Itegue Taitu Hotel: The Old City’s center of gravity

On the morning of Sunday January 11 a fire of unknown origin has destroyed part of the most ancient hotel in Ethiopia – the Itegue Taitu Hotel – making away with Jazzamba, the historic ethio-jazz club. For many, the loss is personal

Adriano Marzi

 
The cat’s nails wouldn’t stop rasping the sofa where I have laid my sleeping bag. No one else is in the large hall where I am going to spend my first night in Addis Abeba. But I still feel presences here. A feeble yellow light peering through the wide French window lightens an oil picture in front of me. Emperor Menelik II, full size portrayed in its military uniform, points a severe inquiring look upon me. After a short run from the airport along the City’s silent and dark streets a taxi has dropped me off here at 3 am. A dozy young girl at the reception desk has informed me desolately that the room I had booked from Italy has been given away to another customer. So for the moment I can stay in the main hall of the historic hotel. But despite the comfortable accommodation, I couldn’t fall asleep. Perhaps I have already perceived all of the glorious past of this magic place, which soon would become to me home, office, and gallery.

Meant to lodge the prestigious visitors of the city that Queen Itegue Taitu and her husband Menelik II had founded, the Itegue Taitu Hotel – of which she was its first administrator – is not only Ethiopia’s oldest hotel (it was completed in 1907 on Armenian architect Minas Kherbekian’s project): it is the trait d’union between local people and foreign visitors. “You people who come from overseas here you will be given lodging and food to meet your customs”, announced the billboard the Queen had hung at the entrance. In today’s reception, beside Itegue Taitu’s portrait in her regal vestment, a more modest tablet informs foreign customers that “no price discrimination is applied, our fares are equal for all hotel guests”.

 
An extraordinary mankind parades around every day on the hotel’s terrace: German writers on the brink of a nervous breakdown, exorcisms passionate south Italian anthropologists, gargantuan Armenian film makers in search of roots, African diplomats too honest to stay at the city’s five star hotel, the Sheraton, Dutch coffee-shop owners who need to brighten up their minds, circus managers, gold diggers, silent government spies, pretty young women hunting for a one-way air ticket to a Western country. To many of these characters the open-air café tables are the ideal place where to deal with their business and weigh the city’s external temperature from the wicker canopy’s fresh shelter.

 
All around the terrace, in the flower beds peep out broccolis, callyflowers, lattuce, beans, tomatoes. A gardener from Zimbabwe has converted the hotel’s green areas into vegetable gardens. A reality that has become part in the Slow Food “Thousand Gardens” project. A small room has been indeed left for flowers, but an excellent cheap “zero-kilometer” vegetarian lunch buffet is available daily at the hotel.

 
The Taitu Hotel hosts one of the local music Pantheons. Part and parcel of the historical building, Jazzamba is the stage on which the best ethio-jazz talents and word-music rising stars perform: among the others Alemayehu Eshete, the Addis Acoustic Project, Samuel Yirga, and Girma Negash. Old Ethiopian music lions and young global musicians perform side by side to find a synthesis of modernity and tradition through soul, blues and folk music. The Addis Abeba Social Club.
Although less eye-catching than the graceless monolith known as “Arada building”, Taitu Hotel is the landmark which best represents Arada, the social life and economic city’s beating heart. The hotel compound is a permanent gravity center for tens of young people keen to guiding tourists through the major City’s attractions and helping meet their needs. Just across the main entrance the never ending drama of Addis Abeba’s life is on play, with no intermission or filter. Lepers wound in their putrid bandages dragging themselves along the street, begging drunken cripples, dogs and children sharing restaurants’ remains and dust, and commercial sex workers selling their bodies in front of the local police station. Living at Taitu’s means getting in touch with these people, listening to their yammers and pleas, meeting their glances, and brushing against their bodies violated by misery. Those who really have an interest in getting acquainted with this City won’t find any better place where to move from.

 
For many travelers, like myself, Taitu has been home and family away from one’s own home and family. The hotel staffs often adopt long-time guests and take care of them affectionately. I know persons who fallen ill and who have been assisted by room service personnel with no less attention than their own relatives would have paid. For most hotel personnel, the hotel not only is their workplace but the place where they live. The fire at Taitu gutted all these together. They all deserve support and help, as attention and engagement by all the people who love this City deserves the reconstruction of one of Addis Abeba’s most important laical temples.

 
Places like Itegue Taitu Hotel are as meaningful for Addis’ future as the city “Babur”, the light train which is to be inaugurated shortly. Willpower to taking care of their City’s historic past should conform to Addis’s people enthusiastic expectations towards modernity. Defending the most ancient hotel and expecting from government the utmost engagement in promoting a prompt and effective reconstruction of the building means making sure that the Old City’s heart will keep on beating in the “new Africa’s New York”.

 
The action that in the coming months will be taken to mend damages occurred to the landmark which by Lonely Planet is defined as “a museum piece full of beautiful old furniture and high ceilings” will be a test bed. Besides being strongly engaged in putting up a skyline worth of the global capital city that Addis is rapidly turning into, is the City’s administration also keen to safeguarding its historical heritage?

Photos: Adriano Marzi