Who ruled Addis Ababa?

Addis Ababa sits on a high plateau at about 2,350 metres, beneath the Entoto hills in the centre of Ethiopia. Unlike most African capitals it was neither an ancient city nor a colonial creation: it was founded in the 1880s as the camp of an Ethiopian ruler, grew into the seat of an empire that defeated a European invasion, and in the twentieth century became the diplomatic capital of the African continent.

The highlands around the site had a long history before the city. Christian kingdoms that looked back to the Kingdom of Aksum and the later Solomonic emperors held the region in the Middle Ages, and the remains of a medieval town and church on Entoto suggest a settled presence that was swept away during the wars of the sixteenth century. In the generations that followed, Oromo herders and farmers occupied the plain, which they called Finfinne after its hot springs.

In 1881 Menelik II, then king of Shewa, moved his court from Ankober to Entoto, a defensible ridge that suited his campaigns to the south. His wife, Taytu Betul, preferred the warmer valley below and in 1886 began building a house near the springs. The court followed, the nobles were given plots around the royal compound, and the new town took the name Addis Ababa, "new flower". When Menelik became emperor in 1889 it became the capital of the whole empire, and after his victory over Italy at Adwa in 1896 foreign legations and merchants arrived in growing numbers.

The early city was a sprawl of camps and compounds rather than a planned town, and its hunger for firewood stripped the surrounding hills. For a time Menelik considered moving the capital again, but fast-growing eucalyptus trees imported from Australia in the 1890s solved the fuel problem and the city stayed. The railway from the French port of Djibouti reached Addis Ababa in 1917, binding it to world trade.

Ras Tafari, crowned as Haile Selassie in 1930, set about modernising the capital with new schools, hospitals, a printing press and public monuments. On 5 May 1936 Italian troops under the orders of Benito Mussolini entered the city, which became the capital of Italian East Africa. After an attempt on the life of the Italian viceroy Rodolfo Graziani in February 1937, occupying forces and settlers killed thousands of residents over several days, a massacre remembered in Ethiopia as Yekatit 12. The Italians also laid out new avenues and quarters, partly to segregate Europeans from Ethiopians. British and Ethiopian forces drove them out during World War II, and Haile Selassie re-entered the city on 5 May 1941, exactly five years after Italian troops had marched in.

The emperor made Addis Ababa a meeting point for newly independent Africa. The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa was based there from 1958, and in 1963 the Organisation of African Unity was founded in the city. The revolution of 1974 brought the Marxist Derg to power, and the capital endured the violence of the Red Terror in the late 1970s before rebel forces took the city in 1991. In 2002 the African Union replaced the OAU and kept its headquarters there. Plans to extend the city into the surrounding Oromia region provoked deadly protests between 2014 and 2016 and were abandoned.

Addis Ababa is now a chartered city with several million people, the largest in Ethiopia and the seat of the African Union.