Recently, I found myself at a cultural restaurant off Bole Road on a quiet afternoon. At 3 p.m., long before the place would come alive with music and late-night diners, the room was still. Yet even in silence, the restaurant spoke.
The walls carried the weight of heritage: hand-carved wooden chairs, painted scripts of the Ge’ez alphabet, traditional curtains, and woven artworks arranged with care. Soft strains of Ethiopian classical music floated through the room. The ambiance alone was enough to remind me that culture is not a thing of the past but something we inhabit—if we choose to.
At the center of the room stood the mesob, the woven basket-table that has anchored Ethiopian dining for centuries. Made from dyed and natural grass, the mesob is not just furniture but philosophy. It insists on sharing. It collapses distance between people. Meals are never served in solitary plates but on a single platter of injera—a canvas for sauces, vegetables, and meats, an invitation to eat together.
When I asked if I might be served a plate for myself, the chef smiled warmly but shook her head. “Here, all food is shared,” she said, pointing me to the mesob. I left without eating but with something harder to digest: the realization that our dining tradition embodies the very closeness we seem to be losing as a nation.
Ethiopian cuisine is more than delicious food—it is a cultural compass. Injera sets us apart, as does our coffee ceremony, which transforms even the smallest corner café into a ritual of intimacy, conversation, and connection. These outward practices, inherited from our ancestors, shape inward habits. They are designed to pull us closer, to remind us that life is best lived in common.
And yet, outside the walls of these cultural spaces, we seem to have abandoned the spirit they preserve.
Consider one unsettling story told to me by a young tour operator who organizes pilgrimages abroad. Once, she could assign hotel rooms randomly to Ethiopian travelers. Now, she and her colleagues quietly match people by ethnicity—using birthplace on passports as a proxy—to prevent disputes. Left unchecked, grievances rooted in suspicion and division surface even among pilgrims en route to holy sites.
This is no small thing. It reflects a deeper unraveling. Ethiopia today ranks fifth in the world for civilian casualties from conflict, behind only Ukraine, Palestine, Myanmar, and Sudan, according to World Population Review. The Early Warning Project has consistently placed Ethiopia among the countries at highest risk for mass atrocities. For all our rituals of closeness, we remain dangerously fractured.
We cannot afford to shrug at these contradictions. Too many of us fall silent in the face of division. Too many of us consume the poisons of hate speech, passively complicit by failing to question, to resist, to reason.
But culture shows us another path. The mesob tells us something politics has forgotten: the table forces proximity. It compels us to reach across, to share, to recognize one another’s presence. Our ancestors knew this truth. They built a dining system that insisted on harmony, and they preserved it for us.
As Ethiopia’s new year approaches, the rains will circle back, as they always do. But peace and reconciliation will not. They require more than wishes; they require deliberate choices. Every day, as citizens and leaders, we decide whether to nourish our collective dignity—or starve it.
Marcus Garvey once wrote: “A people without knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.” Ethiopia still has roots, deep and strong. But unless we summon the courage to strip away vanity and fear, unless we restore the solidarity our traditions still model for us, we risk becoming unmoored.
If the mesob could speak, it would tell us: eat together—or fall apart.
Contributed by Selamawit Kidane
