Teodros Kiros - Ethiopianity or Ethnic Federalism

Ethiopianity or Ethnic Federalism:
A brief response to Professor Andreas Eshete’s
The Uses and Abuses of Cultural Diversity:
African Past and Ethiopian Present.

25 December, 2010 | By Teodros Kiros (Ph.D)

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Federalism has two moments: A
Political moment and cultural moment.
As a political moment, politicians use it
to control the governance of the
population, particularly when the polity
has a rich cultural and linguistic
diversity; as a cultural moment
politicians also use it to redress past
cultural afflictions.

Andreas is right that the African past
and the Ethiopian present have sought
to address the cultural moment, but he
is silent about the abuses of the second
moment in order to accommodate the second crucial cultural
moment. The examples of flagrant abuses of cultural diversity that
Andreas cites are Apartheid and institutionalized racism in the USA.

Andreas claims that,

So far my claim on behalf of federalism is that it enabled both
Ethiopia’s survival and the establishment of legitimate political
authority - - two foundational accomplishments without which the
pursuit of other public aims is unthinkable. Thanks to federalism,
many who felt they had been renounced by their birthplace were
now persuaded not to renounce Ethiopia but instead to join together
to form a legitimate political order for peaceful mutual cooperation.

Contra Andreas, I claim that the current regime is in fact abusing
cultural diversity as opposed to using it constructively to sculpt a
democratic Ethiopian personality culturally equipped with a rich idea
of Ethiopianity, which is part and parcel of the glorious Ethiopian
past, which enabled the historical Ethiopian people to resist colonial
penetration and racial enslavement.

Furthermore, the Ethiopian present is infact a classical case of a
shameless abuse of the culturally and linguistically diverse modern
Ethiopia by forcing Ethiopians to wear a new political identity-
against their will. They are being forced to identify themselves as
Oromos, Tigreans, Amharas, Gurages, when they are insisting that
they are Ethiopians first and them members of ethnic and language
groups.

The modern regime, as evidently articulated by the architects of the
Federal constitution is insisting that there is no Ethiopianity, nor a
unified Ethiopian State.

I call this claim, most elegantly staged by Philosopher Andreas
Eshete as the abuse of cultural diversity in the politics of the modern
Ethiopian present. This thinking is foreign to classical and modern
Ethiopianity. To make matters worse, modern Ethiopians are also
being brain washed to secede from historical Ethiopia to defend
their ethnicity.

Classical Ethiopian emperors fought very hard to preserve the
territorial and psychological integrity of the historical Ethiopian
nation by forging unity out of diversity and not the dismemberment
of unity through diversity. True, there have been significant injustices
rendered against certain ethnicities in the past, and Andreas is right
in pointing them out, but these injustices can be redressed by a new
Federal constitution with powerful protection of human rights, under
the rubrics of Ethiopianity as opposed to Ethnicity, as is the current
practice, which is dividing Ethiopians and putting them on a
dangerous path.

Indeed, it appears that federalism is being used to control the
political space of the Ethiopian population, so as to control their
very movements by locating and relocating them-against their will. In
these intricate ways Ethiopians are being observed from the palace
and their life chances are dependent on their docility and their forced
willingness to follow the rule of the law, which they did not legislate.
The accommodation of cultural diversity does not necessitate the
creation of new political spaces. The creation of the new political
spaces in nothing more than a tool of control, a method of
subjugation and an instrument of governance, all of which are
flagrant violations of deliberative democracy.

This response is sketch of a longer scholarly article, in which I
would like to invite Professor Andreas to engage in a democratic
dialogue on the behalf of the Ethiopian public.

I know Professor Eshete loves his country as much as I do, and that
we are merely expressing this love differently, a function of our
human diversity and our sincere understanding of our Ethiopianity.

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Teodros Kiros Professor of Philosophy and English (Liberal
Arts) Berklee College of Music is also a Senior Editor at Ethio
Quest News. His weekly column appears here