ETHIOPIA: Explore Addis Ababa

Historic churches, monuments and crowded markets all contribute to the colorful ambience of Ethiopia’s capital.

While visitors shouldn’t miss the emerging Bole district or the “Red Terror” Martyrs’ Memorial Museum and Africa Hall in the southeast sections of the sprawling city, a rewarding area to explore surrounds Entoto Avenue, the boulevard connecting the two landmark roundabouts Arat Kilo and Sidist Kilo northeast of the city center.

You might think of it as Lucy’s neighborhood, since its most distinguished resident resides midway up the road in the National Museum of Ethiopia.

To be precise, it’s not actually the 3.2-million-year-old skeleton of an Australopithecus afarensis hominoid woman but a replica of her striding across her glass case in a darkened gallery room.

Her discovery in 1974 required a complete rethinking of human genealogy, and she continues to attract visitors who fawn over her image and crowd around to take selfies with one of the world’s oldest inhabitants.

Elsewhere in the charming, colonial-style building, the museum devotes four main exhibit sections to art works, ancient and medieval artifacts, ethnographic displays, and regalia and memorabilia from the country’s rulers — including the iconic modern leader, the “Lion of Judah” Haile Selassie, also once a resident of this part of town.

Arat Kilo, also called Meyazia 27 Square, commemorates May 5, 1941, the double date of Ethiopia’s liberation from Italy and Haile Selassie’s triumphant return from exile. The square is surrounded by shops and restaurants serving the staple national dish injera, the spongy flatbread coated with vegetable and meat sauces. At night visitors can stop at Jolly Bar and Grill for pizza, hamburgers and live music performed in its mirrored setting.

Wandering into the side streets running west uphill, visitors encounter secondhand book stalls, the residence of the Patriarch of the Ethiopian Church and clusters of old Armenian style houses dating from the Armenian Orthodox community that took refuge here. At the top of the hill, examples of the dark-maned Abyssinian lions prowl cages in the Lion Zoo.

And it’s a statue of a lion that stands on a ledge on the monument at Sidist Kilo, dedicated to patriots massacred in 1937. Just beyond, up the hill on the campus of the University of Addis Ababa, surrounded by gardens, the Ethnological Museum showcases historical artifacts of daily life, religious art and musical instruments. Housed in a former palace of Haile Selassie, it also exhibits his private suite, including a bullet hole reminder of the 1960 coup d’état.

ETHIOPIA: Promised land? Rastafaris Struggle In Ethiopia

They came from across the world to Ethiopia in search of their “promised land”, but for many Rastafarians, struggling to win even basic rights, the dream never materialised.

“How did we survive so far? I wonder,” said Reuben Kush, the grey-bearded president of the Ethiopian World Federation, a branch of Rastafarianism.

Kush left his home in Birmingham in Britain a decade ago to join a Rastafarian community based in the southern Ethiopian town of Shashamane, 250 kilometres (155 miles) south of Addis Ababa.

But in decades of existence, the settlement’s around 500 members have failed to win legal rights to property, education or work.

Celebrating the 85th anniversary this month of the 1930 crowning of their messiah, Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, the dreadlocked group sway in a circle chanting to a drum beat “Emperor Selassie I, Jah Rastafari”.

Rastafarianism — which jettisoned to worldwide notice in the 1960s and 70s with the music of reggae stars and committed Rastafaris Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff — first emerged as a spiritual movement in the 1930s among descendants of African slaves in Jamaica, who adopted Haile Selassie as their leader at a time when he stood out as the only independent black monarch in Africa.

They even took their name from his pre-coronation title, “Ras” for “head” and his birth name “Tafari Makonnen”. The “King of Kings” was deposed then killed by a military junta in 1974.

A supporter of decolonisation and cooperation among African states then largely under European control, Haile Selassie in the 1950s set aside 500 hectares (1,200 acres) in Shashamane to welcome back descendants of slaves seeking to return “home”.

“Ethiopia is our land, for we blacks in the West,” said Kush.

Rastafarians say it was the “divinity” of the land that drew them to Ethiopia, mentioned in the Bible more than 30 times and believed to be the birthplace of the Queen of Sheba, who visited the wise King Solomon.
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A 500-hectare (1,200-acre) plot of land in the Ethiopian …
A 500-hectare (1,200-acre) plot of land in the Ethiopian town of Shashamene, was offered to descende

In the late 1970s, Mengistu Haile Mariam’s Marxist-Leninist regime confiscated the Shashamane plot, prompting most Rastas to flee its authoritarian rule.

When Mengistu’s rule was toppled in 1991, some returned. But life in the promised land remains a struggle, with exile followed by exclusion.

“The Emperor had given us 500 hectares – today we live on six or seven hectares,” said Kush. “Today, we have no control over our property.”

Though many turned their backs on their country of origin by not renewing their passports, they have not been granted Ethiopian nationality, leaving them effectively stateless.

In tightly controlled Ethiopia,still run by Communist-inspired ex-rebels, land is a sensitive issue with Rastas neither allowed to file building permits or own property.

Nor can they work, pay taxes or send their children to university.

“What’s disappointing is that I have to confess to my relatives back home that we aren’t integrated here either,” Kush said.

On the recent anniversary of the emperor’s coronation, Rastafarians gathered as reggae music played and psalms were sung in a church painted red, yellow and green — the colours of both the Ethiopian and Rastafarian flags.

The smell of marijuana hung in air.

“We want to be identified as natural Ethiopians now – not as Jamaican, nor American!” said Paul Phang, a Rastafari leader, without fully clarifying what he meant.

The Rastas’ political wing, the Ethiopian World Federation, started in the 1930s but is still lobbying for their basic rights.

“We’re here to stay. We haven’t been kicked out of Ethiopia after all these years, that means we are accepted,” Kush said.

But they remain in legal limbo.

“Our needs are basic human rights needs,” Kush added. “We need to be able to tell our children that they have a state. Children are being born here and being classed as stateless — not able to get identification here and not able to get IDs from the countries where their parents come from. So we’re in a limbo.”

But with each Rastafarian church celebrating its own way, there are political divisions within the movement too.

“If every one of us was in accord, then these natural rights would have been granted to us already,” said Phang, a priest from the Bobo Ashanti Rastafari group.

“So because of this different ideology, different thinking, it’s like we cannot approach the government in our oneness.”