(sea murmurs) (vibrant music) - Africa, one of the fastest-growing parts of the world, with the youngest population, where six in every 10 people are under 25, with hundreds of different ethnicities and some 2,000 languages, Africa is the most culturally diverse place on earth.

I'm Afua Hirsch.

I've been lucky enough to work across Africa as a journalist.

Now I'm exploring how young Africans are re-imagining the past through art, music, and culture in three very different countries: Ethiopia, Senegal, and Kenya.

This is an Africa we don't usually see, Africa on its own terms.

These African countries are reasserting their identities, gaining new recognition for their role as cultural powerhouses.

I'm interested in how that's happened and how the struggles for liberation in the past have helped shape today's African renaissance, (brooding music) in this episode, Ethiopia, a country which has a proud 3,000-year history as significant as any civilization in the West.

- [Wendwesen] As an artist, it is my responsibility to teach my people.

- [Afua] That gave rise to one of the most influential figures of the 20th century.

- We're witnesses of Jah, Ras Tafari, the Almighty in flesh.

(determined music) - [Afua] An empire with a distinctive story of faith, devotion, and resistance to European colonizers, a midwife of African liberation, a once-failed state that developed a new grammar of communism and, with striking imagery and new art, now responding to the dark days.

- There's such great beauty that I would like to share with the world.

- Ethiopia is both utterly distinctive and quintessentially African, a country whose past is full of heroes and heroines, tragedies and triumphs, and successful resistance against colonial rule.

That's made it a beacon for the Black diaspora, a symbol of African defiance around the world.

(determined music continues) (birds twitter) (reserved music) (nostalgic music) I grew up in Wimbledon.

As a child in the 1980s, I used to play near this statue.

Only later, as a teenager and as I became aware of race, did it strike me how incongruous it was.

Here in a very white London suburb was a positive symbol of Black Africa, a statue of Haile Selassie, emperor of Abyssinia, what we now call Ethiopia, a country that, unlike much of Africa, was never truly colonized by European empires.

Growing up here with my mixed identity and my British and African heritage and then seeing this statue, the devotion towards this man often left with garlands and religious tributes gave me a sense of the richness of Ethiopia's political history and culture but left me with far more questions than answers.

(birds tweet) (gloomy music) (scampering music) Landlocked between mountains and deserts, Ethiopia has an ancient, deep-rooted and highly distinctive culture.

In Tigray, northeast Ethiopia, the country developed its own particular brand of Orthodox Christian faith, a faith that has been at the heart of Ethiopia's story and its keep-out attitude to invaders.

It's a one-hour hike upwards to Sunday worship.

This is actually steeper and harder than I thought it was gonna be.

Unsurprisingly, some of the regular congregation overtake me.

Worshipers have been climbing to the Church of St.

John since the fourth century.

It's one of over 100 similarly remote churches in this region.

Built high up to protect the faith in the early days of Christianity, the churches embody the country's fierce independence.

(worshiper sings in foreign language) (worshipers sing in foreign language) (worshipers sing in foreign language) (wind murmurs) (worshipers sing in foreign language) - The rituals here are familiar and yet otherworldly at the same time, an authentic joyful worship that has been practiced here centuries before the Vatican was built or the Protestant Reformation.

(ground rustles) In the main chapel, faith and art come together.

Here is a culture telling its own Christian history.

This church really feels like a sacred space.

It's built into this rock high up and covered with these beautiful wall paintings.

Here's the Madonna with baby Jesus.

Over here is John the Baptist; his head, newly decapitated.

And here is Adam and Eve with this menacing serpent luring them into sin.

The murals were painted in the 18th century in vivid primary colors, conceptual and symbolic.

The wide almost cartoon-like eyes are typical of Ethiopian icons.

It's not only we viewers observing the saints and martyrs.

They gaze back in judgment.

They're instantly recognizable biblical scenes, but at the same time, they're so distinctively Ethiopian, and I think that's a metaphor for this whole place, part of the ancient Christian world but a civilization unto itself.

