Ethiopia and Diaspora Reconnection

Every other reconnection article in this series begins at a fort on the Atlantic. This one cannot, and the difference is the point.

A different thread entirely

Ethiopia was never colonized and was not a source of the Atlantic slave trade. So for most readers of African descent in the Americas, Ethiopia is not an ancestral country in the way Ghana or Senegal may be. It is something else: the place that stayed sovereign, and that for that reason became a symbol far beyond its own borders.

That symbolism is real history, not sentiment. Ethiopia's independence made it a reference point for Pan-Africanism, for the Rastafari movement, and for Black political thought across the Americas and the Caribbean for the better part of a century. The country carries a meaning for the diaspora that has nothing to do with descent, and a great deal to do with what it refused.

And a literal one

There is also a modern Ethiopian diaspora, large and recent, built by displacement and migration over the last fifty years, with substantial communities in North America, Europe and the Gulf. For those readers this is an ancestral country in the ordinary sense, and the practical questions are different.

The most useful of them is the Ethiopian Origin ID, the document commonly called the Yellow Card. Holding one removes the visa requirement entirely. If you are of Ethiopian descent and have never looked into whether you are eligible, that is the single most valuable thing on this page.

The warning we are not going to bury

The UK FCDO records that travelers to Ethiopia may face increased scrutiny, particularly if they are of Amhara, Tigrayan or Oromo ethnicity. It states that officials may conduct road checkpoints and door to door calls, that security services sometimes conduct house searches without authorization, that security checks have increased at Bole International Airport, and that there are reports of ethnic Tigrayans being prevented from boarding flights.

We are printing that in a reconnection article rather than only in a safety guide, because the people those sentences describe are the readers this article is written for. Someone traveling to see family in Ethiopia is far more likely to be affected by it than a visitor on a two week itinerary.

The FCDO's own advice is to check the credentials of officials who ask for access to your accommodation and then comply with their requests, and in all cases to avoid confrontation and follow instructions. Travel with documents in order, allow far more time than seems reasonable at the airport, and tell someone at home your movements.

Read this alongside our guide to the Afar

The Awash valley is covered in more depth in Afar: Human Origins, Salt and Fire in Ethiopia's Rift, written for this publication by Mahlet Degefaw. It is the better place to start on that part of the country.