White Flower: A Narrative Report on Ethiopia’s Evangelical Movement

This narrative report is based on my time in Ethiopia, and on interviews with members of my wife’s family. Some conversations have been condensed, relocated, or adapted for clarity.
[Editor's note: This is starting from part two. We’ve read part one which was entitled: “A Three-Part Report on the Pentay Movement Revised”]

Museh

“I am a revolutionary; my life is dedicated to freeing the people.”

Mengistu Haile Mariam, Chairman of the Derg communists and Ethiopia’s head of state, 1977–1991

Sometime in 1983, on a dusty road somewhere in Ethiopia’s Oromo region, the first of three miracles occurs. A truck loaded with men, making its way towards a large military base to the east, slows down to avoid a pothole in the road – and a young man drops from the back, rolling to the side of the road and lying still.

It was, he realises, a stupid thing to have done. On this flat, open terrain he is extremely visible – no doubt the driver will see him in the wing mirror, or one of his companions in the back will raise the alarm. The truck will stop, come back, and then he will be beaten – or shot.

But the truck does not stop. It speeds up, continuing its way along the road, kicking up a cloud of white dust behind it as it fades from view. The young man lies still until long after the truck has disappeared, before getting up, brushing himself off – and beginning the long walk back towards town.

Forty years later, Gifti and I are making our way to my in-law’s house, winding our way up into the hilly suburbs around Addis. From up here I can see almost the whole of Addis, glass towers and clean, broad roads punch through a mess of narrow streets and dusty low rises.

As we pass through the remnants of one of the old slums that used to ring the city, Gifti asks the driver to stop for a moment. She leans out of the window shouting to a young man, wearing a dirty t-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, huddled with a group of other young men next to a stall selling a random assortment of plastic containers.

“I know his mother” she explains, gesturing for the driver to continue up the road “he should not be spending time with those boys.”

Suddenly, we pass through an invisible line that seems to mark the boundary of the slum, emerging onto a clean concrete road flanked by modest new-build houses, their flat rooves peeking out from behind high concrete walls. I’ve seen areas like this springing up all around the edges of Addis, a product of the growing class of small business owners abandoning their old towns for the relative security of the major cities.

My father-in-law, Museh, is waiting at the bottom of the road to make sure we’ve arrived safely. As we leave the taxi, he leans in and says something to the driver, before ushering us into the little compound that encloses his house– shooing away a group of young boys that have gathered outside the battered metal gate.

“They are waiting for food” Gifti explains.

As we pass into the front courtyard, I look up at my parent-in-laws house. It appears to have been designed to purge any traditional Ethiopian elements – a low concrete structure composed of clean lines and sharp corners. To me, it looks more like a military outpost than a place to live, but I know Museh is extremely proud of it - and keep my mouth shut.

As we enter the front room, I see that there are already several older men sat around the large table at its centre, drinking coffee and talking quietly. I recognise most of them from previous visits – when I had assumed they were Musehs friends. I was told later by my wife that this was not really the case. According to her Museh has no real friends, and these men are ‘upstanding members of the community’ who will turn up at anyone’s house once they get wind of an interesting visitor.

Harmeh, my parent-in-laws adopted daughter, is playing in the corner with the little yellow handbag I brought with me from the UK – one of the many presents sent by my wife. Seeing us enter, she pushes herself up and makes a flat-footed half-dash across the room, holding out her handbag in front of her. Harmeh’s story has taught me a lot about how things work in Ethiopia. As a newborn she was abandoned at a hairdresser by an old woman, while my mother-in-law was getting a haircut. The local police didn’t want anything to do with the problem, so it was decided that someone would have to look after her – at least until her parents were found – almost two years later and she is my parent-in-laws daughter.

Arriving at my feet, she holds the little handbag up towards me, waiting for me to take it. Lately, Harmeh has taken to bringing me ‘presents’ whenever I visit, which take the form of whatever she happens to find lying around the house. Last time I was here she brought me Museh’s personal bible, stuffed full of receipts, which was the cause of a great deal of entertainment in the room.

