EDITOR’S NOTE: This is just one example that if Ethiopians are left alone, we can do miracles. Unfortunately, and ironically, we are unable to develop our own country because of the repressive conditions created by U.S.-backed fascist regime.
By Amanda Abrams, DC North
Is it possible to be a victim of your own success—not just once, but twice in a row? The answer could be yes for Washington’s Ethiopian community. In their search for a neighborhood that feels like home, the area’s Ethiopians have been pioneers of economic growth in two formerly down-and-out neighborhoods—first Adams Morgan’s 18th Street, and then the block of 9th Street just south of U Street. But the phenomenon of rising property values that finally pushed the community out of Adams Morgan could repeat itself on 9th Street, if that neighborhood’s growth continues.
Back in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, Washington’s Ethiopians opened businesses on 18th street, at a time when Adams Morgan was a dangerous, no-go zone and rents were cheap. “You couldn’t go there in the daytime, let alone the nighttime,” said Hagos Seyoum, who opened the first Ethiopian restaurant in the United States in 1979. “There was only one other restaurant on 18th Street at the time. My investors didn’t want to put any money into it, so I did it myself.”
Nine years later, he left Adams Morgan, but by that time business on the street was booming. The neighborhood was home to a number of Ethiopian restaurants, as well as many bars and other entertainment spots, and it continued to swell. Within a few more years, however, rents became prohibitively expensive, and the community sought out a new neighborhood—to buy buildings this time, rather than rent.
In search of cheap prices and easy parking, they wound up on the 1900 block of 9th Street, just south of U. The block had once been part of the African American arts and entertainment district that comprised the greater U Street corridor. During the first half of the 20th century, Addison Scurlock, Washington’s best-known photographer of black society, had his studio in a brick building at the corner of 9th and U streets. The Washington Conservatory of Music, containing the largest collection of compositions by black composers, was a block away in a massive turreted home on the corner of 9th and T streets.
But gradually the area had fallen into disrepair. In 1978, Mr. Seyoum bought two houses near the corner of 9th and T streets for $13,000 each. One of the only Ethiopians in the neighborhood for many years, he remained there through some of its worst times.
“Ninth Street, you couldn’t walk on it, it was so dangerous—there was shooting at night,” he said. Standing in front of one of his properties, he pointed out all of the houses nearby—a majority—that were vacant when he first came. “They were very, very shabby. They were all boarded up.”
For years, there was no appreciation of property in the area. It was only in the 1990’s, as Ethiopians began to arrive in the neighborhood, that things gradually changed.
Axum Restaurant was the first Ethiopian-owned restaurant on 9th Street. Gebre Kahassai, the restaurant’s current owner, was the manager in the early ‘90s. “Back then, it was kind of hard to do business here,” he said, sitting in Axum during a break one afternoon. “There used to be trash, illegal things going on in the street, and it was dark, hard to walk. But the city paid attention.”
Little by little, the neighborhood transformed. More Ethiopian businessmen—and women—set up shop on the block, as Ethiopian cabdrivers and other service workers gravitated towards the new hub. Gradually, some savvy Ethiopian entrepreneurs shifted their business models to appeal to a wider audience; meanwhile, a few non-Ethiopian businesses moved in, seeking cheaper rents and proximity to U Street.
Today, the neighborhood is thriving. “This area is born again, like a baby, a good baby,” said Mr. Seyoum with a broad smile.
Alex Padro, executive director of Shaw Main Streets, a nonprofit organization that encourages economic development in the area, agreed. “There were plenty of boarded up buildings here. It’s through the Ethiopians’ hard work that the neighborhood is productive,” he said.
Wandering down one side of 9th and up the other, it’s easy to feel that the block is on the cusp of something exciting. On a given weekend evening, passersby might be Ethiopian, African-American, or white, visiting any number of establishments.
Maybe they’re heading into Haregewine Messert’s bakery, Chez Hareg, located halfway down the block, for cookies and cappuccino. The café’s door sports Obama posters, and Ms. Hareg, who opened the bakery last year, glows with optimism and inclusiveness. One of the business owners on the block who tries to market to a wider audience, she says, “I’m trying to offer something different. I have seven kinds of vegetarian cookies, with no animal products. I want anybody to come and feel like they belong here.”
Other passersby might be coming from the Velvet Lounge, a bar and alternative music venue on U Street just west of 9th that’s under new ownership. Owners Abdul Kayoumy, a Californian of Afghan descent, and Haile Berhane, an Ethiopian, are excited about the changes they’re making. “It’s gonna be really great,” said Mr. Berhane, showing off the club’s new bathrooms and newly expanded space for socializing. The two recently bought a building next door that they plan to make into a separate nightspot.
