By Gabisso Halaale
In his recent article, “The Oromo Leadership Convention and the Future of Ethiopia: A Reply to Tedla Woldeyohanes’s Plea for Clarity”, Professor Ezekial Gebissa offered a candid feedback befitting the past and the current narrative on Oromo renaissance. He had gone a great length to elucidate to all the doubting Thomas out there that the Oromo has always been a great indigenous African nation and a willing partner to build a sovereign territory in which we all can live as equals. I could not agree more.
That the Oromo has always been a nation has been attested not only by foreign historians but also by some of Ethiopia’s own progressive revolutionaries of the past although many today seem to be unware or unwilling to fathom it out. In his seminal article of 1969, “On the Question of Nationalities in Ethiopia” the late Wallelign Mekonnen, the most progressive leader of the student movement of the 1960s, argued rather eloquently that Ethiopia was never a nation-state, but that it was made of various nations who lived in it. Wallelign Mekonnen (1969) posited: “What are the Ethiopian peoples composed of? I stress on the word peoples because sociologically speaking, at this stage, Ethiopia is not really one nation. It is made up of a dozen nationalities with their own languages, ways of dressing, history, social organization and territorial entity. And what else is a nation? It is not made of a people with a particular tongue, particular ways of dressing, particular history, particular social and economic organization? Then, may I conclude that, in Ethiopia, there is the Oromo Nation, the Tigrai Nation, the Amhara Nation, the Gurage Nation, the Sidama Nation, the Wellamo [Wolayta] Nation, the Adere [Harari] Nation, and however much you may not like it, the Somali Nation.”
That Ethiopia is not a nation-state today as much as it was not five decades ago, as Wallelign forcefully articulated, is indisputable. It is not insurmountable to illuminate the extreme fallibility of the arguments of the protagonists of Ethiopian “nationalism”. The Ethiopian “nationalists” assume that because certain territories were annexed by force into the Ethiopian empire they would automatically constitute a nation-state. This is erroneous for several reasons.
First, an empire-state is not a nation-state. The Ethiopia created following the imperial expansion by King Minelik II in the 1880s and 1890s was an empire which was ruled by empresses and emperors from the Shoan Amhara ruling dynasty. Until the 1974 revolution, therefore Ethiopia was a dynastic state not a nation-state. True, the imperial regime pursued active policies to discredit ethnic identity and assimilate the various ethno-national groups including Oromo, Sidama, Somali, Afar, Hadiya, and others into an Ethiopian “identity” using the Amharic language and the Amhara culture as an official medium of assimilation. Nonetheless, the policy of assimilation failed despondently because it was confined to rudimentary state structures and few garrison towns. The policy of assimilation never penetrated the rural communities where the vast majority, i.e. over 95%, of the annexed peoples lived. The majority of the annexed peoples remained illiterate and never had any opportunity to learn to speak the national language, Amharic, which was an instrument of assimilation. Ethno-linguistic nations preserved their national identities with minimal intrusion from the center during both the imperial and the Derg regimes. The Imperial regime and the Derg regime that replaced the former unwittingly believed that the successes in assimilating of the Agew into the Tigrai and the Amhara societies over several hundred years would naturally follow in the newly annexed vast territories of the south. The assimilation never happened as anticipated outside of few garrison towns and in fact since 1991 it has been gradually reversed.
Secondly, social and administrative integration does not imply political integration: true, after annexation, the various ethno-national groups in the south were integrated into various administrative units known as districts, awrajas and provinces. Nonetheless, this did not achieve political integration. John Markakis, who studied extensively nation-state building processes and center-periphery relations in Ethiopia during the three successive regimes, from the imperial to the totalitarian TPLF dictatorship, argues that the various regimes in Ethiopia attempted to integrate the country socially and administratively during the past 130 years but have never succeeded to integrate it politically. In his book entitled Ethiopia: The last two frontiers; Markakis (2011) identifies two peripheries that until today remain politically unintegrated. These are: (1) The physically lowland borderlands such as Afar, Somali, Southern Oromia, as well as Nuer, Berta and Gumuz in the west of the country, and (2) The more integrated highland peripheries inhabited by Sidama (including the broader Sidama sub groups of Halaba, Xambaro, Qewena, and others), central Oromia, and other regions. According to Markakis, nation-state building cannot occur without the integration of the peripheries, i.e. without equal share of political power by the various peoples that inhabit the territory and the prerequisite autonomy to decide on their future within the sovereign territory.
