I arrive in Addis on Fasika, the Ethiopian Easter. It’s a cool, cloudless day. The little shops are shuttered, their owners in church contemplating the miracles and resurrections that make earthly life here, in the third-poorest country in the world, tolerable. Ephrem Gezehegn, my driver and new friend, shoots around rotaries in the boxy blue Lada he’s borrowed from his uncle, tooting his horn amiably for no apparent reason. At the first red light the windows fill up with street kids. They seem reasonably healthy by Addis standards, in that they appear to have all of their limbs.

“Fazer, give me money, fazer,” they chant in a jaded, mechanical way, as if running down the rules of an all-too-familiar game. “You got money, fazer?”

I nod congenially—of course I have money. The kids press against the glass, curious about this big, nervous-looking farenji in the passenger seat. Ephrem rolls down the window, scolds them playfully, tosses out some coins, and then the light changes.

Downtown Addis lies drowsy and quiet under its tattered blue blanket of haze. The homeless and destitute who populate the sidewalks appear to be sleeping in this morning, curled up on squares of flattened cardboard; feral dogs wander among them, nosing around. Many of the billboards are AIDS-related—a blindfolded couple strolling cheerfully off a cliff; happy young people in caps and gowns (Graduate With Positive A’s, Not With HIV/AIDS); ads for Hiwot Trust and Sensation Condoms (Value Your Life, Value Your Culture)—which is sobering and impressive and, after a while, numbing. Women in white traditional dress stream from the churches, brandishing candy-striped umbrellas against the sun. The men wear webs of yellow string over their scalps, halo-style; it’s as if they’re all ensnared in one great golden net.

We drive around Meskel Square, the massive Soviet-style concrete plaza that dominates the city center, ringed by what would be sixteen lanes of impenetrable traffic if anyone observed the lane markings. The square lies empty. Flags from the country’s eleven far-flung, highly contentious regions dangle from their poles. An enormous satellite projection screen, like the face of some grinning and beneficent god, looms overhead, waiting for tonight’s soccer match, Manchester United versus Some Other Team. Ethiopia, like the rest of the world, is mad for Manchester United. Meanwhile, Ephrem, for reasons he’s powerless to explain, roots for Liverpool.

“Why not root for the Ethiopian teams?” I ask.

“Ethiopian teams are not so good, I think. Liverpool is better.”

“You realize of course the Brits don’t even know you guys are out here watching.”

Ephrem ignores this, as if it’s merely an academic, tree-falls-in-the-forest issue, easily dismissed. He points out the flashy new Millennium 2000 lightboard the government has put up since my last visit, high atop the new Millennium Wall. Banners flap in the breeze, emblazoned with patriotic slogans: The New Millennium: A New Era of Ethiopia’s Rebirth; In the New Millennium, We Will Unify and Work Diligently to Eradicate Poverty and HIV-AIDS; and so on.

If this millennial sloganeering seems, in 2008, somewhat counterintuitive, blame it on the Ethiopian calendar which, thanks to its Coptic origins, shoehorns in an extra month (Ethiopia: Thirteen Months of Sunshine!) and thus, at the moment, lags seven to eight years behind our own. It’s not that they’re behind the times—more like they keep their own time.

“So, what about the obelisk? You guys must be excited about that.”

“Obelisk?” Ephrem looks briefly distracted.

“The obelisk up in Axum. Remember?”