Despite some gripes about increased parking hassles, business owners’ optimism about the neighborhood is palpable. Weekend foot traffic is growing, and new restaurants and services are opening every month. But the pace of change may increase spectacularly in the near future.
Big Changes on the Horizon
Geographically, 9th Street is somewhat isolated from the rest of U Street. As a result, the development that transformed U Street in the past few years—the condos, cafes and upscale chain restaurants—largely passed it by. Finally, however, a number of major, large developments are slated to be built in the vicinity. Within five years, the landscape around the Ethiopian neighborhood could be massively transformed.
Phil Spalding, the Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner for an area that includes the west side of 9th Street, listed some of the projects currently on the drawing board. “Metro owns a section of Florida Avenue east of 9th Street [to 7th Street] and is planning to develop it; that could take out a couple of buildings on 9th, as well as the area now used as the flea market [at 9th and Florida]. In the next month or two, it’ll be clear who won the contract, so that development is a couple years down the line.”
He continued, “Then there’s the Broadway Atlantic project, being done by a huge developer from Manhattan. It’s big—900 units—and all approvals are in place.” That will be a couple of blocks north of the Ethiopian neighborhood, and should be built in the next two years.
Those are the ones with the biggest impact. But there are also plans for another building in that area with 350 units and retail at ground level. Meanwhile, Howard University is planning the Howard Town Center, a mixed-use development on Georgia between V and W streets, two blocks east, and another mixed-use development that will house the headquarters of DC’s Radio One is scheduled to be built to the south, at 7th and S streets. And scattered around the neighborhood are many smaller projects: a building renovation here, a school reuse there.
There’s even a small development planned for the very heart of the 1900 block of 9th Street. A parking lot next to Axum Restaurant has been sold to a local developer, who will be putting in a four- or five-story live/work space for artists. Although it may mean trouble for the restaurants that currently use the parking lot for street access, Mr. Spalding is excited about the project and describes it as “just right for that area.”
About the rest, though—the condos, the retail, the changes—he worries about the pressure it will put on Ethiopian business owners. “With all that development, I’m not sure this area can sustain these businesses,” he mused, pointing out that owning the buildings—rather than renting, like in Adams Morgan—is no insurance against change. “The value of these buildings will go up and up, and the current owners will start getting offers. When they understand that the value is going from $300,000 to $1.3 million, they will have an incentive to move on,” he said.
At the very least, he said, the nature of the businesses will have to change. Places like Axum that serve as an “internal social club,” as Mr. Spalding put it, with a largely Ethiopian clientele who come to speak their native language and feel at home with friends, will face pressure to widen their customer base or leave.
Mr. Spalding’s observations are difficult to argue with. Ninth Street may once have been a remote hinterland, but it’s becoming increasingly central in a DC that keeps reinventing itself.
The Ethiopians who work and hang out on the block are also watching developments closely. In Axum one Saturday night, reactions to the neighborhood’s current and planned growth are mixed, but few people speak negatively—on the record, at least—about its prospects.
“The future? It’s going to be more crowded, bring more business,” said Axum’s owner, Mr. Kahassai. “A lot of things might change, but I’m not going to worry.”
Haile Gebro, a former contractor who was nursing a bottle of beer, said, “So far, the changes are for good. But it’s very hard to talk about the future because it’s changing so fast.”
His friend, Negasi Teklu, a former correctional officer who has lived the area for 25 years, was more specific. “The neighborhood has definitely changed. It’s like 18th Street—I saw how it changed. The Ethiopians come here, open businesses and open eyes. Now the changes might drive us out of here.”
But his response sounded a rare negative note. At this shining time when the neighborhood is flourishing and seems to hold enormous promise, most Ethiopians are overwhelmingly optimistic about the future.
“I think it’s going to be good,” said Danny Kebede, the manager of Chez Hareg’s bakery. “To see this area cleaner and safer means more business to the strip—I don’t see the negative at all. Starbucks is absolutely welcome to this block. More business is better.”
Harsh as they were, my views on Africa had to be expressed – Kevin Myers
(Belfast Telegraph) — Last Friday week, with famine approaching yet again, I wondered about the wisdom of forking out yet more aid to Ethiopia [see here].
