Dire Dawa

Dire Dawa was made by a railway. The Franco-Ethiopian line from the port of Djibouti could not climb the escarpment to Harar without great cost, and in a letter of November 1896 Menelik II accepted that the first section might end at a village at the foot of the mountains instead. The line reached that spot on 24 December 1902, the date taken as the city's foundation, and the new town was known at first as New Harar. Its planned half, Kezira or Gezira, was drawn as a grid of straight streets with squares, a station, workshops and housing for the company's staff — a French colonial town plan in an uncolonised country.

Trade followed at once. French, Greek, Armenian, other European and Arab merchants opened shops, hotels and small industries beside Ethiopian traders, and the market quarter of Megala, settled mainly by Somali and Arab traders, grew on the opposite bank of the Dechatu, the seasonal river whose sandy bed still divides the city. Coffee, hides and khat went down the line to the coast; manufactured goods came up. Harar, robbed of its through traffic, became the smaller place. The line reached Addis Ababa in 1917 and Dire Dawa became its most important intermediate town.

Italian occupation from 1936 to 1941 added buildings and a garrison, and the town stayed under British military administration until 1947. Industry followed: a cement works, textile mills and food processing. When the Somali Region was established in 1993 it wanted Dire Dawa as its capital, Oromia opposed the claim, and the federal government took the city under its own jurisdiction; a charter approved by parliament in 2004 made it one of Ethiopia's two chartered cities, with Addis Ababa. In August 2006 the Dechatu and Gorro rivers overflowed: about 200 people were reported dead and thousands displaced. The standard-gauge railway to Djibouti, opened for commercial service in 2018, passes the city from a station outside the old centre.

Dire Dawa is a mixing point rather than the city of one people. Oromo, Somali, Amhara, Harari, Gurage and Argobba residents live side by side, and Afaan Oromo, Somali, Amharic, Harari and Arabic are all heard in the markets; the city's administration works in more than one language. Most residents are Muslim, with a substantial Orthodox and Protestant Christian minority, so both the Islamic and the Ethiopian religious calendars are publicly marked, and Eid and Meskel are both occasions in the same streets.

The two halves of the city have different characters. Kezira keeps the habits of the railway town — pavement cafés, macchiato, wide shaded streets, an evening promenade — while Megala is denser, louder and organised around the market and the mosques. Khat ties them together: it arrives from the hills around Harar in the morning, is sold through the middle of the day and chewed through the afternoon in groups of friends or colleagues, an institution of social life across the east.

Music and dress reflect the mixture, with Somali and Oromo songs, Harari celebrations and Ethiopian highland music heard in the same bars. The city's long-standing trading families, some of foreign descent, and its railway workforce gave it an outward-looking reputation within Ethiopia, and residents are conscious of belonging to a chartered city that stands apart from the regions around it.

The 2007 census counted 341,834 people in the Dire Dawa chartered city, which includes rural districts as well as the built-up area, and the official projection for 2015 was about 440,000, of whom some 277,000 lived in the city proper. The economy rests on trade with Djibouti and the Somali lowlands, transport and logistics, the market, and a cluster of older industries including cement, textiles and food processing, with an industrial park built on the edge of the city in the last decade.

Work starts early to beat the heat, and the middle of the day is quiet, with shops shuttered and the streets left to the bajaj drivers. The market is busiest in the morning; by mid-afternoon the khat stalls have taken over. Evening brings people back onto the avenues of Kezira when the temperature drops.

Water is the persistent difficulty: supply is limited in a dry lowland city that has grown quickly, while the Dechatu can flood violently when rain falls on the hills above, as it did in 2006. Unemployment among young people, the cost of living and the informal cross-border trade that supports many households are the other recurring concerns. Housing spreads outward in low compounds and newer condominium blocks, and the rural parts of the administration farm with irrigation from the valleys.

The kitchens of Dire Dawa draw on three directions at once: the Ethiopian highlands, the Somali lowlands and the Red Sea trade. Injera with wat is standard, served with shiro, lentils and greens on fasting days and with beef or goat stewed in berbere otherwise, and tibs — cubes of meat sautéed with onion and chilli — is the usual order in the evening. Somali and Arab habits bring rice cooked with spiced meat, pasta, camel meat and camel milk, and canjeero, a thinner and softer fermented pancake than injera, eaten at breakfast.

Sambusa, the fried triangular pastry filled with lentils or minced meat, is sold on every corner in the afternoon, and ful — broad beans crushed with oil, chilli and sometimes egg, scooped up with bread — is the breakfast of the market quarter. The irrigated valleys near the city supply mangoes, papaya, bananas and guavas cheaply, which appear as thick layered juices in the tea houses, a drink the east is known for.

Coffee comes down from the Harar hills, among the most valued Arabica in the country, and is brewed in the jebena or drunk as macchiato in the old town's cafés; the husk infusion favoured in Harar is drunk here too. Spiced tea with milk, sweetened heavily, is the other constant, and bottled beer is sold in Kezira although many residents do not drink.