It’s the whole reason I’m here, but Ephrem gives a laissez-faire, to-each-his-own wave of the wrist, as if it’s too exhausting a project to keep track of the flimsy, confusing desires that draw white people to Africa. I’m a little confused myself. Ostensibly I’ve come to pay witness to yet another resurrection—that of the “Axum Obelisk.” Which is not technically an obelisk at all, but rather a two thousand year old granite grave pillar of incalculable national and historical value, looted by Mussolini’s army in 1937 and recently, after the mother of all international custody battles, returned from Rome. In the celebrations that followed, the patriotic fanfare and vindicatory hoopla, it was easy to lose sight of the fact that the Ethiopians had not exactly treated the obelisk as an immaculate treasure in the first place—at the time of its plunder, it had lain tumbled and broken in pieces for centuries. But such lapses and lacunae prevailed on both sides. The Italians, for instance, despite their own aggressively litigious campaign against the Getty (among other museums) to retrieve artifacts illegally excavated from their soil, seemed more or less content to leave the Ethiopian obelisk right where it was, standing watch over a traffic circle behind the Circus Maximus, choking on soot, pigeon shit, and Vespa exhaust while seven decades of protests, petitions, bilateral negotiations, and international entreaties slipped noisily by. In the end, it took an act of God (a lightning bolt that struck in May 2002, on the very eve of Ethiopian Independence Day) to persuade the Italians that, basta, this was one piece of Nile Valley statuary they could do without.

“This is the beginning of a new chapter,” the Italian ambassador announced. “Our colonial period is over.”

But returning an obelisk from exile turned out to be a complicated business. First the Italians had to disassemble it for transport, cut the granite into three sections of eighty tons each, reopen the joints, remove the dowels, and insert jackscrews along the breaks. Then a plane strong enough to hoist all that weight had to be found. There were only two options: the Lockheed C-5 Galaxy, which thanks to a certain ongoing fiasco in Iraq was unavailable, and the behemoth known as the Antonov AN-124. If you’re looking to transport a bull elephant, say, or a blue whale, or a locomotive, yacht, or NASA launch vehicle, the Antonov’s your plane. But of course it was too large for the tinker-toy Axum airport, so another runway had to be built. Then followed the three harrowing flights to deliver the stones. When digging to prepare the foundation finally commenced at the Axum site, a vast, chambered necropolis was discovered below; it had to be studied and assessed by UNESCO and then structurally reinforced by Italian engineers before the drilling could resume. After which it was observed that the neighboring obelisk, like a rivalrous sibling, had begun to shudder and tremble and generally call attention to itself—so that too had to be reinforced.

By now three years had passed. The crowds were long gone, the foreign media ditto. Even the peppy and informative website had vanished. The obelisk, last anyone knew, was lolling around Humpty Dumpty–like in some tin-roofed hut, in the process of slowly being re-erected, or slowly not being re-erected, no one can say. And save for the intrepid dilettante journalist with too much time on his hands, no one seems to care.

Though hardly luxurious by western standards, the Ghion is a very nice hotel indeed. Of course by local standards—given the $150 median annual income—it’s a palace. To ensure the locals don’t suffer too much resentment over the pampered lawns, the sparkling pool, and the spacious lobby full of leather sofas and mirrored columns, the hotel employs a formidable security detachment to keep them out. It’s a job for one or two people tops, but there are at least a dozen guys hanging out at the gate, playing cards and chatting away in the guard house as we pull up. The dread Derg with their thuggish socialist ways may be gone, but the national fabric retains some of the old pink dye: hey, jobs and uniforms for everyone!

No doubt this accounts for all the stewards, busboys, cashiers, and other staff members loitering in the breakfast room, looking dignified and forbearing in their snappy burgundy outfits and doing nothing much at all. The waitresses skate past—slender women with somber, heart-shaped faces—bearing silver pots of coffee and foamy pitchers of milk. Macchiatos. For all the brutal wreckage of Il Duce’s Abyssinian Campaign—the mustard gas and phosgene, the forced labor and random decapitations, the roughly three-quarters of a million dead Ethiopians—he did leave behind some enduring niceties, in the form of better housing and roads, a more dependable electrical grid, and a really great way with espresso drinks.

Unfortunately the buffet this morning shows little else in the way of Italian or any other culinary influence. Not that I’m worried, what with half a dozen vials of Immodium, Pepto Bismol, Cipro, and various pricey anti-malarials clicking away in my cargo pockets like castanets. In truth I’m feeling pretty indestructible, happy to be back here in the Ghion with the businessmen and missionaries and NGO types—all these other travelers who are, like me, too cheap to spring for the Hilton.

