The Spirit Of Fendika
A dancer, a storyteller, and a guardian of Ethiopian culture, Melaku Belay has spent his life turning movement into a language of resistance, healing, and belonging. Through Fendika, he has Built a space where culture becomes a source of healing.
BY BETHEL BIRU
PHOTOGRAPHED BY BATSINAEL FEKADU
Qena Africa Bernos and Tenefanef pants.Designed and styled by Amanuel Atle.
The breeze is pleasant outside on the Cascara balcony of the Hyatt Regency in Addis Ababa. The water fountain's sound gives the atmosphere a sense of calm. In the middle of rainy season, the morning sun shines and warms patrons sitting outside. I spot Melaku's signature afro before he fully comes into view to join me. “I seem to always be in meetings, but I was looking forward to this one,” He says with a smile.
I’ve only met Melaku in passing. We exchanged warm greetings despite not knowing each other very well. His politeness reminds me of the kind I grew up around — deep bows and extending both hands in a greeting as a show of respect. “The Walking Earthquake” Western media had nicknamed him. If you’ve ever seen Melaku on stage, you’d understand why.
It’s mesmerizing to watch the way he dances. He evokes a visceral reaction. The way his body shakes faster than you thought humanly possible, or the trance-like jerking he does as he infamously destroys an umbrella on stage. Dancing has been the language Melaku has always spoken when other ways of communicating didn’t suffice. It’s how he has learned to speak about Ethiopia, to question it, to celebrate it, and, at times, to survive it. “When I found Fendika, I had so much burning and emotions heavy on my heart and had no one to discuss it with. I used dance to speak,” he shares.
The founding director of Fendika Cultural Center, Melaku, along with his peers, grew a space that started as an Azmari bet, with all its informal charms, into a home for musicians, dancers, visual artists, poets, and other creatives to gather, share ideas, and dance. The original Fendika Azmari Bet opened in the early 1990s in the Kazanchis neighborhood of Addis, and under Melaku’s direction, expanded into the cultural center we know today in the basement of the Hyatt hotel. But when Melaku speaks about Fendika, he rarely speaks about it as a building. He speaks about it as a symbol of Ethiopia. “The West knows [Ethiopia] as a place of suffering and hunger and, recently, coffee. We’ve always known her to be much more.”
Melaku’s relationship with culture began with a contradiction. He loved Ethiopian dance and Azmari music, but he grew up in a society where artistic expression could easily be considered frivolous, even sinful if enjoyed too much. Dance was relegated to celebrations and holidays. In his family, music was something listened to on occasion. A life dedicated to either was difficult to imagine and arguably brought shame to your family. Yet dance became the thing that gave Melaku a sense of direction. His artistic life developed largely outside formal institutions, through observation, participation, travel, and immersion in different communities across Ethiopia. He learned regional dances through religious festivals, folk ceremonies, everyday life, and his experiences across the country. Fendika’s own history describes this immersion as central to the way he developed his practice.
Qena Africa Bernos and Tenefanef pants.Designed and styled by Amanuel Atle.
“There was no infrastructure or protection for the arts back then. Azmaris and dancers aren’t seen as worth being protected. When there’s war or conflict, everyone is suffering and forgets their country as a whole and each other,” he explains.
“Dance and music are what saved my life and what we can use to survive during moments of pain.” These days, he worries about a generation that can recognize a movement without knowing its provenance, or wear traditional clothes without understanding the thread’s significance. And there’s also the palpable pressure to appear modern, particularly when modernity becomes synonymous with Western ideals of sophistication, while heritage is dismissed as backward.
For him, this is one of Ethiopia’s unresolved tensions: how to move forward without treating what came before as something that must be abandoned. “I’m worried we’re being too easily influenced by the outside world in the name of modernization and taking on ideas and expressions that aren’t true to us,” he shares with me. “If it comes from you, that’s okay. It’s your right. But if it's not yours and you do it to seem like something else, that's different.” It’s a common concern shared by many across generations. “Having the knowledge of these modern things is important, but the problem is that we’re not questioning it before completely adopting it. We’re not talking about them. We’re just taking it, no questions asked.”
