Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multiethnic Society

Explananda

Preface 2000

September 12, 1974, was the official date of publication for the first edition of Greater Ethiopia. It was also the date on which Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed by officers of the Provisional Military Administrative Council, known as the Derg. With that action, the Derg put an end to the institution that played so large a role in the story presented in this book. Subsequent Derg actions provoked revolts that within two decades caused an epidemic of ethnic and regional hostilities, three secessionist movements, and one successful secession, as well as its own downfall.

In view of those disintegrative changes, it was natural to fault Greater Ethiopia for painting an unrealistic picture of Ethiopia as a sustainable multiethnic society. Although the book does depict lines of internal differentiation and external influences that led to enormous diversity among the peoples of Ethiopia, its argument focused on the foundations of unity and patterns of unification. This emphasis was made both for scientific reasons, because the notion of Ethiopia as a congeries of discrete ethnic entities is simply counterfactual; and for practical reasons, out of anxiety about the future of Ethiopia’s cohesiveness following the regime of Haile Selassie. As subsequent events made painfully clear, that anxiety was justified.

Since the Derg regime ended in 1991, issues raised in Greater Ethiopia have come to the fore in discourse about the future of Ethiopia. That is, of course, personally gratifying, and I am delighted that the book is being reissued now in an Amharic translation and a fresh English edition. For these publications I have composed a short bibliographical addendum. In this new preface, I shall sketch two arguments that may enhance the book’s contribution to contemporary discourse: an analysis of the grounds for increased interethnic hostilities in Ethiopia in the past quarter century, and a suggestion of ways in which Ethiopians might work to overcome those hostilities and build a more harmonious, just, and open society.

The interethnic hostilities that flared up in Ethiopia following the demise of the Derg reflected, not a sudden manifestation of ethnic tensions, but a process of internal divisiveness going back for decades. In 1962 a major challenge to the Ethiopian center began to brew with the formation of an insurgent liberation front in Eritrea. In 1966 the Metcha-Tulema Development Association began to stake out claims for the Oromo, after which their suppression by the government led to an insurgency in northern Bali. Within the modernizing sector growing tensions were manifest, for example, by serious fights between Tigrean and Oromo students at the Wingate School in the late 1960s, and an Oromo nationalist publication was circulated clandestinely in Addis Ababa in 1971.

With the overthrow of the monarchy, tensions increased. Nearly every political faction that took part in the postrevolutionary skirmishing made appeals to a principle of self-determination of nationalities. Except for the Ethiopian Democratic Union, all of the factions went a long way toward conceding a right of secession, including the presumably centrist EPRP (Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Party) and even the Seded party to which the head of the Derg, Mengistu Haile-Mariam, belonged. This sympathy for the self-determination of nationalities led naturally to the formation of insurgent opposition groups on ethnic lines. When a coalition of these ethnic insurgent groups overthrew the Derg, it was not surprising that ethnic allegiances and identities became politicized in consequence. The ascendancy of the Tigrean People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and its ethnicist ideology, however much they intensified the trend, must be seen more as a symptom than as a primary cause of the problem. What can be said about its underlying causes?

Sociological analysis points to three factors that intensify local tensions in any society: an administratively strengthened center, a geopolitically weakened center, and a culturally depleted center.

Throughout Ethiopia’s history there have been tensions between the national center and diverse regional and ethnic groups. Yet the bureaucratic centralization of the postwar years was bound to exacerbate these tensions at the same time that it created elements of enhanced national unity. In a seminal analysis of this problem in the developing states of Africa and Asia first published in 1963, Clifford Geertz described this modern transformation toward greater national unity as an integrative revolution, a change that necessarily involved an intensification of loyalties along lines of ethnicity, clanship, language, locality, race, religion, and/or tradition. More recently, several nations of Europe and North America have experienced comparable developments in waves of what has been called ethnonationalism.

