First,
let me say that Messay is very kind in noting that “On Marxism and
Ethiopian Student Radicalism in North America,” an article I published in
the Monthly Review in 1984 inspired
him to embark on his own more involved work on the Ethiopian Student Movement
(ESM), a major effort which resulted in the publication of his book, Radicalism and Cultural Dislocation in
Ethiopia. As a scholar and Ethiopian patriot, Messay has been actively
engaged over the years in the study of problems of revolution and modernization
in Ethiopia, subjects that are of keen interest to me as well, and on which I
am currently undertaking research.
Let
me now respond to his rejoinder to my recent article. I agree with Messay that the TPLF is “a product of the
radicalism of the student movement,” as are, I might add, the OLF and
other essentially identity-based “revolutionary” parties and fronts
in Ethiopia, past and present. I explicitly state in my article that “…identity
politics has from the beginning been connected in thought and practice to the
broader Ethiopian revolutionary project.” I also concur with Messay that
the defect of narrow power-mongering partisan elites which substitute
themselves for whole “nationalities,” “nations,” and
“peoples” is commonly shared by both exclusively tribal
“radical” fronts like the TPLF and multi-ethnic revolutionary
groups, notably the EPRP in its heyday.
Recognition
of these facts does not, however, require us to ignore or suppress significant
differences between, on one side, the tribal insularity and separatism of TPLF nationalism
and, on the other, the multi-ethnic, and even transnational progressivism of
the ESM or the EPRP. I still think the former is better understood, at least in
part, as an unintended consequence or byproduct rather than a direct and
deliberate creation of the ESM. I don’t share Messay’s emphasis
here on the difference of his view from mine. The divergence is not worth
quibbling over as long as we are in agreement on the basic point that, be it in
effect or in intent, the ideological and political ground for Woyane “radical”
tribalism was prepared by the ESM. Not passive recipients of this opportunity,
the Woyanes have cleverly used the political terms and categories which have
constituted the basic vocabulary of Ethiopian revolutionary language to encode and
institutionalize their own tribal meanings and values.
Closing Political
Accounts with History
I
should mention that I sense a misreading of my plea for “getting over
history” in Messay’s response to my article. He characterizes the
plea as “hasty,” noting that “we should leave the past as
past but only after we have understood it properly…” I want to make
three quick points here. First, in urging leaders and partisans of
ethnonationalism in Ethiopia to get over history, I was not conveying
impatience with the legitimate aspirations of ethnic and cultural minorities in
the country to freedom, autonomy, and democracy. Nor was I overlooking the need
to understand and redress historical injustices and inequalities. I do acknowledge
in my article the importance of righting past wrongs even as we struggle to go
beyond the historical realities of Ethiopian nation-state formation.
But,
second, if we trace the beginnings of revolutionary politics in Ethiopia to the
mid-1960s, we have now endured nearly half a century of more or less
ethnocentric “radical” criticism and devaluation of the Ethiopian
experience, a relentless assault on our national tradition pioneered by a
crazed ultra-left faction that came to dominate the ESM, an offensive carried
on subsequently by such political parties as the EPRP, EPLF, OLF, and TPLF.
The
antipathy toward Ethiopian nationhood has entailed an interminable negative
obsession among certain separatist elite factions in
particular ethnic communities with the nation’s distant and more recent
past. And in this obsessive state, such narrow factions have grossly caricatured
Ethiopia as the sum of its problems and limitations, nothing more. I
don’t believe calling for an end to this decades-long “revolutionary”
fixation as I do in my article can be characterized as “hasty” at
all. Far from it. If anything, it is long overdue. It
is simply high time Ethiopia stood up for her
rights, as one nation, one people, diversity and all, and with no apologies to
unreconstructed separatist tribal elites.
Third,
it is not clear to me what Messay means when he says “we should leave the
past as past, but only after we have understood it properly…” What
constitutes a “proper” understanding of history in this case? What
do we need to know about our past that we don’t already know?Is the inability of practitioners of “radical”
identity politics to get over their politically paralyzing fixation on the
historical realities of Ethiopian nation-state formation an outcome simply of
their “improper” or limited understanding of these realities? Messay
does not say. But what he has in mind here might be in a way related to an idea
I proposed in another article a few years ago, one that I still hold.
The
idea is that, as we continue to strive toward the illusive goals of freedom and
democracy for all Ethiopians after three decades of struggle, it may be
necessary to look back and survey the troubled and troubling road of radical
modernism we have traveled as a nation, to take stock of the gains and losses
we have registered through the Revolution, the political false starts, dead
ends, and reversal of progressive values we have suffered for over a
generation. I imagine such a critical yet constructive generational review of
the Ethiopian revolutionary experience may be seen as an integral part of a
“proper understanding” of our recent national past. More
importantly, I believe we need to undertake a grand review of the kind I am
proposing as a condition of settling our political accounts with history once
and for all and articulating an alternative forward-looking national vision, thereby
paving a better, more democratic political path ahead.