Melaku believes the answer lives in robust programs that may be transformative the way his experiential learning transformed him. “We need to learn to think of ourselves and find a way to bring infrastructure to support each other, to support the children. After-school programs, curricula that encourage studying the arts, these things can help us learn how to work together and ease the burden.”
If I love Azmari music, I’m not modern. If I wear my culture clothes to an event, I’m too country.
Melaku Belay during his solo performance at Fendika's Friday night show.
Despite Melaku’s restitution, he is not interested in preserving Ethiopian culture by freezing it in time. He’s equally resistant to the idea that tradition has to remain untouched to remain authentic. Change, he believes, is not the enemy. Discarding your roots is. One of his performances is offered as an example. In the traditional Konso dance, a man may appear as a heroic figure carrying a spear and wearing a lion’s mane, embodying strength and masculinity. Melaku reimagined the choreography with a woman in the role, and instead of killing an animal, she kills COVID. The story may change, but the meaning remains. It’s this ability to translate that has become central to Melaku’s work. Taking something deeply rooted in a particular community and finding a way for someone somewhere else to understand it. Culture, in Melaku’s eyes, is not something encased in a museum to simply be looked at or scrolled past on your phone. It’s something that is alive and kept alive by the people who choose to experience and engage with it in real time.
Some of Melaku’s most memorable artistic gestures have come from ordinary objects. An umbrella symbolizing shelter as a house, justice, protection, freedom. When that umbrella is destroyed, it becomes something else — an image of what happens when the structures that are supposed to protect people begin to disappear. An empty coffin found and filled with flowers as a reflection on how, despite people’s effortful attempts to accumulate money and social status, they all eventually meet the same fate.
And then there were the chickens.
His mother had asked him to buy some on his way home from work, but he was busy, so he decided to bring them with him on stage for a quick stop before he left. You’d think people would ask questions at the absurdity of it all, but not a single person did. Why would you bring chickens on stage? Why do you always break a perfectly good umbrella in the middle of your dances? Why are you doing a dance traditionally performed by women?
These are the questions people may have asked in his social media comments and whispered amongst themselves in the crowd but never to him.
That, perhaps, is what concerned him most. Not that people misunderstood his art; that was expected, but that they didn’t ask. “People are scared, and it's understandable. They’re scared because of religion and not to upset the elders we look up to or our belief systems. You don’t want to be ostracized from society and the community you’re a part of.” He continues with a frown: “But that’s how things slowly start to disappear or get destroyed, and then we’re left with nothing real. By the time we look up, you see that everything is wrong and nothing is familiar.”
For Melaku, the role of the artist is partly to interrupt that complacency and to make people uncomfortable enough to ask why. “We’ve gone from talking to each other face to face and discussing the things we see and don’t understand to not even being curious about them.” He shakes his head. “We were once strong, brave, and wise people, and I know we still are deep inside.”
Azmari bets have always been known as places where strangers can sit together, listen to music, watch dancers goad members of the crowd into dance, and speak in hushed tones about the charged and poetic lyrics being sung. This philosophy remains in Fendika despite it being uprooted from its humble mud and straw structure in Kazanchis to the glossy floors and high ceilings of Hyatt Regency.
It’s become a place of juxtaposition where traditional music and dance exist alongside modern art, open mic poetry, experimentation, and younger forms of expression. Its programs are deliberately shaped to bring artists from different regions and disciplines together, while its gallery spaces have given artists room to present their work on their own terms.
For Melaku, that openness is essential. Even in his new venue. “I don’t believe in borders; my roof is the sky,” he says. “I know people think, ‘Oh, Melaku is in Hyatt, all the diasporas and foreigners come to him, he must be rich.’ But I’m not. I have bills to pay and family to support like everyone else.”
He does not want Fendika to belong to one region, one generation, or one definition of Ethiopian culture. He wants it to belong to everyone of all walks of life. That belief has shaped the way he thinks about artists and their livelihoods as well.
