CHARTING OUT ETHIOPIAN MODERNITY AND MODERNISM

Author(s): Elizabeth Wolde Giorgis

Source: Callaloo, Vol. 33, No. 1, ETHIOPIA: Literature, Art & Culture (Spring, 2010), pp. 82-
99
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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 CHARTING OUT ETHIOPIAN
MODERNITY AND MODERNISM

by Elizabeth Wolde Giorgis

Background

Any meaningful discussion of modernity, modernism, and modernization in Ethiopia

has yet to take place among Ethiopian intellectuals. Scholars have attempted to talk about
the projects of Ethiopian modernity, in a narrow range of meaning that neglects to construct
the processes of modernity within the discursive space of its multiplicity and cultural
specificity. Not only does the discourse lack the focus of the metanarrative of modernity,
that of the methodological, archival, and theoretical requirements particular to modernist
studies, but the theoretical charters of many Ethiopian intellectuals also falls short of look-
ing at the totality of the political, social, and cultural phenomena of Ethiopian modernity,
within the paradox shared by all non- Western modernities. Conventional preconceptions
by Ethiopian historians of modernity and modernism are often confused with processes of
modernization complicit in projects of nation and Empire. Hence, the discourse of Ethiopian
modernity has often been informed by the socioeconomic phenomena of modernization
in the context of development and where modernity, modernization, and Westernization
are considered identical.
For instance, in Bahru Zewde's Pioneers of Change in Ethiopia: The Reformist Intellectuals
of the Early Twentieth Century, a seminal book for being the first document of Ethiopian
intellectual history, the author deliberates on concepts of modernization in different parts
of the world and particularly in Japan. The book gives a historical account of Ethiopia's
interaction with the Western world to come up with lists of early intellectuals that were
acclimated to Western education. Without articulating the broad historical movement of
modernity, the book freely interchanges notions of modernization theory with modernity,
short of producing a coherent framework that situates Ethiopia and Ethiopian intellectuals
in the scaffold of global modernity politics. Instead, it generates a narrative of moderniza-
tion which expresses the vision, most successfully implanted in the mass consciousness
of post-war Japan. This book, which is a primary document that details the contribution
of modern Ethiopian intellectuals, therefore falls short in accounting the disciplinary
identity and purpose of modernity as an inquiry of thought and experience in this period
of the "modern" that is covered in the book, and as a form of historical consciousness.
Modernity and modernism, therefore, have often been used in Ethiopian scholarship
to signify Europeanization and Westernization. Modern or modernity is nevertheless a
spatio-temporally-based concept which is not constituted by fixed sociohistorical traits.
It is on the contrary shaped in a contested space of decisions and actions in which ideas
are unremittingly critiqued and revised.

Callaloo 33.1 (2010) 82-99

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 CALLALOO

Furthermore, epistemological insight to bear on the notion of the "modern" and the
meaning of modernity in African societies particularly requires the investigation of European
modernity within the climate of Europe's colonialist aggressions. The agency of Africans
in fashioning their own modernity shapes itself in a continuous space of contestation that
critically engages European projects of modernity, its history, and its intellectual tradition.
The question then is how to frame the discourse of Ethiopian modernity and modernism
in an intellectual history that has neglected the evaluation of these important issues in
the making of modernity. Although Ethiopia has never been colonized, I argue that the
interrogation of Ethiopian modernity has in the main manifested itself in the dichotomy
of "Other" and "Otherness." The question of "Otherness" as a central moral and political
issue is one that cannot be ignored and its predicament extends itself to self-questioning
that was usually attended by a sense of acknowledgement of alterity. This alterity was at
once highly local in its engagement with the urgent political and social problems of Ethiopia
and widely pertinent in its confrontation of the ethical demands of "Otherness."
Whether Ethiopia was colonized or not, the belief of "Otherness" prevailed because
just like any other non- Western society, Ethiopia was posited by the West in a Eurocentric
archetype that has historically excluded discourse of alterity and that perceived subor-
dinated groups from the point of view of a dominant "first world" culture. I will further
elaborate this in the works of the writers of the newspaper Berhanena Selam and in Gebre
Hiwot Baykedagn's work Atse Menelik and Ethiopia {Emperor Menelik and Ethiopia) to in-
vestigate the relation of "Otherness" to culture and knowledge in the beginning dialogue
of Ethiopian modernity.
How did the modernist intellectuals of Ethiopia fashion their own distinctive response to
the larger paradigm of European modernity? Despite their history of not being colonized,
how did they apprehend an alterity that made demands on them not by entering into dia-
logue with them, but by the very intensity of its un-ignorable being that had excluded them
from its discourse, but had simultaneously imposed itself upon the prevailing discourse?
How did the discourse of modernity that estranged as it enticed, that fore-grounded the
symbolic as it exploited the imaginary pronounce itself in the writings of these intellectu-
als? How did the scanty changes in technology impact the form and reception of early
intellectual thought? More importantly, how was the nation imagined and articulated by
these intellectuals, which I believe informed the discourse of modernity that translated
state and its citizen in the configuration of Ethiopian modernity.
The relation between the state and the citizen and the state's many interventions in
the life of the citizen is especially important in the construction of the imagination of the
nation where the tension between the state and an independent intelligentsia at times
confronted each other in an open ended contest where overall control by both parties was
not possible or desirable. One especially sees this contestation in Gebre Hiwot Baykedagn's
Atse Menelik and Ethiopia. I believe that this work, although mentioned by many intellectu-
als including Bahru Zewde as an important document of its time, has not been decoded
effectively in its instrumentality and direct referentiality to the discussion of Ethiopian
modernity. I especially consider this work to have opened a space for the apprehension
of "Otherness" despite the exceptionalist performative text of the nation in the larger
narrative of Ethiopian history. Although not as critical as Gebre Hiwot Baykedgan, the
writers of Berhanena Selam also depict the complex ways in which the interplay between
modernity and the construction of the nation was played.
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 CALLALOO

The discursive performance of nationhood by the state through the conspicuous rep-
resentations of an all encompassing affinity to national value and myth, constructed and
imagined through shared experiential spaces, is therefore an unexamined premise that I
attempt to explore in this paper. I believe that looking at the discursive parameters of the
concept of the "nation," in addition to the intellectuals' deliberation of alterity, is critical to
map the intellectual and ideological framework of the f oundational narrative of Ethiopian
modernity and modernism.

