History

Before becoming the Emperor of Ethiopia, Menelik was the king of Shewa. He found Mount Entoto a useful base for military operations in the south of his realm. The king, in 1879 visited the reputed ruins of a medieval town, and an unfinished rock church that showed proof of an Ethiopian presence there prior to the campaigns of Ahmad Gragn.

Menelik’s interest in the area grew when his wife Taytu began work on a church on Entoto, and he endowed a second church in the area. However the immediate area did not encourage the founding of a town due to the lack of firewood and water, so settlement actually began in the valley south of the mountain in 1886. Initially, Taytu built a house for herself near the "Filwoha" hot mineral springs, known to the local Oromo people as Finfinne, where she and members of the Showan Royal Court liked to take mineral baths. Other nobility and their staffs and households settled in the vicinity. Menelik expanded his wife's house to make it the Imperial Palace which remains the seat of government in Addis Ababa today.

During the second Italo-Abyssinian War In 1936, Italian troops occupied Addis Ababa, making it the capital of Italian East Africa. The city was governed by the Italian Governors from 1936 to 1939. The Italian army in Ethiopia was defeated by the British during the East African Campaign and Emperor Haile Selassie returned to Addis Ababa on May 5, 1941. Selassie immediately embarked on the work of re-establishing the capital city.

The Organization of African Unity came into being in 1963, also at the initiative of Emperor Haile Selassie among others and he invited the new organization to maintain its headquarters in the city. The OAU was dissolved in 2002 and replaced by the African Union, which too headquartered in Addis Ababa. The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa has its headquarters in Addis Ababa. The city was also the site of the Council of the Oriental Orthodox Churches in 1965.