“When people come to Fendika, everyone is equal, no matter what,” he explains. “The major thing is the art, the creativity, the dance, the music, and the communion with others. It's a place where people can be safe no matter who you are.”
Under Melaku’s management, Fendika is the first place to introduce regular salaries for its performers, breaking from a system where musicians and dancers traditionally relied on tips. The policy stems from his core belief that artists are an integral part of human expression and culture whose work deserves dignity. “This is why I founded the Ethiopian Dance and Art Association and teach a curriculum at Addis Ababa University,” he adds. “There aren’t any funds for these kinds of people even though they give their whole bodies to the craft. But they still do it because it’s healing. Dance and music have healed me and so many others.”
Qena Africa Bernos and Tenefanef pants.Designed and styled by Amanuel Atle.
A moment from Melaku Belay's solo performance at Fendika.
Photographed by Batsinael Fekadu
Perhaps this is why Melaku describes Fendika as a place of healing.
“Welcome to Fendika Hospital,” he chuckles as he explains the ways music and dance are his medicine.
“There are things that some therapy cannot always reach.” He says, “In Ethiopia, we have our coffee ceremonies, spirituality, church, music, dance, and community. The Azmari can take someone's frustration and turn it into a song. A dancer can release the pent-up frustrations of something through the body that cannot easily be explained through words.”
This translates to his catchphrase, emphasizing how people who hear about Fendika come carrying something and leave a little lighter.
“When I dance, I’m reborn,” Melaku says.
For someone who has spent years navigating the difficulties of keeping a cultural institution alive, the statement is more than metaphor.
Fendika itself has had to repeatedly find ways to survive. Its mission today is explicitly tied to supporting artists, sharing Ethiopian culture internationally, and creating spaces for artistic freedom, economic sustainability, peace, and healing. Melaku learned what it means to build something while knowing it could disappear even before Fendika and its precarities.
His dream for Ethiopia is the same dream that drives him to run Fendika. He believes that folk dancing should not only be a traditional way of movement but an active act of memory, resistance, healing —a call to Ethiopia to remember who she is.
“Who teaches the child about the meaning behind our movements? Who makes sure that the knowledge survives when the person carrying it is gone?” He shakes his head. “Sew ayfres. Ke tibeb indet yitalal?” Perhaps this is why the future of Fendika remains inseparable from his vision of the country.
He imagines the new Fendika returning to its original plot in Kazanchis but this time, as a place that could also include recording studios, artist residencies, an art gallery, a rehearsal space for dancers, a restaurant, a hotel, archives, and spaces for learning. Not because bigger is inherently better, but because infrastructure allows culture to breathe.
When I was little, my mother and siblings had to flee to Sudan because of war. When they came back, I spent years gathering money, nails, and other materials so that I could buy a small plot of land for 2,000 birr and build a house to put my family in.” He smiles ruefully at the memory. “It’s gone now, but I wanted to have a safe place to put my mother and siblings in. That’s how I feel about Ethiopia and her people.
Melaku and Ethiocolor performing together at Fendika.
Despite his cheerful energy, Melaku has thought about quitting many times. The work is difficult. The responsibilities are constant. Government regulations and legalities seem to never end. He has watched people leave, projects disappear, and systems fail.
Still, he continues.
“I’ve always been true to myself and will die the same,” he says. “I’ve given my life to this place and will see it through till my last breath.”
His faith is part of what keeps him moving. So is an untiring belief that the work belongs to something larger than himself. When asked what he would want someone living two hundred years from now to see when they look back at Ethiopia, his answer is not a particular dance or instrument.
A people who won against colonization, against corrupt governments, against modernization that erased the essence of who they were and, most importantly, a people who loved one another. A future where Ethiopia can move forward without having to leave herself behind. And somewhere inside that future, he hopes Fendika is still there — not necessarily as the building it is today, but as the ideas it inspired and grew.
Maybe that’s what Melaku has been dancing toward all along.
I want them to see people who stood proud of themselve.
Photographed by Batsinael Fekadu
