Dispatches: Ethiopia

Thoughts on a place never colonized, not even by its own government.

1.

I had flown through Addis Ababa a number of times before ever leaving the airport. I was on my way to Nigeria the first time, and as the plane descended into Addis Ababa Bole Airport, I was more focused on my final destination than the transit point. Nevertheless, as I took in the view from my window seat, the lush greenness that surrounds the city caught my attention. Addis sits in the shadow of Mount Entoto, in an area of grassland that rises above the desert of the Great Rift Valley.

My interest was piqued. This verdant landscape was not the Ethiopia of my imagination. But there would be three more years of trips on Ethiopian Airlines, flying through Addis, before ever leaving the airport.

An act of nature took me out of the airport the first time. I was on another work trip, again connecting through Addis, but my flight home was cancelled due to an ominously-named super typhoon.

My business class ticket meant that Ethiopian Airlines would put me up at the Addis Ababa Hilton. I was happy about this because I wasn’t keen to test the city’s budget options. To get my voucher I had to wait and wade through the throng of people crowding the ticket counter. There was a business class line that would have been a shorter wait, but the way through the crowd just to get to that line was as dense as the line itself. So, I waited in a crush of bodies and was slowly carried by this human current up to the counter to collect my voucher.

A few poles and some rope could have formed that scrum into something resembling a line, making the whole process much faster and less infuriating. The familiar refrain of “TIA, this is Africa” lingered in the back of my mind before I caught and chastised myself.

It was evening when I landed in Addis but the middle of the night by the time I made it to my hotel room. I had the whole next day to kill before having to be back at the airport at night.

2.

Addis Ababa is not a walkable city, at least not in the present parlance. That said, I have walked it. Walking is what I like to do in a new city. It is a way of testing boundaries. I walk as far as I feel safe and then turn and repeat. In the process, I trace an area of interest. Sometimes that area is quite small. Other times my legs give out before I begin to feel any danger or lose interest in what I am seeing. In Addis it was the latter.

I enjoyed my time walking Addis, though I do wish that I had taken a ride in one of the city’s many Lada taxis. The Ladas are painted royal blue with white roofs and are a relic of the Derg, the Soviet-aligned military government that overthrew the Ethiopian Empire in 1974 and ruled until 1987. Addis has a fleet of newer taxis, painted yellow and with working meters. This time the cars are Chinese made, a reflection of Ethiopia’s latest diplomatic turn.

There is a shabby chicness to Ethiopia's capital city. You can see it in the National Museum of Ethiopia, with its display of the uniforms of Ethiopia's last Emperor. The uniforms give away the emperor’s slight frame. Their nattiness stands out against the threadbare carpeting and the fading paint of the museum’s exhibition rooms.

Among Haile Selassie’s many epitaphs was Negus Negu, or king of kings. The title hints at what Ethiopia was, what it still is. Ethiopia was an Empire, a confederation of kingdoms. Ethiopia is now a parliamentary republic, but one organized under a federal system. It remains a conglomeration of different ethnic groups, many with their own political parties and some with their own armies.

Ethiopia is Africa’s second most populous country, but its population is oddly distributed. Addis, which has only been the capital since the end of the 19th century, has a population of 3.3 million people, making it only Africa’s 24th most populous city. Ethiopia’s next largest city has 440,000 residents, another hint at the country’s disparate nature.

The National Museum has an excellent collection of ceramics as well as some very good paintings. In the museum’s lower level, lies a plaster replica of Lucy, the Australopithecus Afarensis who lived in Ethiopia’s Awash Valley an estimated 3.2 million years ago. Her remains were discovered in 1974, a time when it was still fashionable to speak of a “missing link,” the transitional species that might bridge the gap between primates and modern humans.

After a day of walking and seeing the museum and walking some more, I returned to the Hilton, which continues in the theme of shabby chic. There are a number of newer hotels in Addis, among them the much grander Sheraton. But I like the Hilton, which was inaugurated by Haile Selassie himself, or so says the plaque in the lobby. The grounds are leafy and bring to mind a club. An Ethiopian friend of mine tells me that he learned to swim in the Hilton's pool. These are pedigrees that I like.

I have been in a few places like the Addis Hilton. Quiet, green enclaves that sit in the middle of cities that are anything but. If you travel far enough, you are bound to reach such a place. Sometimes you discover that you are already in such a place.

There is always the urge to wonder just how much of the comfort can be directly related to any nearby misery. How much of it is stolen, ill-gotten gains? I never know. There are many things that one never knows as a tourist. Even so, I consider myself lucky to have seen a more bucolic side of Ethiopia, if only to help with exorcising the associations of my youth, the news reports of famine, the images of refugees fleeing civil war, the shots of children with distended bellies.

3.

The second time I left the Addis airport, I was meant to leave. It was another work trip but this time to Addis. I had also managed to tack on a weekend excursion north to Lalibela before my meetings began on Monday. Lalibela is a city of rock churches carved into the landscape. The town bears the name of the 12th century king who commissioned the churches in an effort to create a new Jerusalem. Lalibela is to this day an important place of worship to Ethiopian Orthodox Christians.

