This article is not a rejoinder to
Prof. Alemayehu G Mariam’s recently posted article titled “Ethiopia: The
Irresponsibility of the Privileged.” Alemayehu’s article is
well-thought-out and accurate in its analysis of the shortcomings of
Ethiopian intellectuals. The apparent indifference of many Ethiopian
intellectuals to the plight of the Ethiopian people and to the lack of
democratic governance or their veiled support to a tyrannical
government, mostly because of ethnic affiliations, is indeed appalling.
Rather than a retort, this article is a complementary contribution with
an eye to discerning the root of the derailment of Ethiopian
intellectuals.
Besides indifferent or sold intellectuals, Ethiopia
has produced a virulent type of radical intellectuals who are directly
or indirectly responsible for the prevalence of tyranny in Ethiopia
since the fall of the monarchical system. I am not saying that tyranny
started with the collapse of the imperial rule, but that the imperial
autocracy was replaced by a more vicious and destructive type of
tyranny, characteristically defined by the commitment to a clean slate
or tabula rasa ideology.
The typical ethos of the ideology is to
indiscriminately denigrate whatever has been bequeathed by the past so
that the country must be rebuilt anew. Whether we take Leninist type of
socialisms or the various versions of ethnonationalism, they share the
belief that the first condition of real change is the merciless
destruction of inherited features.
Those who are familiar with my book, Radicalism and Cultural Dislocation in Ethiopia,
know that I trace this clean slate ideology to the colonialist
overtones of modern education in Ethiopia. What else is the
indiscriminate assault on tradition but the product of the
internalization of the colonial discourse by uprooted native
intellectuals? Colonial discourse and policy called for the eradication
of native traditions, judged primitive, and pushed for the subservient
copying of the Western model of modernity. A cursory examination is
enough to see how closely the modern system of education in Ethiopia was
and still is framed to inculcate uprootedness and colonial mimicry. As a
result, a significant number of Ethiopian intellectuals (this writer
included) became in the 60s and 70s, not the defenders, but the
gravediggers of Ethiopia’s history and legacy by creating radical
movements championing the clean slate ideology, be it through Leninist
versions of socialism or outright ethnonationalism. Unfortunately, their
undoings still define today’s Ethiopia and constitute a major obstacle
for democratic government and modernization.
This is not to say
that social radicalism should be banned in favor of one category of
intellectual. As in any other social question, prudence should avoid
one-sidedness and promote diversity. It is much healthier for Ethiopia
to produce various types of intellectuals, ranging from conservatives
and reformists to radicals. The democratic process itself, to the extent
that it is genuine, requires and produces various types of
intellectuals. Even so, the type practicing indifference or insincerity
should be denounced. For, the role of intellectuals is to tell and argue
in favor of what they believe to be true, that is, what they have
established as “true” through an intellectual procedure of research and
validation. What is sane for democracy and progress is not the triumph
of one view, but the open and dynamic debate between competing
perspectives.
In my view, the type of intellectuals that is most
needed in today’s Ethiopia is the type that transcends classes and
ethnic groups and defines a national mission for the country that is
both comprehensive and galvanizing. Traditionally (what follows is taken
from my published paper titled “Return to the Source: Asres Yenesew and
the West”), Orthodox Church intellectuals, often known as debteras,
played this role. Indeed, according to Asres Yenesew––a leading scholar
of the Ethiopian Church during the imperial rule––traditional
intellectuals were the scouts or the outposts of Ethiopian society; as
such, their role was to scrutinize the surrounding world so as to
safeguard its national mission and identity. What defines them is thus
their national function, which compels them to rise above factions and
special interests. While kings rule, warriors fight, peasants produce,
priests pray, intellectuals reflect on what is good and bad. They
represent the small but advanced garrison protecting the society from
malefic and dissolving internal and external forces.
After
highlighting the traditional role of intellectuals, Asres deals with
what he considers as the greatest betrayal in Ethiopia’s long history,
to wit, the transformation of the Westernized Ethiopian intellectual
into an ally of the colonization of Ethiopia. In a highly provocative
statement, he declares: “although Italy’s army was driven out, its
politics was not.” In other words, the military defeat of the colonizer
has not ended the colonial project; it has simply compelled Westerners
to use subtler means. Chief among such means is modern schooling. That
is why they were so eager to open schools and send teachers in Ethiopia.
What better means was there for realizing their colonial project than
the propagation of their books and the creation of a Westernized
Ethiopian elite?
For Asres, Ethiopia faces the gravest danger of
its long history since modern native intellectuals, whose task is to
provide protection, now side with the enemy by becoming the instrument
of colonization, When the patrols of the society turn into deserters,
its defensive capacity is utterly shattered. This ominous transformation
fully materialized when the guardians of tradition turned into its
critics under the instigation of Western teachers and books. Asres
unravels the insidious method used to effect the transformation. To
change intellectuals into turncoats, Western education had first to
denationalize their mind by encouraging “individualism and social
ambition.” In thus isolating them from the rest of the community and
inducing frustration over their place in the social hierarchy, Western
teachers changed them into rebels and revolutionaries.
In light of
the deep predicament in which Ethiopia is immersed, mere political
activism and elections are not enough to salvage the country. Hence my
belief that the kind of intellectual change that Ethiopia needs is the
kind that assumes the role of the traditional intellectual but by
modernizing it. Freed from the clean slate ideology which, to paraphrase
Asres, is just the continuation by natives of the colonial ideology,
the modernization of the traditional intellectual redefines the national
mission of Ethiopia in accordance with the requirements of modernity
and the religious and ethnic characteristics of today’s Ethiopia.
Rather
than partisanship, reborn intellectuals draw a comprehensive vision
that is renovating and galvanizing because, going beyond group and
individual interests, the vision provides a supreme national goal,
thereby mobilizing the sense of duty and the power of emotion. Such a
vision preserves and changes at the same time; it alone is capable of
inspiring social and political reforms that are born of the Ethiopian
soil and that elevate Ethiopians from copyists to designers and agents
of their own modernity. In short, what is needed is a modernized and
integrative new Kibre Negest, the very one that creates a nation, that is, an object of love, and not merely of interest.
Let
us rethnink Ernest Renan’s famous definition: “A nation is a soul, a
spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute
this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past, one in the
present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories;
the other is present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will
to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an
undivided form. . . .The nation, like the individual, is the culmination
of a long past of endeavors, sacrifice, and devotion. . . . To have
common glories in the past and to have a common will in the present; to
have performed great deeds together, to wish to perform still more–these
are the essential conditions for being a people. . . One loves in
proportion to the sacrifices to which one has consented, and in
proportion to the ills that one has suffered. One loves the house that
one has built and that one has handed down. . . . Man is a slave neither
of his race nor his language, nor of his religion, nor of the course of
rivers nor of the direction taken by mountain chains. A large aggregate
of men, healthy in mind and warm of heart, creates the kind of moral
conscience which we call a nation.”
Nation is love, history,
forgiveness; it transcends race and language and is commitment to unity
in greatness. Is not the above definition absolutely contrary to the
path taken by Ethiopian intellectuals since the 60s? Instead of love,
history, forgiveness, and unity, we have division, tabula rasa ideology,
resentment; instead of transcending race and language and working for
greatness, we are mutilated by ethnnationalism and sectarian meanness.
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