The loss and gain of Addis Ababa

After being away from Addis Ababa for a while, I find myself wandering around the city, which feels both eerily familiar and strange. My childhood reverberates in Lideta's winding alleys, but the skyline is punctuated by strange towers, a sign of a metamorphosis that is both stunning and unnerving. 

The name Addis Ababa, which means new flower, was given to the city by Empress Taitu after she saw the acacia trees that grew around the Filwoha hot springs, the first inhabited area of the city. This “new flower” has always been more than just a place built with stone and steel. It is a living palimpsest, its surface rewritten by imperial ambition, colonial blueprints, and the hum of bulldozers, yet still singing with the melodies of memory. 

Empress Taitu played a pivotal role in founding Addis Ababa in 1886 by selecting its location, a decision with immense bearing on the city’s indigenous and homegrown beginnings. But within a century the city was transformed from a “from a conglomeration of interspersed settlements to a bustling African metropolis.” Shimelis Bonsa’s careful historiography in his article The Historiography of Addis Ababa: A Critique and a Discussion of the ‘Ethiopian City,’ challenges the mainstream academic view and criticises the early “Antecedents” - short accounts of Ethiopian towns, especially Addis Ababa, written by foreign travellers, soldiers, diplomats, and expats in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “Most of them did not speak local languages and oftentimes did not interact with the local population, except with some members of the Ethiopian ruling class,” writes Bonsa. They primarily thought about the city in terms of how it was different to what they were familiar with in Europe. 

As a student, I have just returned to Addis Ababa after years studying at a university 365 kilometres from home. My perspective is both intimate, shaped by a childhood in the city, and distant, allowing me to witness its transformation with fresh eyes. My experience strongly resonates with the themes in one of my most beloved books, Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts into Air. 

Though Berman’s inquiry into the Bronx may seem geographically removed from Addis Ababa, the book’s strength lies in its ability to capture a universal experience of modernity - the bittersweet promise of progress entwined with the erasure of familiar worlds. Berman wrote about “the huge steam shovels and bulldozers and lattings of steel and steel beams... the huge cranes... the wild, jagged crags of rock newly rent... vistas of desolation stretching... and marvel to see our ordinary nice neighbourhood changed into sublime, spectacle ruins.” 

That feeling transcends location. The common man’s experience of watching the solid melt into air resonates with my own as I witness Addis Ababa’s restless and frenetic transformation. At the heart of my reflection is this tension: the allure of expansion versus the destruction of the known. 

Cities rise on spiritual columns, their essence a reflection of the lives within them. Like large mirrors, they reflect the inner lives of their denizens. When those hearts lose their fervour, cities lose their sparkle. This vision by Shams Tabrizi, a 13th-century Persian poet and Sufi mentor, as translated in The Forty Rules of Love, echoes my disappointment walking the changed boulevards from Lideta to Arat Kilo. 

Tewodros’s litany - “አጉል ተቆራኝቶኝ, ሃይለኛዉ ትዝታሽ ልረሳሽ አልችልም, በምን ሰበብ ልጥራሽ” which translates as: “Excessively attached to your powerful memory, I cannot forget you, what reason do I have to forget you?” - whispers faintly in my ears. Cities are not collections of buildings, but layered tales, myths, and shared memories stacked upon one another messily; noticed at times, forgotten at others but always ubiquitous. With each hut destroyed and every new highway widened, another page of lived memory disappears. Yet, like a manuscript with generations of marginal notes, Addis Ababa’s soul lingers in the lyric: "ልረሳሽ አልችልም" (I cannot forget you). 

Between 1936 and 1941, the Italian occupation carved Addis Ababa into zones of power and subordination - Case Incise for colonial elites, Case Popolare for Italian workers, and Quarteri Indigeno for everyone else. Bonsa describes this as “the institution of racialised urban segregation, a phenomenon alien to the city.” Yonas Ashine, in Slaves of State and intellectuals of Development: A Genealogy of Development in Ethiopia, underscores how Mussolini's master plan turned urban planning into an instrument of repression: “The European and native quarters are to be separate and provision was made for the natives themselves to be divided into various sections according to race [tribe] and religion.” 

This was more than spatial control; it was epistemological violence - imagining the city along hierarchies of race, heritage, and knowledge. Even though racial segregation lessened post-liberation, today’s glass towers and gated compounds maintain these hierarchies based on wealth in the name of economic growth. The poor are evicted, their sefer (quarter) in Kazanchis and Piassa bulldozed as part of the imperative to progress. Berman writes about the fact Russians experienced modernisation “mainly as something that was not happening” in contrast to other European countries where it was social actuality which captured a changing world, triggering an “anguish of backwardness” and a potent and violent desire to catch up. There are echoes of this in Ethiopia, where the need to overcome the “anguish of backwardness” among the nation's elite recreates hierarchies from the colonial era. The exclusion persists, no longer drawn by race and codified in law as in the past but by the ideals of property. 

