3. Special Relationship
The people residing from the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean have a special relationship. The Ethiopian ambassador made this point very clearly and in several occasions in the two days I attended on the 25th and 26th. The people and the region can either move forward by acting together “like a great body that refuses mutilation” (Fanon) and works for enduring composition or they can also remain trapped in fighting, spreading hate and confusion by trying to pursue misguided missions to form nations without knowledge, resources and experience as Isias boasts. In Africa the post- colonial states have not been successful to bring about a tolerable and acceptable level of well being of the people nor bring fully yet the dignity and respect of Africa from marginalisation and constant state of conflict and warfare. The countries of the Horn of Africa by now should have learned the bitter lesson from the way they mutilated each other by joining the cold war and dying for an agenda which has nothing to do with their own welfare. Having failed to learn from the Cold War debacle, they seem to fall in once again for being victims of global agendas and global politics they have absolutely no part in manufacturing. Some of them fight on the side of one set of global actors that fight another set of global actors. As long as they continue to do so and behave with such subservience to other powers greater than them, they may have a geographical proximity, but may not be able to realise and cement their special relationship to construct a shared present and future free from war and misery. A special relationship means a unity of purpose and approach to develop a shared goal, direction and strategy on how to deal with the external forces and internal challenges in the region itself. How can” one Africa that fights against colonialism and another that attempts to make arrangements with it” (Fanon) ever unite to pursue shared goals either as good neighbours or as entities that need to share a common approach in relation to outside forces that come with their own exclusive agenda and/or internal challenges that can be overcome by deploying unity borne of the special historical, cultural and spatial connections of the region and the people in it?
4. Myth of Origin
Looking back far ahead at the possible birthdates of the names Ethiopia, Sudan, Djibouti, Eritrea and Somalia, one finds a remarkable history that they more or less originated in the same area and the forces that shaped each one has shaped the other. If we look back thus to the myth of origin of these entities, we find that it argues for their unity and composition rather than their division and fragmentation. If we take the Pre-Judaic, Pre- Christian and pre-Islamic phases of historical evolution, again the same thing transpires: the same forces that shaped each have shaped the others.
If we take the Judaic, Christian and Islamic periods respectively, we see a history of interaction, communication, migrations, wars, and a shared civilisation and extensive contact through trade with the outside world of Europe, India and China. We see not only did these entities from the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean communicate through mutual subjugation and the brutalities, injustices and oppressions recorded in history from the outside medieval and ancient worlds, but also through the migration of their own civilisations through the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, even the Atlantic and other outlets. (Shihan de S Jayasuriya & R. Pankhurst (eds.) The African Diaspora in The Indian Ocean, 2003) The division of these entities into the states as we know them as they are arranged now came during the notorious period of the European Scramble for Africa. During this period in the 19th century the people of this region were divided or mutilated and their determined resistance against the colonial encounter was largely and on the whole, though heroic, was unsuccessful. Even the Ethiopian kings that appeared to have been able to snatch and retain a territorially carved Ethiopian state formation that waxed and waned territorially over time from the jaws of the European scramble only were able to maintain and retain on the whole a tenuous grip. Their states have been constantly threatened by perfidious imperial humiliations through unequal treaties and unrealistic and unfair border demarcations that imbedded the seeds of all sorts of conflicts and antagonisms that have undermined state and unification in Ethiopia. The imperial- colonial pressure was victimising rather than building. Ethiopia emerged scathed with the scars and threats of the imperial agenda of the time falling prey to it once more by those it defeated, for example, at Adwa in 1896 and falling under fascist occupation between 1936 and 1941 under the Italians colonial adventures.