Contesting Inequalities, Identities and Rights in Ethiopia

The Collision of Passions

Data D. Barata

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351209984
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the relationship between inequalities and identities in the context of an unprecedented state advocacy of human rights with a distinct emphasis on (ethnic) group rights in post-civil war Ethiopia. The analysis is set against the background of a dramatic state remaking by a rebellion movement (the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front – EPRDF) that seized control of the Ethiopian state in 1991, after a decisive battlefield victory over an unpopular regime. The new government of former rebels pledged to institute a new system of ethnic self-government that celebrated ethnic diversity with a firm pledge to guarantee basic human rights. After nearly three decades in office, however, the Ethiopian government is challenged by the resilience of identity-based inequalities it ostensibly sought to end, and by protests against its own policies and practices that intensified inequality.

The events in Ethiopia, reverberating throughout the Horn of Africa, have inspired heated and often polarized debates between academics, policy experts, political activists, and the media. Data D. Barata contributes to this debate through a nuanced ethnographic analysis of why identities with distinct notions of inequality persist, even after relentless interventions and ideological repudiations. The contestations and struggles over political representation, local governance, cultural identities, land and religion that the book examines are shaped, one way or another, by the global human rights discourse that has inspired millions of Africans to confront entrenched structures of power.

This book will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of anthropology, African studies, political science, sociology and cultural studies.

1Introduction

Issues, debates and perspectives

This book examines the relationship between inequalities and identities in Ethiopia with special reference to globally riveting contentions on striking a balance between individual citizen rights and collective group rights. The analysis is set against the background of dramatic political changes that unfolded following the conclusion of a devastating civil war in Ethiopia. After a decisive battlefield victory over a punitive dictatorial regime, a rebellion movement that seized control of the Ethiopian state in 1991 rolled out radical state decentralization policies that culminated with instituting what is dubbed ethnic federalism. Among other things, the newly constituted federal government led by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) superimposed an official interpretation of human rights with a distinct emphasis on ethnic minority rights onto diverse ethno-cultural structures.¹ This ushered in a new era in which the state, ethnic groups, and multitudes of other actor groups have since been grappling with previously ‘contained’ questions of identity, more specifically identity-based inequalities and struggles against them. Both the process and the outcomes of this extraordinary encounter are the subjects of ongoing political and cultural struggles.

The events in Ethiopia, reverberating throughout the Horn of Africa, have inspired often polarized debates between academics, policy experts, political activists, and the media. This book seeks to contribute to this debate through a nuanced ethnographic analysis of why identities with distinct notions of inequality persist, even after being attacked and ideologically repudiated. This book specifically focuses on how the sizable ethnic minorities of southern Ethiopia, each made up of a staggering number of hierarchically structured sub-ethnic identities, have engaged with the new state’s ethnic group rights politics and related policies. To introduce the specific issues the book examines, I first impart three snapshots – one from the world of historical fiction, one from my own observations, and one from the media – of how ordinary citizens confronted structures of inequality in Ethiopia’s south.

My first snapshot is drawn from the breathtaking historical fiction, The Prince of Africa, in which Ethio-American author Daniel Gizaw (2001) portrays a captivating image of life among a southern Ethiopian ‘tribe’ of Dawro in Emperor Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia, c.1940s.² In the story, two characters are intensely engaged in opposing human dispositions. The first, the abuse of power, is masterly displayed by the villain, a ruthless local governor whose subjects happen to be ethnically different from him. This small-time tyrant was appointed by the methodically modernist Emperor Haile Selassie to reward the former for his service as a loyal ex-soldier. In charge of a territory far away from the emperor’s gaze, the warrior-cum-governor engages in appalling practices such as levying excessive arbitrary taxes, imposing forced labor demands, abducting and marrying an under-aged girl, and other dreadful abuses of state power. The story’s pendulum then swings to an opposite human zeal – the determined struggle against evil. The hero of the story is a man from an ‘untouchable local caste,’ who, through sheer determination, takes on a mighty quasi-mythical beast that had been consuming the flesh and blood of his people.

Gizaw uses these two characters and their opposing actions to depict Emperor Haile Selassie’s modern Ethiopia where profoundly unjust acts sanctioned by the national state were perpetrated against the imperial subjects. The subject community was culturally and hierarchically ranked with the Amharic (national language)-speaking political class on top, followed by the upper-class/caste local peasantry, slaves, artisans, and the Manja hunter-gatherers on the bottom. When the Amharic translation of The Prince of Africa was published in 2013, it was heartily endorsed by none other than the then-Minister of Foreign Affairs/Deputy Prime Minister of Ethiopia, His Excellency Hailemariam Desalegn, who was also the vice chairman of the ruling party, the EPRDF at the time.³ The Prince of Africa might have attracted the attention of the ruling EPRDF because its plot reinforced the ruling party’s core narrative that the Amhara-led past regimes of Ethiopia constituted a system of ethnic inequality in the country.⁴ EPRDF’s antidote to this system of ethnic injustice was to institute a new system of ethnic self-governance (see Chapter 2).

