By Khaled Diab

Live8 aimed to raise awareness of Africa, but it succeeded in perpetuating the one-dimensional view of Ethiopia as a famine-stricken land with nothing going for it. This complex land, with its rich past and culture, impoverished present and precarious future deserves to be explored on its own terms.

July 2005

A more upmarket Addis house.

It was set to be our most unusual date ever but the sands of fate had other ideas. We had arranged to arrive in Addis Ababa within a couple of hours of each other after more than two weeks apart during which Katleen was on mission in Sudan. I should have perhaps gleaned that something was not quite right when I couldn’t see Khartoum from my window as we flew over it.

As I kicked my heels in the arrivals hall, I heard a group of people speaking the unmistakable Egyptian dialect. They turned out to be officials at the embassy who had come to greet some people on the flight from Cairo. They were a little surprised that I had come to Ethiopia on holiday and one of them warned me that trouble was expected a week or so down the line when the government was expected to announce ultimate victory in the elections, an outcome which the opposition and most Ethiopians would consider a travesty. How deadly accurate he would prove to be! He gave me his telephone number at the embassy just in case I needed any help.

For the time being, thoughts of imminent reunion were growing in my mind. Then, suddenly, the Khartoum flight disappeared from the arrivals screen. I went around the chaotic customs area of the new Bole International Airport trying to discover what had gone wrong. Eventually, I found an airport official and I informed him that I’d lost the flight I was waiting for. He told me that a sandstorm over the Sudanese capital meant that no flights could take off or land there. I switched on my mobile phone and found an SMS from Katleen saying that she was grounded until the following morning.

On the way to the hotel, we drove through Addis Ababa’s bleak, run down streets. I had already got a sense of how poor the city was from the air – it was less luminous than most other urban areas I had flown over. From ground level, and veiled by night, the town looked destitute: a rusting, crumbling expanse of corrugated iron peppered with the odd solid brick or concrete structure.

The friendly cab driver, when he learnt that I had to go back the next day to pick up my wife, asked enviously: “You’re married?”

“Yes. Are you?” I inquired.

“No,” the 24-year-old laughed with a hint of bitterness that was beyond his years. “Not yet. I must prepare myself.”

“Have you got a girlfriend,” I prodded innocently.

“No, I have no money.”

“Do you need lots of money to have a girlfriend?”

“Of course,” he responded simply. “Love and feelings are not important when there is no money.” Being a strong believer in the power of emotion, I was taken aback by his cynicism. But during our stay we were to see several apparent displays of the power of money. The very next morning, we came across an Ethiopian woman in her 20s with an English man that was old enough to be my father. I knew he was English because he was in the midst of a shouting match with a young Ethiopian man who seemed chagrined by this match. Later in our trip, we encountered two middle-aged American men – obviously friends – with pretty Ethiopian partners about Katleen’s age. All four sat silently staring into space while they awaited their flights, fiddling with their fingers or their cameras.

We chatted a little about the political situation and he told me how disillusioned everyone was with Meles Zenawi’s government. “After 14 years, everyone has had enough, we need change,” he stated confidently, ticking off the problems with the current regime: falling living standards, corruption, too much investment in the PM’s part of the country and nowhere else, etc.

That hoped-for change was in the form of the opposition Coalition for Unity and Democracy, which I hoped, for Ethiopia’s sake, would live up to its label. My driver was in no doubt. “They’re educated people – doctors and lawyers and engineers – and they have a programme.”

Feeling exhausted, I entered the hotel lobby with thoughts of sleep, but I was about to be delivered my second disappointment of the night: the booking I had made over the internet was not communicated by the manager – who banned anyone else from using the hotel’s only computer – to the reception and all the rooms were occupied. Luckily, they managed to arrange a cheaper room at a better hotel.

Addis awakenings

My first morning in Addis was spent dashing between airline and airport sorting out the mess in our domestic flights bookings – which Ethiopian Airlines’ Addis area manager, once involved, cleared up efficiently – and picking Katleen up.

