Colouring In Is How a Child Looks at Something Long Enough to Remember It

Colouring forces sustained attention on detail in a way that looking never does. To colour the border of a habesha kemis you have to follow it, band by band, and decide where one shape ends and the next begins. Twenty minutes of that teaches a child more about how tibeb is actually constructed than a decade of seeing it worn by relatives at weddings, because seeing is passive and tracing is not.

It puts her in the position of maker rather than spectator. Almost every cultural object in a diaspora home is something adults own and children are told to be careful around — the good coffee set, the woven basket, the framed cross. A colouring book is the rare cultural item that is hers to work on and allowed to be imperfect, and the finished page usually ends up on a fridge, which is a small but real act of claiming.

It asks nothing of her language, and that removes the usual obstacle. Language books are the default cultural gift for a child and they carry an implicit test — a page she cannot read is a page that makes her feel behind. A colouring book has no reading level and no right answer, so it works equally for a daughter who is shy about her Amharic or Tigrinya and for one who has none at all.

• A child somewhere between four and eleven, depending on how fine the line work is
• An older daughter or a teenager who colours to switch off
• A family wanting a cultural gift with no language requirement attached
• Long flights, waiting rooms and Sunday afternoons

• Teaches the visual detail of dress and daily life by making her trace it
• Requires no Amharic or Tigrinya whatsoever
• Cheap, light, and genuinely used rather than displayed

The things worth checking before you order — this is where gifts like this most often go wrong.

• Line weight decides the age, and listings almost never say so plainly. Thick, simple outlines suit a small child and bore a teenager; fine, dense detail is absorbing for an older reader and demoralising for a six-year-old. Judge from the sample images rather than from any age range printed on the cover.
• Check whether the pages are printed on one side only. Double-sided printing means felt tips bleed through and destroy the drawing on the reverse, which limits her to pencils — fine if you know in advance, annoying if you have also bought the markers.
• A paperback binding will not lie flat. Expect the spine to need breaking or weighting down, and expect the innermost part of each drawing to sit in the gutter. This is normal for the format rather than a defect.
• "Habesha" in a title tells you nothing about which traditions are inside. The umbrella covers Ethiopian and Eritrean dress, and a book may lean heavily one way. Look at the illustrations for the thing you actually want rather than trusting the word.
• Colouring books get used up. That is the nature of the format rather than a shortcoming, but it does mean this is a finite gift — and it is worth pairing with a decent set of pencils if you want it opened the same day rather than shelved.