Frank had been in Addis Ababa for only a week when the routine he depended on turned into the moment that put him in real danger. He was staying in the four-story house I rent in an upscale, gated community—large enough for the tools, samples, and visiting colleagues involved in the cookstove project. The neighborhood is ringed by perimeter gates, each manned by guards who lock them at ten every night.

Because of frequent power cuts, Frank worked from a nearby hotel where the electricity was reliable. Three young men had been watching him.

One night around nine, Frank reached the house gate and knocked. Before anyone inside could answer, three men came from the dark and attacked him. They shoved him against the fence and wrestled the backpack off his shoulders. Inside were his laptop, his passport, and the essentials of his work.

Upstairs, two young women—the maid and the sister of one of my partners—saw the struggle from the balcony above. They turned on the light and began screaming for help.

No one responded.

Not a guard from the neighborhood gates.

Not a neighbor from the adjacent houses.

Not a single door opened.

Frank survived only because the attackers left. If they had decided to injure him further, no one would have intervened. When they disappeared, the silence settled back over the street. That quiet says more about the neighborhood than the attack itself. The real loss was not the backpack; it was the sense that the walls, gates, and guards meant something.

Another Addis I Remember

What unsettled me most about Frank’s experience was not the attack itself but the silence that followed. In the Addis I knew growing up in Merkato in the seventies, a scream at night was an unambiguous summons. People did not wait to understand who was involved; they came out immediately, carrying whatever was close at hand—sticks, stones, metal bars—because danger was treated as a shared problem.

Even neighbors who were not on speaking terms would appear at the same moment, drawn by the obligation that came with sharing the same streets. No one stood behind a door to “stay out of it.” The idea of hearing a scream and choosing not to act was impossible. It violated something deeper than etiquette; it broke the basic logic of communal life.

That is why the silence around Frank’s attack was so difficult to accept. In a relatively well-lit neighborhood, with guards stationed at perimeter gates and houses pressed close together, the screams from the balcony should have brought people out at once. That they did not is no small detail. It shows how far that instinct has receded. The Addis of my childhood relied on people stepping forward when someone was in distress. The Addis of this neighborhood relied on walls.

This is not nostalgia; it is a measure. The shift is not about memory or sentiment. It is about the disappearance of an expectation that once held daily life together: that when someone near you is in trouble, you respond.

Inside the Walls

The neighborhood where Frank was staying gives the outward impression of safety. The streets are quiet, the houses tall, and the perimeter gates heavy. Guards sit near those gates, though “guards” may be too generous a term. They are poor men paid to sit through the night, wearing no uniforms, carrying no radios. Most nights, they sleep on thin mattresses in a shack beside the metal doors they are meant to watch.

The night Frank was attacked shattered the assumption their presence creates. They did not move when the women screamed. They did not step toward the sound. Whether out of fear, or because their formal duty ended at the metal door, they remained where they were. The houses sit close enough that voices carry easily at night, yet not a single door opened. People heard, but no one responded.

The physical layout reinforces this inward posture. Each house sits behind a stone wall roughly two meters high, topped with barbed wire or broken glass. Walking through the area, you see little of the houses—only upper floors rising above the walls. They resemble small strongholds arranged side by side, built to exclude rather than to connect.

But the walls themselves do not explain what happened. In the Addis I knew, a scream has never required visibility. No one waited to see who was shouting or what the trouble was. The sound alone was enough; obligation began at the moment of hearing. The walls here block sight, but they do not block sound—and they do not block responsibility.

That is what failed. It was not a matter of limited vision. It was a failure of response. The guards remained still, the neighbors stayed behind their gates, and the kind of cry that once drew a whole block met only stillness.

The attack did not create this condition. It revealed it.

When the Pattern Becomes Visible

The silence that night was not an exception. It fits a broader shift across Addis Ababa, where physical proximity no longer creates social connection. The city has grown quickly—new neighborhoods, new money, new arrivals—outstripping the slow, organic work of building the norms that make communal life function.

In older parts of the city, familiarity was a byproduct of shared space. You knew the people around you through the accumulated weight of shared days. This created a web of mutual, unspoken obligation. You acted because you understood, instinctively, that your life was intertwined with those nearby.

The newer, affluent neighborhoods operate on a different logic. They are assemblages of private worlds. People from different regions, from the diaspora, from entirely different walks of life, bringing no shared history with their neighbors.

