part of the groom’s party to go to the bride’s village and collect her from her parent’s house. This involved a peculiarly formal ritual dance outside on the street, then more inside a tiny kitchen. The wedding itself got even more bizarre for me, as the best man had to go to find a replacement DJ and asked me to stand in. Don’t ask me about the speech. I had barely opened my Amharic phrasebook, let alone got to the section on best man speech jokes!

Anyway, after that I set off to the Southern Highlands, and spent some days in a wooden hut a mile or so outside a village in the Bale Mountains. In the evenings I’d walk into town and some men in a bar would offer to teach me about ritual dancing (it’s all about the shoulder throw). Then on my way home I’d hear wolves and quicken my pace, hoping they weren’t between me and my hut.

For the first couple of weeks I felt like an outsider, as children herding goats would call me names I learned meant white-skin and foreigner. But one morning I was walking into the village and a small boy smiled at me as he called out ‘faranji’ and then took up step beside me and walked all the way to the village with me. All of a sudden I felt part of the fabric of the place. The air smelt different. Home wasn’t so far away any more.