Bati: the city like music

A year ago, I came across a video from Bati: a man playing the harmonica in a small coffee place. The music filled the air. Around him, people began to join in—some clapping along, some swaying to the rhythm. It wasn’t planned or choreographed. It just happened naturally, as if they had all been waiting for that moment. Back then, I remember commenting: “Neighborhoods should be like this.” A year later, after wandering through Bati’s streets and feeling the warmth of its people, I’d go further. Perhaps life itself should be like this.   

Bati is a name shared by a city and by “qegnet,” one of the four musical modes known for its two modes. But looking deep at the city itself, at the paradoxes it holds—perched between highland and desert, between Afar, Amhara, and Oromo cultures—it becomes clear that this sharing of a name is no linguistic coincidence. It’s a way of being. A reflection of how the city’s physical, cultural, and climatic contradictions come together in one eclectic lived rhythm.   

Bati’s music, like the city that bears its name, has a haunting and sweet character. It uses a five-note pentatonic scale—the Bati major and minor— weaving tones that sound joyful and melancholic at once. It moves with intervals that bend expectation, each phrase slipping effortlessly into the next. Its melodies are often melismatic—a single syllable stretched across many notes, sliding, trilling, and inflecting in microtones that give it a fluid, almost improvisational quality. Sometimes there’s a call-and-response pattern. The lead singer’s phrase is answered by a chorus or the echo of an instrument. Always moving like a serene river.   

The climate of Bati echoes this dual nature. The city sits between the cool breath of the highlands and the fierce sun of the desert—two modes, just like the scale’s major and minor, each lending its mood to the song of the city. This in-between-ness is woven into every street and every conversation. The streets stretch like the strings of an instrument, plucked by the movements of people who know that life is a series of returns and departures. Cyclical flows that never quite repeat. These are streets where the slow dance of commerce and conversation opens up each day, shifting with the heat and the winds.   

Cities are made differently. Some are carved by emperors and become imperial capitals. In some, castles rise like stone memories of power. In others, obelisks stand as monuments to past glories. Some cities are garrisons that bear the imprint of conquest and ambition. Some are built by traders and tell the story of centuries of caravan trade and the soft hum of commerce through every courtyard. Some cities are shaped by industry, their activities dictated by the factory bell and the promise of modernity.   

And then there are cities like Bati, built like music. A gathering of many voices, each adding a note to the melody of everyday life without a single composer. The city grows and evolves like a song shared around a fire. Each voice finds its place, each note played not to dominate, but to add. Bati is not known for its strict boundaries. It has soft edges and open doors, bending the rigid lines of federalism to accommodate its unique character. Ethiopia’s federal structure, introduced in the early 1990s, with its stiff maps of nations and nationalities, is meant to fix identity in place. To give every group a home and every language a territory. But Bati resists such neat partitions. It is officially a special zone of Oromia within the Amhara region—an administrative compromise that reveals the limits of cartography when confronted with the complexity of real lives. In Bati, borders soften in the warmth of daily exchanges. The map’s straight lines yield to a more honest shape. Here, cultures overlap and identities flow together like melodies merging in a single chord.   

The city’s built environment mirrors this fluidity. Walk down its streets and you’ll find the Mesgidiskian—a mosque visible from the football field whose architecture resembles both mosque and church. Its shape embodies Bati’s refusal to be pinned down by any single identity. Like the music of Bati, the city’s spaces are never just one thing. They are both and neither, shifting with the light and the footsteps of those who pass through.   

Bati’s buna Tera coffee stalls are more than places to drink. They are places where the city’s different modes meet without hierarchy. In the buna Tera, there is no stage and no audience, only a shared, continuous improvisation of voices. Conversations drift from Middle East politics to someone’s medical condition. Then they move to art, to the mystic lyrics of Aya Mule, and finally to the weather. These are what urban sociologists call “third spaces,” where the private becomes public and the public becomes personal. In these spaces, identities and ideas mix freely, creating a civic intimacy that is hard to find elsewhere.   

Most of all, Bati’s music echoes in the daily gestures of its people. Oh, the people! The simple are wise, and the wise are simple. They do not hide. They do not show off either. Their talk is quick and clear, sometimes sharp, always sincere. There is no performance, no fake capitalist humility, no mask of politeness to coax a price or please a stranger. Their laughter is loud and unashamed. Their words are a direct expression of life’s unvarnished truths. They speak with the blunt honesty of the desert and the calm patience of the highlands. They meet each other in conversations that never need to be forced. Each person becomes part of a living harmony. Some clap, some sway, some simply listen. Together, they create something that cannot be forced or rehearsed. A melody that moves through the city like a warm wind, carrying the voices of those who refuse to be anything but themselves. It’s a music that leaves space for each new arrival to add their own phrase, and for each departure to leave an echo that lingers.   

Unlike cities that boast grand structures—monuments that stand as proof of their being, places where visitors pose for photos, capturing a memory to take home—Bati is a city whose essence cannot be photographed or contained. It is not a city of static forms but of shifting moods. Not of stone and steel, but of breath and voice. The philosopher Martin Heidegger once wrote about the difference between things that simply stand present-at-hand and those that reveal themselves in our use and care. Monuments stand apart, to be seen and admired from a distance. But places like Bati reveal themselves only when you walk their streets, share their coffee, and join their song.  

They are cities that exist not to be shown off, but to be lived in. Alive in the music of countless small moments. Their beauty lies in this flexibility. While rigid cities force their people to fit into narrow shapes, open cities like Bati are always ready to change. To be reshaped by every new arrival and every departing friend. That is their beauty, and also what makes them fleeting. They slip between your fingers even as you try to hold them, shifting like a melody that becomes something new whenever a new voice joins in.   

I’ve walked Bati’s streets and sipped coffee in its buna Tera. I’ve seen how my tourist feet became part of the city’s living rhythm, how I too left a trace in the song. But I know that when I return, Bati will be different again. Another Bati. Another arrangement of voices. And it will take me back to the first line. Life too should be like this. A rhythm of constant change. Open to every honest voice. Alive in the warmth of small, shared moments. Unwritten. Unrehearsed. Yet always whole.