Is history a subjective opinion which one can accept or reject or is it the expression of an objective truth? This question may not make sense elsewhere; but in Ethiopia where the retrospective politicization (intellectual Balkanization ) of Ethiopian history has become a political excercise in which some individuals take pleasure, we are forced to pose such a question. The fact that we have been witnessing the attempt by some pseudo historians to rewrite Ethiopian history in a way which suits their personal parochial views and interests points to their belief that history writing is like story telling to children. How can one explain the recent futile attempt to disglorify Kings Teodros and Menelik if not by this tendency which considers history writing to be the same as story telling? Twentieth century Ethiopia is directly or indirectly the work of those great kings. The glorious Adwa victory is also inseparably tied with the name of Menelik. Without Menelik’s proclamation of war mobilisation i.e. kitet serawit mita negarit, no Ethiopian would have gone to Adwa to fight against the Italian invaders. Our current history shows clearly how individual rulers can play a negative role in the violation of Ethiopia’s territorial integrity. Besides, even if there is no gainsaying that he built on the considerable work achieved by his predecessors, Menelik also played a decisive role in the territorial reunification of Northern and Southern Ethiopia. However, foreigners acclaim Menelik not so much for reunifiying Ethiopia territorially but for defeating colonialism. But without the territorial reunification, neither Southern nor Northern Ethiopia would have survived the colonial encounter and Ethiopia would not have continued to be an island of independence in a sea of colonialism. Because of this, Menelik has gone down into the annals of history as as a great patriotic and nationalist leader. However, there are some political flotsam and jetsam who do violence to this historical fact by airbrushing Menelikian patriotism out of history. These individuals make a fool of themselves by propagandising that Menelik alienated Ethiopian territories for temporary political and pecuniary gains. The author of such revisionist and utterly false statements is Prof. Tecola Hagos (hereafter Professor). One may ask on whose behalf does he level such mendacious accusations against the great king. The Professor would have us believe that he does that on behalf of Ethiopia. But there are serious reasons to doubt that. As his divisive articles show unambiguously, the Professor is so much terrified by the slim possibility of a regime change in Ethiopia even if the persent regime has been the nemesis of this ancient country of ours. The Professor is not either reputed for carrying the flag for democracy and national unity in Ethiopia. He already made it clear in his article entitled “undoing Ethiopian modernity” that he would like dictatorship to prevail in Ethiopia. That explains also the reason why he is moronically besotted with the idea of warding off the Shewan comeback to power while the major preoccupation of Ethiopians is how to be united in order to protect together the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of the nation and to work towards the democratisation of Ethiopia. But how is he going to achieve that political insanity of warding off the “Shewan” comeback to power? Ridiculous though it is, the Professor wants to be seen as more Tigrayan than the true Tigrayans themselves. In reality by depicting Menelik and the Shewan elite as the “sworn enemies” of Tigray, the Professor wants to zombify Tigrayans and rally them around his personal anti Shewa crusade. To this end and incredible though it is, the unpatriotic Professor has even gone as far as suggesting that Tigrayans should consider working together with Eritreans in order to ward off the Shewan comeback to power (see his Book review and comment). But, he makes also a contradictory statement when he says that what he calls Mehal Sefaris are in power and the weyane ruler has become their “puppet king”. Is the role of the weyane ruler really that of a puppet king? I wonder if the professor really lives in the same political planet like Ethiopians. Who can deny, with the exception of the Professor, that the weyane ruler wields an absolute political power and that his aim is to deconstruct Ethiopia by pitting different ethnies against each other and one awraja in Tigray against other awrajas by saying that Tsorona should be “returned” to Ethiopia and the rest of Ethiopian territories in Tigray and Afar provinces should be ceded to Eritrea ? Does the professor really think that Ethiopians are so stupid as to buy his propaganda that the weyane ruler has become a puppet king of the Shewans and that the destiny of Ethiopia is in the hands of the latter? By the way, if the weyane ruler has become a puppet king of the Shewans, why does then the Professor say that there is a life and death struggle between the weyane ruler and the “Mehal sefaris”? If the weyane leader were a puppet king, why urge the populations of Adwa to “recall” him as if they had elected the weyane leader in the first place? If the heroic Adwans were able to recall the weyane ruler , they would have already done that after they were made to fight against the EPLF invading forces with their bare hands in 1998.