And for me, being here really drives home how exceptional and unique a culture Ethiopia has.

(worshipers sing in foreign language) - Everywhere you go in Ethiopia, you feel the weight of history yet a history little known outside of Africa.

(menacing music) (menacing music continues) We've heard of the Aztecs, the Egyptians, the Mayans but rarely of their near contemporaries the Aksumites.

Archeology has revealed a sophisticated civilization developed in Northern Ethiopia after the eighth century BC.

This is the largest megalithic tomb anywhere on Earth, and like all of these obelisks, even though this one has fallen down, I have to say I find it incredibly austere and imposing.

Maybe that's because the 500 tons of stone from which it's built resembles concrete in quite a modern way and all these geometric intricate carvings feel very contemporary, but it's not contemporary.

It marks the burial site of nobles from an ancient civilization, millennia old.

There are 120 obelisks here in Aksum, the tallest engraved with floor upon floor of windows and topped by a rising sun, like a kind of mini skyscraper.

It's as elaborate art and ambitious a feat of engineering as anything you'd find in Pompeii.

The ancient Ethiopians who built this place did so to mark a burial ground.

They couldn't have known that, millennia later, it would come to mark something very different, the story of how Africa, far from being the dark continent, was harboring a civilization older than the one of the Europeans who came to colonize it.

(tender music) (worshipers speak indistinctly) The Aksumites converted to Christianity in the fourth century.

It's one of the ironies of history that Victorian missionaries came out this way to convert a people who'd been Christianized much longer than they had.

Ethiopians believe Aksum is the birthplace of the Queen of Sheba, who married King Solomon, bore him a son, and established a line of Solomonic kings.

They ruled Aksum on and off for centuries afterwards and built an empire in East Africa that would become modern-day Ethiopia.

(priest speaks indistinctly) Aksum is not just a seat of kings.

It's also a religious hub on a par with Rome, Jerusalem, and Constantinople because it's home, Ethiopians believe, to one of the holiest relics in the Abrahamic faiths.

It's said that this church houses the Ark of the Covenant, the sacred tablets on which the Ten Commandments, received directly from God by Moses, were inscribed.

Most Ethiopians have never actually seen the Ark of the Covenant, and as a woman, this is the closest I'm allowed to go, but just the knowledge that it resides in this country is a foundational part of Ethiopian identity and faith.

Some people even believe that its presence here is what protected Ethiopians from imperial conquest.

A formidable test of the Ark's protective power came in the 19th century.

(wind murmurs) (bird caws) (belligerent music) In 1868, the British mounted a raid into Ethiopia but withdrew soon after.

In 1895, Italy, hoping a foreign war might distract its people from the stresses of their country's unification, mounted a full-scale invasion.

The Italians were confident they could add Ethiopia to their growing empire around the Horn of Africa, but what happened next in the Adwa Mountains would seal Ethiopia's reputation as an African promised land.

- [Wendwesen] Real life here (indistinct) I prefer to.

- This is artist Wendwesen Kebede.

(music stops) (lock clicks) The Battle of Adwa is his muse, a constant motif in his work.

This is incredible.

- Welcome.

- Thank you.

I wasn't expecting your paintings to be so huge.

The colors are so vibrant.

What is it that happened at Adwa that is so meaningful?

- Adwa rescued my identity, being an African and being an Ethiopian, an original Ethiopian.

At that time, almost all African nations were under colony.

They didn't imagine that they can win white warriors or white colonizers in their lifetime.

(frenetic music) - [Afua] When Ethiopian forces faced the Italians at Adwa in 1896, they seemed outmatched.

Feudal and in many ways archaic, Ethiopia lacked modern European weaponry, but it had numbers on its side and a fierce faith in its Solomonic King, Menelik II.

In the event, the Italians were bamboozled by poor maps.

The battle was over in hours with 6,000 of the Italian army killed and 3,000 taken prisoner.