The Imagination of the Nation in the Discourse of

Modernity: Proclamations of Ketet ("War")

In Nation and Imagination, Dipesh Chakrabarty broaches several questions on Bengali

modernity by rethinking the use of Benedict Anderson's notion of "imagination." Turning
to one of Rabridranath Tagore's writings, Chakrabarty argues that understanding moder-
nity in non-European contexts requires diverse ways that are attentive to heterogeneous
social experiences. The center of Chakrabarty's critical account is the imaginary bonding
between nation and citizen that is often mediated through complex themes of historical
consciousness, associated with a variety of socially, politically, and culturally mottled
processes of change. To this process, Chakrabarty argues that Anderson's category of
"imagination" in the analysis of nationalism "opens up the word for further interrogation
to make visible the heterogeneous practices of seeing we often bring under the jurisdic-
tion of this one European word, 'imagination'" (149). He employs the idea of imagination
as an "argument regarding a non totalizing conception of the political - to allow for the
possibility that the field of the political is constitutively not singular" (Chakrabarty 149).
In a concept that is beyond the reach of academic historians, Chakrabarty uses Tagore's
"piercing the veil of the real" exemplar used by Tagore to characterize Catholic missionary
Sister Nivedita's mission in India. Tagore describes Sister Nivedita's mission in India as:

We hear about Europeans who came to India with feelings of devo-

tion toward her, having been attracted by our scriptures or by the
character or the words of some of our holy men - but they returned
empty handed, their sense of devotion waning over time and dis-
carded in the end. They could not pierce the veil of poverty and
incompleteness in the country as a whole to see what they had read
about in the scriptures or what they had seen in the characters of
Holy men. (qtd. in Chakrabarty 150)

Chakrabarty's understanding of this statement frames cultural values and assumptions

within a myth that performs as an objective truth. He states: "how could one reconcile
the need for these two different and contradictory ways of seeing the nation? The critical
eye that sought out the defects in the nation for the purpose of reform and improvement,
and the adoring eye that saw the nation as already beautiful or sublime?" (151). To be
able to love India was therefore to go beyond realism, to "pierce the veil of the real" as
Tagore rightly asserts. Chakrabarty explains, "What did it mean to pierce the veil of the
real or to see beyond it? Blending as we will see, idioms of European romanticism with
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 CALLALOO

those of Hindu metaphysics, Tagore sometimes explained such sight as a matter of seeing
the eternal that lay beyond the veil of the everyday" (151). Chakrabarty is bringing into
discourse the imaginary bonding between nation and citizen not as an esoteric issue, but
as one that " transcends the objective and historical vision and as one that is rooted in a
multifarious range of contextual factors that identifies and legitimates symbolical no-
tions of truth unrelated to materialist or objectivist methods" (151). Chakrabarty voices
his reproach to historicist and objectivist ethos that reduces discourse to the discovery of
universal truths. He asks:

If the nation, the people, or the country were not just to be observed,
described, and critiqued but loved as well, what would guarantee
that they were indeed worth loving unless one also saw in them that
were already lovable? What if the real, the natural and the historically
accurate did not generate the feeling of devotion or adoration? An
objectivist, realist view might lead only to disidentification. National-
ism, one may then say, presents the question of vision and imagination
in ways more complicated than a straightforward identification of
the realist or the factual with the political might suggest. (149)

What Chakrabarty argues is hence the conditions that contribute to the discovery
of these objectivist and historicist truths that fail to capture the dialectical relationship
between them. What counts as reality at any given moment is mediated from the direct
knowledge of phenomena generated by the historical that describes the contingent and
contextual element of objectivity, and the philosophical that answers the abstract ques-
tions regarding objectivity.
Anderson's definition of the nation as an "imagined political community that is
imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign" is widely studied and discussed in
the intellectual community of our time (15). The lack of representation of particularities
of many "nations" in this work nevertheless raises critical points such as Chakrabarty's
interrogation of the category "imagination" to reconsider Anderson's finished historical
certainty to a wide array of context of specific national histories. It is this external and
abstract criterion that Chakrabarty also interrogates through Tagore's "piercing the veil
of the real" imagination of the Indian nation. The complex ways in which the individual
experiences a sense of attachment to imagined communities is therefore tantamount to
the construction of social identities.
The distinct narratives, myths, and stories that each nation embodies therefore raises
the interesting issue of how the various layers of imagined community to which an in-
dividual may feel a personal sense of attachment cohere together in socially meaningful
ways. Chakrabarty's interrogation of the category "imagination" therefore brings into
light several points in the relationships between linguistic expression and the formation
of national identity, and moreover, a different purview to understand modernity and
modernism in its context of plurality. It is within this combination of interacting layers of
imagined community, of complex and consequential nature, that I also want to explore the
discursive performance and legacy of nationhood in the framing of Ethiopian modernism
and modernity. As said above, any analysis of Ethiopian modernity and modernism is
contingent and contextual on how the nation was imagined and narrated.

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In Ethiopia, the unifying ideology of nationhood between the rulers and the masses
was a successful strategy that defined the ways the nation was presented not only as the
primary source of loyalty and solidarity, but also as the rallying image in the discourse
of modernity. As Chakrabarty asserts in Tagore's "piercing the veil" exemplar, ahistori-
cal notions of culture which postulate cultural essences allow for various conditions of
possibility and / or complex processes of the construction of nation. I am less concerned
in this study with what Chakrabarty calls "any one understanding of the political - to
locate the political in historical time" but with "the political that resisted historicization"
(178). I am therefore focusing on the ephemeral ideological formulation of the historical
imaginary of the nation that I assert engulfed discourses of modernity. I believe that this
will address a critical point in the reading of history that relates itself with subtle images
that embedded themselves in historical cultural narratives of the "modern" and conse-
quently of modernism.
Let me hence examine the national imagination and identification produced in various
texts that were written within unifying and concurrently clashing discursive practices of
nationhood that reworked and rearticulated itself within a particular time and place. I will
start with an earlier text of Emperor Menelik's1 proclamation of ketet ("war") against the
Italians in 1896, and of Emperor Haile Selassie's against the same enemy in 1935.2 1 believe
that it is imperative to understand the discursive formation of the nation at its earlier stage
during Menelik's time and subsequent years of Haile Selassie to comprehend the Ethio-
pian "project of modernity." This discourse erected the sublime figure of the nation in an
expression that had a visual, tactile, sensuous, and emotional dimension. The circulation
of print media particularly in Haile Selassie's reign facilitated the grand Utopian narrative
of the nation as a medium for understanding the social space of the modern nation. As
Menelik proclaimed to his people:

Whoever remains back I will not just leave you alone. I will confront
you. In the name of the Virgin Mary, I have no intermediary for this.
An enemy has come to our country. This enemy is threatening our
country that is bordered by water. It is an enemy that will make us
convert our religion. My fellow Ethiopians, help me. I don't think
I have treated you badly. Hence, help me for your country, your
wife, your children, and your religion. If you are healthy and able
to fight, help me with your strength. If you have money, help me
with your money. If you neither have health, strength nor money,
help me with your meditation and prayer. If you decide to do noth-
ing after you had heard this proclamation, I will punish you. (qtd.
in Wolde Selassie 33)

If we look at this statement of Menelik, we see a romanticized historical memory in the

evocation of the past that assumed significance and greater importance as a political
weapon. It was used to foster unity as well as legitimate existing hierarchies of power.
As the state's tool of political and cultural hierarchizing of society, it is important to note
that the impact of historical memory also depends on the extent of its acceptance by the
larger populace. In Memories of State: Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq,
Eric Davis deliberates the bearing of historical memory in the formation of the Iraqi na-
tion state: "Clearly historical memory must be viewed dialectically. For every memory

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 CALLALOO

promoted by the state there will be counter-memory - frequently marked by subaltern

groups in their own coded historical texts or oral discourse - that challenges the state's
interpretation of the past" (29).
Davis's postulation has surfaced itself more significantly after 1991, with the takeover
of power by the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), when the
state's previous hegemonic discourse of historical memory was challenged by subaltern
groups. The political power base of the EPRDF posited itself in renouncing the dominant
historical imaginary to proliferate different forms of memory. It is nevertheless not the
intent of this paper to engage the tensions and contradictions of contemporary construc-
tions of memory that bases itself on ethnic differentiations and that reflects unresolved
issues of cultural pluralism. It is nonetheless essential to comprehend the origin of the
current claim of contestation, not only because it plays a critical role in the subversion of
the authentic tradition of the nation and its historical mission, but also to understand the
social base of Ethiopia's modernity and modern nation building.
Let me now go back again to Menelik's and Haile Selassie's versions of ketet and its
attempt to appropriate historical memory that was designed to foster a specific national
identity: "If you do not come to fight with me, you are my adversary. In the name of the
Virgin Mary, I have no intermediary for this." By saying, "in the name of the Virgin Mary, I
have no intermediary for this," Menelik is rallying support by imagining the nation in the
spiritual, familial, and cultural /social sphere. The Virgin Mary occupies a special place in
the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. She is an intermediary between heaven and earth because
Christ became incarnate through her. She contained in her womb a divinity that cannot be
contained. Menelik is saying that even the mediation of Mary, the most impenetrable of
all mysteries, could not help those who fail to defend the nation live through such blas-
phemy. The Virgin who recognizes evil and who has pity on all souls who do not know
the Kingdom of Love will not have mercy for any form of defamation of the nation. The
close analogy of the nation and the divine is spoken with its paramount validity and any-
body that is uncertain of this "truth" sins against the Holy Ghost. This unity of the nation
with the divine was of a proprietary nature, a vested interest, something in the nature of
intangible assets which embodied the nation's population and resources: "Help me for
your wife, for your religion and for your country. If you are healthy and are able to fight,
help me with your strength. If you have money, help me with your money. If you neither
have health, strength or money, help me with your meditation and prayer. If you decide
to do nothing after you had heard this proclamation I will punish you."
Menelik as the spiritual and moral leader forges a personal and collective identity at
the moment of truth when the nation is faced with the ominous calamity of war. Lehagereh,
lemesteh, and lahimanoteh ("for your country," "for your wife," "for your religion") brings
to mind what Teshale Tibebu calls "the sacred trinity of Ethiopian war nationalism" (32).
Tibebu argues that Ethiopia attained sovereignty despite the colonial history of Africa
because of the country's possession of firearms imported from Europe, the existence of
an armed body that was separate from the rest of the population, and moreover because
of the cultural unity instituted by the Orthodox Church that contributed to a formidable
sense of identity. Menelik's inference of "I the nation" also evokes a personal reinforcement
of a hegemonic construction of Ethiopia as a unified, inclusive, and imagined community
and the monarchy as a conceptual origin of the nation. Wartime struggles hence were

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 C ALLALOO

powerful representations of the unity of the nation and what it meant to be an exemplary
patriotic Ethiopian.
A dichotomously paradoxical and vexing nationalist discourse emerges in Haile Se-
laasie's version of ketet where the legitimizing concepts of the nation are not only cultural
and mythical, but also a symbolic field of feelings and experiences that served as a vision
of national identity. The idea of the nation was contingent on a cultural politics that was
used to advance an unexamined category of "Ethiopianness":

I feel very sad that the enemy is wishing to destroy our ancient
country and her civilization. My fellow Ethiopians, if you do not
have health and strength, help me with your prayers. You are helping
me with both your strength and meditation because of the sanctity
of your religion, your freedom, your Emperor and moreover your
flag. One who lives with shame and grief, one who cannot even
dictate over his own livestock, his property and his grave is one who
has inherited serfdom and slavery. One who cannot have destiny
over his own grave is one who condemns the next generation with
slavery. Although Italy is proud of its arms, we all know that death
is there for all. If you cannot defend yourself from the invasion of
your own house, if you are denying your country death, if you
don't spill blood for your country, you will be condemned by your
creator. Remember the paradise that will be reopened if you die an
honorable death. Remember the history that awaits you. Rise up
and defend yourself. Do not deny your country death itself, (qtd.
in Wolde Selassie 35).

