Daily life in Addis Ababa during the 1960s

A grounded look at routines in Ethiopia's highland capital, shaped by compound houses, Merkato, churches and mosques, schools, offices, buses, coffee, and expanding modern institutions.

Addis Ababa in the 1960s was Ethiopia's political capital, largest city, and a highland meeting point for people from many regions. The municipal census of September 1961 counted about 449,000 inhabitants, although contemporary officials acknowledged weaknesses in the available statistics. The city held ministries, foreign embassies, the railway terminus from Djibouti, schools, hospitals, churches, mosques, hotels, cinemas, workshops, and Merkato, its dominant commercial district. Yet daily life still turned on rent, food prices, water, fuel, transport, kinship, schooling, worship, and the search for dependable work. A civil servant near Arat Kilo, a trader in Merkato, a student at the university, a domestic worker in a better-off household, a railway employee, and a new migrant renting a room did not share one urban standard of living.

The decade also changed the capital's public role. Africa Hall opened in 1961, and 32 independent African states founded the Organization of African Unity there on 25 May 1963. The same year that Africa Hall opened, several colleges were brought together as Haile Selassie I University, with the former Guenete Leul Palace at Sidist Kilo as its administrative center. These institutions enlarged a relatively small world of salaried officials, students, clerks, interpreters, drivers, hotel staff, and construction workers. They did not erase the shortage of housing or secure work. From 1965, university students marched over land reform under the slogan “Land to the Tiller”; demonstrations on poverty, civil liberties, and education followed, and 1969 became a particularly confrontational year. For students and nearby residents, the campus and central streets were therefore places of study and employment but also of surveillance, protest, and interruption.

Housing and Living Spaces

Housing in 1960s Addis Ababa ranged from villas, government residences, and apartment buildings to older compound houses, rented rooms, servants' quarters, and self-built dwellings on the expanding edge of the city. Central neighborhoods such as Piazza, Arat Kilo, Sidist Kilo, Merkato, Kazanchis, Churchill Road, and areas around the railway station mixed shops, offices, workshops, churches, hotels, bars, courtyards, and dense lanes. Many ordinary families lived in compounds where several households shared a yard, latrine, water point, cooking area, and washing space. A single rented room might hold a bed, low stools, a metal trunk, baskets, bedding, prayer pictures, schoolbooks, and cooking utensils, then shift from sleeping space to visiting or work space during the day.

The compound courtyard was a practical center of home life. Cooking, washing, coffee preparation, child care, repair work, and conversation could spill out of crowded or smoky rooms into yards and verandahs. The most common wall construction was chika (spelled “chica” in the survey): a framework of eucalyptus poles and smaller timbers plastered with earth and straw. A 1965 housing survey, using the 1961 census, reported that 90.4 percent of households lived in buildings with chika walls. It calculated a citywide median of 2.65 people per room and estimated that about 16 percent of residents shared accommodation with another household. These are administrative measures, not descriptions of every home, but they show why a room often had to serve for sleeping, receiving visitors, storage, and sometimes paid work.

Services varied as sharply as floor space. The same survey found that few households had water piped inside, that many dwellings lacked adequate bathing or toilet facilities, and that Addis Ababa had no municipal sewer system. Kitchens were often separate structures, which kept some smoke and fire away from sleeping rooms but added steps to every meal, especially when water and charcoal also had to be carried. Corrugated-iron roofs, earth or cement floors, enamel basins, metal trunks, woven mats, clay coffee pots, braziers, and kerosene lamps were more representative of ordinary material life than the new concrete offices rising in the center. Electricity, an indoor tap, a refrigerator, or a private bathroom marked a substantial difference in domestic labor and comfort.

Addis Ababa's growth made housing both a family matter and an urban problem. Migrants from towns and rural districts often relied on relatives, religious contacts, school connections, or patrons for a first room and help finding work. Households could include lodgers, students, servants, apprentices, and newly arrived kin as well as a nuclear family, although arrangements varied and privacy was not uniformly absent. Access to land was highly unequal: a 1961 land survey cited by the housing team attributed 58 percent of the city's area to 1,768 large proprietors, while government bodies and embassies held 12.7 percent and the Church 12 percent. A small low-cost scheme at Kolfe was under construction in 1965 for some households displaced by public and commercial building. Its limited scale underlines the wider point: new monumental buildings were more visible than the provision of serviced, affordable housing.

