It’s a quiet Saturday afternoon at the Club des Cheminots in downtown Addis Ababa, where Chebude Gobeza plays pétanque with a friend as groups of patrons sit around yellow plastic tables, chatting and sipping coffee and beer.
Chebude comes to the Railway Workers’ Club every day, he says, after wrapping up a win. “It’s how I relax and keep fit. I’ve made a lot of friendships here over the years with others who come to enjoy it.”
This small, Francophone corner of Ethiopia’s capital is a legacy of the French-built Ethio-Djibouti Railway, a once-vital trade artery that linked Addis Ababa to the Red Sea for a century before most of it closed in disrepair in 2008.
The majority of the club’s 150 members are pensioners who worked on the line and learned French after being sent to classes at Addis Ababa’s Lycée Guebre-Mariam. The line’s French workers popularised pétanque, also known as boules, by teaching it to their Ethiopian colleagues more than 100 years ago.
Today Club des Cheminots clings on as Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, forges ahead with an ambitious – and highly controversial – plan to transform Addis Ababa from a ramshackle city to a modern, hi-tech hub for foreign tourists and investors.
Over the past year, tens of thousands of homes and small businesses have been bulldozed to make way for high-rise apartment blocks, bike lanes and a gleaming new conference centre – their owners displaced to the far fringes of the city. Cultural venues, social clubs and historic buildings have also been razed as Abiy touts a grand vision of remodelling the capital into an east African Dubai.
The pensioners believe it is only a matter of time until they receive their eviction notice, too. Their pétanque club sits on a prime patch of land, a stone’s throw from Addis Ababa’s main square. Many of the neighbourhood’s informal homes have already been cleared.
Nearby, the defunct railway station now houses a cafe where customers can sip cappuccinos on a platform next to old locomotives – part of a $1.8bn (£1.4bn) development of luxury shopping centres and flats by the Emirati real-estate developer Eagle Hills, which promises “the finest amenities and conveniences for residents who live the good life”.
“There is a very close-knit community here,” says Chebude. “All around, there are fancy hotels, but we can’t afford them. This is one of the last spaces left for people like us. If it goes, it will break the chain of our community.”
Chebude, an ebullient, energetic man in his fifties, spent 15 years working on the railway as a train driver after responding to an advert pinned on a government noticeboard. He recalls driving through the desert at night to avoid the scorching sun of the Ethiopian desert, as well as mishaps along the line such as flash floods and raids by bandits.
“I was very sad when the railway stopped; it was like my mother and my father,” Chebude says. “We brought everything into the country – electronics, clothes, food. It was a great job.”
Emperor Menelik II, the founder of modern Ethiopia, ordered the construction of the railway to begin in 1897, but it took nearly two decades to complete. Rising 2,400 metres from the Red Sea to the Ethiopian highlands, it was considered an engineering marvel and reduced the journey to the coast from more than a month down to 24 hours.
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Today, however, it has been superseded by a Chinese-built line that opened in 2018, and its creaking carriages only operate on a 125-mile (200km) stretch of railway close to the Djiboutian border, serving a few remote border towns.
Nonetheless, the French railway is still venerated at Club des Cheminots, which runs a pétanque league of 20 teams and an annual tournament to celebrate International Francophonie Day in March. Over the years, it has received sponsorship from the French embassy and Ethiopia’s biggest brewery.
Alemneh Abebe, the club’s general secretary, says they have appealed to the French embassy to help stave off demolition but have not received any assistance so far. “Development is changing this area, but this place is an important part of the community,” he says over a beer. “We are like a family.”
Bereket Mikael, a lawyer for a ride-hailing app in his early 30s, is among the club’s youngest members. His family never worked on the railway but he grew up in the neighbourhood and has been coming here since he was a teenager.
“My parents aren’t alive and I have few friends my own age, but here everyone knows me,” he says. “Whenever someone is sick, or if their wife gives birth, we help them by raising money. It’s very close.”
Like other members, Bereket is resigned to eventually losing the club.
“All across the city, the government is evicting residents. Everything you see here will be destroyed. But we will keep coming until it is knocked down.”