A highly symbolic shock to European prestige, the battle stirred a pan-African vision of liberation from white empire.

- My forefathers united the energetic feeling of Africans for independency.

As an artist, it is my responsibility to teach my people.

The victory of the Battle of Adwa is a turning point of history in this planet that defeated white people in African land.

- [Afua] So you are seeing the Battle of Adwa not just as the defeat of Italians by Ethiopians but the defeat of white supremacist ideas by Black people.

- Yeah, it's not only for Ethiopians (virile music) to defeat white people.

Adwa is a symbol of solidarity of all downtrodden people of the world.

- Ethiopia would remain independent, unlike the vast swathe of the African continent, for another 40 years, Emperor Menelik II made the southern city of Addis Ababa the country's capital and the seat of its kings, and after Adwa, Addis boomed.

(strutting music) (strutting music continues) The city was a magnet for Ethiopia's diverse ethnicities, drawn here in the aftermath of victory and connected by pride in a shared history.

Ethiopia used to be called Abyssinia, a name which comes from the Arabic word Habesha, meaning mixed, for good reason.

The ancient Christian cultures of Tigray and Aksum have merged with the dozens of other faiths and ethnic groups that have settled this country over two millennia, and it's in these markets, in this bustle in Addis Ababa, that all those cultures collide.

Adwa had held off the Europeans for a moment, but the story of how Ethiopia's independence survived the 20th century is bound up with another Solomonic king, one who came to symbolize (aching music) the country's defiance and test its devotion, arguably the most complex and flawed figure in modern African history.

(aching music continues) Ras Tafari became regent in charge of Ethiopia in 1916 and then took the name Haile Selassie on becoming emperor in 1930.

His reign would span the most dramatic decades of the 20th century: two world wars, invasion, revolution, all of which embroiled his fiercely independent nation with a legitimacy so ancient, derived from the Solomonic dynasty of the Old Testament.

With so much expected of him, with a world changing so rapidly, was he almost doomed to fail?

(priest speaks in foreign language) (worshipers sing in foreign language) It all started well.

Haile Selassie's Coronation here at St.

George's Cathedral projected him as an international celebrity.

Western newspapers and magazines lapped up the story of a young king, an ancient biblical kingdom, and a fantastical ceremony.

Thousands lined the streets as Haile Selassie, with gold, diamonds, and ivory in his crown and scepter, rode here in a carriage previously owned by the German kaiser.

Priests danced to drums.

Gifts were handed out to some 700 foreign dignitaries and royals gathered here from around the world.

King George V sent his son, who bowed down before the new emperor.

A stage-managed spectacle, it was amazingly successful, a boldly African drama about race and power that played out worldwide to the Black diaspora.

The coronation projected an image of a proud and free African country and of Haile Selassie as a kind of prophet for all Black people.

Here was a descendant of the line of Judah who had come to set us free, (glowering music) but then a few short years later, disaster fell.

Benito Mussolini, Italy's fascist dictator, took revenge for the humiliation of Adwa a generation earlier.

After border disputes between Ethiopia and Italian Somaliland, in October 1935, Italy invaded.

(planes buzz) Haile Selassie was exiled to Britain, living first in Wimbledon and then in Bath.

After Italy's defeat during World War II, Haile Selassie returned.

(thoughtful music) His extraordinary journey of wartime exile and return made him, for a moment, the world's most famous African.

He even became, to some, a living God.

- Haile Selassie is the Messiah.

He's the last emperor of Ethiopia, the first and the last, alpha and omega, beginning without end.

(virile music) - Last trumpet.

Rasta man.

♪ Ah ♪ - [Afua] These Rastafarians are the emigre priests of an alternative religion.

♪ Shashemene ♪ ♪ King of kings, Lord of lords ♪ (buzzing music) - [Afua] Their very name derives from Haile Selassie's birth name, Ras Tafari.

