Common Knowledge on Ethiopia, Part 1: Historical Context

In this post and the next I will give a basic outline of Ethiopia's history, politics, international relations, and political economy. Some of what I am posting here is culled from paying attention to news media over the years, some from a lifetime of skimming interesting books, some from reading the Bradt guidebook to Ethiopia, and some from going to a lecture last week by Dr. Kassahun Berhanu, former professor of Political Science and International Relations in the University of Addis Ababa.

Ethiopia is an old country with a continuous history from antiquity to the present day. As a mountainous country, it developed in semi-isolation from the rest of Africa and the world generally, though it was never a completely closed country. The country was an early adopter of Christianity, with its national Church developing separately from the Church in Europe (or even the other sects in Egypt and the Middle East). As well as Christians, the country has animists, and Muslims, and it has (or had) a large Jewish population that had also developed in isolation from world Jewry. Ethiopia is also a patchwork of different ethnicities and languages.

Ethiopia's great claim to fame is that it was never colonised. In the late 19th century, the Italians sent an army to conquer the country, but the Ethiopians destroyed it at the Battle of Adowa. King Menelik II was the only African leader to end the Scramble for Africa period with a larger realm than he had had when it started.

In the 20th century, an ambitious nobleman of royal lineage seized the throne from Menelik's heirs. Haile Selaise was overthrown by the Italians in the 1930s, when they successfully invaded the country. He was reinstated when the country was liberated in 1941 by British forces operating in concert with the Ethiopian resistance. Italy's coastal colony of Eritrea was federated with Ethiopia. When Haile Selaise instituted a more unitary regime, the Eritreans launched a long war for independence.

For reasons that have never become clear, Haile Selaise was somehow hailed as a divinity by a strange new religion in Jamaica. Despite his apparently divine nature, his rule became increasingly discredited in Ethiopia, as he grew older and his regime seemed unable to respond to a succession of crises.

Haile Selaise was overthrown and murdered by radical army officers in the early 1970s. These fellows ended the monarchy and ruled as the Derg, a name that sounds wonderfully exotic and conjures up the image of a creepy cabal of cloaked figures meeting in darkened caves; sadly the name just means Committee. The Derg aligned Ethiopia to the USSR in the Cold War, and partly thanks to this alliance they were able to successfully fight a war against the US-backed Somalia. Domestically, they broke the power of the old feudal elite and instituted extensive land reforms that remain in place to this day. Apart from that, they instituted a mini-Stalinist reign of terror. The Eritreans stepped up their independence struggle, and were soon joined in arms against the Derg by a host of ethnic-regional movements.

Ethiopia exploded into the world's consciousness in the early 1980s when famine broke out in Tigre, caused by drought and local crop failures and exacerbated by government action against this separatist region. Simplistic news coverage of this tragic event, in which enormous numbers died, created a false perception of Ethiopia as some kind of permanently arid desert, a far cry from the Ethiopian plateau's status as perhaps the most fertile land in sub-Saharan Africa.

Common Knowledge on Ethiopia, Part 2: The Contemporary Situation

The Derg were overthrown in the early 1990s, by an alliance of Eritrean separatists and forces mainly recruited from Tigre. Ethiopia held elections, which were won by the EPRDF (Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, I think), a party led by the Tigrean movement that had defeated the Derg. Eritrea became independent, but at the time it seemed that it would remain forever friends with its large neighbour. Unfortunately, relations between the two countries soured, and a border dispute led to war. In African terms, this war was somewhat unique, in that it saw fighting conducted along a relatively static frontline and was fought mainly by soldiers against other soldiers, rather than against civilians. The war has left a lasting legacy of bitterness between the two countries' governments, and the frontier remains closed. More recently, Ethiopian forces have been deployed in Somalia against the Islamic Courts movement there; Eritrean support for the Islamists has turned this conflict into something of a proxy replay of the Eritrea-Ethiopia war.

Domestically, the rule of the EPRDF have drifted towards more authoritarian rule. Elections in 2005 ended in a shambles when the government announced they had won in a not entirely convincing manner. Protests against this were put down with lethal force, and the entire opposition leadership arrested for a while. Since then, EPRDF figures have talked about how it will take time to build democracy in Ethiopia (perhaps the several hundred years it took to do this in Europe); in any case, some suggest, maybe liberal democracy as seen in the West is not so appropriate for the country. Perhaps related to all this, perhaps not, some areas of the country have seen the re-emergence of ethnic-linguistic-separatist struggles, though these are still somewhat inconsequential.

That makes it sound like Ethiopia is in a lot of trouble at the moment, but that would be an exaggeration. The EPRDF may be creeping towards authoritarianism, but they are not insane maniacs like the Derg or totally rubbish like the later years of the Haile Selaise regime. There are still pressures within the country towards political openness, and the regime has not instituted the kind of full-on authoritarianism that its former allies in Eritrea have. The country remains relatively functional in a way not normally see in sub-Saharan Africa (though I may be in a better position to judge this if I actually go there).

Economically, the country remains heavily focussed on agriculture. Beyond food grown for subsistence or the internal market, coffee is the main cash crop. There is some domestic industry and a growing tourist sector. The country is at the moment experiencing rapid economic growth, but it is unfortunately also suffering from high inflation. Basic foodstuffs in particular are becoming too expensive for the urban poor, pushing them into aid dependency.