In Haile Selassie's ketet, the corporeal metaphor of the nation in categories of imagery that
inculcated determinate moral values about the representations of death and the embodi-
ment of the nation portrayed how the nation was imagined. I wish to draw attention to
how the troping of death, which is an extension of the physical self, opened up space for
engagement in narratives of national consciousness where dying for country resonated
as a critical tool to the sense of collective identity. There are several metaphors and meta-
phorical allusions to death in Haile Selassie's ketet which reflect powerful narratives of
death, symbolizing a variety of losses and frustrated desires, both tangible and abstract.
The theological understanding of death in the Orthodox Church implies that with Christ's
resurrection from the dead, death has been defeated and paradise reopened. The gift of
life is offered to us by Christ's death and resurrection, by which the powers of sin and
death are overcome.
One of the many deaths a country would encounter is hence to be denied of this type
of death that was bestowed with life through Christ's crucifixion and ascension: "If you
deny your nation, death itself," says Haile Selassie, "you will be cursed by your Creator,
and will be ostracized by your ancestors." After all, Christ said, "I am the resurrection,
and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever
liveth and believeth in me shall never die" (John 11:25-26).
Haile Selassie's ketet, therefore, inferred to a nation that dies in a horrible and frightening
way without the spiritual vision of eternal joy and blessedness. Positioning corporeality
at the core of Ethiopian survival and identity, Haile Selassie's ketet entailed allegorical

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 CALLALQO

figurations of death where the life of the nation had a corporeal grounding and where the
nation and the embodied subject collided in a collective understanding and consciousness
of spiritual interpretations. The entanglements of subjectivities, bodies, and nation through
the category of death created an imagined nation that shaped its influence on discursive
formations which dominated and often overwhelmed the fundamental existential aspect
of human actors who populate the nation. Chakrabarty has argued the conceptualization
of nation against the universal scheme of imagination. Arguing that most people have,
among other things, a language, culture, and religion that they are partial to, he looks
at the creative and powerful results of the nationalist imagination apart from political
nationalism. It is these situational exigencies that contribute to the collective whole of the
nationalist imagination that I have attempted to engage in Menelik's and Haile Selassie's
versions of ketet .

I have stated that for any discussion by what Ethiopian modernity might mean and
what the experience of Ethiopian modernity might represent, it is important to comprehend
the nation as an object that is constituted discursively. It is not possible to begin to discuss
the profound ways in which Ethiopian modernists engaged notions of identity without
discussing the myths and ideals of the nation that are contained within this discursive
construction. The ways that the universalist discourse of modernity has both formed and
circumscribed the notion of the nation can never be understood without reference to this
pairing of the non-modern (mythical) to the modern (objectivist) and to the possibility of
their simultaneous coexistence. Combined with historicist and objectivist conduct, this
non-objectivist way of seeing the nation was necessary to specifically revive a distinct
historical memory that upheld the continuity of core myths and traditions. Clearly, when
Berhanena Selam articulated the concept of nationhood in the beginning discourse of
Ethiopian modernity, the theorization of power and the conceptualization of knowledge
were freely interchanged with the nation that was as much an abstract ideal as well as a
political entity.

The Writings of Berhanena Selam: A Reading of the

Nation through its Divine Monarch and Perception of Otherness

Let me now turn to Berhanena Selam and the distinct role that it played in the f oundational
dialogue of Ethiopian modernity. As early as 1925, one could see the poetics of Ethiopian
modernity in Berhanena Selam, otherwise known as Lumiere et Paix, a weekly newspaper
published by early modernist intellectuals. The newspaper had a cautious and tentative
engagement with the "modern" as it probed a variety of cultural and social issues. With an
official rhetoric of "modern nation building" as a strategy, Berhanena Selam experimented
on a strand of thinking that pushed aside previous norms with text that was permeated by
cultural and philosophical perspectives. With subtle and powerful readings, it commented
extensively on tradition and modernity as two categories that can interact beneficially.
Despite the grim political context of Imperial power and pageantry that characterized the
complex nature of early Ethiopian modernity, the newspaper exemplified early literatures
that found science, rationality, and traditional culture comparable. Berhanena Selam was

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a historically viable document that simultaneously asserted and subverted authority in

the instigation of Ethiopian modernity and modernism and that offered a highly vibrant
contribution to the debates surrounding modernity.
I attempt to examine the newspaper to generate questions on the political, conceptual,
and social processes of Ethiopian modernity with the nation as its foundational frame-
work, as well as problematize the multiple and changing location of alterity. Established
in 1924, Berhanena Selam was a weekly newspaper founded by the then Crown Prince
Taf fari Mekonnen, later to be Emperor Haile Selassie. When scrutinizing the contribution
of the thinkers of Berhanena Selam, historians of Ethiopia have long been interested in the
dialogue of modern economic, administrative, and educational spheres that these writers
engaged with and the newspaper to have been a modernizing force that was keen to review
and regenerate culture and society. While this was true, one might yet also question the
changing perceptions of monarchy, nationalism, memory, and modernity in these writings
that propagated hierarchy as it sought democracy, elitism as it aspired for egalitarianism,
and mysticism as it promoted skepticism. For instance, on the coronation of Emperor
Haile Selassie in January 1931, the newspaper writes about the cosmic imperative of the
monarchy and its mystic moral quest that was important to the existential survival of the
nation: 'This respected grand coronation is told by David himself as a prophecy. God has
given hope for Ethiopia that government would always be there and this is exemplified by
Menelik I to Menelik II and now we see that Ethiopia is bestowed with the benevolence
of Emperor Haile Selassie I" (Berhanena Selam 3). Here, the monarchy is presented as the
most obvious and influential marker of Ethiopian identity and nationhood. The monarchy
was the proof of continuity of the nation through time that ran from Menelik I, the son
of Sheba and Solomon, to Menelik II, the predecessor of Haile Selassie I. A sacral notion
of kingship anchored this sacred nation of divine kings and queens, and the citizen was
urged to identify with a nation that had evolved over a long history of moral values of
benevolence. Modern self-consciousness derived from a utopie view of the monarch as a
repository of reason. Again, the coronation of the Emperor was commemorated:

Ethiopia had always been a diamond but nevertheless she was a

concealed diamond. This curtain that had always covered her face
had alienated her from the rest of the world. This curtain prevented
the coming of light into the country. This curtain was first opened
by Emperor Menelik II but nevertheless the curtain was not fully
opened and therefore the entry of civilization was scanty. Because of
God's will Emperor Haile Selassie had been bestowed by God to the
country and he has opened the curtain fully and hence sunshine and
light in the country. Ethiopia and Europe have come together because
of one man. This type of man and government, we have never had
and will be hard to find in the future. (Berhanena Selam 3)

