This year’s ‘Olympics of the art world’ features many artists wrestling with ideas of colonialism and its lingering influence

This year’s Venice Biennale is being billed as an event rooted in the now, in a world of conflict and division – or, as one newspaper put it, the celebration of global art will be full of “ war, refugees, destruction ”.

Another theme that runs through many of the pavilions is colonialism: both its legacy in the form of restitution debates, and Europe’s lingering presence – physically and psychologically – in those countries that were formerly colonised.

Coffee is the country’s biggest export, but millions of smallholders are being asked to provide paperwork to prove their land is not deforested

The first white flowers are starting to appear on the branches of Habtamu Wolde’s coffee bushes in the Kafa region of southwest Ethiopia. They will bloom several more times before turning into round red cherries ready for harvesting in October. Then they will be prepared for export and shipped to the capital.

“Our coffee is iconic, you cannot find a higher grade,” boasts Habtamu. Coffee is more than a drink in Kafa. This region claims to be the birthplace of Arabica coffee, which grows naturally in its temperate cloud forests. The plant is at the centre of daily life and the people’s main source of income.

In an ancient walled city in eastern Ethiopia, the animals are fed in return for cleaning up the streets and keeping spirits at bay

• Photographs by Guillaume Petermann

The hyenas gather as night settles. The bolder animals come early and lounge around, undisturbed by the loud blare of mosques calling people to prayer. By the time Abbas Yusuf arrives, dozens lurk in the semi-darkness, pacing over shards of splintered bone and broken glass.

Abbas whistles and calls, tossing out a few chunks of meat. Then he beckons over the small group of tourists who have come to watch. They take turns feeding the hyenas from sticks, flinching and giggling as the animals tentatively grab the meat between their jaws and scuttle off.

The hyenas pounce on the meat left out for them. Their teeth and jaws are specially adapted for crushing bones

Trhas Tesfay, who fled war in Ethiopia, says she suffers hunger headaches as she cannot eat Home Office hotel meals

One of Ethiopia’s elite female cyclists will be pedalling at the front of one of London’s biggest bike races next month while living in an asylum seeker hotel on less than £10 a week.

Gold medal winner Trhas Teklehaimanot Tesfay, 22, rode a bicycle for the first time when she was 13 years old. She has achieved success in a range of competitions such as the African continental championships and the national championships of Ethiopia.

Ethiopia’s push to attract tourism and investment has seen the demolition of a historic district in the capital, with people’s homes and livelihoods destroyed

In the heart of Addis Ababa, the historic, ramshackle neighbourhood of Piassa once teemed with shops and cafes. People would come from across Ethiopia’s capital city to buy anything from jeans to jewellery.

Today it lies in ruins. Its distinctive stone houses, with their wooden balconies and slanting metal roofs, are almost all gone. In their place are jagged fields of rubble, picked over by workers with sledgehammers.

Poet who is curating country’s first Venice Biennale pavilion says ‘part of the heart’ of the country was looted and is being held in museums

An Ethiopian cultural surge – including a first national pavilion at the Venice Biennale and the rise of stars such as Ruth Negga and The Weeknd – is making the country’s calls for restitution of looted colonial-era artefacts harder to ignore, according to Lemn Sissay.

The poet and author, who is curating the country’s inaugural Biennale pavilion, where Tesfaye Urgessa ’s work will be on show, said the event would be part of a significant cultural push from the east African country and its diaspora over the last two decades.

Watchdog examining claims key details have not been disclosed about altar tablets it is facing calls to return

The British Museum is being investigated by the information watchdog over claims it has been overly secretive about some of the most sensitive items in its collection – a group of sacred Ethiopian altar tablets that have been hidden from view at the museum for more than 150 years.

The 11 wood and stone tabots, which the museum acknowledges were looted by British soldiers after the Battle of Maqdala in 1868, have never been on public display and are considered to be so sacred that even the institution’s own curators and trustees are forbidden from examining them.

With the disease raging in 15 countries and no vaccine stocks, Zambia and the WHO propose a way to finally eradicate it

In the 1840s, a prominent health notion of the time – the “miasma theory” – suggested that bad smells and bad air led to people contracting diseases such as cholera and the Black Death. By the end of the decade, more than 50,000 deaths had been recorded in England and Wales.

In 1849 John Snow – a young physician considered one of the founders of modern epidemiology – had become sceptical of the prevailing theory and suggested that contaminated water may instead be the main form of transmission.

Robin Dimet’s heartfelt documentary follows Sami, who has spent nearly two decades translating classical mythology into Amharic, to the detriment of other parts of his life

In Robin Dimet’s heartfelt documentary, literary translation is a lonely, precarious pursuit. Living in a rudimentarily furnished home in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa, sixtysomething Sami has spent nearly two decades translating Greek mythology into Amharic. Slight in frame, the reticent figure only lights up when he speaks of his colossal project, which has grown into an all-consuming obsession. The book has overwhelmed all other aspects of his life, leaving friends, relatives and Sami’s own wellbeing in the rearview mirror.

The film often observes him from a distance, as he moves across a fragmented, fluctuating urban landscape sprouting with towering new developments. Here is a man who, because of his ardent passion, is perpetually out of step with the times. In spite of his bashfulness, Sami is also embraced by a robust circle of artists and intellectuals, who offer him emotional as well as financial support for the completion of his manuscript. At the same time, at the launch for his long-awaited book, Sami is strangely at a loss for words, as he refuses to give a speech about his efforts. Perhaps, his ambivalence about his achievement stems from what he considers to be a wasted youth, spent in the shadow of Mengistu Haile Mariam’s regime.