They give praise to him through their sacred act of smoking cannabis, growing their hair long, and twisting it into dreadlocks, and what they call the levity of drumming and chanting.

♪ Jah ♪ ♪ Is I Word ♪ ♪ Is (indistinct) ♪ - Drum is the heartbeat of Africa, first music inna creation, and it's a way for us to restore African culture to the world 'cause drum is a kind of healing.

Music therapy I call it.

- [Afua] For Rastafarians, the emperor was the man who would liberate Black people worldwide from what they saw as the tyranny of Babylon, the Western world that had enslaved their ancestors.

He would return them to their promised land of Zion in Ethiopia.

(upbeat music) The Ethiopian emperor was bemused by the adulation but also a little flattered.

He donated 500 acres of his private land in Shashemene, Southern Ethiopia, to Black people in the West who wanted to repatriate.

(upbeat music continues) - We consider Shashemene as a holy place because it was the will of him to gather his children in this place.

- Coming to Shashemene, it's a dream come true.

I wish I'd came earlier, (laughs) and I wish I could invite all my friends and family from the West to come and experience this spiritual life.

- By coming here and living this way, are you seeking to heal the wounds that were done by slavery and colonialism?

- African culture has been, yeah, downpress, despise, you know?

We got dignity, returning home, escaping from Babylon, from the West, from the former colonialists, ya know?

Look, it makes sense to be here.

- [Afua] At its height, it's estimated some 2,000 Rastafarians lived in Shashemene.

Today, only a fraction of that number remain.

After Haile Selassie's reign, they found themselves ostracized by Ethiopian society.

How many are you?

- People say... I don't know really.

What?

300, 400 in Shashemene only.

It's not a lot, but it's not a matter of quantity.

It's a matter of quality, you know?

We're the chosen few.

- I found meeting this community of Rastafarians inspiring.

There's no bigger act of devotion than leaving your home, traveling to a foreign land to fulfill a biblical prophecy.

That takes a huge amount of faith.

At the same time.

I have to say it's left me with a sense of sadness.

This is a community that still lives in a state of precariousness in Shashemene.

It's as if, in trying to repair 400 years of the wounds of slavery, they're still searching for a sense of belonging.

(bustling music) Where did Ethiopia itself belong?

During the 1960s, Haile Selassie tried to bridge two worlds: feudal, traditional Ethiopia and modern Africa emerging around it.

His attempts to modernize Ethiopia were hampered by powerful vested interests in the army, the church, and landowners, but the emperor remained an inspirational figure on the world stage, pushing for the decolonization of African countries from European rule.

He eagerly embraced the symbolism of international power, encouraging the United Nations to establish the headquarters of its Economic Commission for Africa in Addis Ababa in 1961.

By bringing the United Nations here to Addis Ababa.

Haile Selassie wanted to bring the world to Ethiopia, but at the same time, he also wanted to bring Ethiopia to the world, and by encouraging modern art and modern architecture, he was determined to project a new image of what a modern Ethiopia could be.

(kindly music) The emperor sponsored modern artists and architects to train abroad and help him overhaul the country.

One of these proteges would become Ethiopia's most acclaimed artist of the 20th century.

Afewerk Tekle's prolific work ranges from murals to mosaics and public statues, but his positive message is epitomized in this 150-square-meter stained-glass window.

It's the centerpiece of the UN building in Addis, designed to be seen here by Africans from across the continent.

This is Afewerk Tekle's famous triptych, "The Total Liberation of Africa," and it's awe-inspiring to see.

The first scene depicts the colonial oppression of Africa overcome by the angel of death and the serpent of evil.

In Africa now, Africans unite in a spirit of independence and liberation, led by Ethiopians carrying the torch of enlightenment, and in the final piece, the future Africa unites to finally slay the evil that once overcame the continent, and the optimism of this work, the vision of Africa with Ethiopia as its leading light, shines through here, and it's a work that defies categorization.

There are elements of conventional European Christian imagery, but it's visibly African.

