The Orthodox Church of Ethiopia

A History

John Binns

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781784536954
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786720375
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Surrounded by steep escarpments to the north, south and east, Ethiopia has always been geographically and culturally set apart. It has the longest archaeological record of any country in the world: indeed, this precipitous mountain land was where the human race began. It is also home to an ancient church with a remarkable legacy. The Church of Ethiopia is the only pre-colonial church in sub-Saharan Africa; today it has a membership of around forty million and is rapidly growing. This book is the first major study of a community which has developed a distinctive approach different from all other churches. John Binns explains how its special features have shaped the life of the Ethiopian people, and how political changes since the overthrow of Haile Selassie have forced the Church to rethink its identity and mission. He discusses the famous rock-hewn churches; the Ark of the Covenant (claimed by the Church and housed in Aksum); medieval monasticism; relations with the Coptic Church; centuries of co-existence with Islam; missionary activity; and the Church's venerable oral traditions of poetic allegorical reflection.

CHAPTER 1

Place and Idea: Identifying Ethiopia

THE PLACE: A GEOGRAPHY AND A HISTORY

The Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia is a nation state located in the Horn of Africa. It is surrounded by Sudan, Kenya, Somalia, Somaliland, Djibouti and Eritrea. It covers an area of over a million square kilometres. It has a rapidly growing population, which has now passed 90 million inhabitants, and so is the second most populous country in Africa, after Nigeria.¹ It is a land of contrasts, divided between a high plateau, with a spectacular mountain landscape in the north and west, and some of the lowest and hottest regions of the world in the south and east. For many it is still remembered as a place of poverty, war and famine, with images imprinted on the conscience of the world during the tragic years of 1984–5 and the international response which followed. But these are now being replaced by reports of economic growth, with some figures showing it to be the third fastest-growing economy in the world.

The Ethiopia described by these statistics is a new country, with its current borders set out in the late nineteenth century through a series of treaties with the colonial powers of Europe. It reached this point after a long and sometimes turbulent history. The first reference to Ethiopia as a nation comes from the fourth century. The king of the city state of Aksum, near the coast of the Red Sea was Ezana. A Greek inscription describes him as basileus aithiopion – king of Ethiopians. Ezana himself became Christian and this set in place the history of the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, which was to be maintained until the fall of Haile Selassie in 1974. The kingdom of Ethiopia was characterised by its monarchy, its Semitic language and its Christian Orthodox faith. Its extent and location shifted in reaction to the changing political circumstances and the balance of military power. It was forced by the rise of Islam away from the coastal plain and towards the interior; then the restored Solomonic kings who reigned from the late twelfth to early sixteenth centuries expanded the size of the kingdom to the south. There was a brief but devastating invasion by the Muslim armies of Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al Ghazi known as ‘Grañ’ the left-handed, between 1527 and 1543, which reduced the size of the kingdom and threatened its continuing independent existence. This was followed by a more prolonged expansion by Oromo tribesmen, which also reduced the power of Christian Ethiopia. The modern state of Ethiopia was formed as part of the imperialist division of Africa in the late nineteenth century when the invading Italians were defeated and the emperor extended the borders to their greatest extent. The region below the high ridge of Entoto in Shewa with its hot springs grew into the capital city of Addis Ababa or ‘new flower’. Founded in the 1880s, it is the third highest – and one of the most recently founded – capital cities in the world. Ethiopia had become a modern kingdom, with agreed borders, and a complex ethnic mix with over eighty languages spoken. Thus after a process of expansion, contraction, then renewed expansion and southward movement, the modern Ethiopia came into being.

This kingdom grew in the mountains, which remained its heartland even after it extended into the plains. Its location at a high altitude led to its importance, not just in the history of the region but in the history of the human race. These mountains and their significance take us back beyond the city state of Aksum to the beginnings of the human story.

