Bole Michael: Addis Ababa’s “little Mogadishu”

Just a few kilometres from Bole International Airport — where days are stitched with the roar of departing flights and nights blur with familiar faces you can’t quite name — stands Bole Michael: one of the most Somali-populated districts in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital.

Phonologically — and playfully — Somalised by some as Ballay Makaahiil, this neighbourhood is less a place than a living canvas, splattered with every shade of Somali identity from across the globe.

For nearly a quarter of a century, Somali refugees from different parts of the Horn settled among other Ethiopian Somalis, and together they transformed what was once farmland and modest housing into a dense commercial hub, a neighbourhood known by many as “little Mogadishu”.

The muddy, khat-waste-infested streets with numerous restaurants and long lines of taxis waiting for someone to scoop, distinguish Bole Michael from most of its sister districts in Bole sub-city. Its restaurants lure even non-Somalis from across town for plates of East Ethiopian and Somali culinary. Its pensions are shadowed by stories and characters long gone, and every corner and alleyway pulses with greetings in different Somali dialects, questions for directions, jokes, accusations, and loud phone calls with families left behind or waiting abroad.

Yet above all, what ties these voices together is a single, shared tongue: the language of waiting.

In the street-side coffee spots, conversations often begin with a feast of Somali and global politics, detours into witty clan dacaayad (teasings) to test each other’s patience, or stray remarks on geography and history. But they always end with each one sharing their particular case of waiting.

The Urban Refugee Resource Centre is housed here. A local joke goes: “What do airports and refugee centres have in common?” The punchline, always: “Somalis.” It is this centre that brought many here.

An uncle complains about the endless wait for his medical results; a young university student laments the anxiety of securing an Ethiopian passport; a mother wonders how long it will take for the refugee office to reply. Each face changes when the subject turns to waiting, and the air fills with a shared sense of suspension, one so strong it makes you feel as if you too are waiting for something, even if you are not.

The Urban Refugee Resource Centre is housed here. A local joke goes: “What do airports and refugee centres have in common?” The punchline, always: “Somalis.” It is this centre that brought many here. Once every few days, before its pale gate, a queue snakes onto the asphalt of the main road. The white Land Cruisers pull in and out like surgeons entering an operating theatre, watched closely by those in line, their eyes fixed on the pens, the hands, the papers. “Waraaqahii,” “waraqahaygii,” “waraaqaheenii” – choruses sung tirelessly in this place.

To someone unaware of how charged the word waraaqo is here, it might mean little. Just documents, after all. That is how it seemed to me, until I was proven wrong one cloudy morning, when an aunty approached me with a face carrying a contagious shock. She asked in haste if I could read English, and from the folds of her dress she pulled out a bunch of papers, stuffed and creased like treasure but never truly read. She explained how someone from the migration office had called, asking her to come the next day with her documents.

We shuffled through the almost archival bundle, searching for the right paper. And as I read aloud and translated, from the urgency in her movements and the worry lurking beneath her voice, I caught a glimpse into what waraaqo truly meant here for the first time. No, they are not mere papers, but emblems of identity, tickets to possible futures, and sometimes carriers of bad news – hospital referrals, rejections, indefinite deferrals.

But not all the Somalis here are refugees. Fleeing the deliberate coordination of untrustworthy public hospitals and the soaring prices of private ones back home, many Somalis come to Ethiopia for medical purposes. Yet once here, they often find themselves in a system identical to the one they left, only this time in a language they don’t understand.

Lacking the confidence or the language it takes to haggle, they usually pay whatever is asked. This makes them easy targets for overcharging, and sometimes they are even sent through unnecessary medical procedures, not for their health, but, as locals say, simply “to feed the machines”.

Those who come for medical procedures have also created an unexpected job market for interpreters. At an average of 800 birr a day, interpretation is one of the few ways waiting Somalis can earn an income. However, these interpreters are often chosen through personal connections rather than merit, which, in medical cases, can lead to potentially lethal confusions.

While some residents work as taxi drivers, waiters, or even khat traders, most lean on remittances from home and abroad – lifelines that not only sustain families in Bole Michael but also fuel the perception that Somalis here are wealthier than they are.

This perception makes them not only prone to overcharging, but also fuels deeper resentment among some locals who see this way of gaining money from remittances as “unearned”. For a few, it becomes a justification for scams or, in more extreme cases, a moral excuse for bigger crimes – robbery, even kidnapping.

Ethiopian urban culture is often, stereotypically, divided along the characters of the east and west of the Awash River. Somalis, with their “eastern” temperament – loud, restless, insistent, consuming khat – are sometimes seen as bothersome by members of the host community, who describe themselves as more reserved, more grounded.