In a sense, these enclaves are trying to recreate a Western model of safety, epitomized by the 911 call, where the instinct is to let institutions handle the danger. But here, there is no 911. The substitute is local: they hire guards. These are often young, recent migrants from the countryside, for whom the job provides not only a livelihood but a place to sleep. Their presence completes the illusion of a self-contained system, yet they have no stake in the community and no training for confrontation. Their priority is survival, not heroism.

This logic of substitution extends to the very bricks and mortar. Houses and high walls are erected simultaneously, and life inside each compound seals itself off. A neighbor’s circumstances are no longer legible; neither is their need. The scream is heard not as a collective summons, but as a disturbance from a separate sphere.

The silence during Frank’s attack was the logical conclusion of this shift. It was not merely a failure of courage but a failure of recognition—a habit of seeing trouble as belonging to someone else. The instinct that once connected people across thresholds has been replaced by the reflex to distance.

The attack revealed a city where the visible structures of community—the walls, the gates—have been fortified, while the relationships that once held people together have been allowed to thin.

The silence was not the cause of this condition. It was the sign.

Another Place, Another Night

Cities rarely break down all at once. The weakening usually begins quietly, in the slow thinning of the everyday ties that people stop noticing until they are gone. The 1977 New York City blackout is a clear example of this pattern. In Blackout (James Goodman, 2003), the event appears not as a sudden eruption but as the moment when an already weakened social fabric was briefly exposed.

By the time the blackout hit, the city was already deeply divided. Entire neighborhoods had been hollowed out by unemployment and abandonment. Racial and ethnic tensions were sharp. Trust was scarce. People lived beside one another without feeling they shared the same world. When the power failed, the absence of underlying cohesion surfaced immediately—looting, fires, and whole blocks barricading themselves within hours.

To an outsider, it looked like collapse triggered by darkness. Goodman shows that the real collapse had happened earlier, inside the relationships that made the city workable. The blackout only revealed it.

The silence in Frank’s neighborhood follows the same logic. Addis Ababa is not fractured along the same lines as 1970s New York, but it is fractured in its own patterns—by ethnicity, regional identity, class, and the social distance created by rapid migration. New wealth has created enclaves where people live behind high walls without knowing the names of the families living only meters away. The norms that once made response instinctive have thinned.

When the women screamed from the balcony that night, the physical neighborhood remained intact—the walls stood, the gates were locked, the guards were present. What had slipped was the layer beneath all of that: the expectation that people act for one another when something is wrong. That silence was not surprising. It was the predictable outcome of a network with too few remaining connections.

The blackout showed how a single disruption can expose a city’s internal condition. Frank’s case did the same. The attack did not create the silence; it revealed how much isolation had already settled into a place that still thinks of itself as a neighborhood.

Toward Renewal

When I think about that night now, I focus less on the attackers than on the response around them. Their violence was real, but it did not reveal anything new about risk in Addis Ababa. What mattered was the silence—the guards who remained still, the houses that stayed dark, and the cry no one could have misunderstood. That silence showed how far people had withdrawn into their private worlds.

This thinning of response does not come from poverty or crime. It grows from small, steady changes: fewer shared routines, fewer overlapping lives. The expectations that once made involvement automatic erode slowly, almost unnoticed. And once they thin, no institution can restore them. A state cannot legislate them back. A sermon cannot manufacture them. Walls cannot substitute for them.

This is why Dmitry Orlov’s account carries weight. In Reinventing Collapse (2008), he argues that societies endure crises not because of their institutions, but because of the density of the ordinary relationships beneath them. In the Soviet case, formal systems failed all at once, yet people kept functioning because their social and cultural bonds were intact. Neighbors organized food circles. Apartments housed multiple families, sharing heat and childcare. Skilled tradespeople repaired whatever they could in exchange for food, creating informal economies that kept entire blocks operating. None of this required a functioning state. It required only the recognition that survival depended on the people living nearest to you.

Orlov’s perspective throws the New York blackout into sharp relief. New York possessed modern infrastructure and strong formal authority, but the connections between people were already thin. When the blackout came, institutions could not compensate for the absence of mutual recognition.

Frank’s story shows Addis drifting in this same direction. Tall walls, locked gates, and paid guards create the impression of stability but cannot replace the everyday obligations that once defined the city. The scream that would have emptied a street in the Addis of my childhood now stops at a household gate.

Renewal, if it comes, will not come from policies or from fear. It will come from the return of something smaller and older: the willingness to treat the trouble near you as trouble you share.  Cities are held together by those moments. Without them, everything else is decoration.

Tsegaye Nega is a Professor Emeritus at Carleton College in the United States and the Founder and CEO of Anega Energies Manufacturing

Contributed by Tsegaye Nega (PhD)