Mountains matter, and these mountains have shaped the history of Ethiopia and of the people who inhabit them. Most of the African continent is flat. The vast majority of its land surface is less than 1000 m above sea level. Only a small part is higher than 2000 m, just 1.35 per cent, and of this only 0.1 per cent is higher than 3000 m above sea level. Most of this African high ground is in Ethiopia. Although Ethiopia comprises only 4 per cent of the African continent, it contains half of the land above 2000 m and four fifths of the land above 3000 m. This has led to the favourable conditions which enabled the human race to begin and then to thrive. Many disease-bearing insects do not survive at high altitudes, and as a result malaria and bilharzia are absent from the highlands of Ethiopia, as is the tsetse fly, which ravages the cattle herds of pastoralists in the lower-lying areas. As well as being a healthy place to live it is also fertile. High land attracts rain. Hot damp air is blown inland from the sea, and while it brings heat and discomfort on the coastal plains, it falls as rain when it comes into contact with land at higher altitudes. The monsoon winds of the Indian Ocean to the east reverse direction in the autumn, and this change brings a second rainy season, so that farmers can expect two harvests in a single year.²

To add to these natural advantages, the Ethiopian highlands are surrounded by steep escarpments to the north, west and east; and dry desert land to the south. These have made it inaccessible to invaders, and it has been a well-defined and well-defended highland enclave for many millions of years. The natural frontiers have set the high plateau apart from the lower regions around it and enabled its kingdom to remain distinct and to survive. There have been a succession of peoples who have attempted invasion – Muslims and Oromo in the sixteenth, British and Sudanese Mahdists in the nineteenth, and Italians in the twentieth centuries. But these incursions have generally been short-lived and the Christian Amhara kingdom of Ethiopia was able to withdraw, regroup and re-establish itself.

In these mountains, both animals and plants have thrived. Elephant and lion, leopard and zebra, as well as many other African animals, birds and plants have flourished in the high ground of Ethiopia during its history. Some species have survived only in Ethiopia. It is estimated that 12 per cent of the East African region's mammal species and 3 per cent of its birds are found only in Ethiopia.³

Many plants are endemic to Ethiopia. Ethiopians are especially proud of their coffee, a familiar name for a plant which is grown in, among other places, Ethiopia. The Kaffa district provided the name by which the plant is known in many parts of the world, although, strangely, not including Ethiopia itself, where it is called bunna. It is generally agreed that the beans of this plant were first harvested and domesticated in Ethiopia. Then there is tef, a form of millet, with tiny seeds, each of which is smaller than a pinhead, with one hundred and fifty tef seeds equal in size to one grain of wheat. Its yield is lower than other crops, but it is suited to the high terrain and can germinate when other crops fail. It is highly nutritious, and a single daily portion provides enough protein to sustain a reasonably healthy diet. Today tef is grown throughout the highlands and gives that gentle undulating green character to the landscape during the growing season. When harvested it can be mixed with water, left to ferment, and then cooked to form the wide flat pancake, enjära, the staple food of the Ethiopians.

Enjära and coffee are the great facilitators of Ethiopian social interaction. The coffee ceremony is a regular domestic ceremony at the end of the working day or as a welcome to guests. Coffee beans are roasted, ground and boiled on a carpet of grass scattered around the charcoal stove, and brewed in the traditional jerber coffee pot, surrounded by the perfume of incense in the air. It is served in small cups, with three cups drunk before the group breaks up. The eating of enjära is also of a part of highland ‘culture’. The large flat pancakes are placed on a basket, called a mesob, served with piles of spicy sauce or wat, piled on the enjära, and thus form a shared communal dish. People will refer to the eating of enjära as their culture, and see it as an essential part of ethnic identity.

This highland culture belongs in a long history of human development. A little over three million years ago, a young woman was living in the verdant forest which then covered the high plateau. She was 122 cm in height and weighed 8 kg. She was able to stand upright and, while she could still climb trees, she had to find a safe place where she could sleep by night – unlike other carnivores who used the cover of darkness for hunting. By day she foraged for food. After she had died her bones – or to be precise about 40 per cent of her bones – were preserved over millennia and were discovered in 1974 in the Afar depression north-east of Addis Ababa by a team led by Donald Johanson of the Cleveland Museum, Ohio. He called her Lucy since they happened to be playing the Beatles' song ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ when they found her, but Ethiopians are more respectful and call her Dinkinesh meaning ‘you are wonderful’. Her technical classification is Australopithecus afarensis, and she was then the earliest known example of a hominid, and is a candidate for the position of the ancestor for the human race. A plaster cast can be viewed in the National Museum in Addis Ababa. Older hominid remains have been discovered in Ethiopia and elsewhere since then, but Dinkinesh remains as a moving reminder that we, as humans, originated and then evolved, in Ethiopia. As was put in a recent TV broadcast by Brian Cox, every one of us has an Ethiopian ancestor if we go back a mere 200,000 years.⁴ Or, as the archaeologist David Phillipson notes, ‘Ethiopia has the longest archeological record of any country in the world.’⁵

This high mountain land was the place where the human race began. Later it was the backdrop to the growth of the oldest written culture in sub-Saharan Africa, and the centre of one of the great empires of the ancient world, an evolving state and a church.