Since the great famine of the mid-1980s, Ethiopia’s population has soared from 33.5 million to 78 million. Now, I do not write civil service reports for the United Nations: I write a newspaper column, and I was deliberately strong in my use of language — as indeed I had been when writing reports from Ethiopia at the height of that terrible famine.
Since dear old Ireland can often enough resemble Lynch Mob Central on PC issues, I braced myself for the worst: and sure enough, in poured the emails. Three hundred on the first day, soon reaching over 800: but, amazingly, 90%+ were in my support, and mostly from baffled, decent and worried people. The minority who attacked me were risibly predictable, expressing themselves with a vindictive and uninquiring moral superiority. (Why do so many of those who purport to love mankind actually hate people so?)
We did more in Ethiopia a quarter of a century ago than just rescue children from terrible death through starvation: we also saved an evil, misogynistic and dysfunctional social system. Presuming that half the existing population (say, 17 million) of the mid-1980s is now dead through non-famine causes, the total added population from that time is some 60 million, around half of them female.
That is, Ethiopia has effectively gained the entire population of the United Kingdom since the famine. But at least 80% of Ethiopian girls are circumcised, meaning that no less than 24 million girls suffered this fate, usually without anaesthetics or antiseptic. The UN estimates that 12% of girls die through septicaemia, spinal convulsions, trauma and blood-loss after circumcision which probably means that around three million little Ethiopian girls have been butchered since the famine — roughly the same as the number of Jewish women who died in the Holocaust.
So what is the moral justification for saving a baby from death through hunger, in order to give her an even more agonising, almost sacrificial, death aged eight or 13? The practice could have been stamped out, with sufficient political will, as sutti in India once was. And the feminists of the West would never have allowed such unconditional aid to be given to such a wicked and brutal society if it had been run by white men.
But, instead, the state was run by black males, for whom a special race-and-gender dispensation apparently applies: thus the two most politically incorrect sins of our age — sexism and racism — by some mysterious moral process, akin to the mathematics of the double-negative, annul one another, and produce an unquestioned positive virtue, called Ethiopia. I am not innocent in all this. People here remained in ignorance of the reality of Africa because of cowardly journalists like me. When I went to Ethiopia just over 20 years ago, I saw many things I never reported — such as the menacing effect of gangs of young men with Kalashnikovs everywhere, while women did all the work. In the very middle of starvation and death, men spent their time drinking the local hooch in the boonabate [buna bet] shebeens.
Alongside the boonabates were shanty-brothels, to which drinkers would casually repair, to briefly relieve themselves in the scarred orifice of some wretched prostitute (whom God preserve and protect).
I saw all this and did not report it, nor the anger of the Irish aid workers at the sexual incontinence and fecklessness of Ethiopian men. Why? Because I wanted to write much-acclaimed, tear-jerkingly purple prose about wide-eyed, fly-infested children — not cold, unpopular and even ‘racist’ accusations about African male culpability.
Am I able to rebut good and honourable people like John O’Shea, who are now warning us that once again, we must feed the starving Ethiopian children?
No, of course I’m not. But I am lost in awe at the dreadful options open to us. This is the greatest moral quandary facing the world. We cannot allow the starving children of Ethiopia to die. Yet the wide-eyed children of 1984-86, who were saved by Western medicines and foodstuffs, helped begin the greatest population explosion in human history, which will bring Ethiopia’s population to 170 million by 2050. By that time, Nigeria’s population will be 340 million, (up from just 19 million in 1930). The same is true over much of Africa.
Thus we are heading towards a demographic holocaust, with a potential premature loss of life far exceeding that of all the wars of the 20th century. This terrible truth cannot be ignored.
But back in Ireland, there are sanctimonious ginger-groups, which yearn to prevent discussion, and even to imprison those of us who try, however imperfectly, to expose the truth about Africa.
By Teddy Fikre
Senator Obama’s historic campaign has ignited a level of excitement within the Ethiopian-American community unlike any other time. We have embraced Obama’s message of hope and self-empowerment as our own. Ethiopians for Obama is an offshoot of this enthusiasm, what started off with a loose network of Ethiopians volunteering for Senator Obama’s campaign has blossomed into a grass-roots organic movement of Ethiopian-Americans across multiple states dedicating ourselves to organizing the Ethiopian community and encouraging all to register and vote.
Ethiopians for Obama has accomplished some truly astounding feats. We have made phone-calls to over a thousand Ethiopians in the states of Pennsylvania, Oregon, Indiana, and Ohio during the primary season. We have traveled to multiple states and raised thousands of dollars from our fellow Ethiopians in support of Senator Obama. We are currently working relentlessly to register thousands of Ethiopians in every state where there is a robust Ethiopian presence.