Elitism: Missing
Distinctions
I
take issue with Messay’s reference to “elite politics” or
simply “elites.” He expresses understandable discontent with
“the empowering of elites rather than people” in pre-revolutionary
and revolutionary Ethiopia, a phenomenon, he notes, which has commonly marked
the reigns of Emperor Haile Selassie, the Derg,
and the Woyanes. These claims invite several questioning observations. I will
focus here on what I consider to be a basic limitation of Messay’s use of
the term “elites.” Namely, that he employs the term as a generic
notion that obscures enormous variation in political substance and style that
characterizes actual regimes and elites in different historical, cultural, and
national contexts.
We
don’t gain a whole lot of politically productive analytical and critical
insights by railing against elitism in general. As Messay would acknowledge, elites
are constitutive and regulative groups within all complex societies, reflective
of underlying social stratification and organization. Politics centrally
involves the activities and rule of elites – as leaders of revolutions,
drafters of national constitutions and laws, and organizers and managers of society,
polity, and economy. There is generally an elite-mass nexus at work, a
connection of one kind or another between leading or governing strata and
ordinary citizens or people.
So
elitism has been a national problem in Ethiopia and elsewhere in the world not in andof itself or in the abstract, but in the particular political forms
it has taken and in the way it has or has not functioned. The devil is in the variants of elitism, not in elite
politics as such. While I identify morally with Messay’s call for
“empowering people rather than elites,” I find this summons a
nonstarter conceptually and in practice. Elite empowerment does not, by definition, exclude popular-national
rule and democracy. Nor does conceiving “elites” simply in
contradistinction to “people” have much strategic and practical meaning
in actual political life and struggle.
To
be blunt, then, elites are necessary, but not necessarily bad. Leading and
governing strata can be more or less sectarian, dictatorial or conservative,
but also more or less popular, democratic and liberal. In pressing his case
against successive, commonly authoritarian and power-hogging Ethiopian ruling strata,
Messay simply overlooks significant differences of political substance and form
among regimes.
In
this connection, I find questionable Messay’s resort to the term,
“colonial,” to describe varied indigenous ruling groups in Ethiopia, lumping together the reigns of Emperor Haile
Selassie, the Derg, and the TPLF. It
is a rather unfortunate use of the term that plays into the hands of partisans
of separatist ethnonationalist orthodoxy. The terminal point of a centuries-old
system of imperial statehood in Ethiopia, Haile Selassie’s reign in
particular was emblematic of native Ethiopian
national tradition. Whatever their political flaws and imperfections, and they
had plenty, the multi-ethnic ruling elites of Emperor Haile Selassie’s
era cannot be characterized as colonial in any meaningful or generally accepted
sense of the term. Their rule was surely authoritarian and not representative
of ordinary Ethiopian citizens, but they simply cannot have colonized their own native land and people.
We
can pretty much say the same thing about Derg
and TPLF ruling strata, though with much less certainty and conviction when it
comes to the Woyane political elite. Admittedly, as inheritors of a flawed revolutionary
project conceived by the ESM against
Ethiopian nationhood as such, these regimes have practiced their so-called
progressive politics largely in a way alien and inimical to our national
tradition, engaging in wholesale devaluation and rejection of it. In varying
forms and degrees, the revolutionary regimes of the Derg and the TPLF can be said to have adopted toward the tradition
and the Ethiopian people the hostility and dominating attitude of a foreign
occupying force.
This
is particularly true of the Tigre elites in power in Ethiopia today, led by
(the apparently dying) Meles Zenawi. Still, for all their narrow tribalism and deep-seated
animus toward Ethiopian solidarity, Woyane Tigres remain indigenous to
Ethiopia. They are not an alien invading power, though they have behaved like
one. As “revolutionaries” and ethnonationalists, they may have alienated themselves from Ethiopia, but
their native Tigray remains at the core of the historic and contemporary Ethiopian
polity. The Woyanes have surely employed a colonial-like strategy of divide-and-rule in imposing their minority tribal regime
over vast ethnic majorities in the country, but this does not make their regime a colonial one in the
strict sense.
Can we Help Ethiopia
Make a Democratic Turn?
Finally,
I share Messay’s discontent with Ethiopian national affairs
“…still [being] driven by elite conflicts” in which the
Ethiopian people are reduced to “nothing more than instruments” or
captive constituencies of disparate authoritarian-tribal parties. But what is
to be done to end this sorry state of the nation and help Ethiopia make a lasting
democratic turn? This is the fundamental question progressive and patriotic
Ethiopians face today as they struggle against the Woyane regime. But it seems
the question does not weigh heavily on the nation’s intellectuals who
seek to help bring about the sorely needed change. It has yet to become a
subject of sustained debate and discussion among them.
Messay
does not focus on it in his rejoinder to my article. He merely issues a moral
injunction that “the struggle should be less about empowering new elites
than of arming ordinary people with rights…” There is no hint here
– theoretical or practical – as to how this worthy goal might be politically pursued and realized. So the
problem remains: What does effectively changing our national predicament for
the better require or involve in political thought, strategy, and practice?
Posing this question openly for ongoing discussion and debate is a challenge
for us; and finding answers for it is even more so. But it is a question we can
no longer avoid.