ETHIOPIA IN LITERATURE

The name Ethiopia had been used for well over a millennium before it was associated with the land we know today as Ethiopia. It is not surprising that the location to which the name was applied was vague and non-specific, since the pre-scientific geographical picture of the world lacked accurate definition. People thought that there was a land bridge connecting Africa and Asia – as indeed there once was. The word Ethiopia was used by the Greeks, and is found in Homer. It occurs in several places in the Iliad and Odyssey, and later in Herodotus' histories. The Greek word aithiops means, literally, ‘burnt face’, and was applied to people living over a wide area. An Ethiopian could be anyone with dark skin who lived south of Egypt, and so Ethiopia could be Arabia, or India, or Africa south of the Sahara. Some medieval maps show an eastern Ethiopia south of the Nile and a western Ethiopia to the south of Mauretania. By the sixteenth century, the location of Ethiopia was narrowing down to be directed to the Upper Nile and Nubia, but it was not until the late nineteenth century that the name was firmly attached to the modern state. Since there had previously been no specific location of Ethiopia, it could be used in a general way to describe a kind of people. It is more accurate to describe Ethiopia as ‘a concept rather than a geographical location’, an idea rather than a place.⁶

Ethiopia was not the only name which could be used of this rather broad area inhabited by dark-skinned people. Some maps and texts prefer to speak of Abyssinia, which was applied to the same area until the nineteenth century. This alternative title can be traced back to Arabic/Sabaean inscriptions of the first millennium BC. Here there is a name written in the un-vocalised form HBST, which became Habashat or al-Habash in Arabic. This eventually became Abyssinia. The word is often understood as deriving from an Arabic root meaning mixed, although this derivation is questioned. The association with mixture could be derived from either the composite racial character of people living in the mountains or the variety of ethnic groups in the area. The name Abyssinia was used to refer to present-day Ethiopia until the mid-nineteenth century, and the last occurrence of the word in a formal political context is the person called the negus habashat or king of Abyssinia in a treaty between Ethiopia and England signed in 1843.

Another term which started life as a general description and later adhered to a specific place was Sudan. Sudan is an Arabic term meaning black. Arabic texts write of Bildad es Sudan or land of the blacks to apply to a large swathe of western and central Africa, south of the Sahara. As late as the nineteenth century, this general title was used by a group of American Evangelicals who founded a missionary society in 1873 to bring the gospel to the people of Africa, to the ‘great Soudan’. They called their society the Sudan Interior Mission, or SIM, and set up its first headquarters in Nigeria. They later changed the name to Serving in Mission. In due course the name Sudan was taken by the new African state formed in 1956.

The word Ethiopia evokes what it means to be African. Travellers from the West have been drawn by the attractions of Africa, and they often expressed this mysterious magnetism in use of the word Ethiopia. Nineteenth-century missionaries felt themselves called to evangelise Africa, and for them it was often Ethiopia. The missionary T.J. Hutchinson published an account of his endeavours in 1861 entitled Ten years wandering among the Ethiopians from Senegal to Gabon, and in 1885 Daniel Flickinger wrote Ethiopia or Thirty years of missionary life in western Africa – he meant Sierra Leone.⁷

The names Ethiopia, Abyssinia and Sudan began as general descriptions. They indicated that unknown space south of the Sahara where people with burnt faces or black features, or mixed origins, live. For those using it in Europe, the name Ethiopia resonated with a sense of mystery, antiquity, riches and abundant natural resources. The word Ethiopia retained this evocative character and came to be used in the last two centuries to articulate and express the growing hopes and longings of those born on the continent and those who came to it, as a sense of African identity was discovered.