And then there are the Ethiopian children, with their new, adoptive, European and American parents. Adoption has become big business here since countries like China and Guatemala have cracked down on illegal trafficking, but as awareness of the commoditization and export of children grows, along with the sense that a lot of money is changing hands in the process, some slow-burning resentment has begun to build. It’s no longer quite so sweet and benevolent a picture, in the eyes of the Ghion staff, to see these Ethiopian kids loading up their plates at the buffet and then ignoring the food in favor of their new picture books and action figures and Barbies. Every so often the kids sneak a glance at the tired-looking adults across the table, as if to make sure they’re still there—these pallid beneficent creatures who have descended from the skies with their digital cameras and bulging North Face backpacks, and who are now, it seems, by virtue of some mysterious and perhaps even slightly sinister process, their parents.

And I know what I’m talking about. Three years ago I was one of them, sitting in this same breakfast room with my wife and our own newly adopted Ethiopian daughter, dopey with jet lag, marveling at how smoothly we’d managed to slip the bonds of our honeyed, cloistered New England village to assume other bonds: e.g. this new daughter of ours—one of approximately four million orphans in this country—whose own socio-cultural-familial bonds we had with the best of intentions seriously loosened, if not severed completely.

At bottom you see this is a story of returns. I, too, like the Italians up in Axum, have returned to the scene of a stolen treasure, though whether in triumph or penance or to make restitution of some kind isn’t clear at the moment even to me.

There are a number of things to be said about Addis Ababa, but few that would make anyone choose to live here or, for that matter, visit. The place is chaos itself, a city of filthy air, undrinkable water, open sewage, and collapsing shanties in twisting, unmarked lanes; a city of diseases so atavistic and exotic they must be seen in the poor, malformed flesh to be believed. “A look of timeless decrepitude,” Paul Theroux sniffs peremptorily in Dark Star Safari, “dirty and falling apart, stinking horribly of unwashed people and sick animals, every wall reeking with urine.”

Bela Tibor Kozma / iStockPhoto

Such claims are, of course, not just lazy but willfully blind to the flip side of the record—the modest but ingenious sidewalk commerce, the resilient good humor of people squashed together in appalling circumstances, the crazy quilt of condo housing going up beside, and often inside, the worst slums. Addis at a glance is a kind of teeming, bizarro-world Los Angeles: you’ve got the sprawl and smog, the tacky sun-blasted congestion of the basin; but then, as you ascend into the surrounding foothills, the clutter falls away; the lovely cough-drop scent of eucalyptus wafts over you; and suddenly there’s a light moisturizing mist against your skin, like a promise of good things to come.

We’re on our way to see the eminent Ethiopianist Dr. Richard Pankhurst—the founder of the Axum Obelisk Return Committee, and for the past thirty-five years the most prominent, eloquent, and insistent voice in the chorus of international protest. So eminent is Dr. Pankhurst, such an oft-quoted name in Ethiopian studies, that everyone keeps assuring me he’s been dead for years. But no, he’s very much alive, rather jolly even, when I call to get directions to his house. On our way we twice lose our bearings and have to call Professor Pankhurst again for directions. Each time it’s as if we’ve woken him from a nap, and I’m forced to explain all over again who I am and why I’m coming to see him. For a historian he appears to have a pretty short memory.

Ephrem frowns with impatience, thinking of all the ongoing entrepreneurial ventures he should be attending to: his driver/translator business, his videography business, his wedding-planning business, and the open-air video game/foosball/Ping-Pong arcade in the alley behind his house. Also in his spare time he writes screenplays and, as they say, wants to direct. He’s a busy guy. It’s because of the economy, he says: the price of injera has quadrupled; the bus costs three times what it did last year. Meanwhile the Chinese are out there flooding the markets with cheap goods. Accusingly, he points to the tiny wand-shaped tape recorder in my shirt pocket. “No way,” I say, “it’s a Sony.”

“Still: Chinese.”

“Really?”