Gratefully accepting her gift in one arm, and scooping her up under the other, I stand by the doorway for a moment while she gently tugs on my hair, expecting Museh to offer me a seat. Instead, he gestures for me to put down my bag before turning and saying something to Gifti.

“Before lunch he will show you the new house.” Gifti explains “You can go now.”

The men at the table bristle, they were expecting some conversation with the visitor – one of them even rises from his seat, but Museh waves him off. Flashing me a rare smile, he gestures back towards the door. I remember that he’s missing a front tooth, which he lost in a fight some twenty years ago. The missing tooth is nothing unusual, but I know he could afford to replace it - and has not.

Putting Harmeh down and turning back towards the door, I ask Gifti to come with us. I feel bad for dragging her along - I can hear my mother in-law and the other cousins talking from the kitchen, and I know she would rather be with them – but I need her to translate. Even the few Amharic phrases I know are useless with Museh, because he only speaks Afan Oromo – the dominant language of the western regions. For a second, Gifti seems to hesitate but, picking up on my intention, Museh gestures for her to come - and she quietly obliges.

Making our way back out through the courtyard, I see that the driver is waiting for us. Museh must have told him we were coming back. Opening the door for Gifti, I get into the back with her while Museh takes a seat next to driver, directing him down the concrete road.

Heading back through the slum, we begin our way down, skirting the edge of Addis. The drive is uncomfortably quiet. Museh barely seems to notice anyone is in the car with him, staring out over the city with a serious expression. Gifti, who had been comfortable enough to talk freely with me early in the day, has retreated into silence in the presence of my father in law.

As we sink dumbly towards the city, I see an opportunity to ask Museh about the Pentay – and try and think of a subtle way to bring the topic up. Failing, I settle instead on a blunt approach.

“Museh, I’ve never been told, how did you become Pentay?”

Listening to Gifti translate, he replies without turning away from the window, watching Addis rise up from beneath him.

“I was in darkness, and I was shown the light.”

Of course, this is exactly the kind of answer he would give to a question like that.

I try explaining the point of my question to Gifti. “I want to know more about why people joined during the communist years– I’ve heard it was dangerous to be Pentay at the time.”

The mention of the communists is calculated, I already know that Museh grew up under the old Derg government and enjoys an opportunity to denounce them.

My new way of framing the question seems to work, though not quite as I expected. As Gifti translates, Museh turns away from the window, giving me a serious expression.

“If you like, I will tell you about a miracle.”

Without waiting for my response he begins, pausing now and again for GIfti to catch up.

“When I was young, my aunts husband became sick. He was the headmaster of the local school, and a loyal dog for the communists. He taught us a saying ‘The foreigner comes with the Bible in one hand and Capitalism in the other.’”

He stops to chuckle slightly at the memory, before continuing.

“God chose to strike him; he fell down onto his bed, and we all knew that he would die soon. No one knew I was in town then, because I was hiding from the army in my mother’s house. If he knew I was still there, and not being trained to fight in Eritrea, he’d have reported me to the communists. But God told me to pray for him – so I went to his house, and me and his wife and his daughter prayed over his bed.”

He pauses for a moment, letting his words settle.

“A week later he was healed – and he was saved.”

A Museh finishes his story, the car slows, turning off the main road and into an area very similar to the one we have come from; a cluster of one-story new-builds, all in various stages of construction. Despite being closer to Addis proper, our descent has put us below the vast suburbs that surround it, and I can no longer see the city. Turn into the open courtyard of the ‘new house’ as Museh calls it, we leave the taxi and begin to make our way inside. I know Museh’s eagerness to show this to me isn’t about the building itself, in any case it looks almost identical to the house he lives in, and is more about what it represents: a culmination in his own personal story.

My wife calls her father ‘the perfect capitalist.’ He began small, selling salt at the local market. Later, he bought a truck to move goods between the regions—a profitable but risky trade in a country where roads are unsafe and kidnappings common.