The fashioning of the Ethiopian monarchy's public image not only presented itself as
the official emblem of the nation but also as a modern, civilized, and civilizing institution
that responded to modern ideas and practices. So deeply implicated were the categories
of modern thought with Imperial ideology and the sacred nation that the newspaper gave
significance to the progress of the West as it questioned the adequacy of the West's ideol-

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ogy for the life of the nation without the moral quest and activism of a divine monarch
who was responsible for leading the masses. Modernity was hence part of a transcendent
kingly moral insight that shaped the vision of the ideal society that had to be realized.
The incorporation within mainstream nationalism of a discourse of the modern nation
founded in an irreducible monarchial patriarchy - in which the ruler, by his exemplary
moral and divine qualities, expressed the collective will - encapsulated the thinking of
early modernist intellectuals of Berhanena Selam.
What makes Berhanena Selam interesting is therefore its attempt to achieve organic unity
between the cultural, moral, and social sphere that it pontificated to be dependent upon
the Imperial institution and its ideological production of the imaginary of the nation. What
makes it also interesting was its ability to provide an alternative approach to modernity
that was chiefly aimed at technological and economic development and did not present
the urgent need to root out Imperial ideology. The irony is that the state made effective use
of the narrative of modernity to expand its own powers, while the intelligentsia robbed
itself from an appropriate reckoning of the "modern" in the genealogies of the "modern"
as experienced in the non- West. At stake was the question of whose modernity or whose
terms would dominate values, forms, ideologies, and histories associated with the "mod-
ern." This is particularly felt in the genealogy of the "modern" after the Italian occupation
and Emperor Haile Selassie's return from exile in 1941.
Nevertheless, I seek to go beyond simplistic understanding of the elite as homogenous
and as mere tools of the state who enhanced a fictitious narrative of the divine nation. On
the contrary, I argue that the intellectuals assumed divinity to be real, objectively definable,
and desirable. Progress only meant the movement of science and industry. Progress was
not meant to tamper with the grace of the divine nation and its benevolent monarch. Its
allegiance to Imperial power and tradition intact, the intellectuals' engagement with the
"modern" was therefore a genuine hope that the concept of progress and development
could be extracted from the monopoly of the West, and Ethiopia could become an equal
participant in the community of the modern world. To that process, the intellectuals of
Berhanena Selam set a discursive tradition of the "modern" that foregrounded modern-
oriented concepts of culture, history, and progress that were intertwined with a distinct
imagination of the nation. One could say that these intellectuals were organic in the Grams-
cian sense, openly recognizing their location within the Imperial dominant ideology and
functioning in perpetuating Imperial rule while yet circulating local issues that connected
to the people and their experiences.
I have argued that the nature of the nation was the dominant frame through which the
modern subject made sense of community and identity and framed the understanding of
and engaging with the world. Ethiopia's greatness that was recited through such tones
as Menelik's and Emperor Haile Selassie's ketet, and other gradations of the grand nation
that reverberated themselves in the writings of Berhanena Selam, such as the one mentioned
above, certainly shaped the narrative and the history of the "modern" and unfolded itself
in a variety of realms in the genealogy of the "modern."
Although one could get wary of the naïve assumptions of progress contained within
the concept of the "modern" in Berhanena Selam, and particularly over the nature over
their normative usage of the "modern," one cannot nonetheless discount the newspaper's
social and cultural phenomena that highlighted the trajectory of the concept of the "mod-

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ern" that led to its early constitution and to its different formations in subsequent years.
Here, it is imperative to note the intellectuals' relationship to the discursive formation of
the nation as a major analytic category that revealed a unitary conception of modernity
around the myth of the nation.
The nation that can be read as both human through its subjects and divine through
the monarchial state articulated the double meaning of imagination as a representation of
subjectivist sight and a non-representational, non-subjectivist vision. A real phenomenon
that cannot be understood as false or unreal, the imaginary of the nation was an authentic
intermediary among cultural producers that reconciled various forces to permeate main-
stream imagination.
The modern history of Ethiopia, consequently, cannot be seen without this source of
identification. Although ambivalences and hierarchies were clearly reproduced in the en-
counters between people and ideas about the nation, the nation historically remained an
important frame through which these ambivalences were reconciled. Therefore, there are
truths that take us out of historical time, and this way of allegorically figuring the nation
that I have attempted to portray in the Ethiopian vision of the nation is non-objectivist,
but was as real as the fictitious.
Let me now come to the notion of alterity that magnified the anxieties of the intellectu-
als of Berhanena Selam. How did these intellectuals reflect on the historically constructed
divide between the West and the non- West? The dimension of this articulation in the
social and political imaginary was intensified and motivated by an acknowledgement of
marginality but one that fell short from problematizing the body of thought that qualified
and authorized those categories of knowledge that privileged the West and denied the
plurality and historicity of alterities. I argue that the imagination of the nation that was
replete with exceptionalism reduced sentiments of alterity just as it exacerbated its sensitiv-
ity. The question of how Europe could surpass Ethiopia dominated discourse just as the
question of regress. The scrutinies of the regimes of truth in which alterities have emerged,
deployed, and transformed were nevertheless not configured. The broader discursive field
of alterity was instead subsumed with changes in traditional cultures and beliefs that
blocked technology and development, and with the benevolent Emperor who was paving
the way for this great nation's rapid advancement that would equal the West.
The intellectuals therefore talked about the importance of bringing the nation together
with Europe, with the supposition that the nation should rally together to come to par
with Europe and how Europe's technology is the symbol of civilization. It was repeat-
edly emphasized that Europe's technology has contributed to the intellectual pursuit of
humankind, and that transformation was imperative for Ethiopia to tackle the dominance
of Europe. Centering on multidimensional ideological issues which put culture into two
distinctive spheres of the material and spiritual, the intellectuals of Berhanena Selam de-
liberated on the material that reveres science and technology of Western civilization and
Ethiopia's marginality within that domain, and the monarchy's instigated spiritual realm
to overcome this feeling of marginality.

