Blaming the past for all the ills of the present has long become the preferred intellectual sport in many academic circles and centers of so-called African studies in Europe and America in particular. The usual refrain goes like this. Who underdeveloped Africa? Europe and America? That is true to some extent but it does not tell the full story. The full story could be accessed by asking whether the same European powers have not contributed to the development of peripheral societies although such a contribution may be limited? The answer to this question is: Yes, they have contributed a lot despite their oppressive and racist political structures.
Apartheid was an abomination in South Africa a few decades ago. The white minority enriched itself at the const of the black majority. However it would be unfair to say that the black people there could have built the modern economy that that has become the hallmark of South Africa’s economic development. This is not by any means an apology of Apartheid rule. Even the white population did not achieve economically what it could achieve given the country’s vast natural resources. The other point of view is whether majority rule has done better than the white minority regimes. This may be controversial because the following question should inevitably asked. Has black majority rule improved the lots of millions of black South Africans? The answer is obviously no.
The ruling ANC is in power despite its dwindling support among the black population simply because the ruling party is perceived as exclusively benefiting the new black ruling party at the expense of the black populations in the living in the ghettos. The ruling party is no less corrupt than the white minority governments in the country. The black elites may even prove more corrupt than the former white oppressors. Suffice it to watch the political scandals that have been shaking the ANC bigwigs since Mandela left the scene.
The ANC looks as if it has stayed in power thanks to its fast fading old charisma as a party of liberation and thanks to Mandel’s charisma. However, in order to see whether this assertion is true or not, one has to wait for the results of the forthcoming election 2024 in South Africa. The bottom line to this argument is that the obsession to blame the past for everything that goes wrong in the present might be an attempt by the African elites their own failures to develop the continent at large.
This is in fact a long-established academic obsession with rejecting everything that was born and developed under feudal regimes everywhere in the world as backward or behind the times without even trying to figure out the sources of the literary and cultural achievements that laid the basis for the modern age when emperors played the roles of patrons of the arts and literature.
In Britain, Shakespeare wrote most, if not all, of his classic plays under the monarchy. Of course, Britain has never seen a democratic system per se, and when it did, it came under the all powerful even though symbolic facade. We can safely say that the British arts flourished under quasi feudalistic or modern feudal regimes for much of the 20th century.
The same can be said for France and Germany or Italy. French arts and literature flourished and managed to unlock to genius of the country in the post-Renaissance period that mostly included feudal regimes. Otto von Bismarck dubbed the “iron chancellor” in Germany created one country out of the various regions ruled by feudal lords. He also supported the development of German arts and literature that developed under largely feudal regimes that produced geniuses like the classic poet Goethe whose name is still shining beyond the country of his birth. To make a long story short, the European past was the harbinger of its present.
The same goes with African countries that were ruled by feudal monarchs since the 18th or 19th centuries. There are fewer feudal monarchs in Africa than in Europe. The monarchic regimes in Egypt, Morroco Algeria, Libya, Ethiopia to name but a few of them, have done their best to develop the cultures, arts and literatures of their respective countries by creating even unholy alliances with European powers from whom they learned how to ran their cultural establishments and copied the Wesgtern way of doing things in general.
In the case of Ethiopia for instance we can trace the genesis of its cultural and overall modernization from Emperor Haile Sellassie who launched the overall modernization of the country “after his coronation in 1930, bringing two constitutions in 1931 and revisited in 1955. Although Emperor Tewodros II is given the historical credit for starting Ethiopia’s modernization by putting an end to the decentralization of the country under what is known as the Era of the Princes. On the other hand, Emperor Menelik has gone dawn as the undisputed author of the country’s modernization in the 19th and 20th centuries.
As far as culture and the arts are concerned, what makes these monarchs unique was that they initiated and supported the building of many churches that have long served as the mainstays of the country’s long-cherished artistic and cultural relics that were kept in those places because the churches played this role as they were artistically and culturally more advanced than the other stakeholders. This is not however to say that the churches in Ethiopia were the sole authors of the creativity and inventions that marked Ethiopia’s cultural development for centuries.
