Feudal force fields contrast with stark power lines

Which feels worse: the harried power of wealthy South Africans, or rich Ethiopians' cheery blindness to poverty?

One sometimes needs to watch people in foreign lands to understand one's own country a little better. I recently spent time in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. It is like Johannesburg or Durban in so far as there is both much wealth and much poverty. But the relationship between rich and poor is so utterly foreign to anything South African that I wondered, at times, whether the two countries were on the same planet.

The boulevard on which I stayed was lined with imposing buildings of glass and steel, the sort one might find in Dubai or Singapore. At ground level, cafes opened onto the street and well-dressed people sipped coffee and chatted. Clothes stores, restaurants and spas filled the upper floors.

And yet, on the flanks of these buildings, sometimes beginning just metres away, were dense shacklands. They would extend several blocks back, before making way for the next glass-and-steel colossus.

Seen from above, it must make for an extraordinary scene: these proud towers of the new Ethiopian bourgeoisie streaked across a landscape of deprivation. I have never before seen wealth displayed with such a glaring absence of embarrassment. It seemed that these buildings were erected to show the poor the look and the smell of power.

Some evenings, I would walk through the streets with middle-class Ethiopian colleagues. If one looked closely enough, one could see that poor people were everywhere, sitting on mats propped up against buildings or walking along the pavement at a respectful distance.

They never approached us, nor, indeed, even dared to step inside an invisible radius surrounding us. The streets were ours, not theirs.

As soon as I bade my Ethiopian friends farewell and walked on alone, late at night, the radius around me would vanish and the poor would approach me. An old woman would step into my path and demand money. Two young men would walk on either side of me and begin tugging with brazen informality at the zips on my rucksack.

A set of unwritten rules was clearly at work, and they stated that the Ethiopian poor must be invisible to the Ethiopian rich. But when a foreigner walks through the night alone, the rules are suspended and the poor get to speak.

What are these rules about? I do not know the Ethiopian past well enough, but I suspect it has to do with a long feudal and imperial history. As the political scientist Christopher Clapham has noted, maintaining power in Ethiopia has always required showing the poor that one's authority is God-given and permanent.

In other words, the dominant flaunt their power before an audience of the poor in order that they might keep it.

How starkly different South Africa is, where the central divide has been racial, not feudal. White South Africans were always petrified that if the poor got to see and taste wealth from close quarters, they would rise up and rebel.

Our cities have been designed to hide the rich from the poor and the poor from the rich. For most of the 20th century, the main task of urban administration was to keep the two apart; the poor were corralled into ghettos beyond the edge of the city, while the streets of the rich were policed for unwelcome strangers.

Walking through the streets of Addis Ababa, I feel that I am in a profoundly foreign place. The rules that order public space arise from a history that in no way resembles ours. The relationships between those who pass one another by is alien to me.

I find myself wondering which feels worse: the nervous, harried power of wealthy South Africans, forever battening down the hatches and building higher walls; or the cheerful blindness of rich Ethiopians for whom hunger is utterly invisible.

Wealthy South Africans who long for the feudal ease of their Ethiopian counterparts should not get too envious, though. A system that can only maintain power by showing authority to be permanent and God-given has a fatal flaw.

To reveal one chink in that authority is to bring down the whole façade. Ethiopians hounded their imperial leaders out of office in 1974 and, 17 years later, overthrew the next regime. In 2005, they came very close to toppling the current one. Ethiopians, it seems, have a habit of taking revenge on the powerful whenever the opportunity arises.

In South Africa, by contrast, only one political order was toppled, and it was done so in the gentlest and most polite way.

Indeed, so gentle and polite was our revolution that the burning debate in the ANC now is whether black people ever acquired power at all.