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Gebre Hiwot Baykedagn and the Concept of "Otherness":

A Critical Purview of Modernity

I will now turn to Gebre Hiwot Baykedagn whom I consider to have really elaborated
on the problematics of Ethiopian modernity. I believe that he can be considered the pioneer
in reflecting on the national, political, conceptual, and social processes and imaginary of
Ethiopian modernity. Gebre Hiwot Baykedagn engaged with the many different values,
ideologies, and histories associated with the "modern." Although some argue that he
was infatuated with European modernity and maligned traditional values and beliefs, I
argue that he propagated the totalizing concept of progress while he also reckoned with
local particularities. What makes him especially interesting is his contemplation on tropes
of modernity as early as 1914, earlier than the Berhanena Selam intellectuals who started
publishing the paper in 1924. Even though he deliberated on the idea of modernity ear-
lier than the Berhanena Selam writers, I consider him not only to be the first intellectual to
have brought forward and problematized key concepts of nationhood and its accessories,
but also to have been one of the few intellectuals to date who has critically looked into
Ethiopian modernity.
Gebre Hiwot Baykedagn was born in Adwa in 1886, and lost his father at the age of
seven in the Battle of Metema.3 As a child, he joined the Swedish mission school in Mas-
sawa, and it was at the port of Massawa that Baykedagn and his friends were touring a
German ship with permission of the captain. The ship sailed offshore and traveled a great
distance when the captain discovered that Baykedagn had not disembarked. Baykedagn
was adopted by a wealthy family on the ship's arrival to Austria. The family sent him to
study medicine in Berlin where he finished his education at Berlin University. Bayked-
agn came back to Ethiopia after his education and wrote two of his seminal works, Atse
Menelik and Ethiopia and Yemengestna Yehezeb Astedader [Government and People]. He died
at the young age of thirty-three.
Looking at these two works, and especially Yemengestena Yehezb Astedader, one could
deduce that he framed the space of political and social thought in the production of state
formation in Ethiopia by not only focusing on significant trajectories of the nation but
by also understanding the issues and challenges confronted by modern nation-building
projects. In this paper, I will solely focus on his work Atse Menelik and Ethiopia, as I believe
this work not only dealt with the problematics of socioeconomic conditions but also ques-
tioned the adherence of a society to selected values. He begins Atse Menelik and Ethiopia
with a criticism on the writing of history:

It is good to learn history. For officials of the palace, it is even more

important to learn history so that one can know what is good or
bad for the country. History is nevertheless useful if it has truth in
it. To write an objective and truthful history is nevertheless not easy.
You need the following three God given gifts: 1) One has to observe
objectively, 2) One has to have a fair judgment of things so that one
refrains from being partial to things tnat he favors, and 3) One has to
be proficient in language so that one can translate what is seen and
judged. Our historians however sin on all these categories. Instead
of looking at the larger picture, they look into smaller details. If our

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history is true and partial, our Emperors are going to need all the
help that they can get from mythical allusions (implying that there
had never been a true historical analysis of our Emperors and that
our Emperors make up their own histories with each successive
regime. (13)

His argument sheds light over the nature of historical knowledge which includes a critical
look at objectivity in looking at the past and the production of history as a contested truth
that could be manipulated to serve those in power. Throughout this text, Baykedagn inquires
the sort of understanding Ethiopian history had of the past and questions the difference
between historical narrative and fictional narrative. He states, "Negestat behiwotachew
salu tarikachewun yale ferat yemichawetubet y arnet gizeyat leabeshachen gena alwetam"
'Emperors in their reigns who indulge in history without fear i.e. a reign of freedom is
not yet bestowed in our country' (13). He discusses the Ethiopian past as being examined
under a notion where prior Emperors were glorified, and where a counter-history and a
new historical analysis developed as absolutely legitimate with each successive regime.
For him, history was re-invented and remodeled from the point of view of the dominant
subjects. Moreover, his insight on the criticality of the present as best understood in its
relationship with the past was presented as imperative to a correct configuration of a vi-
able historical epistemology.
In this text, he expresses that the present collective identity was inherently political and
that any historical interpretation had a connection to the experience of the present time.
For him, individuals were both collectively and individually embedded in an ongoing
history while also being linked to the present time. The collective had physicality within
the space of historical images where it acknowledged and recognized itself. Questions of
objectivity in history as they have been embraced and contested and of historical claims
and narratives without the mediation between the subject and the object of power are
therefore critiqued by Baykedagn in Atse Menelik and Ethiopia. What makes his view on
history particularly important is that it was written as early as 1914, when the contestation
of history's objectivity has been the focus of academic debate only in the recent past.
Besides his critique of history, what makes Baykedagn interesting to the discourse of
Ethiopian modernity is also his perennial anxiety to "Otherness." Throughout Atse Me-
nelik and Ethiopia, he persistently talked about "aemero yelelew hezb" 'people who don't
have a thinking mind' and "temehert yelelew hezb" 'people who are not educated.' In
one section of the text, he even regrets the fact that Ethiopia had never been colonized
thinking that colonialism at least would have laid the infrastructural foundation of tech-
nology and progress. How then can this feeling of "Otherness" that prevails throughout
the text be considered key to the dialogue of modernity? I argue that contrary to popular
perception of "Other" and "Otherness," Baykedagn's angst apprehended and opened for
the first time in Ethiopian modern history a variety of investigations into the perception
of modernity. He primarily expressed "Otherness" to disrupt the realm of politics in a
radical way. Baykedagn incessantly talked about the need for systems and structures in
a celebratory discourse of Europe but also in an angry discourse that denigrated his own
country's lack of European enlightened edifice. This anger was one that nevertheless
prompted him to intensively discuss the social philosophy behind Ethiopia's backward-

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ness and the socio-political frameworks of modernity that would take Ethiopia out of
this relapse. It was also this anger of "Otherness'' that makes Baykedagn the only early
intellectual who criticized the monopolist state tradition, the government's arcane power
strategies, and the provincialism of conventions. For instance, when talking about Em-
peror Menelik's illness and how the nobility took its entire army to the capital not only to
visit the king but also to preempt any type of coup d'etat by the local army if it was left
behind, Baykedagn states:

With people who have thinking minds, a government is a social

institution and their king is in chame of that social institution.
Hence, the king cannot do whatever ne desires to do. The power
of the king depends upon the institution's bylaws. If the king dies,
the institution does not die. If people do not have thinking minds,
people do not have structures. If there is no structure, there is no
power because the source of power is institutions and structures and
not the number of its soldiers. (21)