Tekle wanted to achieve not just the end of imperialism in Africa but the total liberation of the mind, but there was a paradox at play with the concept of liberation in Ethiopia.

While the emperor encouraged freedom from European colonization, Ethiopians themselves were not truly free under autocratic rule.

Under the emperor, the voice of the people could only be expressed through coded comments and satire.

(Mimi sings in Ge'ez) (proud music continues) - [Afua] These are azmari, troubadours who perform ballads in Ge'ez, the original language of Ethiopia.

(proud music continues) (Mimi speaks in foreign language) (azmari sings in Ge'ez) (Mimi sings in Ge'ez) (azmari sings in Ge'ez) - [Afua] Azmari ballads are improvised, responding to events with subtle meanings.

(azmari sings in Ge'ez) (Mimi sings in Ge'ez) (azmari sings in Ge'ez) (proud music continues) (azmari sings in Ge'ez) (Mimi sings in Ge'ez) (Mimi speaks in foreign language) (soaring music) (Mimi sings in Ge'ez) (soaring music continues) - [Afua] Azmari lyrics use a technique called wax and gold, a metaphor derived from how goldsmiths create intricate goldwork from wax molds.

The hidden meanings of the poetry are the gold beneath the wax of the plain words.

Throughout Ethiopian history, wax and gold has been a way for the street to deftly speak truth to power.

(Mimi speaks in foreign language) (soaring music) (azmari sings in foreign language) - [Afua] Ethiopia may not have had to fight for liberation from European control like other African nations, but it was one of the last African countries to experience proper democracy.

Increasingly disillusioned by injustices, stalled reforms, and the excessive lifestyle of the imperial family, artists, writers, and students began to turn against Haile Selassie.

The tentative clandestine campaign against the emperor became known as the creeping coup.

- It was a generally accepted fact that, you know, kings come from God and you're not supposed to criticize them.

You're not supposed to criticize the society they create.

- [Afua] One novel, "The Thirteenth Sun" by Daniachew Worku, published in 1973, was a milestone in challenging the emperor's regime.

It carefully flattered with irony while revealing the stark contrast of the country under Haile Selassie.

(frenetic music) - "Beautiful Ethiopia with her flats, valleys of deep brown or black soil, with her hills sloping gently upwards."

- "Sloping gently upwards."

- "And covered with barley."

- "And covered with barley, with her endless herds of cattle and droves of broodmares and their foals, with her children parading their bumps from the bugs, lice, and fleas that abound in the hamlets."

"The Thirteenth Sun" uses a wax-and-gold-style allegory of a pilgrimage undertaken by a sick old man and his son impatient for change, the voice of a new generation.

Can you tell me why this was a daring book?

- He questions everything from... "Why are women subjected to so many types of oppressions in Ethiopia?"

"Why are peasants treated this way while, you know, the landlords are living in luxury?"

And he talks about the importance of modern education, of modern medicine, coming up with ways of dealing with the poverty of the country instead of just praying to God.

(apprehensive music) (sheep baas) - "Beautiful Ethiopia, with all men of title, generals, ministers, princes, and princesses, doing their best to alleviate suffering in the hamlets, begging manna from heaven, sending DDT, sending rat poison, sending insecticides, sending the police."

By 1974, faith in the emperor had hit rock bottom.

A three-year drought was devastating the country's northeast.

Nearly 200,000 Ethiopians starved to death.

Riots broke out, and a military council, known as the Derg, seized control.

(shutter snaps) Haile Selassie was arrested.

(shutter snaps) Ethiopia's last emperor was driven across Addis in a VW Beetle to prison, a highly symbolic comedown from the grandeur of his coronation.

He was never seen in public again.

The word on the street was that he was smothered to death.

With the emperor gone, Ethiopia turned to a new faith, communism.

Ethiopian art was transformed in the revolutionary fervor.

Art students were shipped to Moscow to retrain in producing public works designed to mobilize the masses.

