For most of its more than 80 years existence, Mercato, whose name came from the Italian term for market, used to be dubbed as the largest open-air market in Africa and that was no exaggeration. In the pre-CORONA years, Mercato was indeed the biggest business hub in Addis Ababa. When Italian fascists occupied the Ethiopian capital back in the 1930s, they had no idea how this place would evolve through time. The fascist project was to isolate the indigenous population from the White Italians by confining them to what we now know as Mercato in a kind of ghetto where they could live and do business if possible.
The fascist project was short-lived and Mercato became not a kind Bantustan-like settlement but a dynamic business hub where even Italian tourists who came to visit it many decades later were moved by the beauty, the mystery and energy of the market and the hard-work of its traders and its shoppers.
Before the onset of the current COVID-19 crisis, Mercato was indeed a bustling market where hundreds of thousands of traders from the capital Addis Ababa and its environs came to do business and millions of dollars worth of goods and services changed hands every day. Poet Laureate Tsegaye G/ Medhin’s ode to Mercato, entitled, “Oh! Mercato!” best captures the spirit of the market with its colors, smells, its sweats and its blood and the daily battle for survival in the midst of thieves, cone-men, cheats and tough guys.
Mercato is a legendary market to say the least. It is the birthplace of legendary businesspeople who made the astonishing transition from rags to riches in a generation or so. Mercato is the heartbeat of Addis Ababa, the open-air banking center and the place where the poor rub shoulders with the millionaires and even the poorest of the poor make a living by selling steel and iron scraps, discarded rubber or old Coke bottles as well as all kinds of scrap metals. Mercato is a place where the hungry can buy a mouthful of leftover food collected from hotels in the surrounding areas for as little as 50 cents.
If anything has changed in this COVID-19 time, it is the bustling atmosphere of Mercato and the energy and vibrancy of its inhabitants, shoppers and sellers. COVID time Mercato now looks like the shadow of its previous self as a casual visitor to the place may capture in the market’s present day atmosphere of lethargy as well as its hopeful patience.
Mercato never loses hope. It has seen the tough times of the military government and the Revolution that brought it to power. It has witnessed alleged hoarders being summarily shot accused of hiding bags of red pepper or sugar. It has seen revolutionary guards roaming its alley in search of potential victims and heard gunshots ringing in the area as armed youths battled the military authorities in the infamous Red Terror period.
Mercato has now shed its old identity as’ the largest open air market in Africa’. To be honest, Mercato is now a small forest of metal and cement as high rises replace the old shacks and souks that were the marvels of tourists who came to that place as a matter of frequent rituals. The new buildings in Mercato have changed everything in the marketplace. Modernization has set in although at a cost. The old tourist attractions are now disappearing leaving behind only the nostalgia of a lost epoch.
The way shopping is done is radically changed now. Shoppers have to climb up many stairs before they reach the particular shops where different items are bought and sold. Mercato has thus lost its old fragrance and the narrow alleyways that let you walk in the shadows of small shops where items ranging from incenses to traditional fabrics are bought and sold. It has lost its colors that were visible in the distance and the human touch, the smile and the exchange of funny jokes that made it more than a marketplace-a kind of movable feast for the eyes and ears, to borrow an expression from American writer Earnest Hemingway who described 1920s Paris as “A Movable Fest”.
What strikes you now in Mercato is not only the absence of a bustling crowd but also the silence of human voice. People talk less and goods take the place of human expression. As you go around the buildings, you can almost listen to the silence and hear to the “language” of goods as they shove on another, fall over or strike one another. It is as if people speak less and goods speak more. COVID-19 has forced people in Mercato to wear face masks but the cause of the deafening silence is not caused by facemasks but by the kind of weariness, existential angst and most of all, the slow and cold business atmosphere that wraps Mercato in all its loneliness, and undermines its old time glory.
In the pre-CORONA time, Mercato boasted of two movie houses where old Hollywood blockbusters were on show every day and old stars of the silver screen like Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Sean Connery, and other s were displayed on the posters adorning the walls of the cinemas. At that time, one could enjoy three films that are shown old daylong by paying a fee as small as twenty five or fifty cents.
Now, the movie houses have disappeared under tons of steel, glass and cement buildings along with the cheap eateries that offered a plateful of spaghetti with meat sauce and a cup of syrupy tea for only fifty cents. Those old eateries are now replaced with small ‘eating shops’ located up on the second floor of the buildings where people eat lunches in a highly crowded space, entirely oblivious social distancing or masks wearing in these perilous times when the corona pandemic is daily claiming hundreds of victims.
Speaking of masks and crowds, the bus stops of Mercato give a worrying picture of the pandemic as people queue up without properly wearing their masks and speak to one another at close distance. And when the bus arrives everyone seems to forget the public order to keep their distance and fiercely fight for seats in the bus as if they were fighting to go to heaven and not to their homes. The latest information about the spread of the virus maintains that the virus is airborne and that the two meter distance between two persons might not be enough to avert its invisible entry into people’s respiratory systems.
At this time of the year when the rains pour down on Mercato, people are forced to take shelter in the shops and the sheds of tall buildings where crowds often find themselves together and masks or not masks people tend to talk to one another as if the virus is less lethal than rainwater. At a shop near Anwar Mosque, many people take shelter from the rain and speak to one another at close quarters. You may be shocked by such a sight but if upon second thought you might get those people may be wearing invisible facemasks.
In the old pre-CORONA days, rainwater flowed along ditches, meandering through narrow alleyways to end up in the big river somewhere in the southern flank of the market. Nowadays, rainwater form small and dirty ponds in the empty spaces in the middle of the tall buildings. Garbage is strewing those places where there is hardly any dry space to walk along. This is inevitably going to give an ideal breeding ground for many diseases that might be as fatal as the corona virus. In summer, these dirty ponds are going to be turned into garbage collecting spots that pollute the area and might cause various respiratory or allergic diseases.
The other shocking site in Mercato these days is the desolate atmosphere that welcomes you as soon as you set foot in the old bustling halls that are called the Adarash. They are not only deprived of shoppers but the shop attendants themselves are seemingly mourning the bad times as they sit in silence, stare at every passer-by in the apparent hope of turning them into real shoppers. They ask you what you are looking for and when you leave them in silence they sink back to their loneliness and silence. In the pre- CORONA days, these halls were filled with crowds and business was thriving.
Now, many people seemingly stay away from those places for fear of the virus or because they have nothing to buy or no money to spend, and the silent halls rather look like hospital mortuaries. Mercato is waiting and hoping indeed. People have started talking about the Pre-Corona and post-Corona times. Mercato is living its Corona time. Pre-Corona Mercato is slowly disappearing and sooner or later gives way to the post-Corona time that will inevitably be better than the past. Mercato is hoping and waiting for the inevitable.
The Ethiopian Herald July 26, 2020
BY MULUEGTA GUDETA
