The Republic of the Ivory Smile

How a ruling class fell in love with its own reflection eyebrows, dental work, designer labels and all while the city it governs was bulldozed out from under the poor

By Sewasew Teklemariam

There is a face that now greets the Ethiopian viewer at the top of every evening bulletin, and it is not, by any reasonable measure, an Ethiopian face. It has been sanded, lightened, contoured and lacquered into something that belongs to no particular country and therefore, conveniently, to no particular people. The eyebrows have been shaved clean off and redrawn in a stern geometric arc that nature never issued at birth. The hair rises in a glossy synthetic tower, imported by the kilo and sold to the public under that marvellous euphemism, “human hair” as if the adjective alone could launder the artifice. The wardrobe would not look out of place in a Gulf shopping concourse. And beneath all of it, somewhere, is a presenter reading the news to a republic in which most citizens are quietly counting out the day’s injera.

Let me be precise about what this column is and is not. It is not a sermon against vanity. People have wanted to look attractive since the first Ethiopian caught her reflection in the Awash, and a young woman who enjoys her lipstick owes no apology to me or to anyone else. I am not in the business of policing the faces of working women. The argument is narrower, and I think more uncomfortable: the look has stopped being personal and become a uniform. And a uniform always carries a message.

The Mask and the Message

Watch the screen long enough and you notice the message is identical from channel to channel. It says: I am not from here. It says modernity is a coat of paint, and the more of it you wear, the more modern you must be. The makeup too often applied by artists who appear to have learned their craft from a phone screen rather than from any studio is not there to flatter a face. It is there to abolish one. The point is the erasure: the elimination of pore, line and blemish, and with them every visible trace of the ordinary Ethiopian who is presumably watching from a one-room rental with the power off.

The drawn-on eyebrow is the small, perfect emblem of the whole enterprise. You remove the thing you were given, and then you draw, in its place, a stylised version of the thing you removed harder, blacker, more severe, entirely artificial. If you wanted a single image for the governing aesthetic of this country, you could do a great deal worse. Tear out the original. Paint over the gap. Insist the painting is an improvement.

Tear out the original. Paint over the gap. Insist the painting is an improvement.

Dressed for the Wrong Job

There is also the matter of the wardrobe, which deserves its own complaint. A newsreader is not a wedding singer. The job, the actual job, is to be trusted, and trust has a dress code, and that dress code is restraint. When the person delivering news of a massacre in Arsi or a famine warning in the lowlands is turned out as though for a perfume advertisement, something in the contract between broadcaster and public quietly tears. The seriousness leaks out of the room. The viewer is no longer being informed by a journalist; he is being performed at by a brand. A profession that once carried the dignity of bearing witness is reduced, set by set, to a styling exercise. The clothes are not a trivial thing. They are the visible announcement that the channel has decided it is in the business of looking impressive rather than telling the truth.

The Men and Their Ivory Smiles

For a long time this was treated, lazily and a little cruelly, as a women’s affliction the makeup, the hair, the hemlines. It is no longer possible to pretend so. The men have joined the parade, and the men have gone further, because the men have power, and power likes to be photographed.

Observe the new political class when it assembles for a ribbon-cutting. The teeth, first of all: rows of veneered, factory-white incisors, an “ivory smile” so uniform across the cadre that one begins to suspect a single dentist somewhere is quietly building an empire. Then the labels the watch worn at the precise angle that ensures it is noticed, the suit with the conspicuous European name, often enough a counterfeit one, which is its own small poem: a fake badge of a foreign house, worn as proof of having arrived. The whole costume says one thing, and says it loudly: Look at me. I am a fine specimen. I am a man of modernity.

This is the visual grammar of Prosperity the party and, with grim aptness, the promise. It is a politics conducted almost entirely on the surface, in which to appear prosperous is taken as sufficient evidence of having delivered prosperity. The cadre does not point to the factory he built or the family he lifted out of want. He points to his own teeth. The smile is the manifesto.

The Influencer Front

And the painted face does not stay in the studio. It has been issued a phone and a ring light and sent to war.

There is now a standing army of them the YouTube and TikTok brigades, the “content creators,” the lifestyle vloggers and the makers of patriotic shorts and they fight on a very particular front. Their weapon is the colour grade. Watch one of their dispatches from the new Addis: the footage has been run through a LUT until the sky is a Dubai turquoise and the asphalt gleams like wet obsidian; the drone lifts off the boulevard in one unbroken, swooning shot; the same ivory dentures we met earlier flash on cue; and beneath it all swells an AI-generated anthem, assuring you the country has arrived. It is beautiful. That is the entire point. It is engineered to be beautiful, and beauty, deployed at scale, is an argument that asks for no evidence.

