By Messay
Kebede
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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