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Features
Humanity, its beauty and absurdity: the Ethiopian case
Elyas Mulu Kiros
2012-07-26, Issue 595
http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/83910
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One of the defining characters of human beings is our awareness of our own existence either as an independent individual or as members of groups that we create based on bloodlines or cultural, economical, political, religious, and sexual associations.
Indeed no (wo)man is an island. Whether he or she likes it or not, the individual is forced or chooses to be associated with a nation, a community, a group, an identity, a species, or the universe as a whole. I, for example, am a being, a human being, born from Ethiopian parents whose ethnic identity is Tigrayan, whose country is part of Africa; my skin color is black, thus am called a black man; I am a blogger, therefore, I have developed a sense of connection with other bloggers, especially with those I met on wordpress.com.
We often form bonds easily with those we associate ourselves with. Why? It’s safer. It feels like home. You consider yourself a family. And family is the smallest unit of anything bigger: an ethnicity, a race, a province, a nation, a continent, a religion, a philosophy, a planet, etc.
When I, for example, miss Ethiopia, I call home to know first how my parents and siblings are doing (my blood relatives); then I ask about my extended family; then my neighbors, and about my friends; then about the town’s people in general; finally I try to keep up with every news on the country. What I do is more or less similar to what every human being does. Through our associations with these various options we have, we develop a sense of belonging.
When negative things happen in the name of the association we embrace, we may try to disassociate. Or even if we have nothing to do with the negative thing, due to our association, those who are victims may blame us and expect us to confess a sin we haven’t committed. As a result, we may either resent the blamers and become aggressive to defend ourselves, and those we are associated with; or, we may feel guilty and try to hide or negate our association.
As I stated above, here is one my associations: I identify myself as an Ethiopian born from Tigrayan parents. Neither my parents nor I chose to have that identity. My parents inherited the identity from their parents, and those around them also identified them with it. As a child, I remember, kids from different ethnicity used to call me: Tigray Lirgetih BandEgre, meaning: hey, Tigray dude, let me kick your ass! As children, of course, they said it without fully understanding its implication or future effect on me; however, they were fully aware, or were told by their parents, that I was different from them, that I was a Tigrayan; otherwise, why would they bully me?
I have forgiven, but will never forget, for instance, this kid who persistently bullied me to the point my parents had to get involved and fight with his parents. By the way, this has little to do with the fact the then fledgling current government was officially starting to promote ethnic federalism; I mention this because some have the tendency to attribute any problem related to ethnicity to the regime. Tigrayans or others have always been identified by their ethnic identities. And ethnic stereotypes have existed throughout the country’s history.
After the bullying incident that forced my parents to get involved, political tensions brewed at the national and regional levels, especially after the rebel groups that participated in removing the former dictator couldn’t agree with each other on power sharing. The governing party, Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), was founded by Tigrayan rebels, organised under Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), that ousted the Mengistu junta in coalition with other rebel movements such as Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), and Amhara National Democratic Movement (ANDM). Following that tension came a skirmish.
The most visible rebel group from my region, OLF, accused the TPLF-led EPRDF party of unfairness and went back to armed struggle. It was then when it became obvious that the bullying I faced in elementary school was a foreshadow to what awaited me, my family and a few other Tigrayans in the town, where we found ourselves as easy targets for grievance. We were treated as scapegoats because of our ethnic association with those in power. None of us, however, had any influence in national, regional or local politics whatsoever.
My parents, for example, are poor peasants who only minded their business just like every other peasant. Nor were they given any special treatment by the state. In fact, we were one of the first internally displaced communities whose stories never got reported. We were considered ‘outsiders’ in our own country and were driven out of our homes, forced to relocate and live in another town, renting a basement first and moving into a shack next since that was what we could afford. It was better than sleeping in the street, though we were technically homeless.
Now, as a grownup twenty-something guy, the childhood bullying by association has yet to leave me alone. Some unashamedly want me to feel guilty or sorry for party wrongdoings that have also made my family and other families victims. Not to mention I was once denied an internship opportunity at a supposedly ‘independent’ US-based international organisation. One of the associates informed me through email that I could potentially be ‘a regime infiltrator’, after I told them about my ethnic background and what I think of the politics in Ethiopia during an interview.
I will wait for the right time to expose their blatant bias and unprofessionalism. By US law, it is illegal to discriminate based on race or ethnicity. It is not fair too to accuse someone without evidence, an action that contradicts their protest against the Ethiopian regime for doing exactly the same. I could have reported it, but I saw no point. Regardless, it was a great lesson for me that showed me how the so-called independent organisations function and how the ‘experts’ can be easily influenced or can bank on selling prejudice to make a living. For those who may doubt this, I have their email saved. I am still astonished they openly expressed their bias.
