THE GROWING PULSE OF ETHIOPIAN SKATERS

By the time the sun hits Sar Bet, Addis Ababa is already awake and buzzing.Taxi horns leaning into the morning, vendors sweeping dust from cracked pavement, the call to prayer lifting over rooftops. But behind an old parking lot, half-forgotten and now the meeting point for oversized yellow buses, lies holy ground: the birthplace of Ethiopia’s skate revolution.

Abenezer, known as AB and one of the founders of Ethiopia Skate, meets me holding two breakfast wraps, apologizing for being late. “Busy night,” he says, ushering me into his car. He and a crew of skaters had worked until dawn, working on one of the new skate parks by hand. We walk to the first ramp he ever built. It’s lumpy, uneven, and ugly by most standards. Bad cement stolen from construction sites, mixed by teenagers guided by a YouTube tutorial. AB crouches beside it, touching the jagged edge like a relic. “This was my first project,” he says with a wide grin. Fifteen years ago, he was just a kid who’d watched a skate film on a scratched DVD, dreaming about skateboarding without even owning a board. Now he’s helping lead a movement far bigger than he ever imagined.

It’s wild to think this single slab ignited a movement now home to more than 200 skaters, with parks in Awasa and Konso, two more rising in Addis Ababa, and several newly greenlit while also hosting the biggest skate park in Africa and laying the foundation for Ethiopia’s first Olympic skateboarders.

No one knows exactly when the skate scene in Ethiopia really began. Some say the early 2000s, maybe later, but before modern skateboard culture even appeared, kids were hammering wheels onto wooden planks, riding down hills on makeshift boards they called “kushinete.” But one thing everyone agrees on is this: the skate scene lived long before Ethiopia realized it existed.“People think we just showed up out of nowhere,” one skater tells me. “But we were here. We’ve always been here.”

What sets Addis apart from other African skate scenes is that here, everything is built by themselves “We didn’t get handouts,” a skater tells me. While they have received help from other skaters around the world, volunteering to help build some of the parks, those numbers would dwindle with each project, making it clear that if they wanted anything done, they had to be the ones who do it. That difference matters.

“Dust, sweat, and too much sun. That’s how we built every park.”

The first official skate park in Kazanchis beloved by skaters and non-skaters alike is gone now. The Bisrate Gabriel Park, famously seen in Amine’s “13 Months of Sunshine” live recording, has also been shut down until further notice, buried under politics. And yet, Sunday skate sessions under the bridge at Meskel Square never stopped. The culture adapted, rebuilt, and refused to disappear.

Under the harsh midday sun at Ghion, concrete dust hangs in the air like incense. Thick copper rods snake across the ground, workers shovel gravel, faces streaked with sweat, except these aren’t typical construction workers. Most of them are skaters themselves.

AB tells me the park almost didn’t happen. They were originally given a tiny, trashed slot behind the hotel. “Mud, tree branches, garbage, and rubble everywhere but we were hyped,” he says. “We cleaned it basically overnight. Paid for trucks ourselves.” A government official happened to witness their speed and work ethic. Impressed, he upgraded them to the plot we were standing on, a massive step forward for the movement.

One skater, dust-covered and with beads of sweat on his forehead, smiles at us. “When this is done, and we ride it, we’ll feel our blood in the concrete. That’s what makes it ours.”

Bella, long known for its street violence and constant muggings, is an unlikely place for transformation. Which makes it the perfect place. Walking onto the construction site feels overwhelming to an untrained eye like mine. Layouts for a bike lane take shape, a river path carved out, and in the center rises the massive curve of Bella Skate Park, designed for speed, flow, and catching the wind.

Above the bowl, the team imagines a kids’ practice area, block parties, after-school programs an entire microcommunity sprouting from concrete. “Skating is who I am,” a young teen tells me. “It’s not just a sport. It’s how I communicate with the world, how I express myself. It’s an extension of myself."

