Memory, Martyrdom and the Mirage of the New Dubai

By Endex Ethiopian Tribune Chief Editor

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.

Do they know it is Yekatit 12?

To ask that question in February 2026 as the Ethiopian calendar turns again toward Yekatit 12, the date on which 19 February 1937 falls,  is to ask something more urgent than whether visitors to Addis Ababa are aware of a historical tragedy. It is to ask whether the city’s newest patrons, its most vocal claimants, and its most ambitious planners have absorbed the ethical inheritance of that day: that Addis Ababa has already been declared, once before, the exclusive property of a foreign power and a particular vision of luxury. That it was reordered by force. That people died approximately 19,200 of them in seventy-two hours alone, by Ian Campbell’s careful estimate (Campbell, 2017), so that it might become someone else’s imperial capital.

The Dubai comparison is not merely aesthetic vanity. It is a political symptom. And Yekatit 12 is the historical lens through which its contradictions become visible.

I. The New Dubai Narrative: What It Means and Who It Serves

The comparison to Dubai carries different meanings depending on who is speaking. For some international observers and diplomats, it gestures toward Addis Ababa’s undeniable growth, its expanded road networks, its Chinese-built light railway, its emergence as the diplomatic capital of the African continent, home to the African Union and a proliferating constellation of UN agencies. The city accounts for more than thirty per cent of Ethiopia’s GDP while housing less than five per cent of its population (CSA, 2008). By certain measures, the analogy is not absurd.

But the Dubai comparison being circulated in a more specific, and more troubling, register is not primarily about economic dynamism. It is about a particular aesthetic and a particular clientele. It refers to UAE investors who have secured controlling stakes in high-end residential developments in the city’s expanding districts. It refers to the direct financial relationships cultivated between the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and Gulf capital relationships that have channelled foreign direct investment into visible, photogenic infrastructure while the social fabric beneath it strains under contradictions the glass facades do not reflect.

When visitors from abroad describe Addis Ababa as the new Dubai, they are often, whether they know it or not, describing a city being remade for a particular class of people. The Emirati investor. The returning high-net-worth diaspora. The international NGO professional who wants a rooftop pool and a concierge. What they are less likely to be describing — because these people are no longer visible in the neighbourhoods being redeveloped are the approximately 100,000 residents displaced from the city’s central and peri-urban areas to make room for this transformation. Communities removed from Kolfe, Gulele, Kirkos and the expanding metropolitan fringe, relocated to peripheral blocks far from their livelihoods, their schools, their social networks.

One hundred thousand people cleared. A skyline polished for the richest Gulf citizens.

Do they know it is Yekatit 12?

Historian Ian Campbell has documented how Italian fascist urban planners in the late 1930s envisioned reordering Addis Ababa along precisely these lines: European quarters to enjoy paved roads, sanitation and modernist boulevards; indigenous districts relegated to peripheral zones with minimal services (Campbell, 2017). Anti-miscegenation laws enforced social separation. By 1939, approximately 50,000 Italians resided in Ethiopia, concentrated in the capital. The colonial premise was explicit: Addis Ababa was to become a European imperial city, with Africans in subordinate spaces.

The mechanisms today are different. There are no Blackshirts. The legal instruments are municipal development orders, master plans and market forces rather than racial laws. Yet the spatial logic, the clearing of the poor and the indigenous to make room for an aspirationally cosmopolitan elite, carries an uncomfortable historical resonance that the Dubai enthusiasts have not paused to examine.

II. The Conservative Ethiopian Nationalist Argument: Menelik’s City Belongs to All Ethiopians

Before examining the Oromo elite claim on Addis Ababa, it is necessary to give serious attention to a counter-argument that Ethiopian nationalist conservatives have long advanced one that is historically substantive, frequently overlooked in international commentary, and which contains within it a profound and under-appreciated irony.

Conservative Ethiopian nationalists argue, with considerable historical justification, that Addis Ababa was founded as a city for all Ethiopians. Emperor Menelik II established the capital formally in 1886, choosing the site, known to surrounding Oromo communities as Finfinne , for its elevation, its climate and its hot springs. His empress, Taytu Betul, is credited with naming it Addis Ababa: New Flower. From its founding, it was conceived not as a tribal or ethnic capital but as the seat of a multi-ethnic empire that Menelik was in the process of consolidating.

