By Tesfaye Demmellash
The latest repressive actions of the Woyane state have resulted in the imprisonment of rising young leaders of legal and peaceful opposition parties in Ethiopia as well as in the internationally unlawful extradition of Ginbot Sebat Secretary General Andargachew Tsige from Yemen to Ethiopia. The jailing of Habtamu Ayalew of Andinet, YeshiwasAssefa of Semayawi, and Abraha Desta of Arena confirms what we have known all along from the regime’s previous and ongoing crackdown against journalists, bloggers, Moslems, Oromo students, and other groups. Namely, born of fundamental insecurity, the massively repressive behavior of the Woyane state makes even the most peaceful and law-abiding individual and collective dissent in the country a difficult, risky undertaking. So there is the ever present question of how opposition forces and movements respond more effectively, in the short- and long-run.
Understandably, we have all been preoccupied with the immediacies of the recent events in the country. As usual, we have responded mainly with dispersed, relatively spontaneous, tactical “battles of position,” like engaging in public demonstrations in various countries and cities around the world. Opposition parties at home and abroad have reaffirmed, as they should, their commitment to the struggle for change. There has been an outpouring of outrage in the media and on the Internet toward the regime’s repressive actions and expression of concern for the wellbeing of the opposition leaders directly affected by the actions.
But, in attending to such high-frequency events in these ways, we don’t adequately pause to interpret and analyze them in terms of the broader, more involved Ethiopian struggle for change, to work them in thought and strategy into a national whole. We don’t generally ask, for instance, given the nature and pattern of behavior of the Woyaneregime, what are the long-term possibilities, limits, forces and forms of peaceful struggle? And how can links be developed between the contingencies of simple, relatively fast-moving oppositional activities tied to the ebb and flow of events with larger, more complex, resistance struggles that unfold at a slower pace? Are the latter growing or even taking shape at all?
Rapid responses to regime actions are important. But insofar as such responses remain our focus, we may never fully understand more fundamental political problems the nation faces and act accordingly to overcome them. For example, the constant currency of the notion of the “self-determination of nations, nationalities, and peoples” inside the TPLF needs to be recognized beyond the partisan or ethnocentric parameters of this political organization. The organization acts in part as a limited embodiment of a residual global Leninist-Stalinist ideology, which remains an underlying problem in the country. The ideology itself has had wide formative influence on other political movements and groups in Ethiopia, notably the EPRP, Meison, and the OLF. And it had seminal currency within the Student Movement.
It follows that identity politics, the focus of my discussion in this writing, cannot be wholly understood and reckoned with simply as an outcome of tribal nationalism, though partisan ethnonationalism is a significant part of the political motivation and practice of groups like the TPLF and OLF. The identity politics of these parties have also taken shape and come into play within a more general systemic pattern as offshoots of a flawed “revolutionary” logos or paradigm inherited from the Student Movement. So resolving the issues and problems of divisive, authoritarian ethnicism in Ethiopia at their roots entails digging a bit more deeply into their “radical” ideological sources, forms, and contents.
Ethiopia has been confronted with complex problems in the revolutionary and post-revolutionary eras. The difference between the past and the present is that today we as a nation face new, more involved difficulties in that what were considered solutions in the revolutionary era have presently become major problems themselves. Indeed, many of the “radical” political remedies administered to the nation by its revolutionaries, particularly by the Woyanes, have proven to be worse than its ills, real or imagined.
Concerning “the national question” and other matters, the challenge now is not attacking simply and directly the problems the country faces or is said to face, but redefining them and changing the process of their resolution. It is one of rethinking the terms and concepts in which vital Ethiopian national issues and problems have been framed. We need to raise probing questions and find new perspectives rather than seeking to make marginal improvements on existing habits of “progressive” thought, or within old ideological formulas. It is in this critical and innovative spirit that I urge that we look at the vexed matter of identity politics in Ethiopia.
Contending with the Politics of Identity
Ethnic diversity has never really been a problem for Ethiopian solidarity. In fact, Ethiopiawinnet, our common nationality, has not only survived but thrived on its basis. Nor are the values of cultural pluralism and equality inherently at odds with the vitality of Ethiopian citizenship. Civil rights are the foundation on which individual and collective freedoms are built.
