A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855–1991

Bahru Zewde

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780821445723
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Afrique

Bounded by Sudan to the west and north, Kenya to the south, Somalia to the southeast, and Eritrea and Djibouti to the northeast, Ethiopia is a pivotal country in the geopolitics of the region. Yet it is important to understand this ancient and often splintered country in its own right.

In A History of Modern Ethiopia, Bahru Zewde, one of Ethiopia's leading historians, provides a compact and comprehensive history of his country, particularly the last two centuries. Of importance to historians, political scientists, journalists, and Africanists alike, Bahru's A History of Modern Ethiopia, now with additional material taking it up to the last decade, will be the preeminent overview of present-day Ethiopia.

1

The Background

1. The internal scene in the first half of the nineteenth century

The northern principalities

The year 1769 symbolizes the initiation of the period in Ethiopian history known as the Zamana Masafent. It was in that year that a Tegrean prince named Ras Mikael Sehul (the second name being an epithet to describe his astuteness) made a bloody intervention in royal politics in Gondar. He killed the reigning emperor, Iyoas, and put his own favourite, Emperor Yohannes II, on the throne. Before a year was out, Yohannes himself incurred Ras Mikael’s disfavour, and was in turn deposed and replaced by Emperor Takla-Haymanot II.

This making and unmaking of kings by Ras Mikael marked the nadir of imperial power. While the intervention of other members of the nobility was not to be so dramatic, the long-standing struggle for power between the monarchy and the nobility had been decidedly resolved in favour of the latter. Until 1855, when Kasa Haylu became Emperor Tewodros II and restored the power and prestige of the imperial throne, the successive emperors were little more than puppets in the hands of the forceful nobility. An emperor had practically no army of his own. In the 1830s and 1840s, his annual revenue was estimated at a paltry 300 Maria Theresa silver dollars, the Austrian currency then in use in Ethiopia, whereas Ras Walda-Sellase of Tegre had 75,000 thalers at his disposal, and Negus Sahla-Sellase of Shawa had some 85,000 thalers.

Ras Mikael’s domination of Gondar politics was itself short-lived. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, a strong man by the name of Ali Gwangul had emerged as a powerful figure and kingmaker. He initiated what came to be known as the Yajju dynasty, after their place of origin in present-day northern Wallo. From their base in Dabra Tabor, successive members of this dynasty controlled the throne for about eighty years. Although Muslim and Oromo in origin, they had become Christianized, and followed other Amhara customs. The power alignments for or against them were dictated less by ethnic and religious considerations than by self-interest and regional aggrandisement. Yajju power may be said to have reached its peak in the ‘reign’ (1803–1825) of Ras Gugsa Marsu.

On the southern side of the Bashilo river, where Islam is believed to have had establishment previous to the Ahmad Gragn period, the Muslim and Oromo elements were more pronounced. Known as Amhara in medieval times, the region came to be identified by the name of Wallo, after the most important tribe that had settled in the area. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, a dynasty known as the Mammadoch and based at Warra Himanu established its hegemony over the whole region. The name of the dynasty was apparently derived from its founder Muhammad Ali (more popularly known by his ‘horse-name’, Abba Jebo, ‘father of Jebo’, his war-horse). The death of his grandson Abba Jerru Liban in 1825 marked the decline of Mammadoch power, as his descendants began to fight among themselves for supremacy. This state of affairs gradually reduced Wallo to a buffer zone which invited the expansion and interference of its more powerful neighbours.

In Tegre, a term denoting the Marab Melash (‘the land to the north of the Marab river’) and the Red Sea coastal region, as well as present-day Tegray, a strong ruler emerged in the person of Ras Walda-Sellase, at about the beginning of the nineteenth century. By reason of his region’s proximity to the sea, he was the first Ethiopian ruler to come into contact with European travellers of the nineteenth century. With total obliviousness to the Ethiopian reality, the British traveller and artist Henry Salt, who met Walda-Sellase at his capital Antalo in 1805, described him as the ‘Prime Minister’ of Ethiopia. Such a flattering appellation did not move Walda-Sellase into allowing Salt to pass on to the imperial seat in Gondar, which was then controlled by Walda-Sellase’s bitter opponent, Ras Gugsa Marsu.

