Ethiopia’s capital is a showcase for its leader’s ambition

To walk among the happy throngs in Sheger Park, Addis Ababa’s newest and glitziest public space, is to encounter an idealised vision of Ethiopia’s future. Gentle piano music wafts through the air. Beaming newly-weds pose for photographs beside a glittering artificial lake. Young professionals clink wine glasses as families donning traditional white shawls wander through a botanical garden. When the sun sets a spectacular display of water fountains erupts to rapturous applause.

All Ethiopia’s modern history is on display, too. Looming above you is the palace of Emperor Menelik II, who founded the Ethiopian capital in the late 19th century. To the north, beneath eucalyptus-covered hills, are districts built by Italian colonists in the 1930s that were once racially segregated. To the east stands a grand circular building, in the style of an Ethiopian monastery, made for the national bank in the 1960s during the modernising phase of Emperor Haile Selassie’s reign. A soaring bronze monument nearby commemorates the socialist revolution of 1974. Squint a little, and in the distance you spy rows of hulking tower blocks, built during the era of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (eprdf), a leftist rebel movement which seized power in 1991.