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Leah Niederstadt Circus performances were unknown to most Ethiopians when the first troupe was established in the early 1990s by two expatriate residents of Addis Ababa. Today, dozens of circuses can be found throughout the country and Ethiopian circus acrobats, jugglers, and musicians have performed on nearly every continent (Fig. 1). From the beginning, expatriate and Ethiopian administrative and artistic staff combined circus skills such as juggling and contortion with indigenous forms of dance, song, and costumes and with didactic messages about social issues such as HIV/AIDS. They actively drew upon indigenous performance practices—secular and, to a lesser extent, religious—to create a form of circus that was uniquely and positively Ethiopian. They conceived of the country’s circus movement as a moral endeavor, one that allowed them to celebrate Ethiopia’s national identity with its emphasis on ethnic diversity and to educate the public about a variety of social challenges. Circus also became a means of empowering the country’s youngest citizens, as the performers in Ethiopian troupes are children and youth, not adults. Ethiopian circus performances provide two types of educational messages. First, they reinforce federal and regional state government rhetoric about the importance of ethnic diversity in the construction of a national Ethiopian identity. In doing so, they help teach Ethiopians about their country’s diversity, recognizing and celebrating it as a key component of national identity. Second, circus shows provide information about health and development issues and suggest how these challenges can be resolved. Several factors have combined to render circus performance a particularly popular mode of communication and entertainment, especially for addressing many of the challenges Ethiopia faces as one of Africa’s newest post-Socialist nation-states. These factors include the circus movement’s role in addressing a lacuna in leisure activities for one of the continent’s fastest growing young populations and the joining of familiar indigenous performance practices in music, song, and dance with gymnastics and the martial arts, sports with which many urban Ethiopians are familiar. The combination of free entertainment with didactic messages has also contributed to growth in the number of Ethiopian circus troupes as numerous NGOs and government agencies have proven willing to fund projects that reach large audiences with educational information about HIV/AIDS, the 1 Posters from the 1998 Circus in Ethiopia-sponsored tour to Europe displayed on the wall of Circus Jimma’s amphitheatre. Jimma, Ethiopia. 2003