But we know that the authoritarian, exclusively partisan identity politics practiced by the Woyanes and by some groups and factions in the opposition poses an existential threat to Ethiopia. We have come to this awareness not through interpretation or analysis but by directly observing the intentionally divisive dictatorial actions of the Woyane regime, actions which are highly provocative and generally inimical to vibrant Ethiopian citizenship and unity.
The actual and potential threat our commonly shared nationality is under internally is now an incontrovertible fact that hardly requires much debate and discussion. Indeed, there is a broad constituency of concerned Ethiopians – patriots and democrats from all ethnic backgrounds – who feel that there is no longer anything about the intention and agenda of theWoyane dictatorship to argue about and discuss. We are undoubtedly witnessing our country being subjected to controlled demolition from within, and it is necessary to stop talking and start acting.
I share this sentiment. It is both understandable and defensible. Moving to action in the face of brutal state repression takes courage and commitment, as the experiences of emergent young opposition leaders like Habtamu Ayalew andAbraha Desta show. But effective and sustainable effort aimed at advancing the Ethiopian struggle for change and renewal also requires gaining a strategically attuned conceptual grasp of ethnocentrist identity or “nationality” in Ethiopia in terms of its historical sources and residual political contents, forms, and functions. I believe the movement to action necessitates movement of thought as well. It calls for a critical rethinking of identity politics from the ground up, a reformulation of its terms, ideas, and narratives as an integral part of our resistance against the domination of Ethiopian national affairs by authoritarian ethnicism.
Now I understand that the need for this broader and deeper level of oppositional engagement does not readily make itself felt among us. You don’t hear a whole lot of Ethiopian debate and discussion around the issues it suggests. For the matter does not immediately lend itself to the attention or recognition of Ethiopians active in the struggle for change, including members of the intelligentsia and media.
Within the opposition camp, nether political entities like G7 that approach the Ethiopian struggle for change in terms of the movement of a coalition of ethnic groups and parties, reflecting a model that is not very different from the Woyane pattern, nor champions of traditional patriotism who, concerned about the adverse effects of ethnic-oriented approaches on the nation, defensively stress Ethiopian unity generally favor the quality or standard of resistance I am talking about here. But I am convinced that it is a quality of dissent that is indispensable. If we are to help Ethiopia free herself from entanglement with destructive sectarian, often separatist political ethnicim over the long-term while advancing genuine local autonomy and self-government at the same time, nothing less will do.
What is at issue here is not merely theoretical exercise, idle philosophizing, as it were. Instead, it is politically productive intellectual labor. The movement of thought I speak of is a strategic and practical imperative in the Ethiopian struggle for change. For Woyane ethnocentrist hegemony in particular and divisive identity politics generally cannot be simply rejected or condemned out of existence. Nor can they be resisted or handled effectively through merely discourses of partisan polemic and defensive patriotic contestation.
They must be dealt with pro-actively and critically in all their ideological and practical forms, their imagined and real social referents, their ideal pretenses and actual effects. It seems to me that the road to Ethiopia’s freedom, the way beyond the oppressive, Apartheid-like politics of identity, is the way through it. Unfortunately, after nearly a quarter century of TPLF partisan-cum-tribal dictatorship, we as a nation have yet to embark on this path of freedom. We have yet to reckon with the ethnocentrist system of domination in Ethiopia in thought and strategically guided practice.
I say this because Ethiopian opposition parties, coalitions, media groups, and activists at home and abroad have endlessly lamented the domination of the nation’s affairs by authoritarian tribalism and polemicized against it in various ways. The real challenge, however, is to contend with the underlying premises, ideas, assumptions, and narratives through which sectarian identity politics has taken shape and come to tyrannize over our national affairs. The point is to take systematic and critical account of ethnocentrist hegemony intellectually, morally and politically, “negotiating” with it where possible, and debunking it where necessary.
It is recognizing this challenge, and hoping to help patriotic and democratic opposition forces meet it, that I offer my thoughts and views here. I write this piece as a follow-up to an earlier contribution, published on the Ethiomedia website, in which I talked about the necessity of dismantling the entire Woyane political-tribal encoding or representational apparatus. I discuss the issues I discuss and write the way I do because I see a glaring gap in the contemporary Ethiopian progressive struggle for change that I believe should be filled by the forces of democratic change and national renewal. Namely, for all the polemical salvos with which the Woyane tribal imperium has been bombarded by the opposition for over two decades, never has its constitutive “revolutionary” dogma, arguments, and practices been subjected to sustained fundamental critique and dissent by Ethiopian resistance forces. The nation’s intelligentsia in particular bears much of the responsibility for this deficit in the struggle. I remain hopeful that a new generation of patriotic and progressive Ethiopian intellectuals will begin to fill the gap sooner than later.