That said, shouldn’t the removal of the weyane ruler be the collective responsibility of seventy million Ethiopians? The problem is that on the one hand the Professor seems to give the impression that he desires the removal of the weyane ruler but then he says that everything should be made to prevent the Shewan comeback to power. Why is the Professor incredibly incoherent? Is the problem of Ethiopia the weyane ruler or the Shewan compatriots? Didn’t the Shewans send their finest children to be sacrificed in the defence of the motherland against the Eritrean invasion of Ethiopia? Didn’t they make financial contributions towards the war efforts like every patriotic Ethiopian? Didn’t they demonstrate in Ethiopia and abroad to voice their opposition against the conspiracy of violating Ethiopian territorial integrity? What lies behind the attempt to make Ethiopians believe that the “Mehal sefaris” comeback to power is more dangerous to Ethiopia than the weyane ruler’s anti Ethiopia stance?
This clearly shows that the Professor is a political vulture determined to feed on the ailing body politic of Ethiopia. The Professor can never forward any political, legal or ethical arguments why a part of the Ethiopian people should be excluded from taking power even if it is elected by the Ethiopian people. It is a fact that the deprivation of a part of our society of its citizenship rights (the right to elect and be elected) cannot take place without depriving the Ethiopian people of their right to elect whom they want. In reality, since the Professor is hot for dictatorship, it is not only the Shewans who should be excluded from power but every Ethiopian. That is why the trashy politics of anti Shewanism and its twin brother, the subtle politics of anti-Tigray Tigrayan nationalism should be seen as an attempt to prevent the modernisation and the democratisation of Ethiopia. Should we say that the individual suffers from a psychological trauma as the venerable Prof. Messay Kebede argues concerning what he calls the “ethnicisation” of the Tigrayan intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s? As we know, the majority of Tigrayan intellectuals were active participants in national organisations such as the EPRP. So, it is impossible to associate Tigrayans with anti-Ethiopianism. I believe that even the great majority of the TPLF members are not anti Ethiopia. They never say that the Shewan elites of the last hundred fifty years were responsible for the current Ethiopian predicament and that they should be prevented from having access to state power. Besides, I don’t believe that they are interested in dominating the Shewans in particular and the Ethiopian people in general. In my opinion, those natives of Tigray want to see unity, equality, mutual respect and consideration in a nationally cohesive and strong Ethiopia. This has nothing to do with the greedy dinosaurian view that the Shewans should be excluded from power. The problem is that when Ethiopians reject the Professor’s anti-unity and anti democratic propaganda, he resorts to name calling. For example, he branded the present writer ‘silly denier of Menelik’s crime of selling out Ethiopian patrimony” when I argued that colonial “treaties” were not treaties in the legal sense of the word and that Menelik was duressed into signing them. And when I defended my position by deconstructing and demolishing his “arguments”, he hit bottom unsurprisingly and made a backward parochialist statement that King Menelik being the enemy of Tigray, a Tigrayan should not defend him. But he also lied arrantly by making a contradictory statement that the present writer had a low opinion of king Menelik. Again in his so-called “sobering lesson,” he rubbished the present writer for defending the “indefensible”, praising the “despicable” and edifying the “inconsequential.” I know that forwarding coherent arguments is not the Professor’s strong suit as can be seen from the above two quotations. We will also show all along this article that the Professor says one thing and its exact opposite at the same time. In view of such glaring contradictions, we can argue that the Professor has decided to airbrush king Menelik’s patriotism out of history because of sheer intellectual ignorance and certainly for cheap parochial political motives. Let us not jump the gun. I will discuss in detail why the Professor’s attack against Menelik emanates from incapacity to think critically. But, before that I want to show why a Tigrayan has a huge stake in defending the Menelikian Ethiopian legacy of patriotism.