“The Chinese know how to sell things,” he says. “They are everywhere now. They walk into a store and see what we do not have, and the next week there it is on the shelf. We never do this for ourself.”

It’s true that the Ethiopians appear to lack the temperament for good capitalism. They’re gentle, soft-spoken; they eat from the same plate not just figuratively but literally, with the fingers of one hand. It’s a culture of small portions, polite accommodations. Their manner, the highly ritualized ways they conduct business—the brewing of coffee, the washing of hands, the elaborate alternate-side-of-the-cheek kissing on the street—seem guaranteed to enfeeble an economy. The men stroll dreamily down the street, holding hands. So do the women. So do the children. Everyone’s draped around everyone else: it’s like the whole concept of personal space has eluded them. Though arguably, in a city of five million shanty-dwelling residents, there’s simply no space for personal space.

At last, up in the hills, where the air’s clean and cool and embassy compounds sprawl complacently behind stone walls (inlaid at the top, for security purposes, with shards of colored glass), we find the personal space we’ve been looking for: the Pankhurst house, a large, lushly gardened estate ringed by pomegranate and false banana trees. No sooner do we arrive than Ephrem ducks away to make some business calls, leaving me to greet our hosts, Richard and Rita—a hale, bemused-looking British couple in their late seventies who have either just finished lunch or are politely pretending to have finished. They welcome me with courtly, practiced humor. While Rita sees to the coffee, Richard directs me along the flat stone path, through a yard full of tropical flowers, to a tilting pagoda with a thatched roof, the beams cantering at weird, precarious-looking angles. “Our own little Pisa,” he sighs in a low, plummy voice. “Not to worry. It’s tilted this way for years.”

“How many years?”

“You’ve heard of Lucy? We were neighbors once.” I laugh politely; clearly it’s a line he trots out for first-time visitors. “Now,” Richard says, getting down to business, “I understand you have an interest in obelisks. But I’m afraid you’ve come rather too early. The re-erection is not complete.

“I was there in ’05, you know, when the last piece arrived. Very dramatic. The Italians flew it in on that big Ukrainian plane. The air was so thin they had to land early in the morning when it was still cool. There were no lights on the airstrip. It had to be done promptly at dawn. We were all there waiting.” He leans back, his eyes smoky behind his glasses, squinting. “At first it was just a tiny spot in the sky. Then it got bigger and bigger until it seemed the very largest thing on earth. Then it landed, and the front cargo panel opened, and they slid the obelisk out onto the trucks and drove to the site. We all gave speeches for the television cameras. The Italian ambassador was there. He was very relieved, of course. It had been quite an adventure.”

“And now? The adventure’s over?”

“Oh dear no. Not until the re-erection is complete. And there are a number of additional treasures we’d like to see returned. Most of the National Archives are still in the possession of the Italians.”

“What about that colonial-chapter-is-now-over stuff from the Ambassador’s speech?”

“I’m afraid that colonial chapters don’t end as cleanly as that. The Brits too ransacked an enormous amount of loot back in 1868, you know, from the old capital Magdala. Took it out by the trainload. Half the silver from the Bank of Ethiopia. Illuminated manuscripts, icons, artifacts. Go to the British Museum or the Victoria and Albert: it’s there to this day. Of course we’re not demanding they send it all back—only those objects that were stolen.”

“But isn’t that kind of a fine line? Aren’t the world’s museums full of stolen treasures?”

“One has to start somewhere,” he says mildly. “Of course it’s easier to ask for what belongs to you than to return what belongs to someone else. But the Ethiopians don’t lack for patience. They’ve been patient since antiquity. They’ve had to be. The problem is we’re so grossly out of balance here—financially so very poor and culturally so very rich. Overpopulation keeps eating up development. But the Muslims, the Catholics, the Patriarch of the Church, and of course your American government policy—they’re all against population control. What’s needed is some kind of regional, Horn of Africa federation. Some new way of gover—”

“What’s needed is education,” Rita announces brightly, emerging from the garden with a tray of coffees. “Particularly for girls. We simply can’t wait anymore; there’s too much of the future at stake.”