Because of these types of assertions, some say that Baykedagn's absolute infatuation
with Europe and adamant fear that his country may never reach Europe's development
discounted the Ethiopian subject's articulation of self and identity. They say that this
tended to foreground Baykedagn's insatiable desire to reach European modernity in a
solidly Eurocentric frame of consciousness. While this was true, Baykedagn also talked
about the importance of the insti tu tionalization of ideas, the imperatives of education, and
the criticality of systems for any project of modernity. His feeling of "Otherness" hence
interrogated several propositions of politically charged ethos that attended to the narrative
of the "Other." His "Otherness" was a site for critical, ethical and socio-political cultural
exploration. It is probably appropriate to say that while he talked about the importance
of these factors, he also disregarded the notion of identity that is consistently reshaped,
rewritten, and renarrated by the very "Europe" that he endeavored to appropriate. In a
European mode of thought, he may have objectified the subject in a discourse that justified
and always found alibis and subterfuges in institutions. It is true that "Otherness" of the
"Other" is a historical and historicized attitude, and understanding the epistemological
relationship to alterity is fundamental in the construction of modernity.
I nevertheless reflect about "Otherness" in Baykedagn's work as a consideration that
what can be called modernity and consequently a revolution from alterity resided within
and originates from the "Other." It is from this context that I want to look into his angst
toward "Otherness." Furthermore, I also want to explore this "Otherness" within the
context of both identity and difference where any exclusion or difference from what he
considered the civilized world, which mainly referred to Europe, was dialectically cre-
ated. It included the values and meaning of European culture as it rejected its power to
define. His discursive route was based on two psychological elements. It consisted of an
unproblematized notion of the subaltern subject whose voice needed to be given expres-
sion and the implicit inclination of a reductive "subaltern subjectivity." This subjectivity
not only repeated the violence of representation characteristic of the very backwardness
against which it was set but also, and more importantly, a subversive voice which wrote
back against the "Other" from one's own position of cultural identification and origin. I

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therefore argue that Baykedagn's reading of cultural and historical phenomena in terms of
"Otherness," although not explicitly articulated, reconstituted the identity of the Ethiopian
"Other." While this "Other" functioned within the means of production of the dominant
European culture, it also ultimately became a Western import or a hybrid form, uniting
local conceptions with Western conceptions.
Baykedagn was sympathetic to Menelik while he critiqued his inefficient system.
When he talked about Tewodros, he talked about the Emperor's valor and courage.4 The
nature of the discourse he constructed in order to account for a cultural space which, in
his opinion, escaped the West was from within the conception of the culture itself that
he wrote of. When he spoke of Ethiopia, he configured and represented it in the terms of
his own mindset that came into existence in and through relation to his own culture in
contradictory and conflictual ways, and that employed discourse quite unlike, even op-
posed to those of European mode of thought. For instance, he states:

The king of Shoa [implying Menelik, and Shoa is the Amhara high-
land] gave his people nis father's tradition. He did not force upon his
people new ideas. He did not fear them with the power of his sword.
He instead fed his people with all his kindness. Whoever came to
his capital, whether it was a monk or a priest, did not go back empty
handed. It was because of this that people loved Menelik. If the Goj-
jammeans [a province in Ethiopia] said that Menelik ruled through
his kindness, it will not be a lie. This is fine and this is respectable
but it nevertheless has not brought education and progress to the
country. (Baykedagn 22)

One could see here Baykedagn's imagination and narrative that evokes a sense of a com-
mon cultural memory. Menelik' s kindness is reckoned in an expression of thought that
was Ethiopian and also within the context of a society that perceived its monarch as the
dominant frame of the nation. Baykedagn was hence confined in a web of thought that
could not break with concepts, values, forms, and ideologies that constituted the genealogy
of his country. Needless to say, Baykedagn was the first modernist who spoke of European
modernity from three major frameworks of European modernist thought. First, he gave
prominence to the concept of secular discourse in a country where the Orthodox Church
played a pivotal role in the philosophical and practical application of knowledge. He
brought forth a secular discourse that in its nature and its bearing constituted an analysis
of social and political life which was unusual to the Church's tenor of discourse. Secondly,
he initiated the concept of the institutionalization of ideas. This contribution proposed
that social institutions provided the philosophic framework of enlightenment reason that
was freed from the tenacity of the subject and that was objectified and empowered by
consensual institutions.
The third feature of Baykedagn's modernity is, as discussed above, his deliberation of
modernity from a standpoint of "Otherness." It is true that the concept of "Otherness" can
be contentious and may constitute several interpretations. How is the "Other" constructed
historically and symbolically? Do "self" and "Other" translate unavoidably into "us" and
"them"? Is knowledge of the "Other" always in a form of colonization and domination?
Can the "Other" know or speak of itself? These are questions that are primarily sought to
critique and acknowledge the notion of "Otherness."

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Taking these questions into consideration, I want to first assert that he was an intellectual
who defied the mythical construction of modernity that was prevalent for later modernists
of the writers of Berhanena Selam, and one who for the first time critically articulated the
problematic of Ethiopian society. Nevertheless, it is also crucial to note that Gebre Hiwot
Baykedagn' s translation of "Otherness" can also be rendered in various layers. While I
consider that his persistent discourse of "Otherness" instigated the space for a critical look
of history, nation, and modernity, it is also essential to document key issues that have been
maltreated in his discourse of modernity.
It is fair to note that he also "Othered" others within the culture in an essentialist and
derogatory discourse. For instance, he repeatedly referred to the Oromo group as "even
the gala"5 who fear and disrespect the government are warranted to do so since the gov-
ernment lacks system, scheme, and structure. He disregarded the diversity of people in
their nature and in their traditions, and as beings in cultures they are both constructed
and changing. While they may be "Other" from Europe, they are also different from one
another and from their own pasts, and should not be totalized or essentialized.
Although his incessant discussion of "Otherness" fell short from analyzing the manifold
experiences of "Otherness" in his own country, I argue that his thought still functioned as
an important and primary precursor to contemplate important perspectives of modernity.
A striking and perhaps most troublesome exchange of "Otherness" in Baykedagn' s work
is also his intriguing exercise in exposing the cherished image of the nation as an "Other."
Interestingly, the "Othering" of the nation is not only discussed within the divide between
Europe and Ethiopia, but also in the deconstruction of the myth of the nation that I have
attempted to explore in Menelik's and Haile Selassie's ketet and of Berhanena Selam. The
nation that was reproduced and confirmed as a coherent and unproblematic unity was
laid bare from its eternal presence.
When Baykedagn talked about "aemero yelelew hezb" 'people without a thinking
mind/ "sereat yelelew hezb" 'people who don't have institutions,' and "temehert yelelew
hezb" 'people who don't have education,' he provoked an argument against the definition
of the national myth of the nation in an approach based on comparative analysis to Euro-
pean values, that believed in the fundamental elements of the modern nation associated
with the drawing up of a constitution and the provision of social welfare and economic
reforms. By challenging the myth of the nation driven by nation-building elite at the center,
Baykedagn therefore surveyed the political, economic, and social background of citizenship
bringing forward a counter discourse of critical thinking to the narrative of the nation. The
mainstreaming and metanarration of a certain type of memory, myth, and values were for
the first time critically scrutinized by Baykedgan. Unfortunately, later modernists as the
writers of Berhanena Selam did not take it to the next level, and the centrality of power in
the narrative of the nation played an important role in later years in the fashioning and
refashioning of modern Ethiopian subjectivity.

