Africabeat

Laphto (Addis Ababa)

Shawel Hailu stands in front of Laphto, a new multi-purpose entertainment center which will feature luxury apartments, an art gallery, bowling alley, pool hall, arcade, night club, cafe, fusion restaurant, shopping, swimming pool, health club, running track, movie theatre (for indy/art house films), VIP center, rentable shopping/office space, Wifi hotspots, a Montessori school and, eventually, a world-class pediatrics hospital. He's part of the wave of returned Diaspora Ethiopians driving the current building boom.

His materials?  Sourced from China, of course, via Guangzhou.  The foreman on his work site are also Chinese.

Gottera Junction (Addis Ababa)

Artistic rendering of the new Gottera Junction, a project by a Shanghai-based construction group.  Pretty, isn't it? 

Without roads, there is no development

The (now former) Chinese Ambassador to Ethiopia, Lin Lin, sits with Mr. Wen, the head of CRBC in Ethiopia at opening of a new road linking a Chinese glass factory to a main thoroughfare.  CRBC, a state-owned Chinese roads and bridge construction company, has broke ground on dozens of new roads in Addis Ababa since it launched its first Ethiopian project in 1998 known simply as "the ring road," a name and a concept which ought to make residents of Beijing smile.  The mayor of Addis Ababa and the head of the Addis Ababa Roads Authority also officiated.  The mayor thanked the Chinese and compared Ethiopia to the US and China saying, "if there are no roads, there is no development."  The Chinese officials praised the EPRDF for their wisdom and for bringing development to the Ethiopian people.  (No comment.)

Greetings from Ethiopia

Kebra Nagast

I'm a little surprised I managed to be on this planet for 25 years without learning anything about the Kebra Nagast.  Samuel Malher, a scholar from Strasbourg, has just published the first unabridged French translation, and I have excerpts from an interview with him by Roots and Culture up at Global Voices.

This week, francophone blog Roots and Culture interviews [FR] Samuel Malher, a religious scholar from Strasbourg who has written the first unabridged French translation of the Kebra Negast, a sacred Ethiopian text.

The Kebra Negast, or the Glory of Kings, is considered sacred not only by Orthodox Ethiopian Christians, who comprise 65% of the country's population, but many Jamaican Rastafarians who believe it predicts the last Ethiopian King was God incarnate. It documents the lineage of the Ethiopian monarchs, who are said to descend directly from Menelik, son of the Israelite King Solomon and the Ethiopian Queen Makeda, otherwise known as the Queen of Sheba.  It also tells the story of how the Ark of the Covenant was taken from Israel to Ethiopia, and how the Ethiopians became God's new chosen people.

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