An Unequal Ethiopia in an Unequal World: Global and Domestic Hierarchies in Afäwärḳ Gäbrä-Iyyäsus’s and Käbbädä Mikael’s Political Thought (1908 and 1949)

ABSTRACT

The Ethiopian empire retained its political independence through the European Scramble for Africa. The imperial elites oversaw the transformation of the empire into a territorially-bounded state, part of an international system of states regulated by international law and by international institutions such as the League of Nations, and later the UN. Ethiopian intellectuals were keenly aware that Ethiopia had joined this international system from a subordinated position and that its sovereignty remained at risk. The struggle for sovereignty was fought not only at a diplomatic level, but also at a narrative level. Afäwärḳ Gäbrä-Iyyäsus’s 1908 Traveller’s Guide to Abyssinia and Käbbädä Mikael’s 1949 Ethiopia and Western Civilisation pushed back against the European depiction of Ethiopia as intrinsically inferior and intrinsically unable to develop. Both Afäwärḳ and Käbbädä rejected the rigid determinism of stagist models of development, and argued that Ethiopia and Europe were natural allies by virtue of their shared Christian heritage. Global power hierarchies rigidified Ethiopia’s domestic power hierarchies. The article shows how the way in which Afäwärḳ and Käbbädä defended Ethiopia’s place in an unequal world had important consequences on their vision of domestic nation building, resulting in hierarchical assimilationist policies that marginalised Ethiopia’s non-Christian citizens.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethiopia
• Ethiopian political thought
• global intellectual history
• Ethiopian nationalism
• anticolonial thought
• global inequality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Afäwärḳ’s Traveller’s Guide to Abyssinia is a bilingual French-Amharic text and was published under the French title Guide du Voyageur en Abyssinie. Käbbädä’s Ethiopia and Western Civilisation is a trilingual French-Amharic-English book; the French section is titled L’Éthiopie et la Civilisation Occidentale and the Amharic section is titled Ityop̣ya-nna Məəhrabawi Sələṭṭane.

2 Of the extensive scholarship on this point see, for example, Luxemburg, The National Question; Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World.

3 The Amharic novel was published in Rome in 1908 under the title Ləbb Wälläd Tarik (‘Story from the Heart’), the history book was similarly published in Rome in 1909 under the title Dagmawi Mənilək Nəgusä Nägäst ZäItyop̣ya (‘Emperor Mənilək of Ethiopia’).

4 For more information on Afäwärḳ Gäbrä-Iyyäsus, see Fusella, “Le premier romancier éthiopien”; Rouaud, Afä-Wärq 1868-1947; Stella, “Un personaggio amletico”; and the two chapters by Taye Assefa and Yonas Admassu in Taddesse Adera and Ali Jimale Ahmed (eds), Silence is not golden: a critical anthology of Ethiopian literature, Lawrenceville (NJ): Red Sea Press, pp. 61–92 and 93–112.

5 Gäbrä-Həywät Baykädaň, Aṭe Məniləkənna Ityop̣ya, 6.

6 I am suggesting correlation, not causation.

7 Page numbers refer to the original 1908 edition.

8 The translations from French and Amharic are mine unless otherwise specified.

9 Cemil Aydin, for example, argues that ‘Beyond proving the equality of the colored races and Oriental People’s, the Japanese [1905] success [against the Russians] helped Asian intellectuals to assert that the existing backwardness of Asian societies was not a result of deterministic factors, conditioned by race, culture, geography, climate, and religion. They emphasized that this underdevelopment was just a temporary delay in progress that could be altered by a set of reforms, such as the ones Meiji Japan had implemented in just three decades’, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, p. 10.

10 Taye Assefa, “Form and Content of the First Amharic Novel”, 90 (footnote 2).

11 The French translation gives a wrong name (Mohammed) and a wrong century (fifteenth). The Amharic version just refers to the military leader as ‘Gragn’, the nickname (meaning ‘the left-handed) by which Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi was known.

12 The most glaring example of this (explicit since its title) is Tedla Haile’s 1930 ‘Purquoi et comment pratiquer une politique d’assimilation en Ethiopie’, MA thesis, Université Coloniale d’Anvers.

13 See for example Thompson, “Border Crimes, Extraterritorial Jurisdiction”.

14 For more details, see Satta, “Roman Civilization and Abyssinian Barbarity”.

15 Braukämper, “Indigenous Views on the Italian Occupation in Southern Ethiopia”; McClellan, ‘Observations on the Ethiopian nation”.

16 For an English-language biography of Käbbädä, see Molvaer, Black Lions. In Amharic, see the piece written by another famous intellectual and playwright from the period, Täsfaye Gässässä, “Yamarəňňa Tiyatər Därasiya”. I have published another piece on Käbbädä Mikael, “Ethiopian Intellectual History and the Global”.

17 Page numbers are from the English section of the 1949 edition, however in some cases the English translation has been readapted based on the Amharic original.

18 The separation between ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’ civilisation was a common one among anticolonial movements, see Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments.

19 See McClellan, ‘Observations’ and Braukämper, ‘Indigenous views’ for more details.

20 John Markakis, Ethiopia.