Geertz argued that peoples in modernizing societies are animated by two powerful, thoroughly interdependent, yet distinct and often actually opposed motives—the desire to be recognized as responsible persons whose wishes, acts, hopes, and opinions matter, and the desire to build an efficient, dynamic modern state. The first aim reflects a powerful wish to be noticed. It is a search for identity coupled with a demand that this identity be publicly acknowledged—a social assertion of the self as having value in the world. The other aim is a demand for progress: for a rising standard of living, more effective political order, greater social justice, and heightened international visibility. As the second aim is pursued—as national governments become more effective in pursuing collective aims—the tension increases, because people’s sense of self remains linked so closely to attachments based on identities that are not national in scope. To subordinate these familiar identifications to an overarching and often alien civil order is to risk a loss of definition as an autonomous person, either through absorption into a culturally undifferentiated mass or, what seems worse, through domination by some rival ethnic, racial, or linguistic community that is able to imbue that order with the temper of its own personality.

Political modernization quickens sentiments like ethnicity, then, because it involves new extensions of central political institutions into personal lives at many points. Through such structures as nationally organized schools, judicial systems, media broadcasts, taxation, road construction, land-development programs, and electoral campaigns, persons whose lives had been circumscribed by local customs and authorities become ambivalently linked to a national center. They want the benefits such a center provides but not at the cost of humiliating subordination. Those who enter the modern sector through education enter an arena of intensified competition for jobs, authority., and status. Those who stay in the traditional sectors often become more identified with local ways in response to threats to their traditional status and ways of living. All these forces produce greater visibility of ethnic identities, along with more competition and tensions among ethnic groups that formerly got along quietly with one another. It is a time when long-submerged peoples slowly warm to their own self-discovery and begin to recall or imagine a shared past filled with glories, often even to engender resentments against a dominant power that seems responsible for their unrequited dreams and current humiliations. In sum: the dynamics of modernization entail an inexorable increase in conflicts among groups organized along such lines as race, language, ethnicity, religion, or region, in societies where such groups have traditionally lived side by side. The spread of education makes these groups more aware of their identities and interests; increased power, prestige, and wealth at the center give them new ambitions; improved communications give them an arena in which to compete; and the increase of outside interventions makes local groups more sensitive to the identities of agents of the center who are regulating their lives in new ways.

Although Ethiopia had the advantage of existing as a multiethnic polity for two thousand years, it could not remain immune to this dynamic forever. Primordial assertions germinated during the last years of Haile Selassie and sprouted under the Derg. These trends were intensified by two other factors. One was Ethiopia’s declining geopolitical status. Sociologist Randall Collins has argued that ethnic groups tend to assimilate the language and culture of a dominant ethnic group during times when a nation or empire is enjoying political and military success, while a process of ethnic separatism sets in when a state becomes geopolitically weak. The latter process, Balkanization, occurred classically during the nineteenth century when, due to the weakening of the Austrian and Turkish regimes, anti-Austrian and anti-Turkish sentiments provided major points of reference for unleashing political activism among the peoples of the Balkan peninsula.

Following World War II, both the United States and Ethiopia were enjoying a good deal of international prestige. In both countries, various groups tended to accept the dominant culture associated with the national center, through the respective processes of Americanization and Amharization. In the 1960s, the U.S. troubles in Vietnam diminished the prestige of the center and subnational identities came to be asserted more aggressively. A comparable development took place in Ethiopia with the loss of Ethiopia’s strategic importance due to the obsolescence of the Kagnew Station in Eritrea, which led to diminished support from the United States.

Perhaps even more important was the threat to the national center posed by internal cultural difficulties. I refer to problems posed by the decline in authority of the Solomonid ideology as a basis for legitimating the national center. As Greater Ethiopia argues, the Kibre Negest provided Ethiopia with an effective national script which offered a charter for establishing and restoring a multiethnic polity that endured for nearly a millennium. This ideology could also be adapted to legitimate a modernizing emperor on the model of Japan; for the first decades of this century, Ethiopian intellectuals viewed Japan as the preeminent model Ethiopia might follow to energize its modernizing process. Yet the time arrived when the Solomonid ideology could no longer serve as a script for the Ethiopian nation, both because of its sacralization of imperial authority and because its linkage with the Christian tradition rendered the inclusion of non-Christian groups increasingly difficult.