Some years after the death of Ras Walda-Sellase in 1816, Dajjach Subagadis Waldu of Agame in eastern Tegre established himself as the lord of Tegre, and continued his predecessor’s bid for control of the imperial throne. This led him into a bloody clash with the Yajju lord, Ras Mareyye Gugsa of Bagemder, at the Battle of Dabra Abbay (14 February 1831). Both leaders lost their lives: Mareyye fell in the course of the battle, and Subagadis was executed by Mareyye’s victorious troops. The man who picked up the pieces was Dajjach Webe Hayla-Maryam of Semen, head of another important area of regional power consolidated by his father and predecessor, Dajjach Hayla-Maryam Gabre. The most significant results of the battle were the end of Tegrean autonomy and the extension of Dajjach Webe’s overlordship to that region. By the mid-nineteenth century, Webe had emerged as perhaps the most powerful regional lord of northern Ethiopia. The Battle of Dabra Tabor (7 February 1842) between him and Ras Ali Alula, known as Ali II, the Yajju ruler of Bagemder, was an outcome of Webe’s eventually abortive bid to wrest supreme power from the Yajju princes. This was another strange battle of the Zamana Masafent, in which, as he was celebrating his victory, Webe was captured by Ali II’s vassals.

Two principalities which were to dominate the history of southern Ethiopia in the latter half of the nineteenth century were somewhat peripheral to central politics. They were Gojjam and Shawa. Although both principalities were to have, as their distinctive feature, territorial expansion in neighbouring Oromo lands, Gojjam was not totally unaffected by the imperial politics at Gondar. Its most famous ruler, Dajjach Goshu Zawde, actively engaged in the bid for preeminence among the northern princes. Yet such was the political anarchy of the Zamana Masafent that his power in Gojjam itself was challenged by his own son, Dajjach Berru Goshu, who managed temporarily to defeat his father in late 1841. As the Zamana Masafent comes to its close, we find Dajjach Goshu in a position of vassalage to the Yajju ruler, Ras Ali II, both bent on checking the rise of a new challenger, Kasa Haylu. But, as we shall see, Kasa Haylu, afterwards Tewodros II, defeated Goshu, who died in the Battle of Gur Amba (27 November 1852), and Ali II in the Battle of Ayshal (29 June 1853); the latter victory symbolized the end of Yajju hegemony.

South-east of the Abbay river (the Blue Nile), Shawa was comparatively insulated from the wars and politics of northern Ethiopia. Its successive rulers steadfastly worked towards the strengthening of the principality by conquering the neighbouring Oromo lands. The stability of the region and the relative prosperity of its inhabitants were well attested by European visitors. Yet this is not to say that Shawan rulers were totally unconcerned with developments in the north. Their affiliation to the imperial idea was evident in their concern to show their Solomonic descent. At the same time, this claim encouraged them to regard themselves as central rather than peripheral to the Ethiopian polity. Their titles also demonstrated progressive confidence. They started with the modest one of abeto, and, passing through mar’ed azmach, ended up with the elevated style of negus, or king. This last title was rarely claimed by any of the northern princes.

Yet even the adoption of the title of negus showed an element of restraint. Shadowy as the emperors in Gondar were, they still retained the aura of ‘Solomonic’ legitimacy. The title of negusa nagast, king of kings, thus emperor, was still regarded as their exclusive preserve. The ultimate ambition of regional lords was thus not to crown themselves negusa nagast, but to gain pre-eminence by securing the position of power signified by the title ras bitwaddad, which would enable them to manipulate the legally crowned emperor. It required the audacity of a Kasa Haylu to crown himself negusa nagast. Even then, he had to resort to the legitimizing name of Tewodros – the apocalyptic harbinger of a new and just order. The regional conflicts of the Zamana Masafent thus showed scarcely any centrifugal tendencies. The moves of the regional lords were to dominate the centre, not to go away from it.

This same dialectic of division and unity was manifested in the doctrinal controversies which rent Abyssinian Christian society from the seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth. The controversy was ignited by Jesuit theology, more specifically the doctrine of the nature of Christ. It was the absence of a unanimous response to the Jesuit doctrinal challenge that gave birth to the diverse doctrines that have continued to baffle students of Ethiopian history. The party which still claimed to espouse the orthodox doctrine preferred to call itself Tawahedo (Union), although its opponents gave it the more pejorative appellation of Karra (Knife). The variations on the orthodox doctrine were known as Qebat (Unction) and Ya Sagga Lej (Son through Grace). The latter was also more popularly known as Sost Ledat (Three Births), in contradistinction to the Hulat Ledat (Two Births) thesis of the Tawahedo.

These doctrinal disputes had a political significance that exceeded their intrinsic value. The various doctrines came to be associated with the different regions, and thus abetted and sharpened the political divisions of the Zamana Masafent. Qebat, for instance, was a distinctively Gojjame doctrine, whereas Karra was associated with Tegre, and Ya Sagga Lej with Gondar. It is also significant that the first major attempt to resolve these differences was made by the same man who tried to forge Ethiopian unity, Tewodros. But final resolution of the doctrinal question had to await the Council of Boru Meda (1878), presided over by Emperor Yohannes IV (r. 1872–1889).