The second snapshot I use as a window to introduce the specific issues I examine in this book refers to an event I happened to observe in a small town in what became the Dawro zone in Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples’ Region (SNNPR). The event took place in the same ‘tribal area’ poignantly depicted in The Prince of Africa. On July 1, 2000, in the hilltop town of Waka, then capital of the Dawro people located about 500 km (350 miles) south of Addis Ababa, the baira (elders) representing the Dawro ethnic group gathered to share their thoughts on key challenges facing their society. These elders were meeting in that capacity (as representatives of the Dawro people) for the first time in more than a century after their former kingdom had lost its political autonomy in the late nineteenth century. The event, titled “Dawro People’s Culture and Language Symposium,” was organized by local agents of the new national government intent on decentralizing the state along ethnic lines. This Waka symposium was meant to pave the way for establishing a politico-administrative structure of ethnic self-government for the Dawro ethnic group per the new national constitution. A young official sent by the new regional state to chair the symposium officially opened the event by condemning the dictatorial regimes of the past and then invited the Dawro elders to share their thoughts and wisdom on how to address the predicaments of the Dawro people and help institute fitehawi astedader (just/good government). Some of the elders took the opportunity to lucidly recount their dreadful historical experiences under the unjust governing practices of past Ethiopian regimes. They also pointed out the continuation of blatant inequalities, stressing that the Dawro remained marginalized in terms of infrastructural development and essential social services such as access to education and health services, to name the most obvious.

One curious question raised at this symposium is noteworthy for upsetting the trajectory of this discursive event. In the late afternoon atmosphere of a heated political discourse, an inquisitive school teacher pointed out that only senior men from notable clans of Malla (Dawro high-status group), had gathered as representatives of Dawro. To my surprise the teacher was part of the organizing committee of this symposium. Regardless, the teacher asked a culturally troubling question: “In this meeting about the Dawro people, why are there no women, no youth, no Manja, no Mana?”⁵ Given that this was a time of great promises and unnerving uncertainties, the question caused at least some discomfort. It reminded those in attendance that everything, including some taken-for-granted cultural practices, was up for questioning. Even then, some elders were puzzled and even irritated by the notion that the Manja and the Mana (the most excluded occupational minorities), who were, according to the long-established cultural traditions, neither entitled to hold political offices nor believed to have any wisdom on such matters, should have been invited to this high profile ‘public square.’

Fast forward to November 11, 2011 in the new Dawro zone capital town of Tercha, to my third snapshot and an event that instantly placed Dawro in the global media space. On this fateful day, a former school teacher, Yenesew Gebre, who was allegedly dismayed by being unjustly fired from his job (by the ruling party/local state), self-immolated by setting himself ablaze in his gasoline-soaked clothing. He died of his wounds a day later at the local hospital. Yenesew apparently drew inspiration from the Tunisian martyr Mohamed Bouazizi whose self-immolation ignited the Arab Spring of 2010 which shook the entire Middle East. Yenesew’s story went viral almost instantly. It was reported in independent national newspapers such as Netsanet (Freedom), pro-government media outlets such as Walta Information Centre, Ethiopian diaspora media outlets such as Ethiomedia.com and Tadias.com, and global media establishments such as the BBC and VOA Amharic service. Most Ethiopians outside the ruling EPRDF circle (including the vocal Ethiopian diaspora in Europe and North America) interpreted Yenesew’s death as yet another example of extreme injustice under EPRDF’s ethnic federalism. The government, however, labeled Yenesew as a mentally ill individual and dismissed his action as an ordinary suicide. To prove this, the government got the local public hospital to issue a medical certificate supporting its claim.⁶ Nevertheless, it was abundantly clear that this was not an ordinary suicide.

