Despite only being founded on the centenary of the city in 1986, the Addis Ababa Museum is the town’s scruffiest museum. That said, perusing candid portraits of the redoubtable Empress Taitu, rakish Lij Iyasu and the very beautiful Empress Zewditu, along with pictures of the capital in its infancy, is still worth an hour or so. It’s unbelievable that the raucous city outside was nothing more than tents on a hill just over a century ago.
There’s also a ‘first-in-Ethiopia’ room, with a picture of the first telephone in Ethiopia (which was brought from Italy by Ras Makonnen in 1890; it’s said that local priests, when they first heard the disembodied voices, thought telephones the work of demons) and another of Menelik with Bede Bentley in Addis Ababa’s first motor car (1907).