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Conclusion

What underlies the possibility of our talking about the "modern" can never be under-
stood without its early history. Early narratives are bridging texts that establish connec-
tions between present spaces of discourse and the past. Furthermore, present Ethiopian
modernity discourses are a product of different discourses where present discourses have
shaped the interpretation of past ones. I consider that the ideas of the intellectuals of Ber-
hanena Selam and Gebre Hiwot Baykedagn root the source of the discourse of Ethiopian
modernity. It is critical to note that contemporary understanding of Ethiopian modernity
and modernism widely derives from the space of modernity in Haile Selassie's Ethiopia.
It is also critical to note that it is the perspective that predicates itself on a significant
examination of past and present discourses that comes up with the genesis and tempo-
rality of the meaning of modernity, in this space of Haile Selassie's reign that is widely
thought to have foregrounded the space of modernity and modernism. The connections
and contrasts between earlier thoughts and the present suggest several ways in which
the examination of discourse might be constituted. I want to emphasize that attending to
the discursive and ontological processes of modernity through the critical look of Gebre
Hiwot Baykedagn and the intellectuals of Berhanena Selam on basic themes of the Ethiopian
imaginary is more a starting point than a store of conclusions. The need to begin this type
of discourse that is completely lacking from our academic institutions is paramount if we
are to place modern Ethiopian history in proper perspective.

NOTES

1. Menelik II was Emperor of Ethiopia from 1889 until his death in 1913. He proclaims to be descen-
dant of the legendary Queen of Sheba and King Solomon. Menelik II was a dominant figure of his
time in Africa. His accomplishments in bringing Ethiopia into the twentieth century is coupled
with his victory over Italy in the 1896 Battle of Adwa. This victory has placed him among the great
leaders of world history. He was originally the ruler of Shoa in central Ethiopia. After the death in
1868 of Emperor Tewodros II, Menelik with Italian support gained steady strength. He seized the
throne after Emperor Yohannes died. In 1889, Menelik concluded the treaty of Wuchali with Italy.
However, when he learned that the Italian version of the treaty was different from the Amharic
version, essentially making Ethiopia protectorate of Italy, he denounced the agreement. The Italian
invasion that followed in 1895-1896 was crushed by Menelik' s great victory near Adwa with great
assistance from his wife Empress Taitou. Italy was forced to renounce all claims to Ethiopia and to
pay an indemnity. He made Addis Ababa his capital. His conquests doubled the size of the country
and brought the present day southern Ethiopia, which was largely Muslim, into the realm.
2. The Italians under Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935, and were ousted by Ethiopian patriots and
by the British in 1941. The Emperor went into exile in 1936 to Bath, United Kingdom, and did not
return until the ousting of the Italians in 1941. The Emperor is well known for his speech at the
League of Nations when he appealed to the League for help against the Italians.
3. Emperor Yohannes IV was defeated on March 9, I8»y, by the Mandi at the battle or Metema in n-
gray province. Following Emperor Tewodros' death, he was crowned under the name of Yohannes
IV (1868-1872). He established Mekele as his capital when he relocated his power base from Debre
Berhan to Mekele. Yohannes was a committed Christian, nationalist, diplomat, and a great military
leader.
4. In 1855, Kassa Hailu declared himself "king of kings and was crowned under the name ot lewodros 11.
Tewodros is known to have re-unified Ethiopia by subjugating regional princes. He imprisoned Prince
Menelik later to be Emperor Menelik II who refused to recognize Tewodros as Emperor. Tewodros
was unpopular for using force to pursue his goal of re-unifying the country. Nevertheless, he suc-

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cessfully overthrew feudal lords and distributed land to the peasants and ordinary people. He made
efforts to modernize his army and establish an independent and sovereign Ethiopia. He contacted a
few European countries, specifically Great Britain for support but he never got the support that he
asked for. He was especially offended by the British for not supporting him. He became angry and
took several British envoys as prisoners in a final desperate attempt to get support. Queen Victoria
wrote to him asking for the release of the prisoners but Tewodros refused to release the prisoners,
and this led to the expedition of British troops to a place called Mekdela where the Emperor was in
1869. The Emperor was defeated at the Battle of Mekdela when he committed suicide.
5. The Oromo is an ethnic group in Ethiopia. They are Cushitic speaking people. During the sixteenth
century, following the wars between the kingdom of Ethiopia and the neighboring Sultanate of Adal
which resulted in the exhaustion of both states, the Oromo moved north into their territories. They
integrated with their Amharic speaking neighbors at least from the seventeenth century. By the late
eighteenth century, the power of the central government of Ethiopia had waned and local governors
and kings enjoyed greater autonomy. During this era, which lasted until 1855, the Oromo dynasty of
chiefs were the most important continuous line of warlords to dominate the figurehead emperors of
Ethiopia. They became regents of the Empire. Ethiopian history is replete with the name gala when
referring to the Oromo, which is a derogatory word where some say meant "slave." Oromos have
always been dominated by the dominant group Amhara. Since the EPRDF has taken over, they have
become vocal and active in fighting for their rights.

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