No where is this effort to register Ethiopians more evident than in the Commonwealth of Virginia . Virginia is home to the largest population of Ethiopian expatriates in the world. There are untold thousands who live in Alexandria , Arlington , Richmond , Fairfax and Prince William County . There are so many Ethiopians in Northern Virginia that it is no longer a novelty to see an Ethiopian in a store or in our neighborhoods. Visiting Ethiopian shops and restaurant, one almost gets the feel of being back in Ethiopia at times. In a state where the outcome of the election could hinge on a couple of thousand votes, the Ethiopian-American vote can be a decisive one.
We hold in our hands the possibility of deciding the outcome of the presidential race. If enough of us vote, we can take part in a broad coalition of Americans who have decided to seek a change. However, to turn this possibility into reality will require hard work and sacrifice. We cannot say we support Senator Obama if we are not registered to vote. Watching CNN or MSNBC and following the election is useless if we do not vote on November 4th. We live in a country that encourages all citizens to vote—to let our voices be heard through the megaphone of democracy. How long must we live in the shadows of this great country, how long must we continue to be invisible men and women?
The truth is that there are not enough of us engaged enough in the political process. During the Ethiopian Soccer Tournament, Ethiopians for Obama set up a registration table for the entire week. Over 30,000 Ethiopians from every corner of the United States were in attendance. While registering even one voter for the entire week is better than none, it goes without saying that the final number of people who registered to vote did not match the number of people there and the overwhelming level of devotion that is evident for Senator Obama within our community. One person actually said “I support Obama but I don’t care about voting.”
While we cannot let our frustration predicate our actions, it is a bit dismaying that our community is not uniting on a much broader level, working harder, and sacrificing more to get as many Ethiopian-Americans registered as possible. No one can judge the worth of a man’s or a woman’s work, but if you are reading this and you are a citizen of the United States yet not registered to vote, then ask yourself—why not? We can debate and argue ad infinitum about developments in Ethiopia . However, we live in America , we have the ability to unite here and be a part of this democracy. How can we demand change elsewhere when we are not willing to do the work of creating change here. We are a very resilient people; most of us came to America with not much more than hope on our side. There might be a lot of reasons why we have not been involved politically in the United States . But this is not time to look backwards; if we are able to unite and vote, we will accomplish a historical feat.
As Senator Obama says, this is more about us than it is about him. We have been fractured and divided for too long; this is our moment to unite and make a difference. We have to stop being reactionary, what good does it do to celebrate on November 4th when Obama is elected if we have not taken the simplest of all actions and register to vote. We are decedents of amazing people–our history is rich and meaningful. We have accomplished some of the most amazing feats and overcome some of the biggest obstacles in our past. However, we cannot rest on our past achievement, now is the moment to reach into the “Yechalal” spirit and accomplish our own amazing feat in our time. We cannot take for granted what millions throughout the world march and die for. The freedom to vote, the freedom to choose our elected officials is one that we have to take seriously. Without registering to vote, we render ourselves irrelevant.
At times, the hesitancy to register on the part of many in our community is frustrating. However, behind every frustration, there is a hope that pushes us forward. This hope–a beacon of light that shines out at times of darkness–is what pushes Ethiopians for Obama forward. One such moment occurred during the very same Ethiopian Soccer Tournament at our registration drive. A 15 year old girl was there from California and was observing the many events of the week. What grabbed her attention more than anything else was the sight of her fellow Ethiopians registering other Ethiopians to vote. She was inspired by this simple act; while we might have fell short of our overall goal, knowing that we had such an impact on the life of this young lady was worth every ounce of effort that we extended. This is how change starts in our community, by inspiring one person—who was not even old enough to vote—we can be a part of a moment that changes how we approach the issues that has divided us for too long.
Time is not a commodity that we have on our side. We have to find a way to translate the overwhelming support for Senator Obama in our community to concrete steps towards getting him elected. Enthusiasm without action is empty; now is the moment for us to work hard to ensure that we register as many of our fellow Ethiopian-Americans as possible. If you are not yet registered, do so today—there is no action that you can take that is so effortless yet has so much meaning. Most states require that you register 30 days before the election; that means that most of us have until early October to ensure that we have the capacity to vote during this historic election. If you are registered already, please reach out to your friends and family and encourage them to vote. This is a time for action; this is our moment to unite and work together for a change that we all have been waiting for.
Please join Ethiopians for Obama at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ethiopiansforobama/
For more information, email [email protected]