Addis Ababa means new flower in Amharic and this is what Menelik II thought of his new capital when he established it in the 19^th century. Blossoms in spring are not the first images evoked by the disintegrating wilderness of shabby shacks, rivers-cum-sewers, and the legions of street children and beggars. Despite its fresh-looking people, Addis looks like a city that is perpetually withering and wilting, a town of gloom not bloom.

The tin and corrugated iron shacks put me in mind of South African townships. The key difference is that they are not kept far away, in a separate dimension, but are right in the heart of the city and permeate everywhere. Addis doesn’t have the dangerous feel of what I hear about, say, Soweto.

The street children and the mutilated beggars are the hardest to deal with. Sometimes I felt seized by the urge to pull my wallet out and hand its entire contents, one note at a time, to the poor wretches. But even if we went round the city distributing every penny we had, it would have no visible difference. The deficit in Ethiopia’s Gross Domestic Poverty balance is too big for small fish like us to plug.

Visitors to such a poor country are bound to come away with some feelings of guilt but we decided our presence here was better than our absence – both for Ethiopia and ourselves. The best we could do, we decided, was to bring fleeting moments of joy and show our friendship and camaraderie to individuals and, in this pummelling mass of humanity, not to lose sight that these are individual humans.

One of our first chances to do so was when a group of boys approached us asking for food. We took them into a nearby supermarket and bought them something wholesome to eat, as well as some biscuits they were staring at. We also took some time to chat and laugh with them.

Once your eyes adjust to their new surroundings, you begin to notice how unthreatening the city is, how friendly and happy many of the people walking down the street seem, and the beauty of the surrounding mountains which hug and curtain Addis. Foreign faces are rare enough to draw a lot of attention, mainly from people smiling at you or saying, “Hello!”

Although it felt strangely inconsequential here, news of the French ‘no’ vote on the EU constitution filtered through and we watched it on the evening news in our room. Addis, of course, aspires to be the Brussels of Africa. It is home to the African Union and the African arm of several UN bodies but the physical shadow they cast on the city is not as large or imposing as in Brussels.

However, to reflect its position as the aspiring capital of Africa, Addis has taken to giving most of its main roads the names of the continent’s 53 countries. This presented us with a three-pronged problem: maps are at best indicative, our guidebook contained the roads’ former names and people tend to give streets popular names. This meant that, in the evening, we spent an hour wandering around looking for a particular restaurant our guidebook had recommended but unable to find it – instead, we came across one seedy bar after another.

The faithful congregate outside an Addis church.

Adventist adventures

One of Katleen’s colleagues in Sudan had given her a package to deliver to his sister who lived in Addis. We tried dialling the number he gave for her but it did not work. He’d also given the address for the Ethiopian Adventist Church where, he had said, his sister was known.

After trying different combinations of the phone number, none of which worked, we decided to head to the church. At the front gate, we were greeted by a spotty teenager with a detached glaze in his eyes. He had something of a sedated air about him, perhaps due to the strength of his faith, and spoke in a slow and deliberate monotone.

I have to admit that I don’t know much about Seventh Day Adventists but, in my imagination, they were inextricably linked to TV evangelists, cultism and crackpot reinterpretations of scripture. Now I’m home I’ve learnt that the 14-million member church is one of the world’s fastest-growing organisations, mainly thanks to its missionary work in poor countries.

Having lived through the changing of the millennium, we are all aware – especially those of us who lived near the pyramids at the time – of the great disappointment felt by millennialists. It appears that like-minded individuals suffered a similar set back more than a century and a half earlier. A certain William Miller predicted the second coming of Christ would occur on 22 October 1844, which didn’t happen. This led to the Great Disappointment and gave the church its name.

Everyone in the Addis church was helpful and friendly but no one could point us in the right direction towards the woman we sought. We went around asking various people, including those staying at the guesthouse, the rector, and the receptionist who dialled all kinds of people for us in her loud and jolly manner.

Conceding defeat, we looked for an internet café to e-mail Katleen’s colleague and ask him to send us clear co-ordinates and ask his sister to look us up upon our return to Addis.

Read Part II

ã2005 K. Diab. Unless otherwise stated, all the content on this website is the copyright of Khaled Diab.