Harold G. Marcus
Ethiopian Review, April 1992
The primacy of politics in Africa has led to serious distortions of the historical record. This is no where more evident than in Ethiopian studies. The misrepresentation commenced with the student activism of the 1960s. When one reviews the student literature, one is immediately struck by the passionate and extravagant nature of its prose. Hyperbole is as normal as the Marxist language used to shape the authors’ analyses.
Combat was the organ of the Ethiopian Student Union in North America. The issue about the Union’s 20th Congress arrayed language characteristic of the mentality of the Ethiopian student at home and abroad. The Congress’s “Report” characterized Ethiopia as a “semi-feudal, semicolonial society,” from which “all the evils attending the lives of working people … emanate.” These evils were seen as “class oppression, national oppression, female oppression, separation between city and countryside, separation between mental and physical labor and all other social ills.” In order to destroy the prevailing political economy, a national democratic revolution and the establishment of “a people’s democratic revolutionary republic” was necessary. The latter would satisfy the peasant’s demand for landownership.
Combat also claimed that “The dominant mode of production in Ethiopia is feudalism existing side by side with an embryonic capitalist sector that has little prospect for development and is mostly owned and managed by imperialists.” Of course, by 1974, much of Eastern, Southern, and Western Ethiopia was dominated by landlords who had transformed cultivators into share- and cash-croppers. This phenomenon was hardly feudalism but market-driven capitalist agriculture.
In the north, especially radiating out from Addis Abeba and other urban centers, there was considerable truck-farming. Capitalist agriculture was growing so
significantly that during the late 1960s and up to the 1974 revolution farmers were being displaced from their homesteads, just as tens of thousands had been
removed in the 1940s and 1950s by the development of plantations in the Awash valley. Capitalism was well developed by 1974, so much so that attendant social
pressures are often cited as one of the causes of the revolution. The new farms and the many new factories that opened in Addis Abeba, Asmera, and Dre Dawa
were mostly owned by Ethiopian and resident foreigners. Although there was some outside investment, the Imperial government always complained that it was unable to raise sufficient foreign capital to undertake many desirable development projects.
The divergence between fact and fancy reveal that a significant and influential portion of Ethiopia’s intelligentsia in the 1970s was willing to come to whatever conclusions necessary to destroy the government of Haile Selassie. Even today, otherwise serious thinkers and scholars cannot free themselves of yesterday’s obsolete and rhetorical devices. For example, Dr. Bahru Zewde of Addis Abeba University’s Department of History recently wrote that once Haile Selassie achieved primacy after World War II, his “activities were bereft of social purpose. His political vision more or less ended with the subjugation of the nobility and creation of a centralized state. Thereafter power became an end in itself.”
One might argue, as I did in volume one of my biography of the Emperor that “Haile Selassie’s business was power, a metier curiously derided by his detractors, who have forgotten that the having and holding of authority is the preoccupation of most public men.” In any case, the record after the 1960s, the year of the
abortive coup against the Emperor, shows that the monarch used his power to promote many projects of high social purpose. He established a university,
which even after the brutish years of Mengistu Haile Mariam’s rule, maintains high international standards and an enviable research record. He built Ethiopian Airlines, still one of Africa’s leading airlines. He laid down thousands of kilometers of all-weather roads. He expanded Ethiopia’s educational system, and even though it served only about 10 percent of Ethiopia’s youth, they received a quality education that prepared them for jobs in a growing economy. He also established orphanages, hospitals and self-help institutions.
Throughout his reign, the Emperor had ruled his traditional people as the heir to ancient cultural traditions. As his post-war programs transformed the country, the Emperor avoided introducing any new and secular legitimization based on the universalist values or institutions. The data are clear that his reliance on charismatic themes and on the mystification surrounding the monarchy stemmed from his lack of experience and training in modern economics, public administration and mass politics. Yet he presided over and spurred the growth of capitalist agriculture which began to transform the countryside in the 1940s and was driving peasants off the land by the seventies. In fact, I long have argued that the so-called revolution of 1974 was a reaction to an economic development considered by important student intellectuals as exploitative and unfair.
So the rhetoric leads to a conclusion that is politically charged and baseless; whereas the public record reveals that the last period of the reign of Haile Selassie was not “bereft of social purpose,” but replete with social change forced by the articulation of capitalism.
The idea that Ethiopia and Ethiopians were incapable of independent policies and actions is carried to the absurd in creative writings about the Oromo. Passionately engaged in the Oromo quest for political sovereignty, various authors seek to create a historical nation called Oromia and fabricate a glorious history for the non-existent country. In these renditions, the northern Ethiopians are demonized as little better than devils victimizing innocent and good Oromos. Unable to concede that the Ethiopians could colonize the fictitious Oromia on their own and for their own reasons, the pro-Oromo authors “show how imperialism penetrated the Horn of Africa and created coalitions with the successive Ethiopian colonial ruling classes. This was achieved through the formation and maintenance of the Ethiopian state as a European informal colony, bringing various peoples, including the Oromo, under the logic of capitalism.” In another flight of pseudo- Marxist fancy, we are informed that “The green revolution was introduced by international imperialism to intensify agrarian capitalism and consolidate the colonial Ethiopian ruling class.” The distortions are so gross as to undermine any authority that history might have in helping resolve contemporary problems of Oromo integration into Ethiopia.