Surely there’s some irony or paradox in the way these transplanted intellectuals with their cosmopolitan outlook have become, in their high villa, such fierce advocates for a strictly nationalist position regarding cultural property. But never mind. For the moment I’m content just to sit here in this tilting pagoda, enjoying their hospitality and wit and their passion for this beautiful beleaguered country they’ve adopted. Eventually I tell them about my daughter, as I suppose I knew all along I would. Both Pankhursts light up at once. “How lucky you are,” Rita says. “How wonderful for you.”

True, true. Nonetheless I’m compelled in the interest of neurotic thoroughness to air some guilt and anxiety anyway. As in: Isn’t international adoption, for all its good intentions and often commendable results, at bottom another form of imperial theft? Transporting precious and irreplaceable treasures to foreign shores? What does it mean that such adoptions are unheard of in Islamic countries, where relatives are obligated to take care of the child? Isn’t it possible in short that people like me are contributing to the very problem people like them (the Pankhursts) have been fighting all these years?

“It is a difficult issue,” Rita says. “But you must not make it too complicated. You’re saving a child from a highly depressed upbringing.”

Richard looks a little depressed now himself, his eyelids gone red rimmed and baggy, in need of some downtime. Time to go. We gather up the coffee things and carry them into the house, past the old photos and ceremonial-looking Out of Africa–style masks and shields that decorate the living room. Over the mantel there’s an arresting tapestry of His Most Virtuous Highness Haile Selassie. He stands on a lush, tree-lined driveway, beside a handsome white woman in a white hat. “My mother,” Richard informs me proudly. “The Emperor was a frequent guest at our house in those days.”

The Emperor. To say the Emperor remains a living presence in this country, thirty-three years after his death at the hands of the Derg, would be a ludicrous understatement. And yet most of what I know about the man is not the heroism and dignity he showed during the Italian occupation and the war years, but the bizarre, operatic, final-days material in Ryszard Kapuscinski’s book The Emperor—his brutal whims and caprices, his Nero-like fiddling while the empire crumbled around him. When I mention this, my host makes a sour face indeed. “Utter nonsense,” he snaps. “Sheer sensationalism.”

“Oh?”

“You must remember, Mengistu’s people had just murdered the man. It was in their interest to spread these foolish stories. But Kapuscinski bought every word. Either he was naïve or he had his own agenda, thinking of his own country. But if he wanted to write about Poland, he should have written about Poland. The fact is he caused a great deal of damage to this country with that dreadful book.”

Suddenly we’re all acutely aware of me and my little Chinese-made Sony recorder, ready to peddle more sensational neocolonialist nonsense about Africa. For the second time that afternoon it’s clear I represent as much the problem as the solution. So I thank the Pankhursts for their warmth and hospitality and go.

Later that evening I take a stroll around Meskel Square. Disconcertingly, a man attaches himself to me outside the Ghion, offering, if not threatening, his services as a guide. I tell him no thanks, but he tags along anyway, pointing out sights I can see perfectly well myself—the statues and banners that line the square, the side alleys behind it where the animal markets conduct their business and mounds of freshly flayed goatskins lie stacked like pancakes, the enormous condo developments going up across Kenyatta Street (Sunshine Construction: Seeing Is Believing). And now, he says, he wants to show me something very special, a very important cultural show from all over Ethiopia.

I catalogue for myself all the reasons this is a bad idea. I’ve got a thrumming jet-lag headache, it’s getting dark, I have no interest in cultural shows, loathe cultural shows in fact, or would if I had any idea what a cultural show even was. Nonetheless I follow him, in my reluctant, conflict-averse way. We proceed down an all-too-literal dark alley, where men sit chewing khat leaves beneath a plastic tarp, their red, batlike eyes blinking through the gloom, in a way that seems only to confirm that I have now wandered into some Paul Bowles–like distant episode that will end with me barking like a dog in some dusty forsaken hole. After five minutes or so we arrive at a small stucco house with a satellite dish on the roof and some faded travel posters (Lalibela’s buried churches, the Axum Obelisk restored to its full glory) Scotch taped to the door.

