Ethiopia

As is the case with most work related travel, I spent the first couple of days between the hotel and our office in Addis, and saw nothing beyond a noisy road that was under construction. On Friday evening, for the first time that week, I ventured beyond the road between the office and hotel. We went to a restaurant called Yod Abyssinia, an aesthetically decorated Ethiopian restaurant with a small stage in the middle of the restaurant where Ethiopian men and women performed continuously hour after hour, showcasing exotic Ethiopian music and shoulder dances.

Ethiopia is such a historically and culturally rich country that I did not do any justice to it by just spending a few hours in down town Addis Ababa. Addis Ababa (new flower) is not a very old capital city in a country that is considered one of the oldest human inhabited areas of the world (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4322687.stm). Ethiopia is full of stories and here is the one I heard around how Addis came to be its capital city. It is said that Empress Taytu Betul had a dream about building a house in the hills of Addis and the city was founded in 1886 by her husband, Emperor Menelik II. It was soon found that there wasn’t enough firewood around Addis to sustain a settlement there however a Swedish advisor to the Emperor suggested planting eucalyptus trees in the city and surrounding hills (as eucalyptus trees grow very quickly) and these can still be found all around Addis. I heard conflicting stories about which was the first house that Empress Taytu built in Addis. Some say it is the building that is now ‘Taytu Hotel’ and others say that the original house was expanded by Menelik and is the Imperial Palace, the seat of power in Ethiopia even today. I would like to believe that it is the quaint historic Armenian building that is now the Taytu Hotel.

The Ethiopian - Armenian connection goes back centuries. Here is another story on the Ethiopian Armenian link that I thought was interesting. It is said Haile Salassie I, met 40 orphans who had escaped from the Armenian Genocide in Turkey. He adopted them and brought them to Ethiopia in 1924, where he then arranged for them to receive musical instructions. One of these 40 orphans composed the music for the Imperial National Anthem.

While driving around the city centre I saw a canon in one of the roundabouts and asked the driver about it. He told me that during the Italian occupation a bunch of Ethiopian revolutionaries kidnapped a group of English priests. Their demand was simple. “We used to purchase arms from England before the Italians took over. You are English, you must know how to produce arms. Build us a canon”, they said. “But we are priests. We have never been to an arms factory” responded the priests. The revolutionary didn’t care and threatened their lives. Left without any choice the priests built a canon. Obviously it didn’t really work. It is now displayed on that roundabout.

The more recent history of Ethiopia is better known. From the Italian occupation between 1936 and 1941 to the return of Emperor Haile Selassie form 1941 to 1974. An article written by Abraham Verghese, that I read recently, summarises this bit of history rather well - http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/apr/11/abraham-verghese-ethiopia-coup-1973.