Ethiopia’s diversity challenge and the politicization of identity

The civil war in Tigray has ignited an ideological cold war among Ethiopian political elites. Some right-wing activists and politicians are proclaiming that the demise of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) would herald the end times of identity politics in Ethiopia. Such narrative positioning emanates from an acontextual and ahistorical assumption that considers TPLF as a founder of a politicized identity. The often-repeated narratives run that Ethiopia was a polity of one united people until TPLF came and polarized it with toxic, ethnicized politics and policy.

But this is far from the truth. I argue that identity politics predates TPLF, and it will undoubtedly outlast the group. I also suggest a helpful way to handle Ethiopia’s “genie out of the bottle” moment. In Ethiopia, ethnic-dominated politics came into play due to historical factors, which predates the emergence of the political left.

TPLF is not the originator of identity politics. In fact, it is a product of identity politics. One can charge TPLF with all crimes in the book but not the inauguration of identity politics. The celebrations by ultranationalists about the beginning of the end of identity politics with the demise of TPLF are premature and gravely misplaced.

The political roots of identity politics

The process of transforming cultural differences into political boundary-making goes back to the 19th century. Ethiopian rulers have since deployed identity politics as an instrument of governance, empowerment, or disempowerment. Such politicization of identity has brought about the prevailing thinking that ethnic communities do not only have cultural differences but promote fundamentally irreconcilable interests that need to be resolved by brute force or zero-sum politics. In other words, the identitarian power struggles in Ethiopia began about the same time that the modern polity started to take its current shape.

As a matter of historical fact, Tewodros II (r.1855-1868) was the contemporary ruler to evoke and invoke identity as a political project to legitimize power and ostracize power contenders. He was not only a protagonist who ‘inaugurated’ the making of the modern Ethiopian state, but he was also the founding father of identity politics in Ethiopia. For example, in a letter he sent to Queen Victoria in 1862, Tewodros made clear his intention to destroy Oromo and Muslims’ power and resurrect Abyssinian hegemony on its ashes.

“My fathers, the Emperors, having forgotten our Creator, He handed over their Kingdom to the [Oromos] and Turks. But God created me, lifted me out of the dust, and restored this Empire to my rule…By His power, I drove away the [Oromos]. But, for the Turks, I have told them to leave the land of my ancestors. They refused. I am going to wrestle with them.”

As the historian Teshale Tibebu has aptly noted, the political process of building centralized Ethiopia was, therefore, predicated on destroying Oromo power. He wrote, “when we discuss how Kassa Hailu-Tewodros brought about the end of the Zamana Masafent, it is seldom noted that the struggle against the Zamana Masafent was not just one of creating a centralized power, but also that it was a struggle against the Oromo dominance.”

The imperial policy of destroying Oromo and building Ethiopia, winning the Empire, and defeating the Oromo had been solemnly followed by Tewodros’s successors almost as an article of faith. The difference lies only in reading practical limitations, not on the intentions. For instance, while Tewodros wishfully vowed to drive out the Oromo from Ethiopia, Menelik II settled for oppression and exploitation. Yohannes’ interlude did not fare any better. He, too, pursued a policy of ‘leave or live’ as assimilated or subjugated subjects in his fledgling empire. Haile Selassie’s assimilation cum exclusion and repression policy was no different in its handling of the Oromo factor.

Teshale correctly surmised that “the rise of modern Ethiopia heralded the demise of Oromo power.” Thus, ever since the formation of modern Ethiopia, identity has been politicized and securitized, whether overtly admitted or subtly executed.

The intellectual roots of ethnic politics 

If Tewodros laid the foundation for a military solution to identity-based ‘menaces,’ Tedla Haile, who briefly led the Ministry of Education during Haile Selassie’s reign, provided an intellectual roadmap or blueprint on how to treat the burden of diversity in general and the Oromo case in particular. He was the first to articulate the necessity of adopting an assimilation policy to manage the challenge of ethno-linguistic diversity in Ethiopia. Hailing from the Shawan aristocracy, Tedla studied abroad on a state-sponsored scholarship as part of the emperor’s modernizing efforts through elites educated in the West. Tedla did not disappoint as he considered and discussed assimilation policy in his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Antwerp.