Here the nationalist argument introduces its most pointed historical observation, and it deserves to be stated clearly and without embarrassment: Menelik II himself, by bloodline and ancestry, was of mixed heritage that included Oromo lineage. This is not a fringe claim. It is documented in Ethiopian dynastic history. The same applies, with varying degrees of genealogical complexity, to Emperor Haile Selassie I, whose family connections crossed the ethnic boundaries that contemporary political discourse treats as ancient and impermeable. And it applies, most strikingly of all, to President Mengistu Haile Mariam, the Derg strongman whose brutal seventeen-year rule is among the darkest chapters in Ethiopian history and who was himself of partial Oromo descent.

The conservative nationalist argument draws from this a pointed observation: none of these leaders not Menelik, not Haile Selassie, not even Mengistu ever claimed Addis Ababa as an exclusively Oromo city. None of them framed the capital as the sovereign possession of a single ethnicity. Whatever their failures, and those failures were considerable and in Mengistu’s case catastrophic, each of them conceptualised Addis Ababa as a city in which all Ethiopians, Amhara, Oromo, Gurage, Tigrean, Somali, Sidama and all others, had the right to dwell, to trade, to worship and to call home.

This is not a trivial point. It means that the framing of Addis Ababa as exclusively Oromo space,  Finfinne for the Oromo and by implication not equally for other Ethiopians, represents not the recovery of an ancient tradition but the invention of a new and exclusionary politics. Even the emperors and dictators of Oromo blood who preceded the current era did not make this claim. They governed, badly or well, as Ethiopians over Ethiopians.

The conservative nationalist position has its own blind spots and its own uses as political instrument. Ethiopian nationalism has historically suppressed minority identities, denied linguistic rights and used the rhetoric of unity to justify assimilationist policies that caused genuine harm to Oromo, Somali and other communities. The 2014-2016 protests that mobilised hundreds of thousands of Oromo demonstrators, and that cost hundreds of lives at the hands of federal security forces, were not manufactured grievances. They arose from real injustice.

But the nationalist argument about Addis Ababa’s civic universalism contains a democratic insight that transcends its ideological packaging: a city founded by a man of partial Oromo ancestry, built by labour from every corner of the empire, grown through the settlement of dozens of communities across more than a century, cannot be retrospectively converted into the exclusive patrimony of one ethnic group — even the ethnic group from whose land it grew.

If Menelik , Oromo by blood among other things, built a city for all Ethiopians, then the claim that his city belongs to Oromos alone is, at minimum, a selective reading of his own project. And if that claim is advanced by an elite class whose members have accumulated land, political appointments, business licenses and international celebrity under the banner of Oromo rights, while 100,000 poor residents, many of them Oromo themselves are cleared to make room for Gulf-financed towers, then the contradiction becomes not merely intellectual but moral.

III. The Oromo Elite Claim: Justice, Selectivity and the Dubai Exit

The claim of Oromo elites to Addis Ababa as fundamentally Oromo space is historically grounded in the displacement and dispossession that accompanied the city’s expansion across what had been Oromo farmland and grazing territory. The 1995 Constitution’s recognition of Oromia’s “special interest” in the capital under Article 49 reflects a constitutional acknowledgement of this history (Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, 1995). The protests of 2014-2016 demonstrated that these grievances commanded mass support across Oromia (Human Rights Watch, 2016).

Yet within elite Oromo political discourse, something else has also been operating alongside these legitimate arguments: a language of exclusive possession that sits uncomfortably beside the behaviour of those who advance it most loudly.

No figure encapsulates these contradictions more sharply than Feyisa Lilesa. At the 2016 Rio Olympics, Lilesa crossed the marathon finishing line with his arms raised in an X — the gesture of Oromo protest performed before a global audience while his fellow protesters were being shot in the streets of Oromia. It was an act of extraordinary symbolic courage that forced the world to look at Ethiopia when it preferred to look away.