Food and Daily Meals

Daily meals in 1960s Addis Ababa drew on highland grain, market trade, household skill, fasting rules, imported goods, and the city's mixed population. Injera was central for many households, made from teff or, depending on price and supply, from mixtures that could include barley, wheat, or sorghum. Meals could include shiro, lentils, chickpeas, cabbage, potatoes, greens, onions, berbere, clarified butter or oil, eggs, and meat stews when money and religious calendars allowed. Bread, tea, coffee, fruit, milk, and tinned goods were also sold in the city, but access varied by income. Restaurants, hotel dining rooms, bars, and small eating places served office workers, travelers, students, and others away from home, while household cooking remained important.

Merkato and neighborhood markets shaped the food day. Grain merchants, spice sellers, vegetable vendors, butchers, coffee sellers, charcoal dealers, potters, and basket sellers linked kitchens to farms and traders outside the city. The surviving expenditure evidence cautions against treating food merely as custom. A 1963 survey of about 600 Addis Ababa households with monthly incomes below 400 birr assigned 48.98 percent of its consumer-price weights to food and tobacco and another 10.23 percent to fuel and light; transport received 4.52 percent and clothing and footwear 6.71 percent. The index excluded rent, so it is not a complete household budget, but it shows how strongly food and cooking fuel could govern spending. Buying in small quantities and using charcoal efficiently were responses to cash and storage constraints as well as culinary preference.

Cooking required steady labor. Under prevailing gender divisions, women and girls—including paid domestic workers in wealthier homes—generally carried much of the work of grinding grain, preparing batter, baking injera, fetching water, tending charcoal, serving guests, and cleaning. Men and boys might contribute cash income, errands, or carrying, but arrangements varied by household and occupation. Food also carried religious and social meaning. Orthodox Christian fasting days shaped many menus, Muslim households followed their own calendars and halal rules, and holidays, weddings, funerals, baptisms, and visits could require more hospitality than an ordinary week allowed. Addis Ababa's food life therefore joined domestic labor to farms, livestock traders, fuel sellers, religious practice, and city markets.

Work and Labor

Work in 1960s Addis Ababa was varied and unequal. The city employed civil servants, teachers, clerks, students, soldiers, police, railway workers, drivers, hotel staff, translators, typists, printers, construction workers, mechanics, carpenters, masons, weavers, tailors, shoemakers, barbers, market traders, coffee sellers, domestic servants, priests, deacons, muezzins, shopkeepers, porters, and apprentices. Government offices, international organizations, embassies, schools, and banks created demand for literacy, Amharic, English or French in some settings, typing, bookkeeping, punctuality, and formal clothing. At the same time, formal employment could not absorb everyone arriving in the capital, so petty trade, repair work, domestic service, day labor, and apprenticeships remained essential.

Merkato gave the city much of its working rhythm. Traders managed grain, spices, cloth, coffee, livestock products, baskets, metal goods, imported items, credit, storage, and transport. Porters carried loads through crowded lanes, drivers moved goods from the railway and surrounding districts, and small shopkeepers balanced family labor with bargaining and debt. Artisans worked from workshops, courtyards, roadside stalls, and back rooms, often training younger relatives or apprentices who swept, carried tools, observed, and slowly learned the trade. Domestic workers cooked, washed, swept, ironed, fetched water, cared for children, and served guests in households wealthier than their own, sometimes living in and sometimes commuting from poorer quarters.

Transport was part of labor itself. Workers and students moved chiefly by walking, bus, taxi, lorry, private car, and the railway, with access depending on route and income. Period photographs identify a bus stop at Arat Kilo, while the 1965 housing report treated all-weather access and public transport as services that proposed housing needed but did not automatically possess. A bus fare or a long walk could affect punctuality at work or school. Many households pooled income from several earners, and some sent money or goods to relatives outside the capital. Pay could take the form of wages, tips, daily takings, food, lodging, commissions, or training, so the boundary between household support and employment was not always clear.