Ethiopian intellectuals who searched for a new cultural script thought they had found it in Marxism, rather than in the vision of a liberal democracy that acknowledged both the rights of all citizens and the values of their constituent cultural traditions. The absence of well-established support for the liberal alternative helped legitimate the atrocities of the Mengistu regime. (I feared such a horrible future might be in store for the country when a young Ethiopian intellectual, years before the Derg came to power, told me that he and his friends were admiring the model of the Soviet Union. When I reminded him that the Soviet Union killed off an estimated twenty million people in pursuing the communist revolution, he replied that they did not think killing off ten percent of Ethiopia’s population would be too high a price to pay for social progress.)

When the shortcomings of Marxism became apparent, what was left? Ethiopia faced a cultural dilemma that proved no less formidable than the crises posed by a shattered economy and an enfeebled political structure. She stood in need of ideas and symbols that could fill the vacuum left by the overthrow both of the Solomonid royal ideology and the revolutionary ideology of Marxism. Her cultural dilemma quite resembled that of France in the 1820s, when Auguste Comte diagnosed French society as suffering from moral anarchy; Comte attributed this condition to the assault on monarchist and Catholic beliefs by a revolutionary ideology which nonetheless failed to offer positive beliefs suitable for reorganizing society in a postrevolutionary epoch. Since insurgent opponents of the Derg had failed to organize around a vision of their country as a historic multiethnic nation, disparate ethnic identities seemed the only available principle for organizing a political future. From Marxism they salvaged only the Stalinist principle (which of course was never respected in the USSR) of self-determination up to secession. The new ideology of Ethiopia was to view it as consisting of an aggregation of numerous ethnic liberation movements.

In order to promote this ideology, its supporters had to find an oppressor from whom the various ethnic groups had to be liberated, and they found it in the image of the wicked Amhara. There was just enough truth in this image to make it plausible and attractive to many Ethiopians. It is true that the cement used to build a modernizing Ethiopian nation included the use of Amharic as a national language. Never mind that Amharic historically grew through the interaction of many ethnic groups, as an amalgam of linguistic features from many language families—North Ethiosemitic, South Ethiosemitic, Central Cushitic, and Eastern Cushitic—and that it provided a lingua franca that enabled Ethiopians from diverse backgrounds to communicate with one another. The fact is that some people found it oppressive to have to use Amharic in schools and in courts and, perhaps even more, resented having familiar place-names changed into Amharic. It is also the case that the Amhara elite, despite its own ethnically-mixed genealogies, tended to depreciate the customs and manners of Ethiopians from other ethnic groups. And it is surely the case that many Amhara—but also Tigrean and Oromo—soldiers and officials were rewarded by grants of land in parts of the country where the indigenous peoples were expropriated and often treated abusively.

All this must be said and understood, yet these facts do not tell the whole story. Knowledgeable scholars attest that the so-called Amhara elite of the Ethiopian state was robustly multiethnic for many centuries. In particular, one should note the prominence of Oromo in the royal court at Gonder in the eighteenth century, when Emperor Bakaffa employed Oromo soldiers as palace officers, Iyasu II married an Oromo woman from Wello, and his son Iyoas I insisted on speaking Oromiffa at the court. Perhaps better known is the fact that Tigreans played a crucial role in Ethiopian national politics over the centuries, including such figures as Ras Mikael Sehul, a major figure during the Zemena Mesafint; the Tigrean Emperor Yohannes who ruled the empire in the 1870s and 1880s; and figures like Ras Alula, Ras Mengesha, Dejazmatch Bahta (of Akale Guzae), and other Tigreans who helped preserve Ethiopia’s independence in the fighting before and at the Battle of Adwa, along with Oromo officers like Ras Gobena and Dejazmatch Balcha.