Yet the story does not end at the finishing line. Reports emerged that Lilesa was subsequently involved in a road incident in Addis Ababa in which children were struck by his four-wheel drive vehicle. Rather than face accountability within the country whose cause he had embodied, he departed. To Dubai.

The irony is almost architectural in its precision. The man who became the international face of Oromo resistance against a government he accused of dispossessing and killing his people who converted that resistance into celebrity, political protection and material wealth,  chose, when accountability arrived at his own door, to flee to the very city whose model of glittering exclusivity is now being applied to Addis Ababa to dispossess the very communities he claimed to represent.

Dubai does not do accountability. It does luxury and impunity and the purchased anonymity of the very wealthy. That an Oromo elite should flee there and that this should be treated as a private matter of no political relevance  is not a footnote. It is a window into the class character of an elite that speaks the language of historical justice while living the life of Gulf-adjacent privilege.

IV. The Shared Bloodline the Politicians Prefer to Forget

The conservative nationalist observation about Menelik’s Oromo ancestry opens a deeper question that contemporary Ethiopian identity politics systematically suppresses: after more than a century of intermarriage, shared urban life, military service, commercial partnership and cultural exchange in Addis Ababa, the ethnic categories being deployed to divide the city’s past and future are far less stable than any of their champions acknowledge.

Haile Selassie presided over a modernising empire with genuine Oromo lineage in his family tree and chose to govern as an Ethiopian emperor rather than an Oromo king. Mengistu Haile Mariam, a man of Oromo and Konso descent who instituted one of the most brutal dictatorships in African history, never once claimed to be governing in the name of Oromo sovereignty. Whatever the crimes of these regimes, and they were grave, their ethnic self-positioning was consistently toward an Ethiopian identity that encompassed rather than excluded.

The irony that contemporary Oromo elite nationalism, which presents itself as liberation from Amhara imperial domination,  finds its most direct historical refutation not in Amhara voices but in the choices of leaders who shared Oromo blood and chose Ethiopia anyway, is one that the current political discourse is structurally unable to process.

This does not mean that Oromo historical grievances are invalid. It means that the ethnic framework being used to prosecute those grievances is considerably more constructed, more recent and more politically motivated than its proponents acknowledge. As the 2007 census indicates, Addis Ababa is approximately 47 per cent Amharic-speaking, 19 per cent Oromo-speaking, 16 per cent Gurage-speaking, with significant further diversity in the remainder. These communities did not arrive as colonial settlers. They arrived, over generations, as Ethiopians, many of them poor Ethiopians seeking livelihoods in the capital that Menelik built and that every subsequent government maintained as a shared national space.

V. Displacement as Continuity: From Fascist Segregation to Market Erasure

Italian occupation of Addis Ababa from 1936 to 1941 was spatial as well as military. Urban planning documents from the period proposed redesigning the city along racial lines, displacing Ethiopians to peripheral zones while European quarters received paved roads, sanitation and modernist architecture (Campbell, 2017; Labanca, 2002). The demographic shock of Yekatit 12, approximately 20 per cent of the city’s population killed in seventy-two hours, emptied neighbourhoods that Italian settlers then filled.

The occupation ended. The Yekatit 12 Monument at Sidist Kilo stands today as architectural testimony. Its bas-reliefs depict bound prisoners, grieving mothers and burning homes. The victims commemorated there are remembered as Ethiopians, not as members of discrete ethnic communities. The fascist bullets, as the historical record makes clear, did not distinguish between Amhara, Oromo, Gurage or Tigrean.

The spatial logic the massacre enabled clearing people from land to create a city for a different and more powerful class of inhabitants, has found new expression in the development model the Dubai analogy celebrates. The 100,000 displaced residents of contemporary Addis Ababa were not killed. They were relocated. But relocation at distance from livelihood is its own form of civic death. Markets disappear. Children travel hours to schools they used to walk to. Social networks built across generations dissolve. The language of development and master planning, deployed today as it was deployed in Italian urban policy documents of the 1930s, does not announce itself as violence. It announces itself as progress.

When Gulf investors purchase luxury residential blocks on the cleared land, and when Oromo political elites celebrate the assertion of Oromo sovereignty over the same city whose poor Oromo residents are among those being cleared, the question of who the Dubai transformation actually serves becomes impossible to avoid.