In the first place, the argument that Tigrayans should not defend Menelik points to the Professor’s parochialist ethnicist conception of Ethiopia if not to his desire of separating Tigray from its motherland. Tigrayans don’t have any other country and nation except their motherland Ethiopia. Besides, there is no doubt that Tigrayans defend the truth for the sake of defending it. I don’t think that Tigrayans believe that there is an enmity between them and the Shewn elite. Au contraire. They consider King Menelik to be their King and his history their history. To ask Tigrayans not to defend Menelikian patriotism is to ask them to accept the landlockeness of Ethiopia as a legal and legitimate act. This is what the Professor has been propagandising when he tub-thumps the defeat of the “Shewan supremacists”. To ask Tigrayans not to defend the truth is also to ask them to accept the illegal cession of Badme, Tsorona, a part of Glo-Makeda, Irob and Afar provinces to Eritrea. More dangerously by tub-thumping that the landlockedness of Ethiopia as the “liberation” from the rule of “Shewan supremacists”, the Professor is condemning Ethiopians to live under abject poverty forever. Because as a part of the Ethiopian people the Tigray people must pay their share to the hundreds of millions of dollars that Ethiopia pays annually for using foreign ports whereas that money could be used for building shcools , hospitals, universities, roads, factories, etc. In view of this, Tigrayans are stake holders in defending Menelikian patriotism and in rejecting the Algiers Agreement. Defending Menelikian patriotism and rejecting the Algiers Agreement are two sides of the same coin. It is because they are aware of this fact that some Ethiopians made it clear that without the respect of Ethiopian sovereignty and territorial integrity, there would be no positive peace in the Horn of Africa. It is impossible for those Ethiopians to fight for the respect of Ethiopian sovereignty and territorial integrity and to accuse at the same time King Menelik of “selling out” Ethiopian patrimony. Unlike the pre-logical (b’and ras hulet milas) Professor, those people are too intelligent and patriotic to be caught in such a glaring contradiction. On the the other hand, one can deduce from their declaration that they reject totally the Eritreanist theory that Menelik sold out Ethiopian territory.
In this regard, it is worth reminding that the EPLF/TPLF leadership don’t say that Menelik sold out Eritrea to Italy. Without making any value judgment, they simply say that the “treaties” signed by Menelik “created” Eritrea. There is however a big difference between saying that Menelik concluded “treaties” with colonialists and saying that Menelik committed a crime of “treason” by signing a “treaty” of territorial cession for “pecuniary” or “political gains”. That Menelik signed documents wrongly called “treaties” is a fact. But he signed them because he was afraid of losing the pyrrhic Adwa victory. He was therefore duressed into signing them. To show that Menelik was not duressed the Professor argued that that Menelik accepted a “loan” of five million lire. In my opinion, it is a crass ignorance of law to say that there was a treaty of loan between Ethiopia and Italy. As I shall demonstrate below, the 19th century European international law did not recognize Ethiopia’s international juridical personality to conclude treaties. Because of this, it is incorrect to say that Ethiopia concluded a “loan treaty”. If we forget the legal issue for the moment, could it really have mattered if Menenlik had not taken any money from the enemy? I don’t think it could have. Because “lending” money to Menelik before 1889 did not prevent the Italians from invading Ethiopia. Menelik learned a great lesson from Yohanes’s excessive trust on Europeans and Menelik knew that the Italians were using different means to snare (including bribing and giving unsolicited “loan”) Ethiopia. As a very intelligent man, Menelik knew how to play the game of Italians. But when there was a need to defend the country, he defended it. The money he received used to defend Ethiopian independence. Without the money he could not have bought weapons and without weapons Ethiopians could not have defended their country with their bare hands. As for the relationship between Tigray and Menelik, we should not forget that without Menelik Tigray would have been desecrated by Italian colonization. Menelik came to Tigray and made history there. That does not mean that Tigray and Menelik were sworn friends. Menelik did not at all adopt a positive policy towards Tigray in particular and to the Ethiopian people in general. The fact that few people called Menelik diminutively “emiye Menelik” while most of the traditional elites were not very happy with his internal policies showed that the Menelikian exceptional diplomatic and military intelligence was not accompanied by an intelligent nation building process. The Menelikian policy towards Southern Ethiopia was far from being a model for any one. I have already discussed the shortcomings of Menelikian policy in my article entitled “The unlearned lessons of Adwa.” Therefore, contrary to the Professor, I have never been a blind admirer of the internal policies of Menelik. But I am not stupid to blindly condemn him. I firmly believe that Menelik must be praised, defended and edified for being the great architect of the Adwa victory, for having accomplished the territorial reunification of southern and northern Ethiopia and for his very skillful handling of Ethiopia’s very difficult relations with colonialists. Those who blindly defame Menelik