The image of the Amhara oppressor also overlooks the contributions of Amhara rulership to the well-being of other Ethiopian peoples. The conquests carried out under Menilek—largely, but not wholly, by Amhara, for Tigreans, Oromos, and others also took part, and the hegemony in question should more properly be styled Shoan than Amhara—also prepared the way for the unification of the country. This led to such beneficial reforms as the outlawing of the slave trade in the 1920s, the construction of roads and telecommunications, the introduction of schools, the use of a common currency, the provision of medical centers, the pacification of a country where intergroup warfare had been common, and putting an end to the widespread brigandage that endangered travel.

To be honest, this image also overlooks even harsher realities. For one thing, the fact remains that ninety-five percent of the Amhara people have lived under such oppressive political and economic conditions that it is hard to say who was most oppressed. What is more, the image overlooks the oppressive practices of other ethnic groups toward Amhara and toward one another. Tigreans, Oromos, and others took slaves. Adalis and Oromos also wrought destruction, not only of people but also of beautiful churches and rare manuscripts, and the severity of Oromo incursions led the Hararis to build their famous wall.

In addition, the representatives of Amhara domination who conquered and colonized the peoples of southern Ethiopia did not come from all parts of the Amharic-speaking territory, but primarily from Shoa province. Strictly speaking, one should really speak of a Shoan dynasty under Emperors Menilek and Haile Selassie rather than of Amhara hegemony, in the same way that other regional dynasties—in Tigray, Gondar, and Lasta—exerted imperial control at other times in the preceding millennium. Indeed, most Amhara areas received very little attention under the regime of the last Shoan emperor. The lion’s share of Haile Selassie’s beneficence went to urban centers—Addis Ababa, Asmara, Harar, Dire Dawa—while Amhara homelands like Gojjam, Begemidir, and Menz were notoriously neglected. And it should be recalled that the Shoans provided the leadership that protected all the peoples of Greater Ethiopia from falling prey to European imperialism (except, of course, the portion of Ethiopian territory the Italians called Eritrea). Yet it would be a severely distorted reading of Ethiopian history to view that effort as exclusively Shoan. The forces that protected Ethiopia against the Italians contained soldiers from many regions—including Akale Guzae, Wallo, Lasta, Mecha—and from many ethnic groups, including Gurage, Wolamo (Woleita), Konta, Kulo, Limu, and Kaffa, as well as Amhara, Oromo, and Tigreans. The coalition of forces that defeated the Italians was a powerful testimony to the symbolism of an independent multiethnic Ethiopian polity. Such a successful multiethnic coalition was not to be seen again until the concert of forces that brought down the oppressive regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam.

Finally, the image of Amhara ethnic oppression overlooks the fact of Ethiopia as a historic multiethnic society, united by ties of intermarriage, trade, migration, multiethnic religions, ceremonies, and pilgrimages—a major lesson of Greater Ethiopia. It must be readily acknowledged that Ethiopia’s peoples are enormously more similar and historically connected than are the different nationalities that composed the Soviet Union.

Many Ethiopians are aware of this. That is why Ethiopians from so many ethnic backgrounds have found it galling to hear their nation’s political discourse preempted by talk of ethnic liberationism. They cherish the historic reality of Ethiopia as a genuinely multiethnic society. They fear the mobilization of ethnic hatreds that made a corpse of Yugoslavia and killed thousands in former Soviet republics like Moldova, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Tajikistan, and, closer to home, in Rwanda. They dream of a future where Ethiopia’s transformation to a modern, pluralistic democracy can be completed.

To update the argument of Greater Ethiopia, then, is to pursue a search for ways to construct a new Ethiopia with a view toward national unity and justice. Outside of direct political action, students of ethnic conflict like Donald Horowitz have identified a number of ways that citizens can neutralize the tendencies toward Balkanization. They can promote organizations based on multiethnic coalitions, organizations that are devoted to dealing with global economic, social, and cultural matters. They can become active in institutions that are group-blind, such as the Red Cross and human rights organizations. In all organizations in which they participate, they can promote distributive justice, working to ensure minimally representative access to public resources for all ethnic groups. They can be mindful of differences that crosscut ethnicity by reflecting cleavages along other lines, such as region, religion, ideology, or occupation. They can work to promote new cultural constructions of a multiethnic national identity appropriate to a post-monarchical, post-Leninist society.