A few years ago at a conference, I rehearsed Asmerom Leggesse’s detailed scholarship to explain why the gada system, the Oromo age-graded, socio-political system had not worked well even for traditional Oromo pastorialists. After continuing that gada therefore would be of little use in governing any modern state, I sat down and listened to the rhetoric about the once and future glories of the gada. As I left the room in awe of the certainty expressed within, I was advised by Dr. Mohammed Hassan that I misunderstood the history of Oromo-Ethiopian relations. I puzzled over this strange criticism until I read his recently published work: The Oromo of Ethiopia: A History 1570-1860 (Cambridge, 1990).
Mohammed begins by indicting the now classic study of Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia 1270-1527 (Oxford, 1972), for ignoring the Oromo as a factor in the history of highlands Ethiopia from the 13th to the 16th century. Dr. Mohammed claims to have found in the sources by Dr. Taddesse “conclusive evidence which demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that some settled agricultural Oromo groups lived in and to the south of … Shoa before the fourteenth century.” His footnote here points, however, to his own dissertation, but he subsequently clarifies by citing linguistic evidence that the Oromo were one of Ethiopia’s primordial peoples: “To consider them as newcomers is a claim which has no historical foundation whatsoever.” He reveals the primordial Oromo as mixed farmers, some of whom became pastorialists when they moved to the lowlands. Never does he explain such a surprising development, rare in world history, but he cites Eike Haberland, Galla Sud-Athiopiens (Stuttgart, 1963) who passed along unsubstantiated Boran and Guji Oromo traditions. In other words, Mohammed has based his analysis on unverified hearsay.
Why make such sweeping claims on the basis of such tenuous material? The answer lies in the politics of ethnic competition in Ethiopia. If the Oromo inhabited the country’s central highlands before their historic invasions of the 17th century, then current politicians can characterize Christian semitic-speakers, whose official culture has long dominated modern Ethiopia, as colonialists. Dr. Mohammed seeks to fabricate what E.J. Hobsbawm characterizes as “retrospective mythology” usually derived from aspects of ethnicity such as the gada system.
In the late-nineteenth century, Menelik II (reigned 1889-1913) restored–or conquered depending on your politics–Solomonic rule in areas overrun by the Oromo in the 17th century. If Mohammed’s “retrospective mythology” is linked to a negative view of northern aggrandizement, then partisans can agitate for an independent Oromia or for a special place within Ethiopia. That negative view was provided in the inventive historical views about Oromos and Oromia now being presented as Gospel truth. Indeed, we are witnessing the creation of a new and poorly based historiography, the facts of which, if repeated often enough, will take on a veracity of their own.
It has happened before in the Ethiopian vortex: through vigorous repetition the Eritreans and their fellow travelers have created a new history, turning logic and fact on their heads to prove a political message: Ethiopia had no valid claim to Eritrea but was permitted to rule the colony by the British and the United States; the United Nations denied Eritrea its right to self-determination in 1950s when the Italian colony was federated to Ethiopia; and Eritrea emerged as a nation from its harsh experience with Italian colonialism.
It is important first to recall that the highlands of Eritrea (Hamasen, Akele Guzay, and Seraye) are peopled by Tigrigna-speaking Christian agriculturalists, who are socially identical with inhabitants of Tigray, the adjacent Ethiopian province. As late as 1888, an Ethiopian emperor put up a spirited and successful fight to retain the Eritrean highlands for Ethiopia, though the coastal strip long had been subject to foreign rule. Menelik II, for reasons of realpolitik, that is to safeguard Greater Ethiopia, permitted Rome to stay on the highlands in 1896, even after the definitive Battle of Adwa. A cardinal feature of Haile Selassie’s policy after 1941, after his return from exile, however, was to regain Eritrea for Ethiopia.
The Allied Foreign Ministers who visited Eritrea in 1948 and a UN fact-finding team that surveyed the colony in 1950, found little evidence of either national identity or of a viable economy. In 1948, Ethiopia had shown it had the military strength and the diplomatic subtlety to rid the Ogaden of the British. While the politics were different, the Ethiopians unilaterally could have moved into Eritrea and encountered little resistance. Indeed, in the highlands the Christian population was largely unionist and would have welcomed the Ethiopian troops. The British and the Americans therefore concluded that they should not stand in the way of a federation between Ethiopia and Eritrea, especially since the Korean War had proved Addis Abeba to be pro-Western. Nobody gave Ethiopia anything. Haile Selassie’s national policy and diplomacy won Eritrea, and it is demeaning for Addis Abeba to be regarded as merely a pawn in international relations. The logic is reminiscent of
the Oromo view that Ethiopia could not have defeated the Oromo without being allied to international capital.