Before Italian blueprints, Addis Ababa's hillside quarters grew organically, tied through relationships and daily patron-client interactions. Bonsa insists: “Addis Ababa was a basically indigenous city based on an idea of space… unlike that of the West.” Still, modern planners often envision it as a blank slate. 

Ashine argues that post-1941, Haile Selassie’s regime made Addis Ababa Addis Śəlǝṭane - the “New Civilisation” - a model city and testing ground for development. “Development prophesied a homogenising single destiny for the entire humanity, shaped by market-led high-mass consumption,” he writes. 

In contrast to this logic, I map my own pilgrimage to the city through memory and music. I ignore blueprints and walk through wrecking-ball-scarred blocks near Ras Hotel, the historic building and nearby National Theatre once offering communal comfort through familiar shapes. 

Now, strange towers rise, altering sightlines and cutting links between hillside and market. Bulldozers echo Tewodros’s elegy - a relentless quest for efficiency, which is presented as painful and necessary like bitter medicine.  

Amidst this chaos, three anchors endure: the Ghebbi (palace), the religious sphere, and Mercato (market). “The palace, the church, and the market... continued to shape the structure, personality, and activities of the city,” Bonsa writes. 

As I walk, Tewodros’s song echoes through these spaces. The Ghebbi's looming gates evoke the pain of lost intimacy, Lideta's domes bring calm, and Mercato's maze whispers strength. I noticed the conflict between remembering and forgetting in each, as though power and forgetting are inextricably linked. 

In Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard explores the matter and makes an interesting remark on what home represents: “For our house is our corner of the world.... It is our first universe, a real cosmos.” The sefer provided this fundamental space for numerous individuals in Addis Ababa, containing a universe of shared experiences, dreams, and memories. 

Therefore, the alteration of these familiar spaces shapes the very core of both individual and collective being, disrupting this primary universe in addition to changing it physically. 

But beneath the sophisticated facades and boulevards of this so-called New Civilisation is the enduring logic of pastoral power that Ashine outlines. Under the guise of salvation by means of the process of development, this secularised, hierarchical relationship forces the state to take on the role of shepherd, leading the flock.  

In sharp contrast to community-led initiatives from the Derg or post-1991 eras, such as Iddir (traditional social support association)-based planning, the cost of this activity is massive displacement and communal deterioration. This latter exposed a subtle politics of survival that permeated the entire city - an anti-power grounded in memory and carnality, manifested through shared memory and grassroots infrastructure. This “power memory” of an alternative construction method that corresponds with the city’s rhythms becomes a form of mnemonic opposition. 

Others bemoan the expansion of Addis Ababa as an “over-urbanisation,” an opinion Getahun Benti supports with population figures. But Bonsa cautions in his article that this judgement “remains contestable. Little conclusive evidence exists to demonstrate Addis Ababa was over-urbanised.” Though certainly social services are pushed to the limit. At the end of the review, Bonsa invites, in the text, “a rectification of the historiographical imbalance and the building of new patterns of urban (social-historical) analysis.” 

My individual experience embraces that invitation wholeheartedly, and becomes an alternate historiography: an electric cartography of belonging that cannot be erased at the hands of technocracy, and instead advocates a counter-narrative, which doggedly resists the desires of the regime as it is and the developmental impulses it advocates, especially the developmental desires of Prosperity... Tewodros’s repetition: 

“በሀሳብ እዋዣለዉ እያብሰለሰለኝ 

እቴ የሀገርሽ መንገድ አሃ ይጉዳኝም ያክመኝ አሃ 

ይሄስ ዉሎ ማደር አሃ ምንም አልጠቀመኝ አሃ” 

“I drown in thoughts, constantly mulling over 

My lady, the road to your home, whether it hurts me or heals me.  

This staying and spending the day, hasn't helped me at all.” 

The new flower still blooms, but its petals carry the marks of bulldozers and the burden of memory. Staring out over the Filwoha springs to the new glass and concrete that characterise this Addis Ababa morning, Tewodros’s song plays in my soul alongside Bonsa's warning. 

This perspective is furthered, however, with Ashine's thoughts about the entrenched systems of power that shape this city—lighted, as it is, with the eternal wisdom that may be gleaned from Marshall Berman's reflections on modernity, coupled with an enlarging sense of the environmental price of modernity, even under the gentle protection of illumination. 

Italian designer and architect Paolo Soleri, who studied under Frank Lloyd Wright, dreamed of an Arcadian future among an otherwise mundane world with the idea of arcology—cities in concert with the natural world that lies about and with one another, their city centres conceived as living, dynamic beings. 

One may genuinely appreciate both the loss and the gain of Addis Ababa: an exuberant fount of faith, belonging, and the “powerful memory” that resolutely lingers, only if both song and learning are taken into account.