Skaters in Addis carry an identity that sparks fascination and hate in equal measure.“Boards are the biggest problem,” one skater says. “Even when donated, the import taxes remain unpredictable, making it impossible to actually get them. They act like we’re trying to access weapons, not wooden boards.”

“They call us dirty. Bad kids. A threat,” another adds. “Especially when we skate in big groups, thirty deep sometimes. They think we’re trying to turn Ethiopia into something negative.”But the narrative is shifting.

“Ethiopia is a conservative country that’s scared of change or what they don’t understand,” a skater tells me. “People are scared of individuality, but skating demands it.”

And while some parents still fear the culture, others soften once they see their kids glide across the concrete. “My mom didn’t like it,” one of the girl skaters says. “But I brought her to a Sunday session. She saw me skate. Saw my friends. She still worries, but I think she’s starting to understand.”

The main contractor gives me a tour, showing me the foundation of what will be the bowl. “Their passion is contagious,” he shrugs when I ask him why he agreed to work on something like this, with no experience in skating or building a skate park. “You see them doing all this themselves, and you can’t help but want to be involved. They’re creating a new future for Ethiopia, and I want to be a part of it.”

“Skating is a language,” one of the older skaters says. “You can talk to someone from Spain or Nigeria without ever saying a word. You understand them by how they ride, the kind of tricks they can do.” For many, skating is survival. “A lot of us didn’t come from happy homes,” a skater admits. “But here, I’m seen. I’m understood. We have a lot in common and share love for each other and skating. It’s a chosen family.”

“When I skate, my mind goes quiet,” another says. “All the noise family, school, stress it melts away once it’s just me and my board.”

We watch one of the older skaters wipe out. He's helped up, dusting himself off. When I ask if he’s ever scared of seriously hurting himself, he laughs genuinely. “Some of us have broken bones and had to sit out for 3, 5, even 9 months in a cast,” He grins. “I don’t care though. I’ll skate until all my bones break. I don’t even want to imagine a life where I’m not skating. I’d rather die.”

Back at Sar Bet on a Saturday morning, tension fills the air politics, egos, the usual barriers. But eventually we’re let in, and wheels hit pavement, the strain dissolving instantly.

Shopkeepers lean on their brooms to watch. Guards skate during their shifts. Patrolling officers laugh as they’re invited to try. Kids dangle over fences, cheering with explosive joy every time someone lands even a simple trick.

It’s the most Ethiopian thing I’ve ever seen: community formed instantly, effortlessly, without hesitation. Despite everything the judgment, harassment, heckling the skaters remain defiant.

“We’re not trying to erase our culture,” one says. “I’m proudly Ethiopian and I’m proudly a skater. Those can coexist.”

One of the skater girls chimes in, “The youth has something to say. We have feelings, ideas, dreams. People think we’re not worth listening to because we’re teenagers and look different. But we’re braver than most adults. You have to rebel, or nothing will ever change.”

While skateboarding only became an official Olympic sport during the Tokyo Games in 2021, many of the skaters in Addis have been skating for longer than that. The very youth once labeled “demonic,” “thuggish,” or “failures” are now building the ramps Ethiopia’s future Olympians will train on. No handouts. No glossy NGO partnerships. Just grit, bruises, and concrete.

At each park, I see the same thing. Regular Ethiopians quiet, humble, traditional people slowly stepping toward this wild, expressive world. Watching first. Smiling next. And then, with a kind of shy thrill, joining in.

It’s the most unlikely cultural bridge I’ve ever witnessed and one of the most powerful.The kids here aren’t waiting for permission anymore. They fall, rise, fall some more, and rise again. Building, skating, and in doing so, are dragging the entire country whether it wants to or not toward a new kind of freedom. One where it doesn’t matter where you come from, what you look like, your religion or your background. What matters to them is sharing boards, guiding each other through life, supporting one another and working hard.

As the sun sets and the wheels begin to slow, we share pizza on the pavement, watching the park get washed in golden light before fading to a chilly blue. One thing is certain: the kids aren’t just alright. They’re the epicenter of a cultural shift Ethiopia can no longer ignore.

I think it’s time we listen.