as “despicable” should better re-examine themselves. It is very funny to claim the right to preach retrospectively about Ethiopian patriotism without having ever accomplished an act that can in any way be considered a model of patriotism. Who knows promoting the politics of divide and rule by bashing the Shewan elite of the last 150 years while admitting ones Shewanness could be considered as a new definition of patriotism? Why so much self hate? Even the blacks and whites in South Africa and America have said “bygones are bygones,” and are working together for a better future. Unfortunately, the Professor has left no stone unturned to make the future of Ethiopia a prisoner of his personal parochialist interpretation of our past. Obviously, it is fiendishly hard for Ethiopia to inch forward with such political dinosaurs who promote unscrupulously divisive ideas with no basis at all. Our unity is a must if we are to survive in this challenging world. We must not forget either that an accusation against an ethnie can trigger an indomitable counter accusation. The beneficiaries of ethnic hate-mongering are the internal and external enemies of Ethiopia. Political reconciliation between Ethiopian political elites is an absolute condition to Ethiopia’s political and economic renaissance.
That said, I must confess that I hesitated for a long time to write this reply. One, I could not see the importance of dialoguing with an individual who does not even know that it is possible to forward arguments without being vulgar and backward. The Professor loves to resort to uncultured language. Except learning how to use offensive language and promote an overt and covert hate propaganda and power greediness, I have not learnt anything intellectually interesting from his vacant articles, which he has self-admiringly entitled “sobbering lesson.” Because it is a cocktail of insult, garrulity, lie, historical distortion, parochialist hate propaganda and legal charlatanry. Two, as the arguments of the professor are very far below the minimum required standard of legal scholarship, I thought that I should not deign to write a reply to those idiocies. In this connection, I must say that his incapacity to marshal rigorous arguments in support of his conclusions and his scattergun approach did even discourage me from continuing to read his articles (I would rather say a juxtaposition of words). If we were to remove all the irrelevant and trivial things from his four parts article, his parochialist message can be summarized as follows: Sahleselassie had introduced slave trade into Shewa and the “slaves” managed to ” usurp ” local power in Shewa by making Menelik a regional lord which enabled them again to “usurp” the Solomonian Throne from its “legitimate” Tigrayan pretenders. Then the “Mehal sefaris” or “ex-slaves” persuaded Menelik to abolish the “legitimate” “decentralized” system and to establish in its lieu a “centralized” administration. Unsurprisingly, the Professor does not demonstrate what led him to say that there had existed a “decentralized” administration before 1868 and why it could be considered “legitimate” and why the Menelikian administration could be called a “centralized” administration and why it was not legitimate. Can one say that the Zemane Messafint period of disintegration was legitimate? Besides, given that decentralization and centralization are foreign politico-juridical concepts, it is not clear what they could mean in the pre-Menelikian and post-Menelikian Ethiopia. In my opinion, to say that there was a centralized administration between 1889 to 1990 is to show one’s ignorance of what centralized administration means. Because of this, to say that the “Menelik and the Mehal Sefaris” of the last 150 years established a “centralized” administration is to accuse the monarchy and the Dergue of policies which they never adopted. Therefore to say that Ethiopia should be remapped by eliminating the “centralized administration” that the “Mehal sefaris” created is to try to resolve a problem which has never existed. Should the intellectual generation pass its time in dismantling everything without constructing anything viable? Besides, it is essential to know that it is not centralization or decentralization per se which creates or resolves problems. The biggest problem of Ethiopia has been the greediness of individual rulers to concentrate power in their hands. That said, the fact is that regional warlords could have their own armies and could collect taxes under the reign of Menelik and that practice continued until the 1940s. The Gult system had not been abolished until 1966. So can we really say that Menelik had centralized the Ethiopian traditional administration? To tell the truth and if there had existed a centralized administration in the Western politico-juridical sense of the term, not only the Revolution would not have taken place but Ethiopia would have never been dismembered and landlocked. Professor Ghelawdewos Araya correctly argued that Ethiopia needed a centralized administration. I agree totally with him. Our economic poverty obliges us not to squandar the meagre ressources we have in financing an unproductive huge political administrative machine. Thanks to EPRDF, Ethiopia has a “parliament ” whose members are as numerous as that of the United States Congress even if a small provincial bank in the United States is incomparably richer than the Ethiopian state. So let us start to be realistic. Let us reflect on the real politico economic problems of the country instead of trying to accuse the ” Mehal Sefaris ” of problems for which they had never been responsible.