The flight from Addis was less than an hour and my hotel arranged a van to pick me up. The van made stops at several hotels around town and I saw several new hotels being built. At the time, Lalibela felt poised to become a tourist hotspot. I read comparisons to Machu Picchu.

Unlike Machu Picchu, Lalibela’s structures are not located in a single compound. They are scattered around the town; though the the town is small. You could see all of the churches in a day or stretch it to two and do some wandering. If you go to Lalibela, be sure to take one of your meals at the Ben Abeba restaurant, which sits perched on a hill just outside of town, overlooking a magnificent valley that runs to the northwest of Lalibela. Not only are the views impressive, but the restaurant itself is architecturally interesting, a kind of deconstructed, post-apocalyptic wizard’s hat. I took several pictures of Ben Abeba, but none really captured the full effect of the place.

There have been a couple of times in recent memory when I experienced something that I half wished to had captured on camera. One time was in Hawaii, on a boat off the coast of the Big Island, on the way to snorkel with manta rays. The sun was still in the sky but falling into the horizon, creating the magical colors of golden hour. I stood on the bow and took in the view. As the boat cut through the water, some dolphins came to swim directly underneath, riding the wake created as the bow sliced through the water. The dolphins reflected pink and grey through the clear blue of the water and the white of the boat’s wake. The colors were something from a David Hockney painting or a poster of art deco Miami.

I was tempted to run and get my phone even though I knew the iPhone camera probably wouldn’t capture the moment’s full magic. It would have made a cool Instagram post, though. I don’t know because I decided to stand there and simply enjoy the moment.

The second time was in Lalibela. As I tried to sleep in my hotel room the first night there, my efforts were frustrated by an abundance of bugs and by a dusty room that aggravated my allergies. At some point during a mostly sleepless night, I heard what I thought might be gunshots followed by shouts that could have been celebratory or could have been something else.

The next morning, I learned that there had been a shooting. Several people were dead. On my way to the tourist office with my guide, we walked through the funeral procession that filled the town’s main street. I found myself surrounded by a sea of mourners in white. The crowd swirled around me, the cries, the ululations, the sounds of mourning encircled me.  It was unreal, as if something from a dream or a television documentary.

I did have my phone that day but felt it would be untoward to pull it out and begin filming. I stick by that decision, but part of me wished that I had captured the scene on camera, though not so that I could show it off on social media. Rather, I wish I had it as proof of an ephemeral moment. Afterwards, I looked online to try to find reports of the shooing but found nothing. To this day I am not certain that any of it really happened.

4.

Leaving Ethiopia, I knew I would be back. There is more to explore. There is Gondar, the former capital of the Abyssinian Empire and Aksum, the capital of the Aksum Empire. And I am sure that there is much to discover in Addis. All thoughts of a return trip were put on hold during Covid. And since November 2020, Ethiopia has been involved in a near civil war.

It was at the height of the Tigray War that I found myself reading Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King, a novel set during the Second Italio-Ethiopian War. The book is about a specific conflict, fascist Italy’s 1933 invasion and occupation of Ethiopia, but the book does a very good job of locating that conflict within the set of larger conflicts playing out both within Ethiopian society and the larger world. The Shadow King is a mesmerizing read, both on the strength of Mengiste’s prose but also on the underlying complexity of the subject.

When I was in Ethiopia in late 2018, there were images of the Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed plastered everywhere. Abiy took office in April in 2018 and that July, he and his Eritrean counterpart signed an agreement officially ending the Ethiopia-Eritrea War, which had ceased hospitalities twenty years ago. This act won Abiy the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019.

In Abiy’s desire to further unite Ethiopia under his coalition government, he chafed some of the country’s ethnic groups, including his own Oromo group, which had before had an outsized representation in Ethiopia’s politics. The centralization efforts also upset the Tigrayans, who were on the front line of the war with Eritrea and were a key part of the alliance that overthrew the Derg. Abiy’s move to greater centralization led the Tigrayans to declare their autonomy, which eventually led to fighting between the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front and the federal government.

There is a quip about how the best way to win a Nobel Peace Prize is to start a war and then end it. But there is another version of this. Nobel laureates who win the prize and later resort to military action. Such is the case with Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, who won the prize for her struggle against the reining military junta but has become something of an international pariah for her refusal to strongly oppose the government’s genocidal actions against the Rohingya Muslim minority.

The conflict in Ethiopia is in somewhat of a lull, but the tensions that ignited the fighting remain. Will it flare up again? Will the country find a balance between the unity of the federal government and the demands of specific groups for autonomy? Will Abiy follow in the footsteps of Aung San? I don't know the answer to these questions. I had to fly to Addis and finally leave the airport, and walk the streets of the capital, and explore the rock churches of Lalibela just to learn enough to ask these questions. The answers will have to wait.