Identity Politics and Ethiopia’s Integral Change
Do our commitments to modern democratic ideals of individual rights and to the equality of distinct communities and cultures in Ethiopia compel us to invoke these ideals or to pursue them in a way that devalues our own national heritage? Does our embrace of the progressive values of local autonomy and self-government rule out vigorous affirmation and defense of Ethiopian unity? Absolutely not. It is safe to say that most forward-looking Ethiopian patriots and democrats today don’t believe so.
We generally recognize that contemporary Ethiopiawinnet cannot avoid ethnic and cultural diversity and political pluralism that accompany democratic national life. This is true, although ruling and oppositional ethnocentrist groups today, whatever their differences, often commonly express concern (real or feigned) about the possible political comeback ofneftegnas, a politically coded term used to polemicize against supporters of Ethiopian unity and integrity, particularlyAmharas. The fact is, since the revolutionary era began in the mid-1970s, the neftegna has been nothing more than a straw man, a figment of ethnocentrist imagination.
Ethiopian patriots and democrats today understand that insisting on simple, immediate national unity is the other side of the coin of seeking separate or exclusive tribal nationality. Their antagonisms notwithstanding, both tendencies commonly reflect avoidance of difference, openness, and complexity that characterize, or should characterize broad-basedEthiopianness today.
More specifically, partisan ethnocentrism in Ethiopia, particularly of the TPLF and OLF variety, is marked by a mode of tribal concern that fundamentally contravenes commonly shared Ethiopiawinnet. First, it has adopted an external, over-politicized attitude toward the Ethiopian national tradition in criticizing and seeking to dissociate itself from it, instead of engaging, questioning, and changing the rich tradition from within. As practitioners of “revolutionary” identity politics, partisans of the TPLF and OLF have had to disown their Ethiopian heritage. They feel that there is no national legacy to build on; they only see in historic Ethiopiawinnet Amhara expansion and domination. Arrogantly, they believe that if Ethiopia is to exist at all, it must be created by them from scratch.
Second, for partisans and supporters of identity politics, nationality is solely a contemporary political project and achievement having to do with representation of particular ethnic groups and with articulation of ideology. That, as inheritors of an ancient tradition, we Ethiopians value nationality as a structure of actual historical events, facts, narratives, and myths counts for nothing. That we experience Ethiopiawinnet not merely in terms of political reason, in represented universal ideas, like democracy and equality, but also in the particularity and immediacy of patriotic sentiments and images is apparently not so significant for the TPLF and OLF.
For these basic reasons, the Woyanes and other champions of exclusively partisan ethnicism view Ethiopia merely as a collection of disparate tribal communities or kilils, nothing more or different. The nation is seen to have no integral self or identity that is more than the sum of its ethnic parts or regions. And the task of achieving Ethiopian unity, insofar as its importance is recognized at all, tends to be seen simply as a matter of additively aggregating tribal political organizations that claim to speak for entire communities. In this way, narrow ethnicism has become the form, content, and horizon of all “national” life in the country.
Consequently, purveyors of identity politics in Ethiopia, within the ruling party and in some opposition circles, are incapable of envisioning the integral transformation of the country. They cannot think and act in terms of the nation’s oneness or wholeness, and its democratic change and renewal as such. And so the determination of the status and function of political ethnicism remains a major task in Ethiopia’s contemporary struggle for transformation.
I believe the central issue around which the struggle needs to be conducted is this: how can Ethiopia re-affirm itself as a vital national whole even as it goes through far-reaching change, absorbing into itself ideas and forces of democracy, pluralism, and ethnic diversity instead of being externally negated by such ideas and forces? Put differently, how can the nation transform itself, taking integrally a new, more open and democratic form rather than having its very integrity denied or undermined by exclusively partisan, often separatist, identity politics?