Anyway, from this synopsis of the Professor’s four parts article, one can see clearly that the accusation of treason leveled against Menelik is not because Menelik did not oust the Italians. The idea (rather the historically irrelevant conjecture or personal wish) is that if Menelik had pursued Italians after the battle of Adwa, he would have defeated them and a joint Tigray-Eritrea front would have overthrown Menelik and power would have remained in the hands of Tigrayan nobles. Menelik is therefore retroactively considered as a “criminal” because he had “usurped” power from its “legitimate” Tigrayan pretenders . This is the gist of the ethnocentric four-part article. It was not easy for me to separate garrulity from the seemingly important, the conjecture, personal wish and curse against King Menelik from the historical fact. Despite all these problems, I have decided to reply because the Professor’s statement that the “treaties” of 1900, 1902 and of 1908 were valid because Menelik signed them for “treasonous” purposes is not only an indirect justification for theTPLF Eritreanist position but it also aims to pit Ethiopians against each other at the very time when our unity is most needed in the face of the weyane ruler’s determination to cede Ethiopian territories. All the same, I want readers to bear in mind that my principal aim is not at all to be engaged in an intellectuel duel. Because I hate those who fiddle while Rome burns. My aim is to forward logical arguments so that readers can see clearly the national issue at stake.
In the past, the Professor asked me to write an article for his website and I wrote an article entitled “ceding Ethiopian territories to Eritrea in the name of the rule of law? Whose law and which law?” Knowing that there were very few points on which we could agree, I asked him if he had any disagreement with my article, which was also a defence of King Menelik’s patriotism. He said he did not have any. Without being a babe in the woods, I was led to assume that he was tolerant even if he hated my defence of Menelik. However, eight months after publishing my article, he branded me “silly denier of facts.” I know that the Professor is very badly brought up and therefore incapable of controlling his impulse to insult everbody with whom he is in disagreement. But I could not understand why he wanted to depict me as “silly” after publishing my article and saying that he had no objection about it. As readers may remember all my articles on the illegality of the Algiers Agreement are based on the firm convinction that “colonial treaties” were not treaties in the legal sense of the term and that Menelik was duressed into signing them. Why did not the Professor challenge me on that point instead of attacking my person and belittling my arguments without trying to disprove them in accordance with the rules of the intellectual profession? If he had dared to challenge me on that point in a civilised way, I would have effortlessly rebutted his arguments and readers could have decided for themselves whose arguments were more convincing . To tell the truth, I know that he cannot challenge me on that point. Because I know that all what he has been saying about the Algiers Agreement emanates not from intellectual convinction but from hypocrisy, not out of intellectual patriotism but from a cheap desire to be seen the “head” of Ethiopian intellectual elites (to verify this, see below the surprising arguments he forwarded to justify why colonial treaties were valid and why they were binding on Ethiopia).
