Teodros Kiros - Revisiting "Two Concepts of Ethnicity"

Revisiting “Two concepts of Ethnicity”

27 December, 2010 | By Teodros Kiros (Ph.D)
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In November 14, 2006 I published “Two concepts of Ethnicity,” in
which I argued:

The recent explosion of the politics of ethnicity in modern Ethiopia
calls for a re-theorizing of the idea of ethnicity itself. The situation is
so grave that it compels a philosophical intervention. I would like to
argue that ethnicity could be viewed as positive and negative, which
I would call positive ethnicity (PE) and negative ethnicity (NE). We
need to salvage the positive merits of ethnicity, and avoid the strong
temptation of divesting individuals and groups of the psychological
and historically necessary need of investing in ethnicity as a way of
defending the differences that mean so much to those who believe in
them. The unnecessary contamination of ethnicity need not force us
to throw the baby with the bathwater.

The essential core of PE is the idea of diversity. The attributes of
diversity are distinctness of experience expressed in language,
customs, traditions and ways of seeing and doing things;
individuality; dissimilarity of experience; constructive articulations of
unique ways of experiencing the world; and openness
.
NE, as most people readily and conveniently understand it, holds
the core ideas of blood and kinship, and the attributes of these core
ideas are the naturalization of customs and traditions as peculiar to
an ethnic group; the forging of alliances and interests on the
presumed existence of a group that shares those interests and
passions; the similarity of experience; destructive articulations of
ways of seeing, knowing and doing things; aversion of differences;
denial of the formation of factions between groups perceived to be
divergent, and finally and most negatively, bolstering and
systematically defending closedness as a tool of argumentation.

In his well reasoned article in the Addis Tribune, Dr. Messay
Kebede, has quite convincingly articulated the political dangers of
NE, particularly, when unanimity becomes the sole criteria by which
groups of people are put in a single basket as if there are no
individuals who would like to reserve the right of choosing the
baskets in which they would like to be. The obsession with NE
denies existentially serious individuals the right to choose, the
crucial right to be. Instead individuals are coerced to force
themselves inside uncomfortable boxes of political inconvenience,
the language of ethnic bureaucrats.

Diversity has been a virtue worth defending for millennia. A
generation of philosophers has linked diversity with the foundational
virtue of freedom. The flourishing of the individual is dependent on
how free she feels to express her diverse desires. The nature to
express diverse desires or how free we feel to express them is a true
facet of personality only when one looks at human history naturally,
as if we are not historical beings-born to a specific space, at a
specific time, to a particular region of the world. In this special sense,
humans are geographical beings. As children of time, space and
geography, in the course of living their lives they develop ethnicity,
which is an aspect of cultural diversity. As ethnic beings with diverse
desires, they further develop distinct ways of knowing, seeing, and
doing which are exemplified as customs and traditions. Ethnicity in
this sense is extrapolated from the ethnos that history and geography
saddle our fragile existence.

It is not only groups who are diverse, as we have been socialized to
think. Groups that are diverse are groups with individual distinctions
of desire. Within groups, there are further individual distinctions of
desire, of passion, of individual culture, albeit implicitly. For the sake
of fitting in, we suppress the yearning for freedom, the passion for
life. Very few of us think of diversity in this deep and sensible way.
However, unconsciously, all of us suppress this desire to be free
from out attachment to our ethnicity, even when it is the cement of
ethnicity that never fulfills us, that never leads us to happiness. PE,
as an authentic love of ethnicity does not have to suppress the
individual Eros for life.

An erotic relationship with our life, as existentially serious, ought to
allow us to grow as genuine individuals with specific rights, the rights
that safeguard us to be open to others and for others to be open to
us. Openness gradually becomes a way of life, an ethics of living
within the ethnic glue and toward those who are not part of our
ethnic group. By using ourselves as measures of happiness and
freedom acting, we can eventually learn to understand the needs of
those outside the circle of blood and kinship. These self-imposed
relations are profoundly complicating relationships among the
Oromos, Tigreans, and Amharas in modern Ethiopia. The ethnic
makeup of our leaders is not helping matters either.

Doing what makes you happy and free will ultimately lead toward
make others feel the same way. Developing empathy for your fellow
man, whoever he may be, and you cannot help but open up to him.
Once we develop this open disposition, we can comfortably
accommodate other human beings not as the “other” but as a human
being made out of the same fabric, but who seems an other only
because history and geography have determined the different ways
of seeing and being. Difference itself becomes a historical product
which can be accommodated by love and understanding.