Now, those days are behind him. Having saved enough money to move into petty real estate, his strategy for the past decade has been simple: buy a piece of land, build a house on it, and then sell it for profit. In that sense, he’s a man in the right place at the right time. House prices around Addis have soared over the last year, and those with any capital to spare are rushing to get in on the boom. My wife tells me that Museh made significantly more money on his last house than he ever has before.

Heading inside the new house, I notice Museh running his hand across the concrete wall – patting it as if to check it’s still solid. Across the half-formed room, the afternoon light pours in through unfinished windows, painting long white bars across the dusty floor. For a moment, as the three of us silently admire the empty shell, I feel as though I might be in a little chapel.

“It’s very beautiful I say,” and mean it.

“Yes” Museh replies, flashing me a smile that is turning out to be less rare than I originally thought “it was difficult to build. Materials are very expensive now – those thieves who own the port in Djbuti think they can charge us what they like.”

I ask Museh when the house will be finished, and he says it will be soon.

“I want to sell quickly. We don’t know what will happen to prices in the next year.”

This makes sense, the massive inflation of house prices around Addis has the strong whiff of a bubble to it – and Museh is clearly looking to get out before the market collapses.

“Will you build more houses after this?”

“Of course, but I will wait and see what happens. If prices go down, then it will be a good time to buy. Then, I might build two.”

“What about labour?” I ask, “that must be cheap now, because of the war?”

Museh laughs “Labour is always cheap in Ethiopia, but yes – it is cheaper now – lots of men leaving the farms and coming into the city.”

I’m curious about Museh’s relationship to the men he hires, I’ve already been told by my wife that he himself rose from the ranks of iterant workers that are now flooding the urban centres of Ethiopia – severed by tragedy or ambition from the mass of smallholding farmers that make up the spine of the country - but I don’t want to question him too bluntly, and I make a note to return to the topic another time.

Instead, I try to steer the conversation back towards his conversion – and decide to throw in a wild card.

“Museh, what do you know about Billy Graham?”

Recognising the name ,Museh smiles - and begins a short back and forth with his niece.

After a minute she turns back to me. “He says all the Pentay his age know Billy Graham – he was famous back in his day. A man who cared about Africa.”

I ask if he was part of the reason Museh converted, and he gives me a surprised look.

“Billy Graham? No – we received his preaching later - when the communists were in power nothing could get into the country. It was the missionaries that brought us out of darkness.”

I know who Museh is referring to —the early 20th-century missions, a mix of European and North American groups invited in under the rule of Haile Selassie. Museh tells me he had never met one himself, ad only hold about them from ‘old men’, but that it was them that built the first schools and hospitals in his hometown.

“Did the things you heard about the missionaries encourage you to leave the old church then?”

“Yes. The old church and the emperor never cared about the Oromo people. They wouldn’t even put the bible into our language. My parents were Christians, but they knew nothing – they may as well have been pagans. The missionaries taught us, they translated the bible for us.”

I wonder if his parents were upset that he left the old Church, and he tells me that they were not.

“My father was very poor and had a lot of struggles. He didn’t care what I did.”

He pauses for a moment, his eyes flicking over the bars of white light that stretch across the floor.

“After he was gone, I taught my mother the gospel.”

I’ve picked up on Museh’s emphasis on teaching and ask if he thinks education is an important part of being a Christian.

“Of course! How can you teach the gospel if you can’t read or write? Selassie and old Church never wanted to teach us anything, they wanted us down in the soil so that they could take from us. But once we began to learn, who could take that?”

“What about the communists” I ask, “were they worse than Selassie?”

Museh laughs “No they were better! I loved the communists when I was a child! They killed Selassie, they built new schools – at first, we all celebrated.”

“What changed then?” I ask

“They sent us to die in their wars.” He says flatly “In the end, they were no different.”

I wonder if he felt things got better in the country after the communists were overthrown and, but he says that they did not.

“The communists were bad and soulless men – but when they were overthrown, the Oromo got nothing.”

He pauses for a moment, before adding “It will always be the same, no one can rule well in Ethiopia.”

I ask why that is, and Gifti seems to hesitate as she listens to his answer.