The Professor also lied arrantly by trying to depict me as ambitious. His poverty of ideas led him to make the most ridiculous statement that by trying to defend the national cause and making a humble contribution towards national reconciliation the present writer was trying to get a position in a future post EPRDF government. Our Professor thinks that everbody is a parochialist belly politician like him. He may not know that unlike animals man does not live for bread. Man lives on his love for his country, people, region, district, for the respect of principles, convictions etc. So how is working for the reconciliation of Ethiopians to be seen as an an expression of personal ambition while parochialist hate-mongering propaganda is to be regarded as telling the truth? A parochialist specialist of hate monerging telling the truth, my foot! How can saying that power in today’s Ethiopia resides in the hands of the “Mehal sefaris” and that the role of the weyane ruler is that of a “puppet king”, or writing hypocritically on Beslan and Darfur while saying nothing on Ethiopia be considered as telling the truth? On my part, I have always been very consistent even if I am an idealist. My idealism led me to argue that it was very important for Ethiopians and Eritreans to work together for mutual benefits instead of erecting another Berlin Wall at the dawn of the 21st century. I also argued that with the merger of UEDF, the light was at the end of the tunnel for Ethiopia. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems now that I sinned against excessive optimism on UEDF’s capacity to be merged into one national party capable of rallying Ethiopians around the national struggle for the protection of the national sovereignty and territorial integrity, and for the advent democracy and economic renaissance; but that optimism was also shared by all Ethiopians. Besides, I also expressed my desire to see Dr. Beyene Petros being the leader of a post-EPRDF Ethiopia. I believe sincerely in that because I think it is indispensable for Ethiopian unity. Like wise, it is my desire to see a Muslim, an Oromo,a Benshangul, a Somali, an Afar , etc., becoming a Prime minister of Ethiopia. I say all this not because I am interested in individual personalities but because that is the only sure way to make every Ethiopian feel that they have a stake in the defense of Ethiopia and work towards modern nation-building process. In a country which has not only the highest number of centrifugal forces in the world but which is controlled by individuals whose loyalty towards the country cannot be proved, the only way to modern nation building is to exert every effort to enable the periphery to participate proactively in the national decision making process. My wish for Dr. Beyene Petros to become the leader of Ethiopia should be seen from this angle.
This position of mine is in sharp contrast with the efforts of the Professor who preaches for power monopoly and who leaves no stone unturned to demonize the Shewan elite as much as possible so that they would be seen as a political paria. By doing so the Professor is knowingly or unknowingly opening the Pandora’s box of ethnic warfare. He should be stopped before inflicting a devastating damage on Ethiopian unity and survival. People are saying that the Professor is indeed eccentric but an innocuous buffoon. In my opinion, the issue should not be the person or the character of the Profesor. The point is that his ideas are more dangerous to Ethiopia than is the EPLF invasion.Because the EPLF invasion helped us strengthen our national unity whereas the Professor’s dinosaurian divisive and racist ideas can be dangerous not only to this generation but to the coming ones also. Fighting against an armed enemy is far easier than fighting against ideas even if the Professor’s ideas are so infantile as to deserve any attention from Ethiopians.
When we come to the substance of his articles, he says very wrongly that “treaties” of 1900, 1902 and of 1908 were legally valid because Ethiopia was the last independent nation that agreed to cede off its territories. He adds that denying the validity of “colonial treaties” because of the extra legal presumption that coercion is constitutive of “colonial treaties” is tantamount to saying that human beings are defective creatures and what ever they do must also be defective and thus invalid. This led him to conclude that such kind of argument cannot help to proceed far in the real world. No doubt that he does not know the difference between legality and realism.
So readers can see for themselves that the professor believes that colonial treaties were binding on Ethiopia. In this case, even if he says that the above mentioned “treaties” were “terminated” by Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, his position that “colonial treaties” were legally valid speaks to his espousal of the EPLF version of “colonial treaties” and to his status as an Eritrean Trojan donkey. If he had not believed that the “treaties” were legal, he would not have insulted Ethiopians by saying that their scholarship was “shoddy”, “half hearted” and he would not have said that they were interested in rhetorical posturing than in the search for truth. One may ask which truth he was speaking about . He answered: ” Take for example, the trouble I have to go through to get the treaties and conventions I have attached with this article…”.