• VI. What the Three Claims Have in Common

Three distinct claims on Addis Ababa are currently in circulation. Gulf-inflected international capital claims it through investment and the transformation of its skyline into a mirror of Gulf urbanism. Oromo nationalist elites claim it through ethnic sovereignty and historical dispossession. Conservative Ethiopian nationalists claim it through the civic universalism of Menelik’s founding and the multi-ethnic imperial tradition.

Each of these claims, when pushed to its absolute, requires the exclusion of someone else. Gulf capital excludes the poor regardless of ethnicity. Oromo ethnic sovereignty excludes the Amhara grandmother who has lived in Merkato for fifty years, the Gurage trader whose family has been in Kolfe for three generations, the Tigrean civil servant whose children were born in the city. Conservative Ethiopian nationalism, in its less reflective iterations, has historically excluded Oromo cultural identity from legitimate expression in the public sphere.

The lesson of Yekatit 12,  as articulated in both historical scholarship and the ethical reflection that the date demands — is precisely that absolutism in civic ownership destroys cities. The victims of 19 February 1937 were drawn from every community that Addis Ababa contained. The shared trauma of that massacre produced the shared memorial at Sidist Kilo. The date did not belong to one ethnic group. The grief did not sort itself by tribe.

If there is an argument that transcends the current political fragmentation, it is the one contained in the historical behaviour of Menelik himself a man of mixed blood including Oromo ancestry who founded a city and named it New Flower and appeared, whatever his other failings, to intend it as a place where Ethiopians of all origins might dwell. Not perfectly. Not without violence and hierarchy and the injustices of empire. But as Ethiopians, together, rather than as ethnic populations sorted into zones of belonging and exclusion.

Knowing the Date, Reading the City

Each year the Ethiopian calendar turns to Yekatit 12. The date does not demand resentment. It demands remembrance and, more than remembrance, the kind of recognition that sees patterns,  the recurring logic of declaring a plural city the exclusive possession of a single power, whether that power is Italian fascism, Gulf capital, ethnic nationalism or imperial nostalgia.

Addis Ababa is both Finfinne and Addis Ababa. It is Oromo geography and Ethiopian capital. It is local homeland and African diplomatic centre. It was founded by a man of Oromo blood who called it New Flower for all his subjects. It was massacred by fascists who wanted it for Europeans alone. It was rebuilt by Ethiopians of every origin. It is currently being partially remade for Gulf investors and a thin wealthy stratum, at the cost of 100,000 of its poorest residents.

The conservative nationalist who invokes Menelik’s civic universalism is right that the city was never meant to belong to one ethnic group alone and should acknowledge that this universalism came with imperial violence that demands recognition. The Oromo nationalist who invokes historical dispossession at Finfinne is right that land loss is a genuine grievance, and should acknowledge that the man who built the city on that land shared their blood and did not build it for Oromos alone. The Gulf investor who sees the next Dubai should be asked, plainly and on the record: do you know what was cleared to build this? Do you know it is Yekatit 12?

If they all know, if the date is genuinely understood rather than merely observed, then they know that memory is not about the past alone. It is a compass for the future.

That compass, at the moment, is pointing somewhere that the martyrs of Yekatit 12, of every ethnicity who fell together on those three days in February 1937, would not have recognised as the city for which they died.

References

Campbell, I. (2014) The Plot to Kill Graziani. Addis Ababa: Addis Ababa University Press.

Campbell, I. (2017) The Addis Ababa Massacre: Italy’s National Shame. London: Hurst.

Central Statistical Agency (CSA) (2008) 2007 Population and Housing Census of Ethiopia. Addis Ababa: CSA.

Del Boca, A. (1969) Italiani in Africa Orientale. Rome: Laterza.

Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (1995) Constitution of the FDRE. Addis Ababa.

Human Rights Watch (2016) Such a Brutal Crackdown. New York: HRW.

Labanca, N. (2002) Oltremare: Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana. Bologna: Il Mulino.

Marcus, H. (1994) A History of Ethiopia. Berkeley: University of California Press.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

About Post Author

Ethiopian Tribune editor

editor@ethiopiantribune.com

https://ethiopiantribune.com

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