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Three days in Addis

You can’t learn much from three days in a country, but you can try to learn something. Here are my first impressions of Addis Ababa, based on walking 22 miles, talking to a few Ethiopians, and visiting both its Unity Park and its National Museum as well as its museum of the Red Terror.

First impressions count. Addis is a naturally beautiful city, built on hills at over 7500 feet. Wherever greenery has survived and the nearby mountains are visible, as from my hotel room, the city gives a warm and welcoming impression:

Walking in it is a different sensation. Vast areas are construction sites. Many of those are inactive, sometimes with 10 or 20 floors of reinforced concrete idle. I am told the uncertain political situation–Ethiopia is attempting a transition to multi-party democracy–has spooked some investors. Most of the active sites seem to be those with Chinese financing announced on placards reading “China Aid” or citing a Chinese bank or construction company.

The rest is mostly nondescript: small sidewalk shops (often without paved sidewalks) selling a bewildering variety of car parts, cosmetics, meat, clothes, and soft drinks, or larger shopping centers where the main tenant seems often to be a bank or finance company specializing in international cash transfers, in addition to shops selling cell phones, related paraphernalia, and other electronics.

Precious little of the city is more than a few decades old. The National Museum is showing its fifty or so years–frayed is not an exaggeration–but manages nevertheless to convey a narrative of pride in four directions:

1. The Nobel Prize awarded last year to current Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, whose medal graces the museum entrance hall;
2. The Ethiopian empire, whose weapons, crowns, and thrones occupy the central position on the ground floor;
3. The peasants and warriors credited with liberating Ethiopia from Italian and Communist oppression, who are featured in paintings and sculpture;
4. The prehistoric origins in Africa of humans and non-humans, with due emphasis on the more than 3 million-year-old partial skeleton of “Lucy,” discovered in the Afar region of Ethiopia in 1974.

The labeling of the exhibits in the pre-historic basement is particularly well done and focused on gradual evolution.

A similar focus is apparent in the more politically focused and beautifully renovated imperial-era buildings of Unity Park. It is a sometimes kitsch oasis where the admission fee to the festival on the day I visited was enough to guarantee that only upper middle class Ethiopian families were tolerating the hour-long wait to get through security. Past the live lions, playground, and small pavilions focused on each of Ethiopia’s regions, I found at the summit the graceful palace of Emperor Menelik II, Emperor Haile Selassie’s throne room, and a gargantuan banqueting hall, all handsomely restored.

The restoration includes a narrative on the sides of the throne room strikingly similar in form to the prehistoric one in the National Museum: gradual and peaceful evolution. On one side, the focus is on Ethiopia’s main religious traditions: Judaism, Orthodox Christianity, Islam, and Protestantism, with connections among them underlined. This is also the emphasis in retelling the legend of the Queen of Sheba and her son (by Solomon) Menelik, who is said to have taken the Arch of the Covenant from Jerusalem, in a room behind the throne.

On the other side, the focus is explicitly on Ethiopia’s state-building process, with each of its rulers since the 19th century given credit, even the Provisional Military Administration Council (DERG)’s President Mengistu, who ruled as a Communist dictator from 1977 to 1991:

The DERG gets its full due however in the basement, which was used to detain and torture its opponents during the Red Terror of 1977/78, when 30-50,000 Ethiopians were killed for political reasons. There is a separate Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum in town where the gruesome period is more grimly documented. The genocide trials of 1994/2006 found 72 people guilty, but Mengistu escaped and lives still in Zimbabwe. The DERG also presided over the disastrous famine of 1985/85, which killed more than a million people.

Leaving middle class Ethiopia and the historical narratives behind, I walked the streets again, struck by the contrast between the all too apparent poverty of the beggars and the sense of relative security an obvious Westerner nevertheless feels, only occasionally interrupted by a half-hearted attempt to follow or pester.

Ethiopia is in fact one of the poorest countries on earth, even after a decade-long boom of almost 10% growth from 2007/08 to 2017/18. Poverty is far more prevalent in the countryside than in the cities. Here in Addis some tiny percentage of the population is enjoying lavish weddings (I am told it is “wedding season” right after Orthodox Christmas) at the Sheraton and Hilton hotels, complete with spectacular wedding dresses, half a dozen well-accoutered bridesmaids, and stretch limos.

I for one feel privileged to be here and hope you enjoy these superficial first impressions. I plan for better and more after the next two weeks, when our 16 SAIS masters students plus a colleague and I will be talking with lots of Ethiopians about their current situation and the transition everyone I’ve spoken with is anticipating, full of hope.