Jed Stevenson
Many families in Ethiopia, including the one I married into, straddle divides between major ethnic groups and between urban and rural communities. As Ethiopian cities have expanded over the past decades and the balance of power among groups has shifted, new relational fault lines have emerged. These dynamics are particularly pronounced in the capital, Addis Ababa, a city where Amharic is the dominant language but which sits on Oromo land and is surrounded on all sides by Oromo-speaking communities. As an Englishman who did doctoral fieldwork in provincial Oromia, I used to think of Addis as somewhere I went through on my way to “the field.” But my relationship to the place has changed over time as I have made kin there and begun to approach it through my children’s eyes. Here I try to make sense of these changes in light of my family’s recent experience.
Soon after our son was born in 2011, we paid a visit to the family farm. My partner’s grandfather, Ababiye, had lived all his life there, raising cattle and growing teff, an indigenous grain, and the main ingredient of injera, a fermented flatbread which is a staple of the local diet. Ababiye showed us around the flower-growing operation that had recently gotten underway on part of his land. He seemed bemused by it all. Growing flowers wasn’t his idea, but rather had been imposed on him by the local government, in cooperation with a French businessman. At night, the flowers basked in the glare of heat lamps; each week, they were cut and flown to Paris and London.
Photo courtesy of author.
Over the previous decade, the family’s hometown outside Addis Ababa had gone from being a largely rural community to being part of an industrial corridor, the main road to the capital city lined with textile factories and warehouses. Having long championed the small farmers who made up the majority of Ethiopia’s population, the government had pivoted to a different model of export-led development. Perhaps families receiving wages from plantation work earned more than those who made a living as farmers on their own homesteads, but still it seemed absurd that flowers should be grown on land that could be used to grow food. Wasn’t there something precarious about this—that is, relying on the market for your livelihood—especially when the main buyers of the flowers were overseas?
A decade passed before we came back to Ethiopia from England as a family in 2022. In the interim Ababiye had died, and we had had a daughter. Our children knew him from stories: the patriarch who had thirteen children; the man who sold donkeys to the Italians when they invaded Ethiopia and bought them back at a profit when they left five years later. (Our six-year-old daughter’s ears would prick up at the mention of donkeys; she loved animals of all kinds.)
Much had changed while we were away. Housing projects serving the expanding capital city had spread further into Oromia, and the seizure of land for flower farms and industrial parks had become a national issue. In 2015, protesters had burned and looted factories on the outskirts of the capital and set up blockades on the roads leading into the city. Over the following months the movement had drawn a cordon around Addis Ababa and brought the government to its knees. The current Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed—the country’s first Oromo leader—owed his rise to power to this moment. There was a sense of hope in the air, but things also felt volatile.
When we spoke to them on the phone, relatives in Ethiopia had tended to make light of the situation. “Things are fine here, don’t believe what you hear on the Western media,” they’d say. Perhaps they wanted to spare us worry. Then again, they had escaped the worst of the disruption. Ababiye’s children and grandchildren had gone on to become doctors, engineers, and businessmen; they had pitched in to help secure a stake in the flower business, and due to the family’s local standing the farm had been spared in the wave of looting.
In 2019 Prime Minister Abiy had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of the political opening he had presided over, and the thawing of relations with the breakaway state of Eritrea, formerly a bitter enemy. In the years afterward, however, new insurgencies had begun in Oromia, followed by a civil war with the northern province of Tigray. Moving around the capital city with friends and relatives, I felt a sense of dissonance. On one level, everything seemed normal. But as land mines were sown across the front lines in the north, the social fabric of the whole country seemed at risk of coming apart.
A week before our most recent visit in 2024, the photographer Mulugeta Gebrekidan was hijacked and killed on a road about 50 kilometers outside Addis Ababa. We had friends in common. Benedikt and Rahwa, who had just started a family of their own, knew him well, and they had often driven the same road south of Addis on weekend outings. But with kidnappings and robberies on the rise, people were hunkering down in their compounds, and thinking twice before traveling outside the city.
What would the children take away with them this year, I wondered, with the country so unsettled? Were these lessons I wanted them to learn?
In the event, we flew to Hawassa, a lakeside city in the south of the country, where friends told us we would be safe. We spent a pleasant week there, our days punctuated by visits to the swimming pool, our evenings at a local restaurant where pizza and injera sat side by side on the menu.
Where did all this leave us—Ethiopians and foreigners, young and old, families with ties spanning continents like the networks of power and commerce that were making and undermining possibilities for life?
In this brave new world based on flowers and guns, who would grow the teff from which our injera was made?
Postscript Reflection
I could still feel the shock of the moment—the jolt I felt when I heard about Mulugeta’s death—when the workshop that led to this collection took place. That’s what I turned up with: a sense of shock and perplexity. Once we began, however, the practice of reading our work aloud and actively listening to each other, punctuated by short bursts of spontaneous writing, helped me to work out what needed to be said, what I could leave out, and what might make an acceptable framing. Over the following months, friends and family provided further advice on gaps that needed filling, and the order in which to tell the story. The title evokes the care with which the pieces of the story were assembled, as in a painting or a collage.
Edward G. J. (Jed) Stevenson is an Associate Professor at Durham University and coordinator of the Omo-Turkana Research Network.
This essay is part of the series “Flashes of Responsibility: Craft, Ethics, and Impact in Global Health Ethnography,” co-edited by Liana Chase,* Marlee Tichenor,* and Sienna Craig.
*Chase and Tichenor are co-first editors of the series.