The scholars have lately given the technique a name: aesthetic propaganda. Unlike the old sort, in which the state ground out its own leaden bulletins, this is produced in a distributed swarm by ministries, by the Prime Minister’s Office and the Addis Ababa City Administration posting glossy drone reels, and then by thousands of supporters who clip them, re-cut them, score them and fire them back out. When a foreign celebrity wanders through the American streamer IShowSpeed pulled some ten million views in a single day on Addis’s remade streets, and the Ghanaian creator Wode Maya has made a small vocation of the genre the machine seizes the footage and elevates it into the official story, conveniently scrubbed of the Western lens that usually frames the continent in dust.

None of this is accidental, and the government has stopped pretending it is. In May it convened an African Social Media Influencers Summit at the Adwa Victory Memorial Museum, bussed the visiting creators out to the corridor sites and the new artificial-intelligence institute, and announced aloud, in plain Amharic and English that it was seeking “partnerships with digital influencers and content producers on national priorities.” The carrot is the junket, the per-diem, the access. The stick sits just behind it: the same authorities have invested in monitoring and sentiment tools to identify which influencers matter, gauge the spread of criticism, and answer it with counter-campaigns or, when the mood sours, an internet shutdown. Sing the corridor’s praises and you are flown to a museum. Mention the people it displaced and you may find your region has mysteriously lost its signal.

For there is, of course, a rival broadcast the TikTokers who never received the memo, who use the very same intimate medium to talk about inflation, unemployment and the development corridors that uproot communities in the name of growth. They are why the state is nervous. The lacquered reel and the furious phone-video are now fighting over the same fifteen seconds of a citizen’s attention and only one of them has a drone, a LUT and a government summit behind it.

Sing the corridor’s praises and you are flown to a museum. Mention the people it displaced and you may find your region has lost its signal.

Turn the Camera Around

Here is where the column stops being amusing.

While the screen the television set, and now the phone has been broadcasting these polished faces and their colour-graded boulevards, the actual faces of Addis Ababa have been loaded onto the backs of lorries and driven to the edge of the city. The “corridor” the Prime Minister’s signature project to reupholster the capital in the image of a Gulf emirate has, by Amnesty International’s account, forcibly evicted thousands of residents across Addis Ababa and at least fifty-eight other towns. In the Bole and Lemi Kura sub-cities alone, the organisation documented at least 872 people pushed from their homes in the space of a single month. Families were given between twenty-four and seventy-two hours’ notice. Most received no compensation. Many held no paperwork the state was willing to recognise, and so, in the bureaucratic logic of the bulldozer, they had never quite existed.

So consider the arithmetic of a single television frame. In the foreground: a presenter whose face has been engineered to look as though it comes from a wealthier country, reporting from a studio in a city being physically rebuilt to look like a wealthier country. Off-camera, beyond the new boulevard and the imported palms, are the people who used to live where the boulevard now runs. The same aesthetic governs both the cosmetic and the civic. Both begin by removing what is genuinely there: the eyebrow, the old town, the inconvenient poor. Both replace it with a glossier, foreign-looking simulation. And both then instruct the public to admire the result as progress.

The ivory smile and the bulldozer are not two stories. They are one.

They are what happens when a state confuses looking modern with being just when the entire energy of a governing class is poured into the management of appearances, because appearances are the one thing it has learned how to manufacture.

The Unretouched Face

I have nothing against beauty, and still less against ambition. A people has every right to want nice things, straight teeth and a handsome capital. The objection is to the lie embedded in the performance: the suggestion that a foundation two shades too light is the same as dignity, that a counterfeit French label is the same as wealth, that a widened road is the same as a home.

There is a real Ethiopian face. It is older and more tired than the one on the bulletin, and a good deal more beautiful, because it has not been instructed to apologise for existing. You will not, as a rule, find it in the studio. You will find it on the bus to the periphery, watching the city it built recede behind the new glass, wondering when, exactly, the country decided it preferred the painting to the original.

Turn the camera around. That is the face worth broadcasting.

Sources: Amnesty International, “Ethiopia: End mass forced evictions” (14 April 2025); Global Voices, “Ethiopia’s Urban Renewal Projects and the Turn Toward Aesthetic Propaganda” (March 2026); the Ethiopian News Agency and allAfrica on the African Social Media Influencers Summit (May 2026); Global Voices Advox, PesaCheck and AFP Fact Check on AI-generated political media; the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre on state digital-monitoring tools; and Addis Insight on Ethiopia’s TikTok dissenters. Corridor displacement figures are Amnesty’s documented minimums for the specified sub-cities and time-frame; the true totals are widely held to be considerably higher.