In the opinion of the present writer, scholarship is a matter of recognition by others and not a self-granted gift. Besides, the quality of an intellectual does not reside in the search for legally irrelevant documents (which by the way are known by many Ethiopians) or in uncritical absorption of empty western theories. But in having the fertile mind to come up with new ideas which can consolidate the unity and the solidarity of ones people and which can help them to move forward together in their quest for political and economic wellbeing. To be intellectual is not necessarily to be wise. Ethiopia has intellectuals who can recite you foreign theories but who are pitifully incapable of understanding the real nature of the problems of the country . There are for example those who think that the isolation of Ethiopia from the world, the removal of Ethiopian capital city to Southern Ethiopia, and the adoption of a policy of political segregation against the Shewan elites are solutions to Ethiopia’s problems of modernisation. This clearly shows that memorizing by heart some empty foreign theories is not a big deal by itself. On the other hand, King Menelik did not go to universities. He might not even have time to read books. But Menelik was one of the two most diplomatically intelligent leaders of the 19th century. This is a fact recognized even by foreigners and which we cannot fail to accept if we are open-minded. It is essential to distinguish Menelik’s external policy from his internal policies. Every netter knows that the Professor has a personal animus against Menelik and the Shewan elite. But that is not a sufficient reason to deny Menelik’s immense contribution to the preservation of Ethiopian independence.
Despite that the Professor believes that what he calls “Mehal sefaris” and the present writer defend Menelik because we did not read the “treaties” concluded by him from 1882-1913. This means that our defence of Menelik emanates from ignorance rather than from a clear grasp of the relevant issues and facts . This is completely false. I will demonstrate in the following pages that the Professor’s attempt to get Menelik tried before a tribunal of history by making “public” “treaties” reportedly concluded secretly by Menelik speaks, on the contrary, to his total ignorance of the underlying ideology of “colonial treaties.” My contention is that “colonial treaties” were not treaties in the strict legal sense of the word but title deeds for the European ownership of African territory.
To verify this very decisive argument, one can read articles 34, 35 and 37 of the General Act of the Berlin Conference signed on the 26th of february1885.
Under title of “regarding the new occupations on the coasts of Africa,” Article 34 reads “Any power which henceforth takes possession of a tract of land on the coasts of the African continent outside of its present possessions, or which, being hitherto without such possessions, shall require them and assume a protectorate… shall accompany either act with a notification thereof, addressed to the other signatory powers of the Present Act, in order to enable them to protest against the same if there exists any grounds for their doing so.”
Under the same title, article 35 also stipulates “The signatory powers of the present Act recognize the obligation to insure the establishment of authority in the regions occupied by them on the coasts of the African continent sufficient to protect existing rights and as the case may be, freedom of trade and transit under the conditions agreed upon.”
Likewise article 37 proclaims “The powers signatory to the present General Act reserve to themselves the right of eventually, by mutual agreement, introducing their modifications or improvements the utility of which has been shown by experience.”
These three most important articles of the Berlin Conference which laid the “legal” blueprint for the colonial scramble of Africa show that “colonial treaties” were not treaties in the legal terms of the word. Because the “right” of the colonizer to own African territory did not derive from a “treaty” concluded with an African king or a local chief but from the General Act of the Berlin Confrence. If Africans refused to sign the “treaty” of protectorate for example, they had to prepare themselves for war as was demonstrated by the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1894.
To help the reader understand the cololnial project, I will discuss in detail the ideology of colonial treaties below. I also contend that the Professor’s accusation against Menelik that he was the only African leader to have “abandoned” his people shows his very superficial understanding of history. The problem with the Professor’s articles is not that they do not make sense at all from the legal and historical point of view but they are also demonstrative of the ethical crisis from which he suffers dangerously. We speak of ethical crisis because the Professor’s distorted and parochialist interpretation of legal and historical issues is intended to justify his current personal political crusade against a section of our society and thereby against the advent of democracy in Ethiopia.
To demonstrate all these arguments, I will divide my article into three parts. The first part will deal with the reasons why the “treaties” of 1900, 1902 and of 1908 were not treaties in the legal sense of the word. The second part will try to demonstrate why the Professor’s accusation against Menelik of having committed treason is without any legal or historical basis. Part three will be devoted to showing why a critical examination of Ethiopian history shows that Menelik’s inability to drive Italians away from Northern Ethiopia after the battle of Adwa had to do with the intrinsic weaknesses of the Ethiopian state and not with the desire of king Menelik contrary to what is argued by the proponent of conspiracy theory.