Posing these questions openly and reflectively for broad-based debate and discussion remains a challenge for the Ethiopian resistance against Woyane dictatorship, and finding answers for them even more so. The concern is to gain a good conceptual grasp and practical understanding of how ethnicism works, or doesn’t work, politically and what can and should be done about it within the Ethiopian struggle for change. And the hope is that we as a nation will arrive at a lasting consensus regarding the place of ethnicity in a resurgent Ethiopian solidarity.
Actual and Imagined Identities: Questioning Naïve Realism
In talking about Ethiopian national affairs these days, we often find ourselves focusing on issues and problems of ethnicism. This is not because of actual tensions or conflicts among entire ethnic and cultural populations, say, between Amharas, on one side, and the Tigre or Oromo community, on the other. Distinct Ethiopian communities generally get along very well, no thanks to the highly provocative divide-and-dominate political strategy of the Woyane tribal regime. Rather, it is largely because of the political phenomenon of explicit, partisan, ethnocentric self-identification by certain aggrieved social strata and movements within some of the nation’s distinct groups. This phenomenon has its origins in the revolutionary era, going back to the Student Movement, but it has received its dominant, most sweeping and dangerous formulation by theWoyanes.
Here we are making a very important distinction. We are differentiating the ordinary, spontaneous, everyday sense of social and cultural belonging experienced and expressed flexibly by Tigres, Oromos, Afars, Amharas, and other groups in the country from willful, calculated, rigid, exclusively ethnocentrist identities projected by political entities like the TPLF and the OLF. This distinction is often suppressed, cynically or unwittingly, by partisans and followers of these political entities. It tends to be overlooked by some well-meaning Ethiopian champions of democracy and ethnic equality as well.
We also recognize that efforts by partisans of ethnonationalism to cordon off ethnicity in Ethiopia within insular, exclusively partisan confines and kilils are made dubious, indeed unworkable, by the everyday realities of the intersections and movements of the nation’s diverse communities – their mutually accommodating self-identifications and their common Ethiopian nationality.
In recognizing this fact and making the distinction behind it, we avoid equating ethnicism as a particular political code and practice with ethnic identity pure and simple. We refrain from committing the mistake of what I would characterize as naïve realism, namely, mixing up a generic ideological representation of ethnicity as insular “nationality,” with actually existing particular communities integral to Ethiopia. We resist conflating categories or labels of partisan Leninist-Stalinist ideology (“nations, nationalities, and peoples”) with actual social subjects, with the identities of entire ethnic and cultural communities. We note also that ethnocentric nationality is more an outcome of political movement than the origin of such movement, as is often claimed by partisans of ethnonationalism. Thus, it was only through political struggle that the OLF invented the “Oromia” it has sought to “liberate.” Ethnocentrist nationality here has been the effect, not the cause or point of departure of “liberation movement.”
This does not mean that the issues and questions of nationality, self-determination, democracy and equality raised byethnocentrist political groups and movements in Ethiopia have to be discounted. But the particular, often exclusive, terms in which such groups and movements have commonly raised the issues need to be distinguished from the issues as such. There are alternative ways of framing and pursuing the issues. The fundamental challenge we have confronted regarding the whole notion of “national self-determination,” for example, is that the idea has assumed authoritarian form and content not only against Ethiopian unity and democracy, but also against the real autonomy and democratic self-government of the nation’s particular regions and localities.
Under these circumstances, the unreal fancy of a “self-determining” Tigray or Oromia hinders any critical analysis and assessment of the limitations of TPLF and OLF ethnocentric authoritarian constructs by equating the political constructs with, respectively, Tigre and Oromo “nationality” as such. This false equation should not lead us into thinking that political ideas and aspirations centered on the Tigre and Oromo communities have a necessary relationship to authoritarianethnicism. They don’t. Nor should it mean that issues of nationality focused on other distinct communities in Ethiopia must be connected entirely or exclusively with partisan identity politics. No such necessary connection obtains.
In drawing attention to these basic issues, noting the problem of naïve realism associated with them, I am making a plea for a re-orientation of our thinking about identity politics in Ethiopia. Namely, rather than asking what is “Amhara,” “Tigray,” or “Oromia” as a “nation,” we should ask, how is nationality in reference to Amharas, Tigres, Oromos and other communities in the country formulated or constructed under TPLF dictatorship, and how can it be conceived and institutionalized better within the broader Ethiopian context? What is significant politically is how “nationality” is deployed and by whom, and which form of deployment really favors civil rights, democracy, justice, and equality within our common national life.