Turkairo / CC BY 2.0

The interior, like most here, is feebly illumined by a bare low-wattage bulb. There’s a Chinese action film on the TV, dubbed into English and subtitled in Arabic. Nobody’s watching. My guide vanishes behind a beaded curtain, then returns in the company of three stunning young light-skinned women in white dresses, their arms ornamented with sinuous, henna-like tattoos. He beams, as if to say, Is this a culture show or what? These women, he announces with a flourish, are “here to give whatever you want.”

As if on cue, they come forward, my three fates, shyly, eyes averted, and greet me with the traditional handshake, delivered in a solemn half bow, the right wrist cradled in the left. Herodotus, something of an authority on such matters, claimed the Ethiopians were the most beautiful of all the world’s peoples. No one who has seen them would disagree. The security officers at the airport, the maids in the hotel, even the women trudging down Entoto Mountain hunched under eighty-pound loads of firewood—all look like supermodels without even trying. And these women are trying. Languidly they begin to prepare the coffee ceremony, an elaborate affair that often takes close to an hour, and involves spreading long scented grasses over floor tiles, roasting beans over a charcoal fire, shaking off the husks, grinding them by pestle, and brewing them in a round black clay pot. While I wait, they urge me to sit on the couch. My guide too urges me to sit on the couch. The couch itself, with its mellow, shapeless indentations, seems eager to receive me. For a few minutes I perch there on the cushions, not quite sitting and not quite not-sitting, looking on. It’s one of those dreamlike moments that seem to be happening to someone else.

Then all at once I remember a scam I read about in the guidebooks. An unsuspecting tourist gets lured into a private home, where he’s offered food, drink, and entertainment; then, just as he’s getting comfortable, some very large, unfriendly person barges in and demands money. “I gotta go,” I announce, springing abruptly to my feet.

“But the show has not begun,” my guide protests, in a voice so plaintive I almost feel guilty.

“No, I really, really gotta go.”

I don’t expect him to follow me all the way back to the hotel, but he does, only slightly subdued, as if nothing in the capricious behavior of Americans surprises him. It occurs to me that maybe it wasn’t a rip-off after all. That maybe, in my effort not to come off as ignorant and naïve, I’ve overshot the target in an ignorant and naïve way. At the gates of the Ghion I reach for my wallet and produce fifty birr. My guide shakes his head; he wants a hundred. So we haggle. It’s my first night in Africa, and already I’m experiencing the full complement of discomforts—fatigue, ignorance, shame, and the sense of impending receipt of some minor unspecified punishment. I give him the hundred and go off to bed.

The next day, on the flight to Axum, the seats around Ephrem and me are full of businessmen, missionaries, monks in brown robes. It’s the Ethiopian Air religious-heritage tour, making stops in the holy cities of Gondor, Axum, and Lalibela. I pass the time chatting with Hanok, an amiable Ethiopian fellow in his thirties, on vacation from his nursing job in Sweden. I ask if he’s heading up to Axum for the re-erection, and his face goes blank. Re-erection? He’s heard something about this but the details are fuzzy. Like other members of the Ethiopian diaspora he gets his home-country news from either relatives or the internet, specifically the political blogs, which are full of colorful invective against the Meles government and the farce of the recent parliamentary (like everyone here, he brackets the word in air quotes) “elections.”

He lowers his voice to a whisper; there’s a rumor Meles’s sister is on the flight. Why take chances? Then abruptly he breaks off the conversation altogether, it having occurred to him that I might well be one of those chances he doesn’t want to take. A few minutes later I hear him shooting the shit, albeit discreetly, with Ephrem.

The plane’s belly rumbles; we have begun our descent. The missionary in the next row dog-ears her book (Money Cometh to the Body of Christ) and puts it away. Below spread the brown hills of Eritrea, fields of teff and sorghum punctuated here and there by round tukul huts. Ephrem clutches the armrests. He’s never been on a plane before.