That ethnocentric paranoia is also one of the reasons why many Tigrayans reserve themselves from giving their support to the oppositions because they know that no matter how genuinely they want to support, they will always be doubted by those who self-appoint themselves as the ‘real Ethiopians’, ‘real oppositions’, the only ones entitled to rule or speak about Ethiopia. First of all, regarding the Ethiopian identity, everyone who carries an Ethiopian passport is Ethiopian, whether one despises that or not. There is no such thing called real, unreal, unless one wants to inflate one’s self-importance. It is a delusion to think that one is less trustworthy than the other because either one comes from a certain ethnicity or one refuses to write or say only negative things about the regime and by extension about Ethiopia twenty four seven. For me, this kind of attitude is an insult, very patronising and counterproductive.
The trust issue also explains why the opposition groups remain ineffective, giving the ruling party an easy ride on the political highway. Let alone trust Tigrayans who by default are considered TPLF loyalists, though there are more than enough people from the community that no longer support it; the opposition, composed of ethno-nationalists and mostly ultranationalist groups, can’t even trust each other.
Mainly because of my ethnic background, some have made it a habit to stalk me online and call me a regime sympathiser to silence me from expressing my view, criticising the opposition parties as objectively as I criticise the ruling party. Thankfully, their extremism hasn’t made me a full time ruling party sympathiser, or its member, or a blind opposer to appease or be accepted by those who profess to liberate Ethiopia from the party’s rule without acting any different from it.
The funny part of my ethnic association is that I haven’t even seen Tigrai yet, the region that gave my parents their Tigrayan identity. Next time I go back to Ethiopia, visiting Tigrai will be my first assignment. After all, I deserve it. I have paid a price for it.
Lastly, I am always going to be an Ethiopian whose parents were born in Tigrai, which has made me a Tigrayan Ethiopian, given what I have been through, though I was born in Oromia, and my mother tongue is Amharic. And I am okay with that. I will embrace it. But I will oppose ethnocentrism and ultranationalism. And, of course, outside the Ethiopian world, I am just another African, black guy; none of the complicated stuff that continues to rock Ethiopians really matters to the foreigners I randomly encounter.
And when you think of all of that from a microscopic or macroscopic level, it is quite irrelevant. At the microscopic level, I am composed of atoms, and soon or later, I will die and decompose; at the macroscopic level, I am part of the Milky Way, which itself is part of the universe, whose vastness or mysterious existence makes earthly dramas insignificant. Sounds a cliché, right? But it is a fact.
Beauty and absurdity. That is humanity.
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Readers' Comments
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This is yet another opportunity to post my feelings expressed when the Ethiopian diaspora in the US brazenly branded another colleague, even when she belonged to a different ethnic group but was working with the regime and hence must have been thought to be 'one of them'. Yet again, I believe this remarkable piece emanates from his frustration of being branded as a member of a specific ethnic group probably tied to the incumbent regime. This is very unfortunate specially coming from the learned diaspora. Nonetheless, the posting evokes another debate that has been diluted into 'personality branding' rather than the more complex issue why the subject has been a matter of intellectual concern for some and the need to rekindle the question of Ethiopian-ness for many concerned Ethiopians.
Indubitably, the single most important influence over how political liberalisation in Ethiopia has been conceived, initiated and is being formalised is the politics of ethnic-federalism. The urban and rural war waged by all the ELF, EPLF, EPRP, GLF, OLF, TLF, TPLF, to name a few, and the ‘national liberation’ struggle waged by the people of Ethiopia and the particular form of political consciousness acquired at the inception and in the course of that struggle have made ethnic-based self-determination the linchpin of the transition strategy. Consistent with this strategy, a major restructuring of the Ethiopian polity is been undertaken, setting the foundation for and cutting it up into a score of regional governments based on linguistic, ethnic and cultural identity. Although swiftly executed, the strategy appears to have been effective not only in allowing to carry out a specific political agenda and ideological goals; but also in setting the tone for institutionalising political agency and activities of alternative and opposition groups, i.e., in channelling their activities along specific social-anthropological formations and generally ethnic lines.
Whilst, in this sense, the regime can be said to have instituted a new paradigm of political discourse, agency and ideology; this is not to suggest that the strategy is uncontroversial or uncontested. Partisans, allies and supporters of the ‘new’ ethnicised order seem to be sure that such an approach to reform is sound, indeed the only way to a new democratic Ethiopia. On the other side, many citizens are equally convinced that, left unchecked, the strategy would lead to the centripetal implosion of Ethiopia. For many, particularly but by no means exclusively the city elite, the values, sentiments and symbols of Ethiopian-ness they cherished and took for granted have suddenly become objects of controversy and deconstruction. Many grumble that more than that it is our everyday social and economic life, which has come under stress and strain in the highly ethnicised political order.