These three snapshots draw our attention to issues and concerns that resonate beyond the pristine mountains of southern Ethiopia. They are instances of recurrent tensions that periodically manifest in violent conflicts that undermine the well-being of Ethiopians and millions of other Africans. The noted symposium in the Waka town of southern Ethiopia was enabled by a battlefield victory of rebels from the northern Ethiopian ethnic minority of Tigre, who had fought a gruesome civil war against a national government they accused of, among other things, upholding a system of ethnic inequality. Following their control of the national state, these former rebels boisterously pledged to institute democracy and respect for human rights (both individual and minority group rights) as a sure way to achieve equality, peace and development. In the early 1990s, many Western leaders hailed these former rebels as part of the new generation of progressive African leaders. Over the years, however, as EPRDF’s grip on power tightened along with accusations of human rights violations, Western praise for the EPRDF government became restrained, but Western financial aid and essential partnerships such as ‘collaboration on counterterrorism’ remained intact.⁷

During the time of my field research (detailed later in the chapter), there was a glaring dissonance between the official rhetoric of democracy promotion, human rights protection, etc. on one hand and extreme forms of inequality, violence, and injustice that manifest in the form of rights denials and violations on the other. Given this disconnect, it was not surprising to find that both activist and everyday forms of struggles against injustice were pervasive. Yenesew’s self-immolation was simply one instance, albeit an extreme one, in this ongoing struggle. The Dawro elders, most of whom were not formally educated, gathered in Waka town and painstakingly debated, in their particular way, about issues such as cultural suppression, political and economic marginalization, and land rights. At the regional level, more than 56 ethnic minorities of the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ Regional State (SNNPR), are engaged in ever-intensifying contestations over the relative position of their respective ethnic group as regards budgetary allocations, political appointments, and representation in the regional and national governments. At the national level, after nearly three decades in office, the EPRDF government is confronted with criticism, controversies, and violent protests. These locally experienced injustices and the struggles against them connect events in ethnic inlands such as Dawro to broader debates and struggles at national and global spaces. Notable in the last category are the ceaseless demonstrations and vigils of the Ethiopian diaspora in European and North American cities. While criticism about the current Ethiopian government abounds at the local, regional, national, and global levels, not surprisingly there is little agreement on which specific issues really matter and why; to say nothing about how to address them.

As I show in this book, some forms of inequality, injustice, and denial or violation of rights seem to attract more attention than others in specific times and places, thus agitating some people to action but not others. Although not all injustices are equal, there are indicators suggesting that the types of injustices that trigger organized action by specific groups of people in a specific place and time may not be, by any objective measure, any worse than the ones that are ignored. This is particularly the case concerning identity-based inequalities and rights violations. For example, in relation to gendered inequality in Ethiopia, Smith (2013) notes that while one set of emancipatory issues concerning unequal citizenship based on ethnic identity reached national attention and thus became the site of institutional and procedural intervention, others remained muted. Southern Ethiopia has been a paradigmatic site of such encounters, not just recently but over the last century. Following the incorporation of autonomous southern Ethiopian polities into the Ethiopian empire in the late nineteenth century, many cultural institutions and practices of these ‘peripheral peoples’ were subjugated by the imperial state that passionately guarded its northern Ethiopian-cum-national culture and history against attempted influence by outsiders such as missionaries and Western or Middle Eastern governments.

Since the late nineteenth century successive national state regimes, Euro-American missionaries, and non-governmental organizations have launched sustained interventionist assaults on the cultures of Ethiopia’s peripheral regions, whose local cultural institutions were labeled as backward, harmful, devil worship, informal, and anti-progress. Confronting a protracted assault on their institutions and cultural identities, southern Ethiopian societies, like many other African communities, have demonstrated an incredible cultural resilience. A case in point is a practice variably referred to as social stratification, status differentiation, quasi-caste, caste-like social organization, and descent-based status hierarchy (Berhane-Selassie 1991; Donham 1985; Freeman and Pankhurst 2003; Amborn 1990; Todd 1977, 1984; Epple 2018). In recent years, partly because of the increasing influence of human rights discourses, the indigenous, caste-like social organizations have become the subject of critical discourse in a new way. Organized political actions such as setting up separate political parties based on such identities (e.g., Haditcho People’s Democratic Party within the Sidama ethnic group), everyday forms of dispute (Chapter 5), and outbursts of status-group-based conflict across the region are all creating unprecedented challenges against culturally entrenched hierarchies. Yet, the hierarchies and associated identities persist.

It is against this backdrop that this book examines why and how cultural identities, with distinct notions of inequality, persist despite being ceaselessly attacked and repudiated by powerful modernist institutions that are themselves systems of inequality upheld by structures of power. Through an ethnographic analysis of southern Ethiopian experiences, the book aims to engage debates on the broader issue of why, at a given time and place, modern human societies (in Africa and elsewhere) exhibit impassioned moral aversion against some forms of inequality and associated injustice, while being either oblivious to, or even admiring others. The contestations and struggles the book examine...