Her and Museh talk for a while, and I get the impression that she is unhappy with what he is saying.

“He says that most people in this country are lost in darkness” she eventually explains "that the leaders are all in darkness - they cannot be saved.”

“So, what can you do then” I ask, “if so, many people are in darkness?”

For the first time since we left the house, Gifti smiles, and without translating my question to Museh - she answers for herself.

“We teach the Gospel.”

My phone rings and, seeing that it’s my wife, I answer.

“Can I talk to my father” she asks “my mother has been trying to call him.”

I hand the phone over to Museh, and him and my wife begin what sounds to me like an argument.

Museh passes the phone back to me, and my wife explains.

“He was told to wait until after lunch to show you the house, but he is so stubborn – now the guests are offended, and my mother is upset.”

Museh stands by the entrance, looking indignant – and for a moment I think he is about to defy his daughter and keep us in the empty house. Instead, he walks through the empty doorframe, and the signals to the taxi driver that we are about to leave.

As we get back into the taxi, Museh turns and says something to me.

“He wants to know how his daughter is,” Gifti says.

I tell him she’s doing well. She went back to university a few years ago and graduated last spring. She has a new job, and she’s been learning to swim. Of course, Museh already knows all this, but I imagine hearing it from me feels different than over the phone.

As Gifti translates, I notice an odd expression creeping across Museh’s face. Then, as he looks at me, I realize he’s starting to cry.

I don’t know how to respond to this, I have never seen him express much emotion. Belatedly, I realise the real reason I was brought to the house – so that Museh could talk to me about his daughter, who he has not seen for six years, away from the prying eyes of his guests.

Instead, I have spent the trip asking him questions about his childhood.

Leaning forward from the front seat, Museh grasps my hand.

“Naboonsiteh”

“I am proud of her.”

I spend our journey back trying to make amends, allowing Museh to conduct his own interview.

How is his daughter doing in London?

Is she cold?

Does she like her job?

How long until she can come and visit herself?

“Just a year more” I say to the final question, “next time I come, we will come back together.”

The drive up feels quicker than the drive down and before I realise it we are back at te old house. As we pull up and make our way back into the courtyard, a little form dressed in a clean white frock and blue trainers comes bursting from the front door.

As Harmeh hurtles awkwardly towards us, I notice that she is carrying Museh’s bible in both hands. Leaning down, I take it from her – making a show of how impressed I am with her gift.

Museh laughs, picking her up and swinging her onto his shoulders.

“Ilma kana ilaali! Mucucaata Waaqaati!”

“Look at this child! A miracle from God!”

Part 3: Ebo

“Evangelist, if John the Baptist were to come to that city, he would tell these leaders - dressed in fine clothes and wearing artificial things on their bodies - the hard truth. He might lose his head again, but he would tell them to repent.”

Message to Franklin Graham, Unnamed Pentay Writer, March 2025

After eating at my parent-in-laws house, I take the taxi back into town with Gifti – dropping her off outside her university dorm, before heading back to my hotel.

Sitting in the hotel lobby, I call my wife.

“How does my father seem?” She asks

“He’s well, I think. He misses you.”

“I know he does. People say he’s a cold man – but they don’t understand him. What do you think of my cousin by the way?”

“Gifti?” I say, thinking about it for a moment “I like her, she’s impressive – a bit intense maybe.”

My wife laughs “I was just the same when I was her age. Of course, she hasn’t been disappointed yet.”

There are many parts of my wife’s experience back in Ethiopia I find difficult to properly understand, but disappointment is not one of them. Even from our first date, our disillusionment with our youth was one of the things that connected us.

We sit in silence for a moment – reflecting on our disappointments – then, the conversation moves on to other things.

I tell her how big Harmeh is getting, and how my suitcase is already bursting with food her mother is sending for. She tells me how her swimming lessons are going, and about the annoying colleague at work who lectured her about her straightened hair – apparently a symptom of internalised colonial oppression.

A few hours later, I make my way up to my hotel room. Laying underneath a ceiling fan that is both too loud and unable to properly cool the room, I find my thoughts drifting back towards my wife.