In approaching the whole matter this way, we challenge the old revolutionary narrative of “nationalities” and “peoples” as pre-given, actually existent, autonomous protagonists engaged in struggles for liberation or self-determination outside and against Ethiopiawinnet. Instead, we see the narrative itself – in all its terms, categories, codes, and pretenses – as a limited partisan artifact produced by particular groups, parties, and fronts. The political language in which the narrative took shape expresses no real democratic meaning. Nor does the language signify any autonomous social or national content. Its terms mean what they mean and operate as they do only as ideological codes within an exclusive Leninist-Stalinist representational machinery and party hierarchy. As TPLF dictatorship amply demonstrates, it is an impersonal, formulaic, authoritarian language that neither democratically addresses the diverse social and cultural interests of the broad ethnic masses in Ethiopia nor relates meaningfully to their felt distinctive and shared identities.
Identities in Ethiopian Context
Ethnic self-identification need not assume a particular national or political form. Varying, more or less acceptable patterns of affirmation of distinct identity can exist, ranging from the highly localized, least accepting or tolerant of others, to the most accommodating cosmopolitan forms. And identity politics can be marked by a narrowly ethnocentric character or by a broader, more pluralistic orientation. It can have a sharp psychological edge marked by obsession with having fallen victim to others and by feelings of alienation, resentment, and hatred.
Looking at our country in particular, “revolutionary” politics of identity has often made itself felt as a divisive negation ofEthiopiawinnet, as the simple reverse of our national unity. This is particularly true of absolutist forms of ethnonationalismembraced by some partisans and followers of the TPLF and the OLF. These extreme elements are simply too consumed by resentment toward Amharas in particular and toward our common nationality generally to acknowledge what is integrally Ethiopian about the Tigre and Oromo communities. Nor are they willing or able to engage Ethiopian patriots and democrats in principled exchange of ideas, recognizing that concepts like democracy, federalism, national self-determination and unity can be understood and approached as relatively open, communicative constructs whose meanings can be discursively established through debate, dialogue and compromise.
That said, I believe issues of identity and identity politics in Ethiopia are not only better understood but also more likely to lend themselves to discussion, negotiation and lasting resolution when approached in an integral Ethiopian national context. In speaking of identities in the Ethiopian national context, I have in mind both pre-revolutionary Ethiopia and the revolutionary and post-revolutionary eras.
Contemporary identity politics can be traced in part to the nation’s pre-revolutionary past. Reflecting a general world-wide pattern, the growth of the Ethiopian nation-state was marked by more or less violent conflict, conquest, and expansion. It has involved the incorporation of some regions or peoples into others, though the road of expansion and cultural influence has not been entirely a one-way street. But, because Ethiopia as a whole remained an underdeveloped agrarian country for centuries, ruled by competing as well as cooperating feudal lords and kings, the national integration of the various ethnic and cultural communities that made her up also remained generally weak.
However, it is not accurate to see distinct communities in pre-revolutionary Ethiopia as having had identities entirely co-terminus with particular regions, absolutely fixed in locality, language, religion, custom, race or neged. The identities of Ethiopian communities have not been shaped only by speaking a particular language, dwelling in a particular place, or practicing a given custom or religion. To a considerable extent, they have also been shaped by crossings of tribal “borders,” by trans-regional movements, expansions, contacts, and interactions of peoples.
Oromo expansion in the sixteenth century, for example, involving massive movements from Bale and Borena in the south to the north and northeast into the Ethiopian highlands, cannot be seen as simple enlargement of Oromo identity. For the Oromo community has been remade through interactions with other Ethiopian ethnic and cultural communities, particularlyAmharas. By the same token, movements of Amharas into what is today eastern and southern Ethiopia cannot be viewed as a static, linear expansion of Amhara identity or culture. While the major formative influence of Amharas on the Ethiopian national experience cannot be denied, it should be recognized that Amhara identity and culture have had a dynamic mixing, fusing, and evolving character in relation to other ethnic and cultural identities in the country. Amharashistorically have allowed the active entry of Oromos, Tigres (including Eritrean Tigres), and other ethnic strata into the Ethiopian national scene. Though political and cultural inequalities remained in the course of the development of the Ethiopian nation-state, what is called “Amhara” has been intersected and influenced continuously by other distinct communities and cultures in the country.
