The long history of Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) activities in Africa is heavily under-researched. Systematic studies only exist for South Africa. There, a YMCA branch in Cape Town, which was exclusively restricted to white members, opened in 1865. With the growing influence of the North American YMCA on a global level, Afro-American secretaries also started to work in Africa, including South Africa. So it was that, after the First World War, the enthusiastic Afro-American secretary Max Yergan successfully started to reach out to young non-white South Africans. Prior to his South African work, the North American YMCA had dispatched him and two other Afro-American YMCA secretaries to Kenya, where they worked with African members of the Carrier Corps during the First World War. In Nairobi, Theodore Roosevelt had already founded the first YMCA branch of the Kenya colony in 1910. The French Alliance started YMCA activities in colonies such as Madagascar or Cameroon as early as 1924. As I will argue in the first part of this chapter, the establishment of the movement in Ethiopia in the late 1940s was not primarily the result of an increased interest by the movement in Africa. In contrast, its initial organization as a sub-branch of the Egyptian YMCA is yet another example of how Ethiopia was conceived of as belonging to North Africa or the Middle East. Arguably, the growing presence of the movement, and most prominently its North American model, in African (post-)colonial states from the 1950s onwards, as well as the increased political interest of the United States in Africa, resulted in the relocation of the Ethiopian YMCA within the East African context.

Facing socio-economic hardships in post-liberation Ethiopia, children and youth tried to carve out new possibilities. Many of them had lost their parents and family members. They often searched for chances in urban areas, and Addis Ababa became their prime destination. In order to survive, some youth operated in gangs. In the late 1940s, the Egyptian YMCA representative Naguib Kelada commented that one of the ‘recognized curses there [in Addis Ababa] is the habit of drinking’ and ‘a great deal of laxity in sexual morality’ due to ‘the utter absence of any provision for the proper use of leisure time of youth’.