She was, of course, the original source of my interest in the Pentay.

I was surprised to find out that she was an evangelical, a word which conjured visions of a fervent mass worshipping under the broad, white wings of a televangelists private jet. It was difficult for me to fit the open and curious woman I knew into that picture. I have learned a lot about her since.

My wife was very young, about the age Gifti is now, when she joined the wave of anti-government protests that would culminate in the expulsion of the ruling Tigrayan party from the governing coalition, and the rise of the new government under prime minister Abiy Ahmed. For many of my wife’s Pentay friends, the rise of Abiy, an Oromo man raised in one of Ethiopia’s largest evangelical churches, was a clear victory. For my wife, it quickly came to signal defeat.

Realising how tired I am, I put on some music to try and quiet my mind. Me and my wife have an agreement that, while I am away, we will both listen to Simon and Garfunkel before we sleep, as a way of “keeping connected”, as my she put it.

I used to listen to them as a child, usually in my father’s car, and introduced them to her early in our relationship. Tonight, I choose one of her favourites; Mrs Robinson, a song she at first misunderstood as a Christian anthem. At first, I meant to explain The Graduate to her but, as I watched a beautiful woman dancing around my kitchen like something out a romcom, it didn’t seem to matter anymore.

As usual - I do not sleep well that night, and wake to the first rays of light creeping through the open window. Outside, the city is already alive with car horns and the grind of construction. I eat a quick breakfast in the almost empty hotel dining room, then step back out into the city.

It’s a bright morning, as it always is in Addis –the same temperature and the same clear sky. My wife says that, with exception of a short rainy season, the weather in Addis barely changes all year round.

As I walk down the scruffy, half demolished street towards the main road – I see that the population of Addis is already out. Despite almost everyone being Ethiopian in the city, the crowds of people are extremely varied: the white cotton dresses of the Orthodox church mingle with flowing black abayas and blue skinny jeans.

I don’t have any plans today; and decide to make my way up towards the new centre of town to see some of ambitious new construction projects I have already observed from a distance. In particular I would like to see the new museum of science, an enormous glass ring that dominates the upper part of the new city.

Despite the business of the city, as I make my way towards the museum I find myself consumed by a strange loneliness. This is first time in days I’ve not been with my wife’s family –and it feels odd to be in Addis by myself. It’s too early back home to call my wife, but I send her a text message instead.

“Morning love – call me when you get up.”

Arriving at the museum, I am disappointed to find the gate shut. A Chinese man, about my age, is leaning against one of the newly installed lampposts along the side of the road – and, seeing my confusion, gestures for me to come over.

“It’s closed” he explains to me in near-fluent English “Everything is closed today – even the park.”

I ask if he knows why, and he shrugs.

“Terrorist threat maybe, or could be that they’re showing a diplomat around … the main street is closed as well, police cars all over the place.”

I remember that the Franklin Graham event is happening tomorrow and wonder out loud if it has something to do with that.

““Never heard of it” the Chinese man says.

Now at a loss for what to do with myself, I decide to go and eat in the hotel restaurant nearby. It’s a pleasant scene, an outdoor dining area under the canopy of a well-maintained tropical garden – next to a large swimming pool filled with wealthy Ethiopian families and their children. I sit there reading until midday, when I get a call from my wife on her way to work.

We talk about little things at first – her morning commute, my failed attempt to visit the science museum, the odd man she met in the hairdressers the other night.

Eventually, the conversation drifts towards something I have been meaning to ask her about since I spoke to her cousin and father yesterday.

“Ebo, we’ve never talked about it much before – but what did you think of the West when you were young? I know you liked it, but what was your picture of it?”

She hesitates before answering.

“It’s embarrassing now. I had a very simplistic view of things - but bear in mind that I was seeing things from a long way away, like looking through a telescope.”

I tell her that it is not embarrassing at all, people in the West don’t know anything about Ethiopia.

“Well” she begins to explain “growing up I knew the westerners were the ones who brought real Christianity back to Ethiopia. They had democracy, and they freed people from backwards traditions – particularly women, they freed women.”

