Ethiopia’s Economy Is Booming, but at What Cost?

KANGATEN, Ethiopia—In Nyangatom, on the plains of the Omo River in southern Ethiopia, they call 2015 the “Year of China.” Around then, a bridge was built from there to Kangaten, the district capital, and CCCC (for China Communications Construction Company) appeared in giant blue lettering on the riverbank.

A few years earlier, a telephone tower had been erected at the edge of town. Then a two-lane highway constructed by a Chinese company started to unfold through the valley, toward the beginnings of a sugar factory and a vast irrigated plantation. The Year of China, locals say, was a period of development like nothing that they had ever witnessed. It was also the moment the river stopped flooding, and their world was altered forever.

More than depend on the lower Omo, which uncurls through southern Ethiopia, and on Kenya’s Lake Turkana, into which it flows. For millennia, the inhabitants of the Lower Omo Valley have, it brought fish upstream from the delta; when it receded, it left verdant soil for growing sorghum and maize, and rich pastures for grazing. Home to , including the Nyangatom, and to three of Africa’s main language groups, South Omo exemplifies the label Italian scholar Carlo Conti Rossini in 1937 gave Ethiopia: a “museum of peoples.”