The accommodation of difference does not require the death of the
individual. The recognition of difference requires of us to emerge out
of the cocoon of dealing with those who are like us. That is easy.
Genuine recognition begins with the modest assumption that no
other human being is outside the region of our understanding if we
sincerely try. The catastrophes of the holocaust, ethnic cleansing in
Rwanda, and closer to our home, the present situation in Ethiopia
are caused less by the impenetrability of the other, and more directly
by the overwhelming saturation of our modern consciousness with
the negative form of ethnicity, that sometimes blends itself with
philistine nationalism. NE contaminates the current reality in Ethiopia
to a degree that has hopelessly offended some of the minority ethnic
groups, such as the Amharas that are not in power now, but were
power holders not very long ago. Kebede is quite right when he
astutely observes that “ previous Ethiopian regimes had ruled
Ethiopia in the name of Amhara people while maintaining the people
in a abject condition of poverty and silence, so too the new leaders
rule Ethiopia for Tigray while shutting up and dislocating its people”
(Addis Tribune, part 2, p, 8). This example is a classic illustration of
the crass form of NE. There are more such appalling examples.

To hide real issues that continue to affect the lives of millions of
Ethiopians, our leaders manipulate blood and kinship ties. Through
these insidious tactics of NE, the Ethiopian masses are deliberately
kept ignorant. Democracy is centralized precisely because ethnic
leaders do not want them to see through it, to go behind the veil and
unmask the machinations of power and intrigue. The willing
members of these ethnic groups among the most numerous, the
Oromos, and among the numerical minorities, the Tigreans, are
bamboozooled by the myths of history and are defined by
degenerate forms of difference that convince them that their needs,
desires and passions can only be represented by their blood
brothers and kin.

All that one has to do is roam the tin houses and plastic shelters of
Addis where millions fester to realize the hollowness of the claim. If
a blood member of these ethnicities dares to point out the miserable
reality, she is hounded by the blood leaders, and silenced by
intimidation, and when absolutely necessary is brutally killed, in the
name of an atrocious ethnic solidarity, the back waters of the abuse
of ethnicity. African political reality is marred by this deliberate
misuse of ethnicity as NE.

If ordinary Ethiopian peasants, workers, civil servants and many
others were encouraged to think for themselves, divisive ethnic
leaders will be stunned by the emergence of independent thinking far
removed from the coercive frames and fences of negative ethnicity.
PE provides potent dosage of the desperately needed virtues of
authentic individuality, dissimilarity of experience, difference and
distinct ways of experiencing the world. The peoples economic
needs, their passions, their aspirations and plans for their children’s
future will be guided by rationality and compassion consecrated in
the formation of smart alliances. Again PE provides the necessary
cushion. The stagnant and shameful Ethiopian economic geography
that has been dormant for centuries will begin to change precisely
because the people will have discovered how to use ethnicity
positively. When PE is used shrewdly the Oromo peasant and
worker will immediately sense that there is a commonality of
suffering and shattered dreams that ties with his Amhara peasant and
worker, and with his Tigrean peasants and workers, and that in the
end it is the most upright and morally and technically intelligent
leader that she must choose. A leader will be chosen not because he
is an Amhara or Oromo. His leadership qualifications and his moral
makeup impose themselves on the voters. Once again Kebede is
right, when he wisely advises that, “We Ethiopians must learn that
when it comes to politics, it is better to trust aliens than kin, just as
we must understand that sane politics is a game resulting in
everybody becoming a winner. The main requirement for instituting
this kind of game is the use of Pan- Ethiopian standards” (p, 4).
Wise indeed.

Much has happened since then, and my thoughts have also evolved
considerably. At one point I thought that PE will outwit NE. That is
not what is happening now. Our current regime continues to use NE
at the expense of PE. The regime has gone mad and became an
ETHNOCRACY using NE as a tool of the governance, and an
instrument of domination.

In contrast to Ethnicity in both its forms, Ethiopianity is the identity,
which Ethiopians wish to wear.

What is Ethipianity other than syntheses of all the ethnics and
language groups in modern Ethiopia? An Oromo is merely an
Ethiopian who lives all over the vast stretches of the Ethiopian lands,
so it the Tigrean, the Gambellan, the Shoan, the Gurage and the
Southerners and all the others. The list is long but Ethiopianity is
short.

So my new thinking is that Ethiopianity is enough and ethnicity in
both its forms is not necessary. What we need now is a new
Federalism that should replace ethnic federalism and
ETHIOPIANITY as a definitive displacement of ETHNOCRACY.

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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