Wage workers also gained a new, if constrained, institutional presence. Labor Relations Decree No. 49 of 1962 formally recognized trade unions and employers' associations, and the Confederation of Ethiopian Labor Unions was founded in April 1963. Industrial employment remained modest beside petty trade, services, and government work, and the state closely constrained organized labor. Still, factories and transport enterprises concentrated in and around Addis Ababa gave some workers identities and networks based on workplace as well as neighborhood or kinship. This was a significant development in a city where many other workers—domestic servants, casual laborers, porters, and small sellers—had little comparable bargaining power.

Social Structure

Addis Ababa's social structure in the 1960s was shaped by class, education, occupation, language, religion, gender, age, neighborhood, and ties to rural or provincial homes. Senior officials, wealthy merchants, professionals, landlords, foreign residents, and court-connected families had better access to spacious housing, private transport, good schools, medical care, imported goods, servants, and salaried security. Lower-level clerks, teachers, artisans, soldiers, small traders, students, and skilled workers lived with more modest security. Poor tenants, servants, porters, casual laborers, and new migrants had fewer buffers against illness, rent pressure, food shortages, or job loss. Yet these groups met daily in markets, buses, churches, mosques, schools, offices, hospitals, cinemas, hotels, and household service.

Kinship and patronage were practical foundations of city life. Relatives helped newcomers find rooms, school places, apprenticeships, domestic posts, market contacts, loans, and meals during difficult periods. Residents from many Ethiopian provinces and communities brought different languages, foods, skills, and religious practices into the capital. Amharic dominated government and much formal education, while English mattered in parts of the secondary-school, university, diplomatic, and international-institutional world; other Ethiopian languages remained important in homes, markets, places of worship, and migrant networks. “Cosmopolitan” should not imply equality: an address, command of official languages, schooling, family backing, and access to authority affected a person's options.

Voluntary associations complemented kinship. The 1960 Addis Ababa Social Structure Survey, which covered 600 families in six selected districts rather than the whole city, found 64 percent affiliated with at least one mutual-aid, religious, recreational, welfare, or youth group. Iddir could organize funeral assistance, iqub pooled rotating savings, and religious associations structured worship and reciprocal obligations. Such groups helped with expenses and labor that a single household could not readily meet. They also remind us that a crowded compound was not simply a scene of deprivation: it could sustain dense practical ties, though membership, resources, and the burden of contributing were unequal.

Respectability was built through work, dress, worship, hospitality, schooling, and the ability to meet obligations at funerals, weddings, baptisms, holidays, and visits. Gender expectations were strong. Women managed food, coffee, children, washing, and hospitality, and many also earned income through trading, brewing, sewing, domestic service, or small sales. Men were expected to provide cash, represent the household publicly, and maintain family reputation, though many had insecure work. Young people were expected to study, run errands, respect elders, attend church or mosque where appropriate, and contribute to household labor. Cinema, radio, university life, football, cafes, newspapers, and imported fashions gave youth and educated workers new urban habits, but family discipline and religious calendars still structured ordinary time.

Tools and Technology

Technology in 1960s Addis Ababa combined modern institutions with durable household and workshop tools. Offices used typewriters, telephones, ledgers, filing cabinets, carbon paper, duplicating machines, stamps, envelopes, and printed forms. Schools used blackboards, chalk, exercise books, fountain pens, textbooks, uniforms, desks, and examination papers. Workshops used sewing machines, hand saws, hammers, planes, chisels, measuring tapes, welding tools, shoe lasts, awls, tire pumps, jacks, and improvised spare parts. Markets used scales, sacks, baskets, trays, ropes, knives, umbrellas, ledgers, and handcarts.

Household technology depended sharply on income and neighborhood services. Radios, electric bulbs, kerosene lamps, charcoal braziers, clay stoves, metal pots, woven baskets, coffee pots, enamel basins, irons, sewing machines, trunks, and umbrellas were present in the city but not evenly distributed. A radio could bring news, music, sermons, public announcements, and football into a room or courtyard; a sewing machine could support repair and paid work. Refrigerators, private telephones, record players, gas cookers, and cars belonged to a narrower range of households. Piped water, drainage, paved access, streetlights, bus stops, the railway, and new office buildings were also technologies of daily life, often most noticeable where they stopped short of a neighborhood.