This is an uncanny thing to see, the kind of Soviet-style monument you'd expect to find in Eastern Europe, yet here it is in Ethiopia, reworked for an African identity.

(people speak indistinctly) (horn honks) This monument is called Tiglachin, which means our struggle, and it really depicts the end of Ethiopia's millennium of imperial rule.

Here on horseback, you have a landlord, a member of the nobility, deaf to the pleas of starving people who had just endured a devastating three-year famine, news of which was suppressed by the ruling elite.

The devastation of that era ushered in a new class of intellectuals gathered here, led by Haile Mengistu Mariam, preaching communism, socialism, as a solution for the inequality of Ethiopia's past, and this form of art was the only art form tolerated by the communist regime.

They believed that abstract fine art was bourgeois and indulgent.

Instead, this socialist realism was what was useful to the country to create a new narrative for itself, and here is this narrative: plentiful food, abundance under communist rule, Ethiopians marching together strongly, boldly, into a new communist future.

Art and reality could not have been further apart.

The communist regime was brutally oppressive, using waves of purges to crack down on dissidents.

In a particularly cruel touch, the families of the executed were made to pay the cost of the bullet used to kill their loved one.

The horror is documented here in Addis Ababa's Red Terror Martyrs' Memorial Museum.

Mengistu's regime created a kind of killing fields of Africa, igniting a civil war that raged for over a decade.

There's so much death and suffering here.

Half a million people are estimated to have died during the Red Terror; each of these faces, a life that was lost.

The communist regime that promised to bring in a new utopian era quickly deteriorated into this nightmare.

Some of the victims are still alive, but how many of us really remember this part of Ethiopia's history?

(weighty music) The civil war and upheaval threw millions into poverty and created the conditions for an even worse famine.

Ethiopia's famine of 1983 to 1985 is estimated to have killed over one million people.

(desolate music) Created despite the official coverup of the famine, Eshetu Tiruneh's masterpiece, "Victims of Famine," depicts a bleak relentless flood of people, but its message is very different to the passive images and helpless begging favored in news reports.

Ethiopia has suffered two devastating famines in living memory, events that have cemented a global image of this as a nation dependent on the white saviors of Western aid and celebrity, yet here is the same tragedy told through an Ethiopian gaze.

It's a radically different image, one which doesn't shy away from the suffering but shows these as families helping and supporting each other, persevering onward with such dignity and strength.

- [Eshetu] There is no outsider.

I'm not showing someone is helping them or something.

They are helping each other.

- [Afua] Eshetu Tiruneh now trains young painters at the Enlightenment Art Academy in Addis, but memories of the famine still haunt him.

How did that painting come about?

- As an artist, I'm always doing sketches around the churches, around the streets.

Step by step, I understand there is some peoples who are coming from the outside Addis Ababa.

You know, peoples are coming and begging the citizens.

I start to sketch some faces, different kinds of faces.

I don't have any that-much-complicated ideas in asking them.

Just, I felt them, the faces, so sad.

I became sad.

Finally, I started to understand they are victims of famine, these peoples.

- I can see you were very touched by the suffering you saw in the victims of famine.

What was it like sketching their faces?

- My mother, sometimes... You know, in Ethiopia there is who are coming to beg house to house.

I asked her, "Please, give them something.

Let them eat, and let me sketch, as well as."

Through sketching, I'm giving them my inner feeling.

You know, I'm participating with them.

I am one of them to them.

I want to help them.

- The Derg and the famine may have wiped out whole communities, but ordinary Ethiopians defiantly held on to their cultural heritage.

(gloomy music continues) (gloomy music continues) This distinctive sound emanates from the begena, a 10-stringed lyre, plucked to accompany Orthodox prayers, a type of music handed down since the days of the Old Testament.

- This is our traditional and spiritual music instrument.

We use it to pray or singing because our fathers and mothers shows us this, how to play and how to pray with this harp, or begena.