Saying that the emperors were the only actors in this process would undermine the role of society in the cultural evolution of the country. The potters, painters, house builders and traditional musicians and dancers are rather the leading actors in shaping the country’s traditional cultures and the arts. The 19th and 20th centuries have particularly witnessed the rise and preeminence of a number of cultural and intellectual figures who left their marks on the history of the country.
In Ethiopia, Zemenawinet (or modernity), which was started within the feudal monarchies of the 19th and 20th centuries ended in the late 20th century when the last monarch who was indeed one of the authors of Zemenawinet was toppled in 1974 in a revolution led by young people who came of age under the emperor and emerged from either university colleges or military barracks. Politically, they were leftist-oriented and culturally they claimed to represent a transition from the monarchic to democratic dispensations.
Meanwhile, different intellectuals had tried to express their ideas of what they called modernity was. In a collection of essays entitled, “Zemenawinet”? What is Ethiopian Modernity? “which was published in 2012, the key ideas of Ethiopian modernity were articulated in the following ways. The authors of the essays are key figures in modern Ethiopia’s intellectual discussions on modernity. The contributors are well-known public intellectual figures who themselves went through the later stages of the country’s “Zemenawinet”, including Andreas Eshete, Beharu Zewde, Baye Yimam, Elias Yitbarek, Fasil Giorgis Elizabeth Woldergiorgis, and Yonas Admassu.
In the introductory part of the essays, it is stated that “The idea of Zemenawinet came from Professor Andreas Eshete, President of the Addis Ababa University from 2002 to 2012. Beye Yimam in his essay entitled, “Modernity, Language and Identity” is quoted as saying that the main characteristic features of Zemenawinet, were, “partly innovation and partly retention of the distinctive features of the past and the socio-cultural relations therein through a process of revision and total transformation.”
In another essay entitled, “What were they writing about anyway? Tradition and Modernization in Amharic Literature” Yonas Admassu examines the intellectual context of the making of Ethiopian modernity. Yonas focuses on two generations of writers whose outlooks and points of views, while certainly opposed, nevertheless shared the same concern of seeing “their” Ethiopia wake from its centuries-old slumber and join the community of modernized nations.”
The other contributors to the collection of essays more or less shared the above views whit a degree of variations on the same spectrum of views. They presented their papers with dispassion while shedding lights on what promoted or hindered the modernization of the country. Elizabeth Giorigis for instance “reveals the discursive and philosophical limitations and drawbacks of Ethiopian modernism and its representation in Ethiopian imaginary engaging with non-western concepts of modernity…”
The point of view lacking in this collection of essays was perhaps the point of view of the student movement that was born on the campus of the Haile Sellassie University. Although most of the presenters were former college students, they managed to articulate the Leftist or Radical or often angry observations of the youth in the 1960s and 1970s that reflected the view that the feudal monarchy of the last emperor was particularly was notorious, in their view because it stifled radical changes in the country’s land tenure system that was the crux of the matter of the central concern of the 1974 revolution. When we look at the positions of the students movement with its radical dispensations, it looks now relevant even to this day because the land question, as it was then presented has remained on the agenda of the Ethiopian modernization process to this day whether directly or indirectly. The land question which later on grew into the so-called “national question” is believed to have given birth to present day Ethiopia’s fundamental political challenge that was touched on in those chaotic days of the revolution.
Now that those radical student leaders, who accused the emperor as agent of stagnation rather than radical reforms, are almost all gone, it might perhaps be possible to reevaluate their ideas and complement them with the critical and balanced approach that such a deep analysis requires. Whether the monarchies of the pre-revolution days were responsible for Ethiopia’s underdevelopment is something that requires a deep and impartial reevaluation in order to address the leftover issues from that critical period of Ethiopian history that are impacting the present and future of the country. Thus, a retrospective look at Ethiopian past history may give a constructive vantage point to get a balanced outlook on the past and a clear vision of the future.
BY MULUGETA GUDETA
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD FRIDAY 23 FEBRUARY 2024