As Ethiopianist historian Richard Pankhurst observed, revising Tedla’s thesis is helpful to “understand assimilationist thinking, which lay behind much Ethiopian government thinking of the late Zäwditu and early Haile Selassie period.” Tedla’s proposal continued to inform and influence both Haile Selassie and Derg regimes’ policies and much of the discourse among the so-called pan-Ethiopianist elites. Thus, Tedla’s thesis is relevant both as a historical document and to understand the contemporary debate and discourse on (mis)managing diversity in Ethiopia.

While Tedla claimed that he set out to formulate a policy to “unify all peoples of Ethiopia,” he ended up proposing and prescribing how to assimilate the Oromo into an Amhara culture, thereby creating “a single people” to resolve what he called the “Oromo-Amhara problem” permanently. The title of his thesis is so revealing, “Why and How to Practice a Policy of Assimilation in Ethiopia?” He did not mince words on whose culture should be a model and who should be assimilating. He stated that Amharas are inherently the “dominant” and “governing” ethnic group to whom the rest should be grafted. Tedla further argued that it is only Amhara who has a written language, a super culture, and religion. (Today, this same narrative is openly propagated by ultranationalist Ethiopian elites and even some in the ruling party’s Amhara branch.)

It underscores the fact that the dominance of the Amharic language and Amhara culture was not a function of historical coincidence but a product of deliberate policy choice. As Pankhurst noted, Tedla’s assimilation policy envisioned a cultural (re)arrangement “in which the conquerors raised the conquered to their own level, and the latter people abandoned their customs and social organization and adopted the language and, if possible, the religion of the conquerors.” The underlying reason to adopt assimilation was to form a modern and prosperous Ethiopian state that is not divided by ethnic differences.

Tedla outlined different institutional and policy arrangements to realize his grand vision. These include schools, churches, courts of law, citizenship tests, and settlement schemes. In particular, he suggested a citizenship test, which required being frequent in Amharic and passing a mandatory Ethiopian history exam. On settlement, he was clear that it should be southward. He called for settling Amharas and Tigrayans in Oromo territories and selectively assigning the Amhara and Tigray administrators to rule over the Oromo. Furthermore, he proposed a ban on teaching in an Ethiopian language other than Amharic—both in private and in public.

Tedla claimed that former “great leaders” who founded and defended the Empire held similar assimilationist positions, but they did not have the time to develop a comprehensive policy to govern diversity. For example, he cited Menelik’s elite-based assimilation as proof of the pursuance of assimilationist policy. Put it differently, he was following their legacy and articulating it in the intellectual realm.

Tedla’s proposal appears to have influenced the cultural assimilation and centralization policy of Haile Selassie after the Italian occupation. Pankhurst generally downplayed the policy impact of the proposal, but he argued that it influenced Haile Selassie’s education and language policy, concluding Tedla’s writing was “more than a mere curiosity of literature.”

Resistance and ethnocultural justice

Halie Selassie’s post-war reconstruction and concomitant nation-building project brought about three structural and cultural contradictions, which in turn precipitated protests and resistance: political centralization, cultural assimilation, and economic exploitation. These cumulatively gave rise to the two Big Bang questions that shook the imperial regime to its core: the land issue and the nationality question.

Resistance to centralization, assimilation, and exploitation come in different forms and shapes. Three interrelated social movements that emerged simultaneously in the 1960s standout: the peasant-based popular uprisings, the student movement, and the rebel insurgency. At the core of these social movements was the discontent with the imperial project of ethnic bondage. The objectors demanded, among other things, ethno-cultural justice and rectifying historical injustice caused by imperial political and policy decisions informed by the grand visions of assimilation and nation-building.

The student movement forced the revolution and led to the unceremonious downfall of the monarchy. But efforts to redress the imperial state’s economic foundation and attempts to delegitimize its cultural foundation and political centralization were carried over to the socialist republic. In that sense, the monarchical rule was replaced by a military regime with the same centralized and personalized power to determine matters of life and death at the whims and fancies of the communist dictator. If the “Mandate of Heaven” was a legitimacy base for the monarchy, the legitimacy of the military junta drove from the barrel of guns.

