Chris McIvor's Blog
‘New Flower’ Chris McIvor blogs on Addis Ababa
In advance of the coming second volume of his African memoirs, Chris McIvor, has resumed his occasional blog. Chris is Country Director for Save the Children in Mozambique with an eye as sharp as his mind, as you will read.
Addis Ababa is the capital of Ethiopia and I have just spent a week there on behalf of the charity I work for in Africa. I attend a fair number of meetings and workshops as part of my job and my more sedentary friends constantly tell me how lucky I am to be travelling throughout the continent. But the truth is often different. Much of the time the only part of the country I see is the airport, the hotel, the venue where the meeting is taking place and perhaps a different restaurant to vary the menu of the hotel I am staying in. The country itself is just a backdrop contemplated from a distance, like watching a film or reading an article in a travel magazine.
This time my flight back to Mozambique where I now reside, was cancelled at the last minute. There was no alternative but to stay an extra day. For the first time in many months I found myself with time on my hands to explore, and though twenty four hours is barely enough to get to know a city that comprises some five million people, it was better than having no time at all.
‘New Flower’, which is what Addis Ababa translates as from the local language, is something of a misnomer for a metropolis which hosts a population the size of Scotland in a few square kilometres. Perhaps when it was first founded in the 19th century it might have merited that title, but today it is a ramshackle, chaotic affair that seemingly has no structure or order behind it. The guide book I am carrying around with me is useless, hopelessly inaccurate and out of date even though it was printed only a few years ago. Someone tells me that much of the city changes every few months, that its fluid nature means that it can never be fixed on a piece of paper. Yet as I explore its streets, sometimes on foot, sometimes in a taxi which is frequently slower, it strikes me too that perhaps this is part of its charm, a quality it shares with many other African cities if you have the time and patience to appreciate it.
By and large, cities in our own part of the world have become increasingly ‘sanitized’. There are all sorts of zoning laws and planning regulations to make them more manageable, even if they are the size of London or New York. You have pedestrian areas from which traffic is excluded. You have residential areas separated out from business districts and industrial sites. One part is modern and contemporary. Another part is older. The rich live in one suburb. The poor in a different location. Everything ordered, planned and labelled, which makes for an easier time in terms of trying to find your way around, but lacking the entertainment, surprises and contradictions that cities like Addis offer as an alternative. What do I mean?
On one of the side streets, not far from the hotel where I have been staying, I am standing outside several shops selling imported goods from France and Italy. There is an advert for Gucci handbags in one of them. On the opposite side of the road there is a smart house, with a sign that states that a European ambassador resides inside it.
I assume this must be the smarter part of the city, judging by these buildings and since the noise of the generally ubiquitous traffic has been left behind. But suddenly I am shoved into a doorway of one of the shops by a passerby who grabs my arm. I have left my passport, credit card and dollars in the hotel safe and just as I am about to tell him that the only thing I have in my pocket are a few measly bank notes in the local currency he points nervously behind me. A herd of cattle is thundering down the street towards us. Behind them are two small boys on donkeys cheering them on, as if they are herding cows in a remote rural village in upland Ethiopia instead of in one of the capital’s more sedate suburbs. Once they have swept past us I thank my rescuer and continue my walk, both curious and apprehensive as to what I might find around the next corner.
Not too far away, but in a busier part of town, I find myself in front of a modern four story building. It is the large plaque on the front of it which stops me. Apparently this is one of Ethiopia’s most prestigious centres for treating cancerous diseases. There are posters on the windows of professional looking lab technicians in white coats staring down microscopes and other sophisticated equipment in order to deliver a diagnosis ‘in less than twenty four hours.’ If I block out part of the environment around me, for a moment I could be in London.
A few minutes down the road I pass one of the capital’s numerous shanty towns, large areas of tin and cardboard that accommodate the overflow of the city’s population. Outside one of the meagre dwellings facing the main street I encounter a small, wizened gentleman in a skull cap and djellabiya advertising his services as a local healer. The sign beside him claims that he also has a treatment for cancer and AIDS, and medicines to cure a host of other diseases including ‘male sexual problems’.
Am I in the same city or in the same neighbourhood? Within the space of only a few hundred metres separate worlds and belief systems have collided. I wonder what they must think when they pass on the street every morning; doctors with PhDs and qualifications from Europe and an old man who could be their grandfather, practicing a medical tradition that is probably older than the one they have just graduated in. Do they have a crisis of identity, wondering what place and time they inhabit or is the clash of old and new, modern and traditional, the past and the present just accepted as a part of normal life, no more remarkable than the weather.
Contradictions are present in every city, but they are never in your face in our part of the world as much as they are in places like Addis Ababa. Outside a store selling perfumes from around the world there is an open sewer which transports the city’s waste to some undisclosed location. Is it the perfume or the stench I should concentrate on? Late afternoon I am sitting in a street cafe, contemplating the passing traffic and the spectacle of hundreds of people milling around in front of me. Is it the beautiful woman with perfect African features stepping out of her Mercedes I should stare at, or the beggar beside her, stretching out his hands in supplication?