This image of Somalis is so common it even found its way into a popular Ethiopian movie, Ye Somalew Vandam (The Somali Vandam), which revolved around a Somali character’s experience in Addis Ababa – a film that would neatly fit in, if racial profiling was a genre.

Still, in Bole Michael, this cultural contrast is well tolerated by house owners and others who benefit from Somalis renting their houses in large families, paying the highest rates in the city – making the neighbourhood a “landlord’s heaven”.

For many Somalis, life here is temporary, even if it lasts a decade. For the locals, it is permanent but increasingly expensive – a shift they justifiably attribute to the Somalis.

Though many locals acknowledge the development refugees and other Somalis have brought – like new houses (mostly built for rent), tightened police activity, a thriving market – they also complain of being displaced by rising rents. For many Somalis, life here is temporary, even if it lasts a decade. For the locals, it is permanent but increasingly expensive – a shift they justifiably attribute to the Somalis.

And then, the market; the pulsing heart of this Somali oasis in a sea of non-Somalis. Here, Somalis are said to run most of it, monopolising niches and weaving transnational supply chains. Their shops are known for sweets and cosmetics imported from Somali cities, halal butcheries with their red crescent slogans, and an air always thick with the scent of halwo and muqmad.

Locals of various ethnicities also flock to these shops for quality and price. For many across Addis, Bole Michael itself stands in for the eastern cities they cannot easily visit, like Harar, Dire Dawa, Jigjiga. When the distance is too great, or the journey impossible, they come here instead. In its shops they find the same colourful diracs, macawis, and other Muslim and Somali attires; in its restaurants they find the fadiirad, cambuulo, spiced meat and bariis upholstered with the moos; and in its alleys they feel the same rhythms of the eastern soul. For many, this place is not only a Somali refuge but also a proxy destination, a condensed mirror of the cities that lie beyond the Awash.

But when it comes to the residents of the neighbourhood, one can hardly distinguish Somalis from non-Somalis in the marketplace; almost everyone speaks the language – from Oromos to Gurage and Amhara traders. It is also common to hear Amharic and Oromiffa laced with Somali words, spoken even by those with no Somali background. Words like hooyo (any older Somali woman), walaalo, saaxiib, and waryaa are no longer exclusively Somali; many other residents use them even when speaking their native languages. The overtly swollen “waraaq” is also common here, since in both Oromo and Amharic the same word exists with slight variations: waraqaa, waraqat.

Right outside the market, “saaxiib, taxi?” floods you from all directions – a mantra of the transitional nature of this neighbourhood. Everything makes you feel you are going somewhere, even when you are not.

Still, not all the Somalis here are in transit. There are those who settled long ago and became part of the neighbourhood’s furniture, bidding farewell to friends every other week while simultaneously welcoming new ones. To meet these OGs, one must pass the chewing spots and teashops and step into the bars.

As many of his friends like to call him, “the Chief” is one such elder.

Prayer beads hanging from his neck, sporting a thick moustache, hangool in his hand, and spitting lines of classical Somali poetry throughout his conversations, the Chief foppishly talks about the days when this whole neighbourhood was made up of nothing but a few houses and muddy farms. “I came in the early nineties from abroad, and I didn’t want to go back home, so I chose to stay,” he tells me, scrolling through a phone permanently plugged into a power bank.

Another friend of his recalls coming around the same time, while a third sits silently, his white hair and beard glowing under dim light. The story of this latter is a haze, he doesn’t often talk, and it rarely makes sense when he does. So, the Chief and the other friends do the talking on his behalf while he sits listening with me, in a matching curiosity, to each of their versions of his own story.

The tables in these bars are crowded with Somalis, and though one might expect different topics from teashops back home, the conversations remain the same: clan politics, Somali news, loud arguments, the occasional aggression, with a swirl of Amharic or Oromo when calling for another drink.

One says he was a prisoner of war from the Ethio-Somali conflict who, when released later on, decided to stay. Another says he was a former Somali National Movement (SNM) fighter who, after being sent to Harar for training, fled to Addis. Even his name is uncertain. Yet he seems unbothered. With eyes always smiling, he carries the strange weightlessness of a life unanchored.

The tables in these bars are crowded with Somalis, and though one might expect different topics from teashops back home, the conversations remain the same: clan politics, Somali news, loud arguments, the occasional aggression, with a swirl of Amharic or Oromo when calling for another drink. A patchwork of identities all sheltered under the name “Somali”, ambidextrously defying the stereotypes with one hand, while ticking them with the other.

Thus, exists Bole Michael as a delicate harmony of contradictions: a place where papers are prayed over, and streets always ready to tell a story or two, and everyone – host or refugee, local or newcomer – seems to be waiting for something.