Clothing and Materials

Clothing in 1960s Addis Ababa reflected altitude, work, religion, class, schooling, and public presentation. The city's cool highland mornings and rainy season encouraged layers as well as lighter garments for midday. Men's dress could include suits, jackets, shirts, trousers, sweaters, shawls, gabi cloaks, work clothes, sandals, leather shoes, and white cotton garments depending on occupation and occasion. Pressed clothing, polished shoes, or a uniform could signal discipline and access to a formal institution, while manual work required garments suited to dust, rain, mud, tools, and movement.

Women's clothing included locally woven white cotton dresses and netela shawls as well as patterned dresses, skirts, blouses, sweaters, head coverings, sandals, and leather shoes. Choice depended on income, age, faith, work, and occasion; no single distinction separates “traditional” from “modern” dress. Tailoring, weaving, embroidery, shoe repair, laundering, and mending connected clothing to urban work and household budgets. Archival photographs are particularly useful for showing formal public presentation—uniforms, suits, white garments, shawls, coats, and polished shoes—but official visits, university buildings, and religious celebrations are overrepresented. They show what people wore on recorded occasions, not how frequently every resident owned or used a garment.

Daily life in 1960s Addis Ababa rested on movement between compound and market, church or mosque and school, office and coffee table, railway station and growing outer districts. International organizations and new concrete buildings changed the capital's public face, but ordinary routines still depended on water, fuel, rent, food work, transport, family backing, religious calendars, and neighborhood reputation. The decade's defining contrast was not a simple opposition between “traditional” and “modern”. It was the unequal coexistence of diplomatic and educational expansion with crowded rental housing, limited services, insecure work, and strong household and associational support.

Evidence and its Limits

The most detailed contemporary evidence used here is the 1961 municipal census, a 1960 sample survey of selected districts, and a foreign-assisted housing study carried out in 1965. They are valuable for construction, crowding, services, expenditure, and institutional change, but their categories reflect official concerns and sometimes incomplete data. They record households more readily than domestic negotiations, and household-head statistics can obscure women, servants, lodgers, and children. Surviving photographs add evidence for buildings, public transport, ceremonies, and public dress, but concentrate on central sites and formal events. For those reasons, this account does not reconstruct a precise “typical day” and uses qualified language where citywide frequency cannot be demonstrated.

Sources and Further Reading

Addis Ababa Municipality. Report on Census of Population, 10–11 September 1961. Municipality of Addis Ababa, 1969. Google Books catalog record.
Dodge, J. Robert, Burton O. Young, and L. Albert Wilson. Housing in Ethiopia. Country Report Series. Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of International Housing, 1966. Based on fieldwork undertaken in April–June 1965.
Goodfellow, Tom. “The Making of Urban Economies.” In Politics and the Urban Frontier: Transformation and Divergence in Late Urbanizing East Africa. Oxford University Press, 2022. Oxford Academic chapter.
International Labour Organization. “Ethiopia (Addis Ababa): Retail Price Index for Addis Ababa.” Sources and Methods: Labour Statistics, Volume 1. Describes the 1963 household-expenditure sample and index weights. ILOSTAT source note.
Bezabih, Adane Kassie. “The Formative Period of the Ethiopian Labour Movement, 1962–1974.” MPRA Paper 115258, 2022. RePEc record and full-text link.
Addis Ababa University. “Addis Ababa University History.” Records the 1961 formation of Haile Selassie I University and the use of Guenete Leul Palace. University history.
Zewde, Bahru. The Quest for Socialist Utopia: The Ethiopian Student Movement, c. 1960–1974. Boydell & Brewer, 2014, especially “In the Beginning” and “1969: Prelude to Revolution.” Cambridge Core chapter record.
United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. “The History: Africa Hall.” Documents the building's 1961 inauguration and the founding of the OAU there in 1963. UNECA.
Smithsonian Institution, Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives. Marilyn Heldman Photographs, Series 3: Ethiopia, 1965–1996. Finding aid includes dated Addis Ababa views from 1965 and 1967. Collection finding aid.