For most of the colonial period, there were few Italians in Eritrea, and the population continued their very local lives without European interference. True, the Italian population swelled during the Ethiopian crisis of 1935-36, when Rome used Eritrea as its spring-board into the interior. Many young Eritreans were absorbed into the Italian military. That period ended in 1941 when a combined Allied (largely British empire) and Ethiopian force quickly defeated the Italians. From 1942 to 1952, while a British military administration ruled Eritrea, the colony’s Italian population rapidly diminished, the economy eroded, and many Eritreans returned to their local lives. Admittedly, Eritrea’s experience was different than Ethiopia’s, but the latter, as an African survivor of imperialism, had an overriding national interest in regaining access to the sea. If anything led to the Eritrean rebellion, it was Ethiopia’s poor stewardship of the ex- colony after 1952, its determination to destroy the federation, and its intention to absorb Eritrea into the nation simply as province.
Issayas Afeworki, the leader of the Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front, is fond of misstating his new country’s history with, of course, a heroic twist. At the constitutional conference of Addis Abeba in June 1991, he responded to a factual rehearsal of Eritrea’s long-standing relationship with Ethiopia by stating that history had no role to play in resolving the post-Mengistu political crisis. In the most immediate way, he is probably correct, although in a more profound sense, he is wrong. In Ethiopia, history has a knack for reimposing its authority over fragmentation and deconstruction.
The country’s history contains an analytical truth validating the idea of a large, historic, and united state. From time to time, the nation had disintegrated into
component parts, but it never disappeared as an idea and always reappeared in fact. The Axumite Empire may have faded after the seventh century, but the Zagwes
followed in the eleventh century. The succeeding Solomonic dynasty created a state which incorporated at least two thirds of the country’s present space. In the sixteen century, that empire was devastated by Muslim armies waging holy war and sharply contracted as the Oromo successfully invaded the now depopulated highlands in the seventeenth century.
Even as the Solomonic dynasty declined in the eighteenth century, the imperial tradition was validated in Ethiopia’s monasteries and parish churches. The northern peasantry was reminded continuously of Ethiopia’s earlier greatness and exhorted to work toward its renaissance. From 1896 to 1907, Menelik II directed Ethiopia’s return into southern and western regions abandoned in the seventeenth century. There they found the ruins of long-abandoned churches and monasteries but culturally different people, most of whom lived in segmentary societies who practiced animal husbandry or digging stick or hoe agriculture and followed traditional religions of Islam and spoke non-Semitic languages.
To them, the northerners were aliens. Their firearms and more complex social organization gave them a material advantage, but they also were inspired by the idea that they were regaining lands once part of their state. Menelik certainly believed that he and his soldiers would restore Ethiopia to its historic grandeur and size. By the end of the expansionary impulse in 1906, Ethiopia was at its present size, comprising the highlands, the key river systems and the state’s central core surrounded by a borderland buffer zone in low-lying, arid or tropical zones.
From the Axumite period, public history in Ethiopia has moved from north to south, and the 20th century state developed along this well trodden path. Menelik and Haile Selassie ruled Ethiopia’s heterogeneous population largely through accommodation and cooptation. The latter built a centralized state and expanded Ethiopia’s civil society as a counterweight to ethnic forces. He fostered unity through the development of national institutions, and pan-Ethiopian economy, modern communications and an official culture whose main feature was the use of Amharic language in government and education.
As Ethiopia’s economy began to be transformed in the 1960s through the articulation of capitalism, considerable social unrest emerged among the peasantry to undermine loyalty to the national consensus. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the old authorities resorted to police repression to keep Ethiopia intact and used clients to bolster its administration in the Ogaden and in Eritrea. Haile Selassie’s government was replaced in 1974 by an ideologically driven inclusivist state determined to extirpate any competing civil society and/or ethnic activity. Ruthless repression of ideological adversaries led to the growth of nationality movements and
ongoing civil wars.
The military government’s tightly centralized authority imposed land tenure and social policies which undermined the peasant’s historic connection to the state. Resettlement, villagization, mass political organizations and the command economy conspired to alienate the people from their natural allegiance. The state’s inability to compromise politically may have led to the destruction of the nation. Moreover, the present government’s belief that it can build a unitary state on the basis of cooperating ethnicities contradicts longstanding historical experience and such blatant recent events as the breakup of Yugoslavia, the imminent demise of Czechoslovakia and the continuing crisis in Belgium. Yet, if history is to be our guide, such a development will give way inevitably to renewed national unity as the logic of geography, economics and tradition once again come to dominate politics. If there is authority in history, then in the Ethiopian case it suggests that the greater state will reestablish itself, perhaps this time with a new official culture.
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Harold Marcus is a Professor of History at Michigan State University.