These longings and aspirations have been reinforced by historical events. As Europeans advanced over Africa occupying large areas as colonies, Italians began to extend their power over northern Ethiopia. In January 1896 the Ethiopian king Menelek advanced northwards with his huge army of 100,000 soldiers, and dependents, until they came to the mountains around Adwa in Tigray. They faced a much smaller but better-equipped Italian force, with less than 8500 Italian troops and 10,700 Eritreans. Both sides delayed the battle as long as they could, partly because the terrain gave the advantage to the defender, but also, from the Italian point of view, because Menelek faced huge difficulties in supplying and feeding such a large army. When the Italians finally advanced on 1 March, the battle was over in three hours. The Italians divided into three columns and advanced on the Ethiopians, but one lost its way, and they found themselves on level ground with attacks launched by the Ethiopian army who had stayed in the hills and so had the advantage of height. Seventy per cent of the Italian army was either killed, wounded or captured, leaving it unable to continue the campaign. It is estimated that Menelek lost between 4000 and 7000 troops, leaving his army as an effective force while what was left of the Italian army withdrew.⁸ As a result of this engagement at Adwa, Ethiopia became the only part of Africa which retained its independence from the imperialist powers of Europe.

When the nationalist movements across Africa slowly gained independence it was Ethiopia they looked to. The Organisation for African Unity, now called the African Union, was set up in Addis Ababa in 1963, and its headquarters are still there. Eight of the newly independent states of Africa favoured the Ethiopian colours of green, red and yellow when selecting a design for their national flag.

ETHIOPIA IN THE BIBLE

Religious faith is bound up in this ideal of Ethiopia. Ethiopians are people of faith, with a special relationship with the gods, and possessing qualities of virtue and justice. This is a claim made by Ethiopians today who often consider themselves to be a naturally religious people. Census findings show that over 95 per cent of Ethiopians affirm that they have a religious faith, and many affirm its importance to them.

This religious claim is traced back to classical times. Homer, in the Iliad, describes a primeval human ancestor, Aithiops, who lived in the far east of known lands. He was a perfect man with a special relationship with the gods. Zeus led other gods to make a twelve-day visit to his descendants ‘the blameless Ethiopians’, and later, in the Odyssey, Poseidon ‘lingered delighted at the banquet side’ of the Ethiopians. The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century, said that the Ethiopians considered that they were the first nation to worship the gods, a view which was repeated by others. Later, Lactantius Placidus, writing in the fifth century, wrote that ‘the Ethiopians are certainly the justest men and for that reason the gods leave their abode frequently to visit them’.⁹ It was a reputation which has stayed with them, and is repeated in later literature. Samuel Johnson's Prince Rasselas was upright and, like the Ethiopians of Homer, just. One of his friends says ‘oppression is, in the Abissinian domain neither frequent nor tolerated’. Ethiopians often claim not only to have a high level of religious commitment, but also that they have always believed in God.¹⁰ Faith was there from the beginning and it was gradually refined and directed until the proclamation of Christ completed the process.

The Bible also testifies to the faith of Ethiopians. There are many references to Ethiopia in the Bible – all but one of them in the Old Testament. The name Ethiopia, when used in English translations, is taken from the Greek Septuagint translation, and is equivalent to the Hebrew Cush. The most frequently cited reference to Ethiopia is the psalm verse, ‘Let Ethiopia hasten to stretch out its hands to God’ (Psalm 68.31). This shows that the faithfulness of the Ethiopian Church is prophesied by the psalmist David, and as a result this chosen nation is placed decisively within the divine plan.

An ear...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Transliteration
• Abbreviations
• Introduction A Tradition of Faith
• 1. Place and Idea: Identifying Ethiopia
• 2. Semitic and Cushitic: A Meeting of Cultures
• 3. King and Abuna: The Formation of a Church
• 4. Sacred Space and Sacred Time: An Approach to Worship
• 5. Monks and Missionaries: The Growth of Popular Christianity
• 6. Islam and Christianity: How Two Faiths Coexisted
• 7. Catholic Missions and Christological Debate: Exploring Doctrine
• 8. Students and Teachers: The Oral Tradition of Scholarship
• 9. Evangelicals and Pentecostals: New Ways of Believing
• 10. Survival and Growth: The Ethiopian Orthodox Tawehedo Church in the Modern World
• Conclusion A Traditional African Church
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Back Cover