In response to the question posed below—"Should the imperial expansion under Emperors Yohannes IV and Menilek II be viewed basically as a subjugation of alien peoples or an in-gathering of peoples with deep historical affinities?—the realities that underlie both images will somehow have to be taken into account as the current generation of Ethiopian intellectuals works to shape their collective self-understanding. Peoples outside the northern highlands need to have their traditions respected and their deprivations following the Menilek conquests acknowledged, at the same time that the sense in which the varied peoples of Ethiopia belong to a common culture area and the special historic role of each needs to be appreciated. Imagine what might be done by propagating a vision of the future that integrates, rather than repudiates, the positive achievements of the past. That is the burden of the latter part of this book, which celebrates the traditional Oromo capacity for democratic political organization and the historic Amhara-Tigrean creation of a multiethnic polity. To that must be added the industry of Gurage and Beta Israel, the artistry of Harar and Dorze, and the myriad contributions of all the elements of Talaqitu Ityopya. Animated by this understanding, Ethiopians may now be able to transform the solidarity and courage that went into fighting the Battle of Adwa into the solidarity and courage it takes to sustain a non-violent political process that works toward a larger community based on unity, justice, and democracy. Perhaps it is time at last for all Ethiopians to stretch out their hands—to embrace one another and to reclaim their historic heritage.

Preface

For people in many countries the name Ethiopia is still connected mainly with the Italian invasion of 1935. A new wave of books on the Italo-Ethiopian War published in the last decade testifies to a continuing interest in that fateful event.

The usual question regarding the Italian invasion is what weaknesses in the international system permitted this aggression. One may also ask, Why Ethiopia? What was it that enabled Ethiopia alone among traditional African societies to retain its sovereignty until the Italians chose to exercise their anachronistic appetite for empire in the 1930s?

How much weight can one give the policies of European powers and the feats of Ethiopian emperors? Accounts of these two variables, important though they are, do not tell the whole story. To be sure, keen competition between England and France in Northeast Africa prevented either from gaining decisive supremacy there. It is also true that Tewodros II, Yohannes IV, and Menilek II presided over a reconstruction of the Ethiopian Empire that gave their people the strength to withstand repeated incursions from Egypt, Sudan, and Italy. Still, internal characteristics of Ethiopian society not commonly recognized were essential conditions for the viability of the Ethiopian state and the success of its rulers.

My objective in this work is to examine those internal characteristics from a sociologic perspective. Psychological and environmental factors will not be ignored, but their significance will be caught as they relate to structural properties of sociocultural systems. Structure, of course, is an ambiguous term. I use it here to refer to three kinds of social facts—institutional orders, interactional patterns, and cultural codes—the meaning of which will emerge in context.

In carrying out this examination it has seemed necessary to establish certain conceptions of the Ethiopian experience as a whole which differ from those apparent in most other writings. For this reason I begin with a general analysis of prevailing images of Ethiopia, both those purveyed by popular writers through the ages and those adopted by professional scholars. My argument proceeds by developing a picture of the Ethiopian experience that draws on recent anthropological and linguistic research and articulates the factors of unity and diversity within a civilizational area that I call Greater Ethiopia. With this revised image as background, I focus on the three main ethnic groups: Tigreans, Amhara, and Oromo or Galla. My principal analytic task is to determine the main structural features of the traditional Amhara-Tigrean and Oromo sociocultural systems. This analysis affords a basis for understanding their respective historical roles and assessing their contributions to the formation and survival of an autonomous Ethiopian society. I hope that the analysis may also suggest useful generalizations about social structure in both comparative and evolutionary perspective. The concluding chapter explicitly relates that analysis to recent work on the process of social