While the nobles fought amongst themselves and the priests engaged in over-refined theological disputes, the social order was sustained by the peasantry, practically the only productive class in society. Through a combination of a long-established plough agriculture and animal husbandry, the peasant supported the whole social edifice. Thanks to a lineage system of land-ownership known as rest, the peasant could claim a plot of land as long as he could trace his descent. But his control over his produce and his labour time was limited by the claims of the nobility, both lay and clerical. A system of surplus appropriation, the gult, gave the nobility rights of collecting tribute, often of an arbitrary nature, from the peasant. Hence the term gabbar (from geber, tribute), often used interchangeably with 14 balagar, peasant. In addition, the peasant had to undertake corvée (forced labour) such as farming, grinding corn, and building houses and fences. This claimed up to one-third of his labour time. One of the nineteenth-century travellers elaborated the theme:

The imposts are numerous, but vary according to the traditionary customs of each village. They [the peasants] pay a certain portion in kind to the Ras, or other great chief, and sometimes a regular tax in money; besides this, they must furnish oxen to plough the king’s lands. Their immediate governor then takes his share in kind of every grain (say a fifth), and feeds besides a certain number of soldiers at the expense of the householder: he has rights to oxen, sheep, goats, butter, honey, and every other requisite for subsistence; he must be received with joy and feasting by his subjects whenever he visits them, and can demand from them contributions on fifty pretexts – he is going on a campaign, or has just returned from one; he has lost a horse or married a wife; his property has been consumed by fire or he has lost his all in battle; or the sacred duty of a funeral banquet cannot be fulfilled without their aid.

(Plowden, 137–138)

Inasmuch as the gult was given as a reward for military service, the whole system tended to foster a military ethos. To be an armed retainer of a lord freed one not only from the drudgery of farming but also from the harassment and persecution of the soldier. Conversely, the life of the peasant became increasingly precarious. Perennial victim of the vagaries of nature – such as drought and locust invasions – the peasant was simultaneously at the mercy of the marauding soldiery. The wars of the Zamana Masafent were particularly destructive in this respect. The system of billeting or quartering soldiers in peasant households subjected the latter to numerous exactions and indignities. Mansfield Parkyns, a British traveller of the early nineteenth century, has given us gruesome details of the fate of a peasant who was roasted alive as a penalty for having hidden some butter from the insatiable soldiers billeted in his house.

Although detection entailed such frightful punishments as the one just described, hiding grain was one of the ways by which the peasant tried to ward off the human locust. Burning grain was another, although such measures were no less wasteful socially. Often, too, the peasant abandoned farm and homestead and fled for security – either to a place of less insecurity or to join one of the many bandits who mushroomed in this period. Commenting on the despoliation which such a situation created in one of the northern provinces, the missionaries Isenberg and Krapf had this to say:

[T]he Wag country . . . is decidedly one of the most important and interesting provinces of Eastern Abyssinia. It would admit a larger population and a high degree of cultivation of the soil, if a better government ruled this country. It would be necessary, however, for such a government to do away with the system of annually plundering their subjects, as this is the very means to destroy commerce, order, cultivation of the ground, and every improvement of human society. At present the Governor comes annually with his troops and takes away what he pleases; and the consequence is that the inhabitants conceal their treasures and take to flight to the mountains; whereupon the Governor destroys their houses and fields.

(Isenberg and Krapf, 486–487)

States and peoples of southern Ethiopia

The history of early nineteenth-century Ethiopia would not be complete without a description of the peoples and principalities of the southern half of the country. It was the unification of these two parts in the second half of the nineteenth century that gave birth to modern Ethiopia. The peoples of southern Ethiopia had attained varying degrees of social and political organization. The term ‘southern’ is used here not in the strictly geographical sense, but as a convenient category embracing those states and peoples which did not directly engage in or were peripheral to the imperial politics of Gondar. Their organizations ranged from communal societies to states with powerful kings and elaborate mechanisms for the exercise of authority. Examples of the latter kind were the kingdoms of Kafa, Walayta and Janjaro. They are often known by the generic linguistic term of Omotic, because of their location in the vicinity of the Omo river.

The kingdom of Kafa traced its origins back to the fourteenth century. The economy, as in both Walayta and Janjaro, as well as among a number of Cushitic and some Semitic peoples of the south, was based on the cultivation of ensat (‘false banana’, Ensete ventricosum). A class of peasants, holding their own land but being forced to give labour service, formed the human base. They were supported by slaves acquired through raiding or trading, or as payment for debt. The first written reference to the kingdom goes back to the sixteenth century, and the state reached the apogee of its power at the turn of the eighteenth century. At the apex of the political and social hierarchy was the king, the tato, assisted by an advisory council of nobles, the mikrecho. While Orthodox Christianity ha...