Yet, notwithstanding the doubts and worries it has raised, ethnocentric nationalism remains the bed-rock of the transition strategy; representing a larger issue having to do with the restructuring of the polity as a whole and not just one of simply changing or improving the position and status of ‘nationalities’, or, in simpler terms, ethnic groups; but the radical transformation of the values, traditions and institutions of the state itself in their historic and contemporary forms. It is wrestling at once with the question of the self-determination of nationalities and the problem of Ethiopian unity and identity closely connected with it.
Unlike many African countries that have gone through the colonial experience, abandon elitist claims prevail that there is hardly any political tradition common to Ethiopia's ‘ethnic’ groups. Fittingly, Eritrea, the only ‘colonised’ part of Ethiopia’s territories by foreign forces has seceded from Ethiopia on that very ‘colonial’ argument. Nonetheless, one also needs to be alive to the fact that ‘Ethiopia’ is not a newly coined lingo – it traces its history back more than three thousand years; though the territory and the ethnic groups it embraced have varied from time to time depending upon the outcome of battles fought among internal rival kingdoms and against external invaders. The modern state was not born until the mid nineteenth century when Emperor Tewodros re-consolidated a political entity that had all but ceased to exist; followed by Emperors Yohannes, Menelik II, Haile Sellasse I...
The modern state that emerged was a heterogeneous society comprising of major ethnic groups, with little or no meaningful efforts undertaken to integrate the 'southern' indigenous populations into the expanded political system, (a shameful spot in our history that the Students’ movement of the 60’s and 70’s took so much pain to mend). Instead, it imposed itself forcibly upon them – through the policy of settling-in 'Northerners' by assigning government position and allocating lands, as compensation for military and government service. The exclusionary rule alienated the 'South' and polarised the country in a 'North-South' divide, inhibiting the development of an Ethiopian national identity among the various ethnic groups, and hence the quest for liberation and self-determination by nationalist movements.
Indeed, the historic Ethiopian state existed long before the emergence of Western nations and civilisations, although recent claims abound that the degree of social tissue and shared cultural values, which bind the community together outside the realm of ethnic and religious loyalties, were not strong enough to tie the people under one cultural symbol. Stalwarts of this view undergird the fact that aside from the gastronomic mix, marriage and mourning ceremonies and some attitudinal and behavioural similarities and the religions that permeate our art, literature and customs, there are few commonalties in languages, culture, economics or social organisation. Hence, for the ‘liberators’ of this ancient nation, Ethiopian unity was deeply flawed -- a forced unity, it was established and maintained at the expense of nations, nationalities and peoples by the subjugation of ethnic communities in conquests, exploitation and tyranny and cultural domination which devalued and suppressed the languages, customs... of diverse peoples in the country. Beginning with the students' movement, much of the ‘intelligentsia’ of the day believed that Ethiopian unity was not based on the distinctive identities, interests and aspirations of various nationalities; but on the domination of a small ruling class – a class forged by women and men from various nationalities, interests and political groups, urban and rural etc….
The brutal military dictatorship, which in the end brought the country to the edge of disintegration, was in essence a continuation of all kinds of dictatorial regimes in our history. The remaining problems stem not so much from the old Ethiopian tradition itself as there are two contradictory perspectives on, or images of national unity still in contention in Ethiopia. On one side is the old territorial view characteristic of previous regimes; on the other side is the perspective of “peoples' democratic unity”, first thought up by the Student Movement and subsequently picked up by various political forces before and after the outbreak of the 1974 and 1991 insurgencies. Many are convinced the former has lost out to the latter, but say the task of completely ‘burying’ the old image of Ethiopia has yet to be accomplished.
Because the idea of self-determination has radically transformed the old image of Ethiopia and replaced it with a completely ‘new’ vision of ‘national unity’, it may have raised worries and fears among various social strata in and outside the country. For those of us that have been the beneficiary of the populace that has taken much pain to educate us, it is incumbent to discourse on a proper resolution of these trepidations through dialogue and education. This is not only decisive for deepening and broadening the democratic unity of Ethiopia, but also an agenda long overdue.
Costantinos
As an American with a lot of experience in your country, someone with friends over the years from all of the main ethnic groups, including Tigrayans, I found your article very refreshing, a nice counter to the nasty intolerance that has become so common.
Berta!
Michael Gasser