(Abel speaks in foreign language) - It's in the Bible, you know.

King Saul, he was possessed by an evil spirit, so when King David was playing the begena, it used to relieve him from that sickness.

It's for our own health and spiritual benefits that we love to play the begena.

- Today, the begena is enjoying a resurgence among young people.

Nothing, it seems to me, better illustrates Ethiopians' resilience, their devotion to their heritage.

A lot of countries in the world are struggling to keep their traditions alive, and young people are rejecting their traditional faith and culture.

It seems, here in Ethiopia, young people are doing the opposite.

They're flocking to learn these ancient customs.

Why is that?

- We Ethiopians, we are not colonized with others.

Because of that, we are proud of our traditions.

(gloomy music continues) (wind murmurs) (lively music) - [Afua] The Derg was overthrown in 1991 with the fall of its Soviet paymaster.

Mengistu fled to Zimbabwe.

In the 1990s, Ethiopia held multi-party elections again.

The economy modernized.

Food security improved, and Ethiopia started to regain its place in the world; (people speak indistinctly) meanwhile, the government's new openness to artists encouraged emigres who fled the Derg to return, spurring a thriving fashion and contemporary art scene.

Ethiopia has long survived in a kind of parallel reality.

Its 1980s reputation as a place of strife, as well as its forbidding language, limited its exposure to globalization, and that helped preserve unique traditions, like the begena and wax and gold.

(boisterous music) (boisterous music continues) Aida Muluneh is an award-winning Ethiopian photographer and painter.

Brought up in exile in Canada, she returned to Ethiopia in 2007, and her work borrows from the past while peeking into the future.

Aida's trademark is African women in striking face paint, often staring defiantly at the viewer in frames packed with symbolism about the Black diaspora and her own personal experience of exile and return.

- What I create is really a provocation.

What I'm looking for is really to provoke someone to say, "Hey, what is that?"

Within the image, there's a lot of messages that I'm transmitting.

A lotta my color incorporates the primary colors, which actually comes from the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.

(Aida speaks in foreign language) And if you look at the staff that I use, that's actually a staff that we use in the church because, in our tradition, in the Orthodox, you know, you stand to receive the prayers.

When we speak of Afrofuturism, this is what it is, you know.

It is the mix of the tradition and also the future, ya know, and to me, a lot of my work, it is that dialogue.

You know, I grew up as an Ethiopian abroad.

I left at the age of five, and we pretty much spent most of our lives abroad and just waiting for a transition to happen in order for us to return back.

(yearnful music) International world, also the art world, is, all of a sudden, looking at Ethiopia and actually coming here physically to see what's happening.

Because Ethiopia has popped up, they're wondering, "Hey, what's going on here?"

ya know?

(shutter snaps) (Aida speaks in foreign language) I remember when I first came.

I think it was, like, in 2001.

If there was one exhibition, it was like a miracle, ya know?

And now there's several exhibitions happening at the same time.

For me, it's quite an amazing moment that we're in.

(brooding music) - [Afua] Big challenges remain.

Since 2020, Ethiopia has fought a war with rebels Tigray in the north.

If there is growing hope and optimism, perhaps it's best expressed in culture.

At places like Addis Ababa's Zoma Museum, which opened in 2019, the renowned Ethiopian architect Elias Sime designed a space that playfully fuses traditional building techniques with a 21st-century ecological message.

(reserved music) (worshipers sing in foreign language) (laid-back music) - What's really struck me being here is the confidence of this country to stick to its own traditions, its own church, its own languages, its own alphabet, its own story; why?

Because it's seen off invaders but also because its more recent struggles, ironically, have protected this culture from the globalizing forces that might have watered it down.

Ethiopia is evolving its identity as a modern cosmopolitan nation in a 21st century where Africa, with the youngest population on Earth, has perhaps the greatest stake of all.

(laid-back music continues) (laid-back music continues) (laid-back music continues) (beaming music)