“Women were an important part of how you thought about the West then?” I ask.

“Yes! When I was young the men all thought it was ok to beat their wives – but I wasn’t taught to accept that. I used to see famous western women on TV, women who had power – it made me ambitious.”

I ask if she has any examples, and she tells me that Condoleezza Rice was particularly popular in her hometown.

“Condoleezza Rice? Really? The woman from the Bush administration?”

“Of course! She was a black woman in the Whitehouse!”

“Was it Republicans you particularly liked then?”

“No, I didn’t know there was any difference. Obama was an even bigger deal– the girls all used to write each letter of his name on their fingers ‘O’-‘B’-‘A’-‘M’-‘A’ and you would hold your hand up in the air and say ‘Yes! We can do it!’”

I notice that when my wife talks about her childhood memories of the West, she only really talks about America - and ask if she saw any difference between the two concepts.

“No, not when I was young, I knew that a lot of the missionaries had been European, but I didn’t see any distinction between Europe and America. As far as I was concerned Europe was part of America, they were the same thing.”

“And now?”

“Yes, I see a difference now – Europe is more miserable!”

I laugh, I know how much my wife hates the British weather, and what she sees as the extreme rigidity of British society.

“I’ve been talking to your family about the Pentay movement” I tell her.

“I know! My father says you ask a lot of questions!”

I’m a little embarrassed to hear this and ask if he was annoyed by it.

“No, he liked it – who else is going to ask him?”

“That’s good – because I have some questions for you as well. If you don’t mind?”

“Sure” she says, “go ahead.”

“Well, the thing I don’t have a clear picture of at the moment is how the Pentay fitted into the protests against the government, back when you were here.”

She thinks about it for a moment. “People will fight you for saying it, but we were the brains of the movement.”

“The leaders?”

“No, we weren’t in charge. There were plenty of leaders who weren’t Pentay, and the big Pentay churches all kept officially neutral – but day-to-day, on the ground, the Pentay were the educated people.”

“Why is that?”

“Because of the schools, we’ve had schools for a hundred years in my area – we can read, and we have the diaspora over in America.”

“So, the important thing about the Pentay was that they were the most educated?”

“No, not just that. Everyone hated the central government – but we had a language for it. Lots of people in the movement wanted a more democratic country, but we knew how to speak about it. I felt like I was preparing for it even since I was a child – what I was out on the street for; a free, democratic country.”

The mention of my wife’s childhood makes me wonder what her father thought of his daughter’s involvement in the movement.

“He told me to stay away obviously. But how could I do that when it went against what believed in?”

A note of passion creeps into my wife’s voice - I’m not used to seeing her so politically animated. Since I’ve known her, her attitude towards politics has always seemed much closer to her fathers – distrustful of the government, but sceptical about any kind of political activity.

I already have a good idea of why her attitude changed since leaving the country, but I ask anyway.

“I saw a lot of things. Abiy cleared all the old people out and replaced them with Oromo, Pentay especially. I saw people I knew from the movement suddenly becoming foreign ambassadors, or social media influencers, or getting business contracts. No democracy, no freedom.”

I ask why she thinks he chose the Pentay in particular.

“Well, he is Pentay of course – so it’s the same reason the government chose him. We’re educated, we’re westernised, and we don’t have the baggage of the old church. A lot of young people were inspired by our message.”

She pauses for a moment.

“I think it was to keep us quiet as well though – the Pentay students were asking the question of democracy very loudly.”

The idea that the government wanted to control the student movement has the ring of truth to it. From what I’ve read, students have been a problem for every Ethiopian government. Long before the religious explosion of the 1990s, the future leaders of the Pentay incubated in the shadow of a much larger and more organised student communist movement – the first people to be crushed under the caterpillar treads of the Derg.

Me and my wife sit for a moment, reflecting on what has suddenly become a weighty conversation.

“Ebbo, what do you want?” I ask eventually “For Ethiopia, I mean.”

She thinks about it for a long time before answering.

“I’m not sure anymore. Things seem more complicated now than they did when I was there.”