Thirdly, nation states cannot be built in isolation from economic modernization and industrialization: Ernest Gellner (1983) in his book “Nations and Nationalism” links successes in nation-building to an epochal shift from an agricultural to an industrial society. Gellner argues that the industrial mode of production, needs a mobile and flexible labor force supplied by a rationalized, standardized education in a common language providing workers with the generic skills to shift from job to job and communicate effectively with strangers leading to a homogenized culture which is the foundation of a nation-state. From the 1890s up until 1974, Ethiopia languished under a brutal feudal system of serfdom that sucked the blood of tenants. Landless tenants were confiscated three-fourths of what they produced by the landlords and the church. As opposed to the rest of the world where the feudal mode of production was a precursor to industrial revolution by galvanizing capital and labour that was the backbone of industrialization, in Ethiopia, the surplus generated by feudal landlords was wasted in conspicuous consumption and Ethiopia never industrial until today. The overwhelming majority of the 100 million Ethiopians today eke out a living as subsistence farmers in rural areas with sever implications on environment and food security. Come El Nino 20 million face famine instantly. Ethiopia failed to feed its own people for nearly 50 years in a row since the Wollo famine led to the ouster of the emperor. This is an unprecedented evidence that Ethiopia is no nation-state that some wish it to be. No nation- state has failed to feed its people in this magnitude in human history.
Finally, due to little economic modernization, Ethiopia remained the least urbanized country today even by the African standard. According to the World Bank, only 19.4% of Ethiopia’s population lived in urban centers in 2015 compared to 43% in Egypt, 54% in Ghana, and sub-Saharan average of 37.7% in the same period.
The utter failure of nation-state building in Ethiopia meant that the various ethno-linguistic groups not only preserved their national identities intact but also resented to remain in the forced marriage in the empire with little prospect for economic development and prosperity. It is only natural therefore that ethno-national political movements such as the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), the Sidama National Liberation Front (SNLF), the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) opted initially for total emancipation from the empire state. Their current positions are however more reconciliatory and inward looking.
What perturbs me most is that after all the pain and suffering these ethno-linguistic nations have gone through in the past 130 years, they are still required to justify measures they anticipate to take to improve their plights. The fact that these questions are arising at the time when thousands of the Oromo Qerroo (youth) as well as hundreds of the Amhara youth are paying ultimate sacrifices in their lives to put an end to tyranny is the most unnerving. There is nothing sinister about holding a National Convention by an oppressed nation that has demonstrated its indefatigable determination for liberty before the eyes of the world. Throughout one full year of painfull struggle for liberty, and in spite of little support from other ethno-national groups including my own, the Oromo nation has displayed an exceptional care and protection to non-Oromos living in its region. What else do we want the Oromo nation to prove that it stands for freedom for all? For me, demanding the Oromo to explain consultations amongst themselves for freedom from tyranny is off limits. For the oppressed nations and for the Cushite in particular, the Oromo nation will always remain a torch bearer for self-determination. Sooner or later, the oppressed nations of the south will stand by the Oromo nation in support of the just cause they stand for.
In conclusion, the Ethiopian empire symbolizes marriage by abduction and not marriage among the consenting adults. In the case of the latter, all parties commit to remain loyal to others until “death do them part”. In this version of marriage, loyalty is openly expressed in vows and can be invoked when any party senses any breach in loyalty. In the former case, an adolescent who feels invisible gathers his friends and abducts a girls for marriage. The girl is then raped and forcefully made a wife. Now, whether the girl will stay in this marriage or not depends on a host of factors including, the laws of the country, how the “husband” treats her in subsequent periods, opportunities to liberate herself from abduction, the support she receives from her family, and so on. The ethno-national groups in Ethiopia have time and again expressed their commitment to remain in the marriage, whatever form it took initially, if their right for self-rule within their territories is fully respected. Ensuring that this will happen is not the responsibility only of the Oromo nation, the Sidama nation or the Somali nation but of all stakeholders in Ethiopia.