1 Published as: Di Nunzio, Marco. 2015. ‘Embracing Uncertainty. Young people on the move in Addis Ababa’s inner city’, in Cooper L., Pratten D. (eds) Ethnographies of Uncertainty in Africa. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan: 149 – 172 Embracing uncertainty: Y oung people on the move in Addis Ababa’s inner city Marco Di Nunzio (Manuscript Draft) Multiple Lives This chapter discusses how young men’s understanding of the unpredictable as a ground for action and hope in inner city Addis Ababa can inform anthropological examinations on the productivity on uncertainty. I start by narrating the biographies of three young men who, more than anybody else, taught me about the promises and the predicaments of living with uncertainty. As Cooper and Pratten have reminded us in their introduction, accounting for the messiness, the contingencies and the multiplicities of life trajectories is not just a mere exercise of ethnographic writing. Studying biographies provides scholars with interpretative tools to consider how people translate the indeterminacy of existence into a sense of possibility and, ultimately, seek to connect what has been with what could be. Haile, Ibrahim and Said 1 were born in inner city Addis Ababa in the period between the early 1970s and the mid-1980s. As with many of their friends, they belong to the first generation of those born in Addis Ababa in families originally from areas away from the capital. Their parents were among those who migrated from their home regions from the 1960s and through the following two decades, and came to constitute the bulk of the population of the Ethiopian capital in that period (Getahun Benti 2007). The three grew up in a poor neighbourhood in Arada, the old city centre of Addis Ababa. They lived in tin-roofed government houses and their family members were engaged in work which did not allow them to consider themselves well off. When Haile was a child, his mother engaged in commercial sex to support herself and her sons. Despite some attempts to run a small retail shop, Ibrahim’s father had worked as a waiter in an established pastry shop for over thirty years. Haile, Ibrahim and Said lived through a period marked by significant transformations in the history of the country. When Haile was four, junior army officers deposed Haile Selassie, the Emperor who had ruled Ethiopia continuously since the 1930s, with the exception of the five years of Italian colonial occupation. In the mid-1980s, when Haile was thirteen, Ibrahim six and Said just a small child, the country had seen nearly ten years I wish to thank the Wenner Gren Foundation, the British Institute in Eastern Africa, the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Wolfson College and All Souls’ College at the University of Oxford for their support during my doctorate. I appreciate the support of the Fondation Wiener Anspach in Brussels for enabling me to conduct further research and write this paper. I thank the staff at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa for facilitating my research in Ethiopia. I am grateful to Liz Cooper, David Pratten, Jonny Steinberg, Henrik Vigh, Laura Camfield, Diego Malara and Emma Lochery for their insightful comments. This paper is dedicated to Solomon, who I hope, found his own peace. 1 The real names of the people that appear in the text have been changed in order to protect their privacy.