Identity politics is also better understood in the context of more recent Ethiopian history, which saw the overthrow of theancien regime. Its most sweeping ideological formulation has been part and parcel of the flawed Ethiopian progressive experience. It has not been a reflection simply of local or regional ethnic grievances and movements. To a significant extent, the growth of strident ethnonationalism in the country is indebted to the Ethiopian Revolution as a whole. Identity politics has been shaped in its mode of national concern, in its “radical” ideas and goals, and in its organizational tactics, by a long chain of Ethiopian revolutionary events and developments going back to the Student Movement, of which theWoyane regime is the last and most perverse link.
So the struggle against divisive identity politics in Ethiopia today is primarily with ourselves as a nation, seeking to settle accounts with our troubled revolutionary legacy, not a struggle merely with sectarian forces like the TPLF and the OLF whose derivative political ideas and projects we resist. This observation may not sit well with the Woyanes or with partisans and followers of the OLF, but it remains demonstrably true nonetheless.
Now this is not to deny that ethnic relations and particular regions in Ethiopia today constitute relatively autonomous sites of issues, problems, and movements. I recognize that they do. But it does not follow that such issues and movements can be viewed in isolation or abstraction from larger past and present Ethiopian contexts in and through which they have taken shape historically and ideologically. Thus analysis and discussion of identity politics in Ethiopia immediately raise questions and issues which go beyond ethnicity or locality.
No one can say, then, that discussions focused on the affairs of distinct Ethiopian communities, notably Oromos,Amharas, and Tigres, have any necessary relationship to a particular form of identity politics or to an exclusively partisanethnonationalism. Not only is this false as a historical or factual matter, it is logically impossible that such a relationship should exist, for a whole actual community cannot be reduced to a particular identification or representation of it by a particular party. The TPLF and the OLF have no partisan monopoly over the representation of Tigre and Oromo identity, respectively. To believe otherwise is in effect to diminish and disempower the community whose identity is at issue.
We can draw from these observations a few significant implications regarding the nature and function of ethnic identity in the contemporary Ethiopian struggle for change. First, ethnic identities are not etched in stone, formed once for all time and place. They constitute relatively open, historically evolving social and cultural formations. And they are susceptible, within limits, to political making and unmaking. What is made politically can also be unmade and reconstructed politically. For, while ethnic identities reflect social-historical subjectivities, they also take shape politically as self-representations. They are often deliberately constructed images we have of ourselves and of others as individuals and groups. They are made up of ideas and beliefs we profess about who or what we are and want to be or not to be.
Second, and relatedly, there is a whole lot that is potentially open to multi-party negotiation and agreement about ethnic and cultural self-representation. Much of what has caused division, tension, and conflict in Ethiopia around ethnicity or “nationality” has less to do with actual disagreements or antagonisms among the Ethiopian people or with the interests, concerns, and self-identifications of distinct communities than with how particular parties and groups construe identity and difference through exclusively partisan notions, beliefs, narratives, and movements. Political notions and beliefs are not inherently closed to debate, dialogue, give-and-take and consensus, although, as particular parties, the TPLF and the OLF remain dogmatic in their ethnocentrism and resistant to meaningful negotiation and compromise.
Third, and most importantly, Ethiopia need not be seen, as partisans and followers of ethnocentrist identity politics see her, merely as an additive collection of disparate tribal groups and kilils lacking her own integral national self or identity. For in affirming our common national life, we do not start by presupposing the existence of insular “nationalities” and “peoples” to be brought from outside into a relationship with Ethiopiawinnet. This entire approach of the TPLF and the OLF is a nonstarter. Instead, we begin with the historical and contemporary realities of movements, contacts, and interactions of diverse Ethiopian communities and the shared as well as distinctive identities these realities have produced. We depart from local, regional, and national intersections and relationships that have already constituted the Ethiopian whole. In our national journey of democratic change and renewal, the Ethiopian whole is our point of departure as well as our destination.
Contrary to the claims of the late tribal tyrant Meles Zenawi, then, Ethiopia’s national and cultural achievements and monuments cannot be narrowly ethnicized or regionalized. They belong to the Ethiopian people as a whole. The achievements cannot be split off from the common national identification of diverse communities, places and regions in the country. They signify a dynamic reciprocity: local communities have gotten added national value in partaking of the historic Ethiopian experience while, in supplying their own cultural identities and forms of life, their own issues, resources and capabilities, distinct communities have in turn enriched the Ethiopian national tradition.
