Hunger in Addis Ababa: The Work of an Ethnic Apartheid System

Girma Berhanu (Professor) 

For more than half a century, Ethiopians have endured cycles of drought, famine, and mass starvation. A German scholar who devoted his career to studying Ethiopia’s long history of devastating famines once observed that one factor driving the catastrophic death toll — particularly in the northern regions — was cultural: a profound sense of dignity and pride that made people ashamed to beg, even as they faced death.

An American senator who visited the famine-stricken areas, including the notorious camps at Korem, was arrested by the eerie silence of the dying. He watched men, women, and children standing patiently in line for food distribution and remarked with quiet awe, “What grace, what discipline.” He reflected that in his own country, people reduced to such desperation might erupt in chaos. Ethiopians, by contrast, absorbed their suffering in silence — with a composure that was both humbling and heartbreaking. This silence persists, but the geography of catastrophe has shifted.

What we are witnessing today is something historically without precedent: famine and starvation unfolding inside Addis Ababa itself — not in remote villages or drought-scorched highlands, but in the streets of the capital. And it is happening with a cruelty all its own. The dying do not look like the famished of humanitarian crises past. They are well-dressed, composed, outwardly dignified — good-looking men and women walking slowly toward death in pressed clothing, in broad daylight, past skyscrapers and manicured city parks. Far from being a natural disaster, this is a man-made one.

As part of this ongoing investigation, I sought access to the institutions that absorb this hidden catastrophe. I approached hospitals across Addis Ababa and conducted interviews with the directors of morgues where unidentified bodies are held. The findings are staggering: at a single hospital, a minimum of ten bodies collected from the city’s streets arrive every day. Many are never claimed. The municipality buries them in silence — as invisibly as they died.

This study is an indictment. It seeks to strip away the gleaming façade of a city marketed as a symbol of African modernity and expose the system behind the spectacle: an ethnic apartheid structure that has engineered extreme inequality into a mechanism of death. In today’s Addis Ababa, the divide between the privileged and the dispossessed is no longer merely economic — it is the difference between living and dying. This is the city that the skyscrapers were built to hide.

Editor’s Note : Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com  

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