In its formative phase, the Derg attempted to acknowledge and accommodate the nationality question, albeit in a socialist framework. Unfortunately, it dialed back those progressive interventions, which included cultural and regional autonomy, when the rebel insurgency gained momentum. Instead, the military regime fell back on an “Ethiopia First” nationalism to delegitimize the cause of the rebellion and portray rebel movements as secessionists. Its counter-revolutionary turn was doomed to fail from the beginning, and it failed miserably.

Eventually, all social movements that emerged in the 1960s mutated into ethnic-based liberation movements. These rebellions finally defeated the military regime and spearheaded the institutionalization of identity questions in the early 1990s. TPLF was a formidable rebel movement in the coalition of liberation fronts that toppled the Derg.

TPLF assumed power on the back of the ethnic emancipation cause, but it failed to make good on its revolutionary promises. Establishing federal arrangements was a step in the right direction, but implementation rendered it only good on paper. At the front and center lies democratic centralism- a Leninist organizational principle in which a centrally decided policy is binding on and trickles down to all members. It resulted in the centralization of constitutionally decentralized political power.

TPLF pursued what Mahmood Mamdani calls “institutional indirect rule” to manipulate and control identity-based quest for redistributive justice. It is a colonial ruling mechanism whereby colonial masters used intermediary native cultures and norms to get the colonial job done behind the scene. Similarly, TPLF employed democratic centralism to have its Trojan horses called PDOs to execute centrally decided policy in the regions. In other words, TPLF used democratic centralism as an institutional tool to usurp ethnic autonomy, which was recognized and sanctified in the constitution. Hence, the identity question was dismissed politically as “narrow nationalism” and even criminally prosecuted as a terrorist act.

Fed up with TPLF’s unceasing trump on federalism and autonomy, the Oromo organized popular protests that later spilled over into the Amhara region and parts of the South. The uprising hastened the political defeat of TPLF and ushered in a new political transition that has been horribly mismanaged by new political Sheriffs who were junior partners in the TPLF-led ruling coalition. The war in Tigray is but the latest manifestation of the continued power struggle between TPLF and their former comrades and mishaps in handling an otherwise once-in-a-generation political opportunity to usher in democratic reform in Ethiopia.

Therefore, portraying TPLF as a champion of ethno-cultural justice for bad or good is equally off the mark as blaming it as the protagonist of the politicization of identity. TPLF oversaw mutually contradictory structural decentralization and political centralization. That is why it faced stiff resistance and was removed from the helm of power. It is now fighting for its survival.

Conclusion

Ethiopia’s diversity challenge will definitely outlast the demise (if that can happen) of TPLF. It will continue to haunt Ethiopians and Ethiopia for the foreseeable future. Ethiopia cannot shed its diversity and identity politics. Ethiopian elites should cease blaming the TPLF and pursue an all-inclusive vision where there would no longer be an oppressor v. oppressed, perpetrators v. victims, and superior v. inferior dichotomy. Ethiopia’s future depends on it.

We should also break with the culture of reinventing the wheel or reverting to a tried and failed model using the barrel of the gun. One logical route to a genuine and lasting political settlement would be taking the current constitutional framework seriously and improving it as necessary, such as establishing a constitutional court to resolve legal or constitutional disputes. Multinational federalism is simply an idea whose time has come. It is the optimal institutional arrangement that establishes a state belonging to all who live in it. A state that guarantees every nation and nationalities the right to govern their affairs.

As David Turton put it 15 years ago, the trouble with Ethiopian federalism is not being too ethnic but less federal. Making it more federal by genuinely respecting and adhering to its institutional norms and procedures would make Ethiopia a peaceful and habitable federation for all its nations, nationalities, and peoples. Otherwise, opting for the nuclear option, dismantling multinational federalism dispensation is tantamount to administering a cure that would worsen the disease. It will lead to state collapse with consequences too great for Africa and beyond.