Joanna Lumley OBE talks with Mulugeta Asrate Kassa Ethiopian embassy official

Perhaps the most intellectually dishonest feature of Al Jazeera’s recent Ethiopia coverage is what it refuses to remember. Ethiopia is home to one of Africa’s largest refugee populations not as a transit country, but as a host. Hundreds of thousands of displaced people from Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, and Yemen have found sanctuary on Ethiopian soil. Syrians who fled the catastrophic civil war that Al Jazeera covered with such sustained passion built lives in Addis Ababa, opened businesses, integrated into communities, welcomed, for the most part, without the violent xenophobia that has disfigured the response of certain wealthier nations considerably better placed to absorb displacement. This is an extraordinary humanitarian record. Al Jazeera, so reliably attentive to refugee suffering when it serves a particular narrative, has shown remarkably little interest in it here.

How a Young Woman from EPRP is Rewriting Ethiopian Political Theatre and What the Ruling Party’s Silence on That Debate Stage Truly Revealed

In today’s Ethiopia, a few words of Afaan Oromo or even an Oromo‑sounding name can open doors that remain closed to others. Professor Girma Berhanu’s new essay exposes how language and identity have quietly become tools of power, shaping access to services, security, and citizenship itself. A gripping look at the rise of ethnicized gatekeeping and what it means for Ethiopia’s future.

The respect I felt rising in me during those two hours was immense, the kind of respect one cannot manufacture or perform. It came from recognising craftsmanship of the highest order in service of a moral imperative that could not be ignored. Here was a man who had spent twenty years researching the trans-Atlantic slave trade, who had been rejected by every major American distributor, and who had taken his film city by city, cinema by cinema, to Black communities across the United States until the world had no choice but to take notice. The film that no one would distribute was eventually ranked by Harvard Film Studies professors as one of the most essential films in the history of world cinema between 1980 and 2000. But that evening in Notting Hill, I knew none of this. I only knew what I felt.

A Date That Refuses to Fade and a City That Cannot Recognise Itself Fly into Bole International Airport on any given morning and the new visitor to Addis Ababa will likely be struck by something unexpected. Glass towers catch the equatorial light. Half-finished luxury condominium blocks crowd the skyline. Billboards in Arabic and English advertise residential developments with names that evoke the Gulf. A certain class of returning diaspora, a certain strain of breathless travel writing, and a particular kind of investor prospectus have begun circulating a phrase that would have bewildered the city’s founders: Addis Ababa is the new Dubai.