There is no question, then, of my affirming my ethnic and Ethiopian identities sequentially or in some rank-order. I am not an Amhara “first” and only secondarily an Ethiopian, as if my two affiliations are separate categories. I am an Amhara and an Ethiopian at once, though my particular identification is less with Amhara ethnicity as such and more with the region of my birth and upbringing and that of my parents, namely, Gondar and Lasta in Wollo. I believe the same goes for an Ethiopian citizen of, say, Gurage, Tigre or Oromo heritage. Ethnic belonging and Ethiopiawinnet are not necessarily mutually limiting or exclusive. On the contrary, they have historically been largely constitutive and supportive of each other and can be made even more so today.
To wrap up, in offering my thoughts and views on the whole matter of identity politics in Ethiopia, I have hopefully made clear that I am not advocating the replacement of ethnic self-awareness with Ethiopian national consciousness, seen simply in abstraction from or against ethnicity as such. My aim is to help open up identities, real and imagined, for probing scrutiny, discussion, and reformulation toward Ethiopia’s integral democratic change and national renewal. What I am broadly critical of is not ethnic self-identification in and of itself but the adoption of categories and narratives of political ideology (“nations,” nationalities” and their “self-determination”) immediately as social-historical facts. What I call into question is the transposition of partisan images and ideal constructs of residual, now largely discredited, Leninism-Stalinism into real features and identities of entire Ethiopian ethnic and cultural communities.
The over-politicization of ethnic identities and differences that has resulted from the sweeping substitution of generic, global ideological categories for particular, actually existing local social subjects is problematic in a double sense. First, while identity politics in Ethiopia has had recourse to universal ideas like freedom, democracy, and development, its partisans and practitioners remain incapable of grasping these ideas in breadth and depth because they embrace the ideas mainly as instruments of exclusive ethnonationalist self-representation and self-assertion.
Thus national and democratic values, principles, and processes that transcend ethnicity or particular identity are reduced to narrow, ethnocentric political projects of “self-determination,” hardly anything more. This amounts to a denial of thegenerality of progressive ideas and values and an inability to address broad, trans-ethnic social, economic, political, and cultural issues in Ethiopia. For the whole purpose and rationale of ethnocentrism is to exclude such issues in order to give pride of place to agendas of identity politics.
Second, and paradoxically, the extensive use of global ideological materials, rhetorical conventions, and organizational tactics by practitioners of identity politics, especially by the TPLF, has also meant failure to address the specificity of distinct and shared identities and forms of life characteristic of diverse Ethiopian communities in particular localities and regions of the country. This failure stems from the domination of politically precooked authoritarian state ethnicismpracticed by the Woyanes. At play here is a contradictory local “self-determination” that converts supposedly autonomous communities and regions into extensions and manipulated objects of a centralized party-state hierarchy controlled by a small partisan minority.
Clearly, true local autonomy and self-government cannot be achieved in Ethiopia without the nation’s integral political change and renewal. Regional identities and interests in the country are products of broad-based historical and contemporary movements, contacts, and relations of diverse communities rather than pure ethnic “self-determinations.” Consequently, a freer, more robust identity of a community or a nation is achieved not by stressing sameness or homogeneity (of language, religion, locality, ideology, etc.) in ethnocentrist exclusion of difference and pluralism, but through enriching pluralist interactions. Simple, exclusive tribal identity or “nationality” is susceptible not only to narrow-minded hatred and intolerance of others, but also to chauvinistic and authoritarian impulses. It is likely to be an obstacle to the freedom, democratic governance, and national flourishing of citizens and communities in Ethiopia regardless of their ethnicity.
Finally, a key task in the contemporary Ethiopian struggle for change, it seems to me, is overcoming the over-politicization of identity. This “revolutionary” phenomenon has led to a narrowing down and impoverishment of the national experience of the Ethiopian people. It has resulted in a grossly partisan reversal of the values of not only Ethiopian solidarity and unity, but also of local autonomy, freedom, and democracy. The road back from such massive travesty of nationality is not going to be short or easy for the country. But it is a road the nation has to travel if it is to re-affirm and renew itself for the benefit of all its citizens.
Email: tdemmellash@comcast.net
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