“Because of the new government?”

“No. I mean yes, that’s part of it – but it’s not just about Ethiopia. It’s difficult to explain.”

I let her think about it.

“You know Yosef works as a bouncer now?’ She says eventually.

“Yes, I remember.” Yosef is a friend of my wife’s, another Ethiopian who left not long after she did.

“I went to see him the other night. He’s still obsessed with getting to America—thinks he’ll make real money there. So we were talking about that.”

“Ok” I say, wondering where she’s going with this.

“While we were talking about that, I kept looking around the smoking area. There were Caribbean kids, Asians, a Moroccan girl I’d met earlier. Then there’s this commotion out front, some Chinese guys were having an argument with the bouncer about a kitchen knife they’d brought in their backpack. One of the bouncers had confiscated it and wouldn’t let them take it away with them, but they were saying they ad it because they worked in a kitchen, and they needed to take it with them for work.”

She pauses for a moment to take a breath.

“So, Yosef had to go and get involved, and I went home. And then on the bus, I’m reading about Trump’s new tariffs, and as I’m reading, I realise - I can’t make any sense of it.”

“Make sense of what? The tariffs?”

“No, all of it. You’re in Ethiopia with my family, I’m in London speaking with this guy who wants to go to America, surrounded by Asian and Chinese and Moroccan kids, and then I’m reading about trade wars, and I wonder - what does it all add up to?”

I take a moment to think about what she’s said.

“So, there’s too much going on?” I offer after a moment.

“Yes, but it’s not just the amount that’s going on – it’s how unclear it all is, where’s it going? Fighting against the government was a hard road. Meles, the old Tigrayan leader, used to say ‘what was won with blood can only be given up with blood’. He was right, that’s what we paid with, but at least you could see where the road led though, I could put up with a lot when I thought I knew where I was going. Now it feels like I’m in a maze, and I can’t put up with anything anymore.”

She pauses. “Anyway, I’m not making much sense. What do you think I should want for Ethiopia?”

“Well,” I say “I’ll tell you when I make my mind up.”

After my wife arrives at work, I head across to see to the Adwa Memorial Museum – another new megastructure built to celebrate the unity of the country - and am happy to find that unlike the science museum, it is open.

Arriving at a little kiosk halfway up the long stone steps that lead to the entrance, an attractive woman behind a polished glass screen asks if I want to pay extra for a guide and, lost in my thoughts, I hand her the money without thinking about it.

Heading into the museum, I am met a young man sporting awkward stubble and an earnest expression. He seems nice enough – but we walk round the museum his narration quickly becomes annoying. As I half listen, he explains how Emperor Menelik II, the near-mythic founder of modern Ethiopia, united the disparate tribes against the Italian invaders, and how, thanks to his leadership, Ethiopia remains the only country in Africa never to have been colonised.

He shows me the first airplane ever built in the country, during the rule of the great moderniser Haile Selassie, and tells me about the bright future awaiting Ethiopia—soon to be the centre of a new Africa.

Leaving the museum, I find the courtyard outside filled with a crowd of Ethiopian men wearing smart suits and blue lanyards. Seeing people filtering into a building on the opposite end of the square – I head across and peer inside. I can’t make out the details from here, but I can see a banner next to the front desk sporting a protestant cross.

I think about going in and asking the woman sat behind the desk what’s going on, but instead I walk back across the courtyard and stand beside the statues of Menelik and his wife, staring out over the city they founded some 140 years ago. Addis Ababa; the “New Flower.”

Rummaging through my backpack for a pair of tangled headphones, I take a seat beside them, admiring the view. I sit for there for a long time, listening to my music as I look out over the busy city –the brightly coloured umbrellas the women of Addis use to shield themselves from the sun bobbing in between the chaotic traffic below me. As I get up to leave, my gaze drifts towards the boundaries of the city – a patchwork of hilly fields spilling out towards the rest of the country. For the first time, I notice how many vultures circle the margins of Addis—black specks skimming the margins of the city.

_

And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson

Jesus loves you more than you will know

Woah, woah, woah